Today is ‘Ranaviru Day’

The writing was on the wall by December 2008. By that time, even the most diehard advocates of ‘negotiation’ has dropped what they had considered the strongest argument against military action against the LTTE; they stopped saying ‘the LTTE cannot be militarily defeated’. Instead they opted to do their utmost to waylay the troops, calling for international intervention, howling about rights abuse and in these and other ways doing their all to throw lifeline and oxygen tank to a man called Velupillai Prabhakaran.

They may have hoped for a last minute miracle, but the vast majority of people in this country knew that after coming that far, it was silly to turn back. The Government too knew that it would be politically suicidal to cave into such pressure that certain vile sections of the international community brought to bear.

December 2008 was 18 months this side of the final denoucement of a 30-year long tragic drama. There was justified anticipation of ‘the end’. People were not lighting crackers. There was no spontaneous cooking of kiribath. There was hope. A glimmering, nothing more.

And in December 2008, a father whose name I do not know, wept for his child. Sanka Vidanagama captured it. The father of a dead soldier, walking through the regimental flags at a commemoration ceremony of the Sinha Regiment. Ambepussa, December 13, 2008.

Ceremonies end, sooner or later. Citations are read, heard, committed to memory and duly end-noted. When it all goes silent and when frills come off and are picked up by the Municipal Council, those left alive have nothing. Nothing. In the end it is not about nation and nationalism, cause and martyrdom, dying so others can live etc., it is about a father or a mother, brother or sister, son or daughter, spouse or friend being conferred absence.

Years ago, while at a weekend paper, those working in the features section, did a two page spread on war memorials. Included were photographs of ‘official’ sepulchres and the LTTE cemetery. There was a caption that I remember referring to the latter: ‘they were also our citizens’. And there was a blank space.

That was for the ‘JVP dead’, the unlamented and unmarked deaths that will always be ‘officially’ forgotten. The bheeshanaya saw the monument put up to commemorate Padmasiri Abeysekera, the Medical student shot to death on June 19, 1994, being brought down. There’s not even a sign of that erasure, itself an act worthy of comment but which remains uncommented on. There are no markers for the dead of 1971 and those of 1988-89. They fell on the wrong side of a fence called public memory.

Who remembers death except those who knew and loved the dead? This is an old man who mourns the absence of his child. He is every father who lost a child, regardless of political conviction, regardless of which side he/she stood, at whom a gun was pointed.

I once interviewed Wijesoma, clearly one of our most accomplished cartoonists. He told me his story. I asked how long it has been since his wife passed away. He said ‘16 years’. I said, ‘that’s a long time’. He replied, softly, ‘not to me’.

December 2008 came and went. So did May 2009. We are in 2010 July. The child that’s been lamented died a moment ago. He/she will die again and again until the father is divested of the burden of remembering forever. We can and should talk about the collective dead, mourn and celebrate as appropriate, but we can’t pretend to grieve in the way a parent does.

We can and must pause a while every now and then and bow our heads low for these fellow-citizens who will not arrive in the tomorrow they helped define, for better or worse, with their lives and their deaths. And not just on days calendared for celebration/remembrance.

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