I feel sorry for the ‘yaalu bhoothaya’ of 2002-2004
 In
Ithaca, New York, on a relatively warm day in December in 1999, I heard
a young boy sing. It was at a demonstration protesting US policy on
Iraq. The boy sang what is called an American Negro Spiritual. The song
was almost 75 years. The title: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
The ‘motherless child’ or the singer/lyricist who felt like one,
according to the song, is ‘a long ways from home’. He felt, we are told
that he’s ‘almost gone’. The reference is to death: ‘way up in de
heab’nly land’, meaning of course a post-death situation.
Wars are orphan-makers, but it’s mostly fathers who get ‘losted’ if
you will. The distinction is academic in this instance, though. I am
thinking of progeny, of ‘parent’ and not specifically mother or father.
I am thinking of an orphan, a fatherless and/or motherless child who is
moreover ‘illegitimate’, a creature who is looked at with derision and
is made to feel like something the cat brought in.
CFA. That’s ‘Ceasefire Agreement’. The CFA is the deal hatched
supposedly by Norway (but probably authored by Anton Balasingham) to get
the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE) to cease hostilities and enter a process of negotiation.
It’s dead now. Today it is like a motherless child. An orphan. No, a
DEAD orphan.
LLRC
We are talking of a post-mortem. To put it another way, it is all
about the interrogation of a ghost. If you so prefer we could see it all
as a lament of a ghost, a confession perhaps. It’s all happening in a
process/body that’s called LLRC (Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation
Commission). We are seeing ‘witnesses’ making claims, washing their
hands off, pointing fingers, squirming in their seats, twiddling their
thumbs and in these and other ways saying ‘Not I, no!’ Through it all,
the poor little baby called CFA is looking around (I am visualizing all
this of course) for its mother (or father), wondering why on earth no
one is claiming parenthood, thinking perhaps that father and mother are
both dead and wondering how on earth the afterlife turned out to be a
kind of courtroom where a steady stream of people come up just to say
‘no, that’s not my baby’.
 Took me back to the year 2002. That’s post CFA-signing. That’s post
February 22, 2002. I remember chatting with the editor of a newspaper
that was seen to be ‘nationalist’. He had just returned from a meeting
with the then Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe. That was a chitchat
with all newspaper editors. My editor friend, when asked, said that we
should refrain from criticizing the CFA (I used to write a column for
that paper, free of charge). Not all editors believed that this was the
best thing to do, thankfully. But that was a time when this baby had
lots of fathers, mothers, wet-nurses, nannies, diaper-changers, bathers,
pediatricians, cuddlers, lullaby-singers etc. It was the most pampered
baby this country had seen in many years.
Motherless child
That was a time when anyone who pointed out that the baby had wet his
nappy or had done the big job was called ‘war monger’, ‘racist’,
‘chauvinist’ and ‘anti-peace activist’.
That was a baby who didn’t urinate or defecate, we were meant to
understand. He never even perspired. Never vomited.
Today, 8.5 years later, the baby is dead. No father. No mother. No
birth certificate. No nannies, no wet nurses, no pediatricians, no one
in fact who is ready to say he/she was among the thousands pampering the
little guy. No, there isn’t even a qualifier coroner to state,
officially, the cause of death.
No one to point out that the little guy was not meant to live very
long because it’s internal organs were all twisted up and since it was
meant to be so perfect, no doctor could even point out flaw, let alone
operate on the kid.
There’s a ghost in the dock. I can’t speak for him. It sure feels,
going by those spitting at him and looking the other way, that it is a
motherless child. Was. Not exactly a ‘punchi ape yaalu bhoothaya’ today.
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