Calvin and Hobbes; Icky Little Boys and their Enduring Appeal

I grew up on tales of icky little boys. Tales of our older brother who had unfortunately matured to less rambunctious activities by the time we were old enough to take note of what was happening… tales of Dennis the Menace… tales of William Brown…

My own father had grown up reading Richmal Crompton’s William Brown and Hank Ketchum’s Dennis the Menace. Consequently we were introduced to their antics at a very early age.

Young girls they say, will out-grow their crushes. And you can only have one ‘True Love’ in a lifetime. They were wrong.

I would like to confess my undying love and fascination for three males who have heavily influenced my life. Too bad they are all fictional; Dennis the Menace, William Brown and Calvin. Rather ironically, I never took to the real-life icky little boys in school. I was too busy playing ‘Susie’ of the C&H series to their Calvin. The irony was somehow lost on me then. But come to think of it, though they brought worms to school, threw spitballs and grossed me out in other ways, they were not quite as cute as Calvin. Or maybe it was just me. It always irritated me no end that they were usually also teacher’s pets.

Anyway, they didn’t have cute, tufty sticking out hair like my heroes. How by the way, did Calvin, William and Dennis manage to have hair like that when school regulations ensured that all hair, boys or girls’ have to be neatly combed back? Never mind! I can’t imagine them without those trademark tufts now.

Dennis the Menace taught me that adults might pretend not to like kids, but they liked us anyway. William Brown taught me that ‘two negatives make a positive’ and that you can generally make a good thing out of conning your teenage sister’s ardent admirers. Too bad I didn’t have an older sister to test this out on. And Calvin… Calvin taught and continues to teach me various life lessons that make more and more sense whenever I revisit them.

He was just another kid to be admired and laugh with (rather than at), when I discovered him, rather late in my reading career, in early adulthood. The first Calvin and Hobbes story I read made no sense at all. So there was this kid with a big cat (which he called a tiger) and they were playing with a big, empty box. Suddenly there was a huge elephant in the room, they were using big words like ‘transmorgrifier’ and the house was a mess because of the elephant in the room, making Calvin’s mom mad.

I had to have someone explain it to me.
“It’s a kid with a very big imagination. Almost all the stories are based on his imagination.”

Ah, now that made sense. I knew all about kids with overactive imaginations that adults couldn’t relate to. I had been one myself.

Back to the books I went and from there on, never got out. Whether it was outwitting his mother or schoolteacher, making Susie’s life miserable or having philosophical conversations with his pet tiger Hobbes, Calvin is in a class of his own.

Just when you’d have thought the icky little boy kid stereotype had been worked to death, Bill Watterson came along and raised that bar to a whole new level. Calvin is not just a six year old terror with antics designed to amuse. He and Hobbes are probably the most under-rated philosophers of our time. But then, that is not an accident. Bill Watterson, the creator behind them, is another under-rated philosopher of our times. He quit his syndicated cartoon strip of C & H, at their peak in popularity, in order to go philosophize in solitude. C & H fans have never yet recovered from the disappointment or the hope that he will yet reappear, to give them more tales of their favourite six year old.

As a matter of fact, both the main characters in C & H are named after philosophers of an earlier era that Watterson admired. Calvin is named after the 16^th century theologian, John Calvin who lent his name to the Protestant Christian branch of ‘Calvinism’. He like Martin Luther, was famous for rebelling against the Catholic Church and the arbitrary strictures of authority of his day.
Hobbes was named after the 17^th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, known as one of the founders of modern political philosophy, and an early champion of individual rights / equity of people, at a time when these ideas were considered radical. He is an apt namesake for the wittily sarcastic tiger Hobbes because according to Watterson, he had a ‘dim view of human nature.’ A characteristic that Calvin’s soft toy exhibits abundantly if rather subtly.

Together, these two did for their readers what their erstwhile namesakes could not; making philosophy easy and accessible to the average reader. Not to mention fun and memorable. A study of the original Calvin’s or Hobbes’ doctrines might give some less-scholarly types a headache, but who among those die-hard fans of C&H won’t remember at least one comic strip by heart because it resonated so well with them? As a matter of fact, we can recall several.

Most of the problems, characters, and situations we face in life have been addressed brilliantly by Calvin and his tiger. Whether it is writing academic reports using meaningless big words, because that would ensure better recognition, or pondering the meaning of life – or the existence of God!

It’s a comic strip series that will resonate with you, both on good days and bad. Calvin’s bite sized pieces of wisdom never fail to find their mark. It’s something I often turn to whenever I am feeling blue. Somewhere in there, this six year old terror will have some nugget of wisdom to comfort me, no matter what my problem is. And that’s a tall order to fill for a six year old. Somehow though, Calvin and Hobbes manage to do it as effortlessly as they do their sledding over hills and vales.

Diasporic Writing

Book Review

In this globe scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage.

Thus begins Vasugi Ganeshananthan’s elaborate novel on a typical Sri Lankan diasporic family that has settled in the United States. Written in the first person by narrator Yalini, a first generation Sri Lankan American, the book examines the issues of growing up as a diaspora member. Issues of being born into a particular culture when one’s own parents and thus the background they bring are from a completely different culture. The added baggage of having an ongoing war ‘back home’ of which her extended family are a part – as both victims as well as perpetrators. A war which her own parents had individually escaped that she, their future progeny might have a safe and secure life – a life which in the late seventies, had seen to them far-fetched as aspiring young Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Yalini’s is thus the voice of many second generation Sri Lankan diaspora members who have an identity crisis. A crisis brought about by two juxtaposed cultures that often don’t mix well. Her parents are ashamed to admit that theirs was a ‘Love Marriage.’ Thus the elaborate tale they have concocted about how it was in fact an ‘Arranged Marriage’; very prim and proper and nothing to be ‘ashamed’ of. This is the marriage that the book seems to draw its title from.

Yalini’s maternal uncle Kumaran, a Tamil militant in Jaffna at the time, had crashed into her paternal uncle’s home demanding an answer, when news of his sister’s impending marriage in America, first broke:

“Who is the doctor who wants to marry my sister? Who is this doctor who is in love with my sister?”

‘Love’ Yalini explains, is not a word her family was used to saying. Only upstarts married for love. And yet, of this upstart marriage came a harmonious union which produced one daughter: Yalini.

Meanwhile Kumaran, subsequent to his militant leader’s famous ‘love marriage’ married a fellow militant and had a daughter too; Janani. Someone slightly younger than Yalini but possessed of more self-assurance on precisely who she is and what she wants in life. Born to militant parents, she was a militant herself before her father developed cancer and she had to give it up to accompany him to Canada.

This uncle, Janani’s father, is the main protagonist of the story – if indeed the story can be said to have a protagonist. Ganeshananthan uses him as a pivot to explain the genesis of Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka as well as the current situation of the Tamil diaspora.

But the story has different threads running though the narrative, and while Kumaran’s story might be the thread given the most attention, there are others. Some of which make sense in the interwoven narrative and others of which don’t. The author is a ‘creative writer.’ It is not just a book with a story to tell. It is also a book with experimental writing techniques – some of which work and others of which don’t. There are flourishes and repetitions a la Arundhati Roy which seem superfluous at times – but as everything else, the beauty or lack of it is best left to the discernment of the beholder – or in this case, the reader.

In spite of the sometimes distracting literary gimmicks, the story flows well while giving multiple insights. Two of the most interesting psyches are Janani’s and Yalini’s. Two cousins of nearly the same age and who even look alike. Yet one is self-assured of who she is and contemptuous of the other while the more ‘advantaged’ of the two, Yalini has issues of identity crisis as well as the American malaise of ‘political correctness’ – something her cousin is blissfully ignorant of.

The conversations between these two makes for some interesting reading. Janani’s mother was in the ‘movement’ too as she tells Yalini and she died in a bombing. “What kind of bombing?” wonders Yalini. Was she the bomber or the bombed?

Despite the validity of the question and the seriousness of the thought, a reader cannot help being overtaken by mirth at situations like these – a situation all too real, unfortunately.

Yalini is too polite to ask the question though – and the information isn’t volunteered. Janani had accompanied her father to Canada, not only to put him to rest but also to get married herself. She is to have a very proper ‘Arranged Marriage’ to Suthan, a fundraiser for the LTTE in Canada.

She has no qualms about this although Yalini has several. But then Janani came from a small world where everything was spelled out; tradition, hierarchy, order. Even in the midst of chaos that was the civil war, the Tigers were famous for one thing; discipline. Janani knew her place, her duty and what she had to do. It is Yalini, the diaspora Tamil of the much bigger world, the globalized world in its entirety, who does not know her place or what she is to do. All the various rules and regulations of smaller worlds have melted into a cacophony of sounds in Yalini’s world. She does not have the benefit of such cleared-eyed vision.

Is she as a diaspora Tamil to support the war effort back in Sri Lanka or not support it? Fund it or not fund it? Is she an American or a Sri Lankan? Is she as a Sri Lankan American to identify with the Tamils who carry forward their various squabbles and grievances with the Sinhalese – or identify with those who choose more moderate approaches? Who is right?

Like most other diapora youth, she is left to herself to chart these un-navigated waters and the murky swirls often overwhelm her. Her cousin might be sanguine about an arranged marriage but for Yalini, an arranged marriage of another sort has taken precedence. The arranged marriage of girl and country. She is not Sri Lankan. She is an American. Tamil girl wedded to the United States of America and its new way of life. Her parents yearn for the old way of life where everything had a place and order. In that ordered life, they would have found a suitable partner for Yalini themselves. But they had escaped that world for certain reasons, and in doing so provided their daughter with not only a safe life but new ideas.

The book leaves her pondering on what her future is to be, especially as regards to marriage.  Her parents had moved half-way across the world to give her physical safety and security. But in doing so, they uprooted her from one culture and pushed her into another – visiting upon her a maelstrom of emotions as to where she fits in. The exploration of that maelstrom is the book itself – but as the waves die down near the end of the book, the horizon is still no clearer. It is still uncharted territory.

The Self-Help Book Industry

A wise man never knows all. Only fools know everything!
African Proverb

It’s a phenomenon that has exploded all over the bookshelves of Colombo bookshops; Self-Help Books.
They have always been there of course but lately they seem to be EVERWHERE! Not in just select shelves, in out-of-the-way corners as they used to be, say, a decade ago.

If the stacking of the bookshelves are anything to go by, we have a lot of under-confident people in Colombo city, searching for a better way / better meaning in their lives. Nothing wrong with that of course. As a devourer of several self-help books in the past I know where they are coming from.

So here’s a tip from a world-weary self-help book reader;

Don’t waste your money on self-help books. You’ll eventually have to buy a self-help book on how to stop buying self-help books. The only people those books actually help are the pompous authors of that drivel.

They are really smart these authors. They know only one thing clearly. Their target audiences are under-confident people who probably got that way due to not having enough approbation / appreciation / love in their lives (aka eighty percent of the world’s population according to established studies).

Their works therefore spill over with feel-good drivel on love, kindness and compassion and some real gems on how to achieve success since you don’t know it already and have to shell out several hundred rupees to get it:

Work from your heart!

Love from your soul!

Give it all you’ve got!

Live in the present; don’t worry about the past or the future!

Believe in yourself! (Heh! If you did, why would you buy the book?)

Really valuable gems eh? When ‘The monk who sold his Ferrari’ was being touted as the next best thing to peanut butter some years ago, I rushed to buy it along with some other gullible people searching for ‘meaning’ in their lives. The blurb on the back gave a lot of promise too. A monk who had gone all the way into the Himalayas to search for the meaning of life and then been compassionate enough to return to tell us mortals the truth.

Inside, several chapters were devoted to each of the above points. Only hermits in the Himalayas knew them before and now thanks to Robin Sharma, the Paramrahasya (mystical super-secret) of working from your heart and loving from your soul is also known to all others who read the book.

Only even those super-secrets unleashed on the world’s population was not enough. Sharma had to write at least nine more similar books. I noticed on one of my recent forays to the bookstore that his latest offer is: The secret letters of the monk who sold his Ferrari.

Ooh, keep those secrets coming. So long as it’s a secret that no-one ever knew before on how to overcome the travails of life, people will keep buying it. Never mind that the last book you wrote filled with promises of changing our lives did not do the trick. You did manage to sell hope effectively so we’ll buy the next book – hoping THAT has the definitive answer!

Self-help books are a multi-billion dollar industry now. If eighty percent of the world’s population have low self esteem and as such are devourers of self-help books, the other twenty percent seem to be busy churning out more and more books to meet that demand.

In one of my favourite book stores where I hang out frequently, I noticed that the garish covers of the self-help books were taking pride of place everywhere. There were self-help books on life and living, self-help books on death and dying, books for mothers-to-be, books for managers with bad employees, books for employees with bad managers…

Yes, we know. There is no human out there without problems, but seriously? When did we get this hooked as a civilization, on reading stuff that makes little or no sense? It’s almost a phenomenon of the Emperor’s clothes now. People ooh and aah over ‘New Age’ writers, buying their books and gifting it to others as epitomes of critical brilliance – when it’s actually utter drivel. Two of the biggest names behind this phenomenon would be Paulo Coelho and Deepak Chopra.  I read only one book of each (and that was one too many) before wondering why they are such a sensation.

Then they came on twitter where I didn’t have to waste money to follow their gibberish. Here are some of their latest tweets:

Coelho: “When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

“Love! Your future depends on your capacity to love.”

“If you see somebody who needs help, help him. One day you might need to be helped too. Either way, the choice is yours.”

Chopra: “Love without action is meaningless and action without love is irrelevant.”

“No fundamental physical substance is the basic building block of the universe.The essential stuff of the universe is thinking non-stuff.”

“Nothing outside of consciousness can be known”

Wow! Profound eh? Doesn’t that just make you stop and wipe away a tear? Hold on! I need to go blow my nose over how much of my money and years of my impressionable youth I’ll never get back again. All those books on how to get rich quick and make friends fast and live life better and here I am, an underpaid, over-worked journalist – with all the issues I ever had and some more to boot.

There’s hope though. If you have read a few self-help books, you’ve read then all. They are all a re-hashing of the same gobbledegook in different terms and words. If the current crisis in my life keeps up, I think I will switch from the losing to the winning team in this debacle. The readers are definitely the losers and I have been one for far too long. It’s better to join the writers who earn millions to re-hash hackneyed terms like ‘love’, ‘passion’ and ‘meaningful living’ and extend them like over-extended rubber bands into meaningless chapters. How hard can that be?

Come to think of it! That’s a great idea. I am going to go write a book on “How to stop reading Self-Help books and get on with your lives in eight easy steps.”

…………………………………………..

And when that takes off and lands me a multi-million dollar contract to write more; I’ll write “The ninth step.”

The Muslim Issue

It is an internationally accepted charter that citizens of any country ‘belong’ to that country; even if they happen to be first-generation citizens of that country. In Sri Lanka however, citizens who are several generations old in the country are facing simmering tensions that are nothing new, yet troubling in its gathering intensity.

“Thambiya, go back home to where you came from.”

More than a few hurt / bewildered Muslims have heard this phrase in recent times. The question is, where did they come from? Most have been settled here for so many generations that they don’t even know which part of the Middle East / Asia their ancestors came from. They can only speculate. Having intrinsically blended into the Sri Lankan culture and landscape for generations, they identify themselves with pride as Sri Lankans. They were born in Sri Lanka and are Sri Lankan citizens. So just where is it that they belong?

“When they tell me to go back to where I belong, I don’t know what they mean. Do they think I belong in a Muslim country like Arabia or Pakistan? Those countries would never accept me. I am not a Pakistani or Arab. I am a Sri Lankan just like my father and grandfather before me,” says Sameer (24), a management trainee.

For many young Muslims who were born during the war, the country was less than the ideal paradise it could have been, because of the rift between the Sinhalese and the Tamils – but at least, they themselves were mostly spared. No community was happy about the war but the Muslim community apparently had  their apprehensions even then.

“I always wondered, if and when the hostility against the Tamils ceased, would it then turn to us,” says Nazla (19), a psychology student. She is quick to clarify, “I went to a Sinhalese school and had many Sinhalese friends. I still do and still remain committed to a Sri Lankan identity. It’s just that, we are often told, ‘You are a minority, keep to your place.’ What is that place? Do we not have equal rights?

“When they keep saying Sinhala Buddhist country, it automatically makes us outsiders. This is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic country but when that is not accepted, we automatically get sidelined and so do our perceived rights.”

The famous Raja of the Dalada Maligawa, gifted by a Muslim trader, who was honoured for it by having the story encrypted in the 1000 rupee note

Her Sinhala friend Malini (21), concurs with her. Asked what she thought about the current situation of tension against the Muslims, she says, “It’s a war waiting to happen. Actually it’s a war that started a long time ago but got side-tracked due to the Tamils. It’s gotten back again on track now.”

According to her, the tension could be traced to the fear-psychosis of her people ingrained in them, due to the fact that Sri Lanka is a small country with a long history of being invaded / taken over. They are afraid of colonization / subversion in any form she says. “Even my own father was saying recently, the Muslims seem to be everywhere and in everything. The repeated negative images out there of Muslims as intolerant extremists prone to violence do not help. Many people have learnt to distrust / dislike the Muslims, based on these portrayals.”

Yet the Muslims of Sri Lanka do not have a reputation of being violent extremists.  How then, did they become the bogeyman to nationalist masses? Kasun (23), software engineer has his own views: “Post war, there is no economic boom for the common man as promised. People are finally waking up to smell the roses. Those not having the promised smell but a lot of thorns, they need to be distracted fast. Through traditional as well as new media, we see the following being broadcast repeatedly:

‘Muslim businesses are prospering at the cost of Sinhala industries.’

‘The reason for high prices is all due to that Halal food certificate.’

‘Some Muslims support Pakistan during cricket matches. They are against us.’

‘They are working together and buying up all the land belonging to the Sinhalese.’

‘The government has hidden the census data because there’s been a Muslim population boom.’

With this kind of paranoia being broadcast mainstream, the angry masses now have a scapegoat. Dinner table conversations invariably touch on topics of halal certification and Muslims these days. This to me is just the powers-that-be cunningly using the Jews (traditionally mistrusted) to take the blame for everything.”

Amali (33), lawyer has a different view.  “Minorities anywhere generally tend to be driven to prove themselves in a way that the majority are not. This while making them successful, also draws the attention of jealous elements in the majority community which is what the turmoil in this country has always been about. Tamils tend to excel academically. After the prolonged war, that has largely been taken away from them. In the meantime, the Muslims, always good businessmen have suddenly become big players industry-wide in Sri Lanka. So it looks like they are going to be shaken up too.”

The question however is whether the current trend is something that is being blown out of proportion or something to be worried about. Across the spectrum, many young people, Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims say that they do not want another war and that they hope that this current tension can be contained.

Says Nuwan (27), Marketing Executive, “In any multi-ethnic democracy, you get racist elements voicing their radical, extremist opinions; but usually, these views are shared by an insignificant minority. It’s when this minority becomes a majority that things start to get out of hand.” He adds that he doesn’t think the current tension is anywhere near that level yet but urges the authorities to act before it becomes bigger. “Those in power and in a position to educate the masses have to step forward to do their part. I don’t think anybody, even the racists want another war, but this kind of racial abuse needs to be checked, before it gets out of hand. Which thankfully, it hasn’t – yet!”

Adilah (23) an undergraduate studying abroad, says she has never encountered racism personally. Thus  the current scenario back in her country is something both new and troubling to her, which she says she is following with ‘obsessive curiosity’ via social media, newspapers and the accounts of people back home. To quote her views: “There are two possibilities concerning the events that have taken place. The first is that this could be vitriol and noise spewed by an isolated group of extremists and is now a mountain-molehill situation. The second is that this could snowball into something bigger and take on larger proportions of hate, racism and violence. I’m not qualified enough to assess the situation but I fervently hope it’s the former. I do hope that the concerned parties reach a reasonable solution rationally and that the dissemination of information to the public is done in a coherent, responsible manner. I’ve grown up reading accounts of the Indian partition, the holocaust and our own riots and know that fear and hate can prove to be a lethal combination. As a Muslim, I’d be afraid for the safety of my family back at home if tensions were to escalate.”

Shifani (23), a fellow Sri Lankan colleague of hers adds, “I couldn’t believe it at first, because I’d always prided myself over the fact that Muslims who were ostracized in other countries post-9/11 enjoyed a lot of religious and cultural freedom in Sri Lanka. I am still in shock; it is a blurry distant reality to me, narrated to me by third-parties. I know the animosity between different communities in Sri Lanka is nothing new but this is the first time it has affected me personally – friends of mine tell me their friends are updating ‘racist’ statuses on Facebook and are going to secret ‘meetings’ that feature discussions about how ‘Muslims are taking over Sri Lanka and must be stopped’.

“I don’t know enough yet about how badly or how fast this movement is spreading, and a part of me is just blocking it out, it’s too depressing to even fathom. But I do know that if it is allowed to grow, it could very well turn into some eerie sequel to the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora who have had to flee their homes. I think strong, firm government intervention is needed – to nip this in the bud right now, and not take it as some idle threat. I’d also like to believe that most Sri Lankans are not racists, and that most of them will not stand for this – every Sinhalese friend of mine has expressed their revulsion towards this movement.”

Neither her worry nor her optimism are without foundation. Those on social networking sites would be used to this by now; posts both for and against the Muslim issue. The question is, who are the majority? For a while it looked like the negativity (at least online), was overwhelming, but now several pages / sites have been formed to confront that negativity heads-on. Many young people from the different communities but especially the Sinhala Buddhist Community are uniting to make it clear that their voices can’t be hijacked. There is hope yet in the new generation. They were born into / lived through one ethnic strife. They absolutely do not want another.

Trials of a Vegetarian

People frequently assume that it must be very difficult to live on a vegetarian diet. It is! But not for the reasons they assume.

No! The most difficult thing about being a vegetarian has nothing to do with finding healthy or tasty vegetarian food. Instead it’s having to explain why we opt to be so, to self-appointed nutritionists out there – aka most of the non-vegetarian population.

“You will have difficulties in child-birth.”

“You will die young.”

“You will never get your required amount of proteins.”

Etc, etc! You get the picture? In this subcontinent where people have lived perfectly healthy lives as vegetarians for centuries due to the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, I really don’t see why I have to answer for my food habits to know-it-alls with colonial hangovers.

Unfortunately though, they seem to take it as some inalienable right of theirs. Thus most of us vegetarians have gotten used to the inevitable interrogation sessions on our food choices.

There is a two-fold reason for my vegetarianism.

1 – I was born into a Hindu vegetarian family.

2 – I happen to be an animal lover and do not want to eat meat, regardless of religious injunctions.

I draw criticism on both counts. People ask me if I am a religious extremist, for being a Hindu vegetarian. I wasn’t aware that peacefully following the principle of Ahimsa would make me an ‘extremist.’ Nor do I see why following such an obviously ethical principle should even need defending. Following on that principle, for a long time now I have wanted to be a vegan (which diet would be comparatively difficult to follow), but even that in my estimation would not be extremism. I simply do not wish to give pain to other living beings. That is humanism, not extremism.

Which brings us to the other famous argument non-vegetarians employ against us: “Plants have life too.”

You don’t say!

Yes, I did study science in school too, thank you very much. I know plants are living beings too – but they don’t exactly have the consciousness to know that they are going to be butchered and thus feel fear and pain like animals. If it makes you feel better about your dietary choices, by all means tell yourselves that plants have lives too – but try to wipe that triumphant smirk off your face when telling us that.

No – unbelievable as it might seem, you are not the first person to confront us with that brilliant line of reasoning. Nor even the hundredth. Even more annoying than having to answer for being vegetarian is having to put up with that “AHA, Gotcha” smugness most people radiate when they come up with that hackneyed argument.

Fortunately for them, my belief in practicing non-violence extends to idiotic humans too.

So, there you have it:
Yes, vegetarianism is a perfectly healthy way of life.

No, I am not going to die young. My strapping six foot two’ grandfather, a strict vegetarian all his life, lived till ninety-three.

Yes the vegetables I eat had life too but they didn’t bay with terror as the knife sliced through them.

No, doctors haven’t said that vegetarianism is an unhealthy diet. Or rather they said that decades ago, but now they are saying that vegetarianism is actually healthier than eating meat.

Your trump card of being ‘scientific’ as opposed to us, no longer washes I am afraid. You have sat on your high-horses long enough. Come down to earth and join us in our journey to humanism.

Book Review: Lost in You by Dr. Noel Nadesan

“The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.” – George Bernard Shaw

When it comes to writings by Sri Lankan authors, quite a large proportion of it is diasporic writing. Perhaps there is something to be said for the theory of inner or outer tumult giving wings to the creative muse. Without a doubt, Sri Lankans who have uprooted as well as re-rooted themselves all over the globe have had to experience a lot of both; inner as well as outer turmoil that is.

Whether they be Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim or Burgher, a deep-seated search for meaning, identity and a sense of belonging has been set in motion by the various upheavals to their inner psyche as well as outer circumstances. This has in turn given rise to a plethora of writings that an audience back home are just beginning to discover.

In a recent attempt to make such writings available to the people back home, some English translations of novels written in Tamil were launched at the BMICH last month.

One of those books was ‘Lost in You,’ the translation of a Tamil book titled Unaiyae Maiyal Kondu by Dr. Noel Nadesan, a Sri Lankan Tamil veterinary surgeon domiciled in Australia. At the launch, the author claimed that he was not a literary genius and wasn’t trying to be; he wrote for his own mental satisfaction as well as to relay certain historic episodes which he had witnessed and which he thought necessary to relay to others who might either not have witnessed it themselves or else viewed it from another side of the divide.

Dr. Nadesan (right) at the book launch in Colombo

He has already written three other books which have earned him praise as well as acrimony. Lost in You, is the fourth, which is the only one I can speak for, having personally read it.

The genre of fiction has many paths but the person who epitomizes Bernard Shaw’s ideal of showcasing his own experiences and culture in works of fiction is perhaps taking the most hazardous path. If he does an honest job of it, he would have showcased his community’s warts as well as its dimples; but especially its warts. Not many people can take that.

In that sense, honest diaspora artistes are much to be pitied. They have been thrown into a maelstrom  of soul searching which have given rise to their creative output. But the rest of the community who would be happier with reconstructing heroic pasts and laudable contemporary portrayals of themselves are very likely to take offence.

In that sense, most of these writings are not comfortable to read, especially if the reader is a person who identifies with the community being written about. Dirty linen has been washed in public. It is a necessary exercise. Dirty linen has to be washed. But the instinctive reaction of someone in a state of cultural flux, seeking to establish their community’s criteria as good and noble citizens would be “Oh No, did he have to go and put it out there publicly for other communities to point and laugh at?”

But that is what artistes ideally do. Hold up mirrors of ourselves that will show us as we are or even caricature and thus emphasize those least endearing characteristics of ourselves which we would rather not acknowledge – either to ourselves or to others.

‘Lost in You’ is such a book. It is not necessarily a literary masterpiece as its author has already acknowledged. The sentences are simple and lucid but lay no claim to literary genius.  Its strength is not in the beauty of the prose but rather in the validity of the story-telling. Nevertheless it flows in simple, direct sentences into an easily readable book of only a 139 pages.

It is the story of a young Sri Lankan Tamil doing his PhD in Australia. He is an intelligent young man able to think, reason and question, which he does constantly. Except that he grew up in a certain culture and is now as a young adult still capable of change, living in a vastly different culture. He is naturally confused. He was brought up in a closed patriarchal system with fixed rules on morality. He is now living in a very open culture where those lines have blurred. He has in some ways adapted to the change, in some ways adapting to the change and in other ways incapable of getting past his deep-rooted culture which he acknowledges.

Life does not necessarily take us from Point A to Point B with an ‘Aha’ moment at the end and neither does this book. It is the portrayal of a young man’s soul searching given trying circumstances in his life and the laudable as well as not-so-laudable ways in which he tries to overcome them. At the end, he does not necessarily know what he could have done better and neither do we. Such are the trials of a community in flux. There are no established rules. We have to make them up as we go along.  Eventually our bluff might be called but we are still not certain what the alternative could have been or should have been.

People with fixed cultural values on how a person should behave may not like this book but that does not invalidate the story. It is a very real story which is honest in not portraying cases in black and white. There are shades of gray everywhere making it uncomfortable for the reader to take the moral high-ground. Nadesan does not oblige us by providing the stereotypes we are comfortable with. In this book, you can’t help liking the mistress, you can’t help feeling irritated with the wife although you feel sorry for her, you can’t help feeling exasperated with the protagonist while yet sympathizing with him.

The book, like the Sri Lankan diaspora itself, is a story of turmoil, with more questions than answers on what could have been and should have been. It reads well, but whether it sits well depends on the reader.

Hoppers: Sri Lanka’s national obsession

The hopper is a delicacy that Sri Lankans all over the country are familiar with. It is one of those unifying dishes that all Sri Lankans can lay claim to as part of their culture, though there are certain cultural variations in some places.

Where though did the dish originate from? It is known in nearly all parts of India (which has several more variations of the Appa, than Sri Lanka) as well as in countries where Indian and Sri Lankan diasporas have established themselves, such as Malaysia.

The South Indian hopper, especially from Kerala is almost identical to Sri Lankan hoppers. Except that instead of yeast, they use toddy to ferment the rice flour batter. Appam is apparently a common name for rice flour cakes / pancakes of all sorts in India and so they have several innovative versions of the appam that we would not recognize over here such as unniappam and neyappam (deep fried rice cakes). A more common version we do have over here is the idiappam (stringhoppers) – the noodle-like streamed rice-cakes popular in both Kerala and Sri Lanka.

As to the hopper itself, which people can lay claim to its origins is a mystery although a wide range of cultures enjoy it as part of their cuisine. It is certainly an Eastern dish (now), rather than a Western one, but according to the Jewish food writer and historian, Gil Marks, the three separate Jewish communities of Cochin, Mumbai and Calcutta in India have a variation of the hopper as a staple dish amongst them. He therefore speculates that it might have originated with them, in the Indian subcontinent.

Sri Lankan Appa

The appa, as we know it in Sri Lanka is a thin, crisp pancake made of fermented rice flour batter. A short search on the internet for its recipe yields a wide variety of results, even within Sri Lanka. The measurements of rice, flour, sugar, salt, yeast all differ – and some have different ingredients. There are variations for example where toddy or beer are used, coconut water used instead of water, urad dhal added, and so on.

But whether it is a town in the South or North or anywhere else in Sri Lanka – most Sri Lankans can be sure of one thing; finding a kade that has a cook deftly making hoppers one after the other. He is usually not even waiting for the clientele. He is sure of the clientele. This is a hopper loving nation and it shows in the number of boutiques that have sprung up, just to cater to our seemingly insatiable appetite for it.

A typical hopper-loving Sri Lankan, one of my favourite pastimes is watching these hopper-chefs in action. Kilted out chefs in all their pristine white formality on TV shows would be hard-pressed to compete with these salt-of-the-earth local ‘chefs’ for finesse and style.

Their clothes and overall personality are not that of white collar professionals. The backdrop against which they work by the roadside are dingy little boutiques. They don’t have the conscious showmanship of professional Chefs on television. But they way they deftly work three pans on a gas stove at a time, pouring in the merest whiff of batter to form a paper-thin crust on the pan, cracking an egg or pouring sweetened coconut milk, as needed at the behest of the customer, and making sure that all the appas are out on a plate without being over or under-cooked, is a feat of skill that many hopper lovers enjoy watching.

To love hoppers is an inherent Sri Lankan trait. So apparently is making it. I have never yet come across any of the young men at the kades making it, who do it with less than perfection.

Love in a Headscarf Book Review

Browsing through the aisles of a bookshop recently (my favourite activity next to actually reading books), I came across a book cover that stood out for its interesting image and title; Love in A headscarf by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed. The cover image was a drawing of a lady in a headscarf.

What’s the average perception of ladies wearing headscarves?
Traditional? Demure? Suppressed? Oppressed? Archaic?
The headscarf (amongst non-muslims) has many stereotypical connotations, not many of which are positive.

Yet the cover design of a headscarf-sporting young woman challenged all these stereotypes. She looked thoroughly modern and confident, with her bright pink sunglasses, matching lipstick and no-nonsense look.

With both hair and eyes thoroughly obscured, it is rather difficult to project a personality, especially one would think, in a drawing – but this drawing projected the personality successfully; ‘Don’t mess with me! I am a modern young woman, who knows what I want and I am going after it.’

Well, that was a challenge right there from the Muslim lady who wrote her story to the reader, and I took it up. She didn’t disappoint. With sassy humour and charm, she relates the many trials and tribulations of being a young Muslim woman growing up in Britain.

The opening chapter is promising. She is having a ‘good headscarf day.’ You know, one of those rare days when the fabric of the headscarf swathes itself as it should? No? Well, it doesn’t seem much different from the good hair / bad hair days that the rest of us suffer from.

It is especially important to the 19 year old Shelina (of the first chapter) that her headscarf drapes successfully. Like other women fussing with their hair before an important date, her room is covered in a rainbow of colours – of all the discarded headscarves. This is the first time she is about to meet a suitor at her family home – and he might be ‘The One.’ It is imperative that she make a good impression.

Unfortunately finding ‘The One’ is no more easier (or difficult) for a modern, young Muslim woman than it is for her non-muslim peers, and the rest of the book takes us on her journey to find her ideal prince. In the stereotypical media out there, we hear of modern young (mainly western) women’s search for their princes and the eastern and middle-eastern women’s arranged marriages to toads (who never turn into princes).

This amusingly self-searching and revealing book exposes most of these stereotypes as well as re-invents them. It is not only the toads who show up for arranged marriages (although they are there too) and eastern women traditionally brought up, yearn for their princes too.

Hers is not necessarily a revolutionary tale but it is a tale that challenges the stereotype out there of oppressed Muslim girls. Thus her recounting of a happy and loving family home is not unique. But in the plethora of writings out there on surly, fanatical Muslim men who make revolting fathers, brothers and husbands, her off-hand recounting of her father who used to rub his trimmed beard against her cheeks as a child to show his affection, and kept it shampooed and conditioned, so as not to hurt her when doing so, raises a tender chord of resonance.

Stock image of Muslim father and daughter

When only the negative stories are heard, all the positive stories that never make it into the media (because they are ‘normal’ and thus not newsworthy) might as well be for naught. Janmohamed consciously writes about her family, community and religion in order to challenge those negative stereotypes.

In doing so, she gives a glimpse of a community long vilified by non-muslims, especially post 9/11, portraying how they feel, think and act. Muslims have unfortunately become the threatening ‘other’ in too many countries across the world, including Sri Lanka.  For an educated young woman who draws sustenance from her faith and community but is not blind to its faults (as indeed which community is without its faults?), being a practicing Muslim, wearing a headscarf in a western country post 9/11 is  suddenly a consciously brave decision that she has to fight for.

To be who she is, believe in what she does and yet continue her life, which was never a threat to anybody else, as normally as possible is an uphill challenge but she doesn’t shirk from it. In books of this genre we already have Bridget Jones and a horde of lesser known modern heroines. But Shelina Zahra Janmohamed on a similar mission still stands out – because she is Muslim. She stands out not only because her traditional community expects her to go about finding her prince within certain culturally defined boundaries and means, but because she is suddenly the ‘threatening other’ in her larger British community.

The author, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

With all our progress in women’s rights, women of the 21^st century face some unique challenges. This book is the exploration of the challenges of a 21^st century Muslim woman. It is by turns, funny and perceptive, mellow and introspective or irreverent and light-hearted – and for many non-muslims out there, it will prove an enlightening glimpse into where these boxed in ‘others’ are coming from, ideology-wise.

One of my favourite chapters was on her interaction with her most religious suitor. Their conversations on Islam and what it teaches are beautiful, thought-provoking and riveting. Having read many books on what Islam is about, I was yet inspired and impressed by the revelations in this chapter.  Many Muslims who insist that theirs is a religion of peace and tolerance seem to be fighting a losing battle against the stereotype of the Taliban, held against them. This book comes at a relevant time to show the other side without being preachy.

The book falls into the genre of chick lit, but its content is too thought provoking for that dismissive label. This is not a book for just dreamy-eyed young women. Even the elderly, the male sex and anyone in general interested in getting past the stereotype of Muslims prevalent in the world today, would enjoy this book. Take a gamble and read it. Personally I loved it.

A tale of Pride & Prejudice

The publication of the much-loved story of Elizabeth and Darcy is reaching its 200^th anniversary. And ‘Janeites’ all over the world are gearing for the celebrations. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any woman who has read Pride and Prejudice must be in want of a Mr.Darcy.

Unfortunately though, even the author herself couldn’t find her Mr. Darcy; what hope is there for the millions of her females fans, spanning generations?  In recent years it looked as if Colin Firth might fit the bill (and did he ever – le magnifique Darcy), but now Colin Firth is married too. And let’s face it – he was only ever playing a part, he is not the Real Mr. Darcy.

The Perfect Mr. Darcy

The sprightly spinster who wrote this timeless novel, what would her reaction be, if she could see the adoration the novel now enjoys?  She was no stranger to failure, Jane Austen. When her father first attempted to publish Pride and Prejudice as First impressions (its original name) with offers to bear the publishing cost himself, it was still rejected. She eventually became a published author within her own lifetime but enjoyed only moderate success. It took more than fifty years after her death for her to be rediscovered and several more years after that, to become the acclaimed author she is today.

Tomorrow (Monday) marks the 200^th anniversary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice. The BBC, which filmed the most popular adaptation of the novel to date, in a six part series featuring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle as Darcy and Elizabeth, is gearing up to thrill fans again by bringing the regency romance alive  – this time in the form of the Netherfield ball.

Yes an honest to goodness Netherfield ball with period costumes, dance, music and even food – with experts being consulted to make sure of their period authenticity. If you are one of the lucky ones who get to attend that ball, make sure you know the right etiquette and protocols. A real Mr. Darcy attending might have a heart attack otherwise. Such as for example, never dancing more than twice with a partner – and even dancing twice might make all the ladies gossip of an impending marriage between the two of you. You shouldn’t exhibit such shocking particularity lightly. Society has its rules. Especially Jane Austen’s society.

For an inquisitive and innately wise young woman, the strictures of eighteenth century British society must have afforded a lot of amusement and entertainment – as well as frustration.  And that is what comes out in all her novels; her perceptive exploration of her society with grace and wit. Like many other artistes who portray their society’s foibles, she caricatures and lampoons – but she does it with so much skill that the caricatured are not cartoon figures. Or if they are, they are at least believably, realistic cartoon figures. Spanning generations and cultures, her books resonate with people even today because they can identify with having a mother / aunt like Mrs. Bennett or an irritating relative like Mr. Collins. It is too bad that only a beau like Mr. Darcy is often the missing staple. Perhaps he alone of all her creations remains a little unrealistic – although not unbelievable.

If fairy tales are accused of engendering unrealistic expectations of a Prince Charming, how much more dangerous is Pride and Prejudice? It has no fairy god-mothers or magic spells turning pumpkins into chariots. It is a very believable tale that many a woman has sighed over. And consequently the average lady bookworm out there has never dreamed of an inept prince picking up her slipper. She dreams instead of a tall, dark and handsome, proud and haughty man, who is also incredibly wealthy. She imagines that their paths might cross the wrong way at first but it will all come right in the end. Sounds familiar? Yeah, Harlequin / Mills & Boon et al make a killing on it. They probably ought to pay Austen patent rights for it.

For her time however, the theme and the way of dealing with it was new. She was a trend setter, not a follower. She wrote at a time when the gothic novel was at its height in popularity. Yet her novels have nothing of melodrama in them (although they sport melodramatic characters like Mrs. Bennett and Lady Catherine de Bourgh).

Charlotte Bronte of the overly dramatic Bronte Sisters  was famously contemptuous of her as a light and frothy writer, a view many of her contemporaries held of her. Jane Austen probably didn’t mind. She had her own contempt for the gothic novels, which she caricatured in her novel Northanger Abbey. The air-head of a heroine Catherine, is a glib devourer of such novels and is always looking for similar melodrama in real life – which obviously doesn’t provide it.  In that novel, Austen irreverently makes it clear, what she thinks of the reigning literary genre of her day.

The Bennett sisters

The main accusation of her detractors is that she was an ‘elitist’ portraying gossipy, elite society in a light vein and nothing else. Yet though the society and its many frivolities that she lived through are long gone, why is she so enormously popular still?  Perhaps because she wrote the perfect romance that is bound to resonate with women the world over, but it is an undeniable fact that she claims many men, as well as academics and scholars amongst her fan base.

A more plausible answer is that she had an unerring eye for detecting human foibles and telling the story of humanity in a way that people can understand and relate to. She had narrow scope in which to study her characters, true, but she made skillful use of whatever access she did have.  She was a lady of noble birth but modest means in eighteenth century Britain. She had limited options as an unmarried woman to achieve anything in her society. She was not Joan of Arc and did not try to be. And rather than writing something she had no idea about, she did something revolutionary for her time –  she wrote about something she did know about exactly as she saw it.  In the 200 years since, the language and sentence structures have changed slightly. The society and culture, especially with regards to the rights of women has almost completely changed. Yet the genuine honesty of her perception and probing in trying to understand the people around her surpasses all that to reach out across time to the reader; because human nature has not changed.

We might be much more independent women with many more avenues to explore those means than Jane Austen ever had – but we still have irritating fathers, nagging mothers, annoying younger sisters, inquisitive neignbours – and over and above all that, that hankering for the perfect Mr. Darcy.

Two hundred years on, we feel you Jane, we so feel you!

A people left stranded

The Muslim populated areas of Jaffna were once some of its richer neighbourhoods.

More than twenty years after they were expunged from the peninsula in 1990 by the LTTE, many Muslims have found their way back ‘home.’ But home is now the slums.

“This is our land. We wanted to come home” was the oft repeated phrase they cited for coming back to Jaffna. But their neighbourhood is one of squalor and poverty. Having received some assistance in Puttalam and the various other areas they had relocated to post 1990, they come low on the list of IDPS to be rehabilitated by the government, in the North.

A people once largely affluent have been reduced to squalor but no-one is taking responsibility for it. As far as the government is concerned they have given some minimal assistance for relocation post the exodus of 1990 and that is all that is required of them. It was the LTTE that took away all the Muslims’ wealth after all. It is not their business to replace it.

“We lost so much of property and money when the LTTE drove us away,” says Sharmila Hanifa, one of the few local activists among the Northern Muslims determined to fight for the community’s rights. “I want to approach Kumaran Pathmanathan (KP) who has said that he is using the remainder of LTTE wealth to help Tamil IDPS, to ask redress for the Muslims too. Do they not owe us? Who else can we demand justice from now?”

Many of the families resettled in Jaffna have been given tin sheets, some cement and Rs. 5000 by the local government through the UNHCR. A few families were also given Rs. 25000 but it is not clear on what basis. They believe that they are all entitled to it but the fact only a few have received it has lead to tension and suspicions from within the community. It does not help that some, while living in Puttalam, come down from time to time whenever aid is announced and thus deprive those actually living in Jaffna of their fair share. The community feels that they are all being tarred with the same brush, due to the mischievousness of a few.

Says Sultan Jinooz, a Grama Niladhari who sought a transfer back from Negombo to his homeland of Jaffna, “some government officials tell me, ‘Your people are only taking the funds here and going back to wherever they have resettled.’ Some of that criticism is true but it works both ways. Some abuse the system that way but there are also genuine returnees sticking it out here, who then get cut out of that aid. It is also a fact that many people genuinely tried to resettle but the aid given was not enough and so they have gone back.”

Today, the GN divisions of Moor Street around which several of the returnees live are a testament to the horrors of war. Skeletal remains of what must have been once-handsome houses dot the area, with shrubs and weeds growing in and around them aplenty. Many other areas of Jaffna have moved on from looking like a war-ravaged no man’s land but Moor Street is not one of them. The only good looking building to be seen in the area is a bright green mosque. All around it, people have used the tin sheets and sack cloths given by the UNHCR, to patch up broken buildings, in order to live in them.

“We once lived in palatial houses, we are now reduced to this,” says Ramlah (34). “My brother had a thriving jewellery business here. When we were asked to leave, we lost all that. Some people managed to secrete away their jewelry in their hair buns or underclothes but most were caught and stripped off. My brother threw caskets of jewels into our garden well. The LTTE beat him up for it.”

Elaborates her friend, “Our community did not traditionally have bank savings. We saved our money in gold biscuits. Many of us buried them in our lands or threw them into wells before going, in the hopes of retrieving them when we came back. We never believed that it would take this many years to return. By the time we could come back – during the ceasefire, all our savings had been looted.”

The LTTE had apparently cordoned off the area and looted all the money and jewelry that the Muslims left behind. This was in addition to stripping off all that they had on their person. Depending on the cadres, some had been stripped of all their money, some had been allowed Rs.100, 200, or 500 but nothing else.

“When they told us to leave, they didn’t initially tell us that we couldn’t take our money or jewellery / vehicles with us” recalls Mohamed, a three wheel driver. I was doing business then and owned two motorcycles and a truck. In the end, we were not allowed to take even bicycles with us. The LTTE transported us out of Jaffna in trucks like cattle. They dumped us outside the peninsula and told us that we were now M.H.M Ashraf ‘s problem, not theirs. We walked the rest of the way to Puttalam, over four days. I was 26 years old, and had a new-born baby as well as a one year old child.”

Not your land

“As we were leaving with tears streaming down our faces, they told us to make sure we stamped our feet to shake the dust off them, before leaving” adds Ramla. “They told us, ‘This is our homeland, not yours. Make sure that you do not carry the soil of this land even on your feet.’ They were that cruel.”

Yet, the Muslims did not think and still do not think that they are a community apart from the Tamils.  “We lived as one and identified with the same problems. When the ethnic conflict broke out, we were also a part of it as Tamil-speaking people. Our children joined the militant groups too, including the LTTE, EPDP and TELO. When the LTTE decimated the other groups, we like the Tamils were horrified to see our children in the LTTE decimating their brethren in the other organizations.  Whatever problems the Tamils had, we identified with too. That is how we had lived in this part of the country for centuries.”

They instead insist that the mischief was done by Eastern LTTE commanders, who by contrast to the northern Muslims and Tamils, came from a background of strife between those two communities.

“Eastern LTTE supremos like Karikalan hated the Muslims because of their own conflicted backgrounds” says Mohamed. “Here in the North, we lived as one but they could not understand that and convinced the northern LTTE to get rid of us. We were also very wealthy and they had their eyes on that wealth. In front of our eyes, they collected our money and jewellery in sackloads and gloated that they had gained the wealth of a mini Saudi Arabia in one morning.”

The Jaffna Muslims however do not blame the Tamils for this. “It was the LTTE alone who were responsible. The Tamils are not to be blamed for not standing up to them. The LTTE was not an outfit you could stand up to. Even so some church fathers and civilians did try and were manhandled because of it,” they recall.

In the many areas they relocated to, they carried fond memories of their cordial relations with the Tamils and even passed it on to their children. Rilwan (27) was only five when he left. He has no memories of Jaffna from childhood but says that he came back to be home. “In Puttalam, we were ‘refugees’, ‘outsiders ‘and even ‘usurpers’. I wanted to escape those labels. I wanted to be in a place which I could call home.”

He currently lives in a makeshift shack put up on marshy land without electricity or running water but says he has no intention of returning to Puttalam. He is happy to be in Jaffna, where the happiness of finally not being an ‘outsider’ outweighs all other considerations.

“The residents of Puttalam even though fellow Muslims, made it clear that we were interlopers” he says. By contrast the Tamils of Jaffna welcome us as one of their own. They stop me on the road, ask me where in Jaffna I am originally from, tell me that they knew my parents well and were sad to see them leave– all that fills my heart with joy; that acceptance and sense of belonging, which I didn’t have growing up.”

The Puttalam Muslims had originally been sympathetic to the Northern Muslim refugees. But neither they nor the Northerners had envisaged that the problem would take many decades to solve. “They greeted us with fruits and sympathetic words,” recalls Hassan (44). “But over time, when we didn’t leave (because we couldn’t) they grew annoyed.”

“We were so shy to come out of the camps. They used to taunt us by calling us Panam Kottes (Palmyrah seeds)” says Amina, who was only 15 when she had to leave. “Over time though, we learned to defend ourselves. We would say, ‘Yes we come from the land of Palmyrahs which are wonderful trees. Every part of it is useful and sturdy. We are not ashamed to be associated with the Palmyrah.”

Whichever part of the country these proud people had found themselves, they were at best ‘refugees’ and at worst interlopers. Their proud spirits rebelled and smarted which is why many of them have come home to Jaffna. Jaffna though is still a far cry from the home they left behind. They are happy to be back at any rate but are continuing the fight to have a stable life with at least basic facilities and infrastructure.

Having given up hope after a decade, many had sold their houses or land during the ceasefire at paltry rates, something they bitterly regret now. Meanwhile some still have deeds and land but not the capital to repair their war-ravaged houses.

“I came back to Jaffna in 2003 to offer my services to the resettling community, but my family is still based in Colombo as I don’t have a home to offer them here,” says M.S.A.M Mubarak, the principal of Osmania College, the only functioning Muslim school in Jaffna. “I was a teacher in Jaffna when we were chased out. I finally ended up in Colombo as vice principal at Zahira College after travelling the circuit from Puttalam to Panadura, in search of stability for my family.”

If only the government would look into proper housing for the returnees, he says, most of their problems would be solved as the challenges of stability and resettlement would then be met.

“The fabric of our society was rent apart in 1990 and it is proving a difficult endeavour to recover. I myself never sold my land as I always wanted to be able to come back home, but that home is no-more and I do not have the funds to rebuild it. I see so many people coming with the intention of permanently resettling but then giving up after awhile and going away.

“I can see the effect directly on the children, it takes two to three years for them to get a sense of balance and start concentrating on their studies, but when their parents up and leave, those studies get disrupted yet again,” says Principal Mubarak.

Osmania College, which re-opened in 2003 with only 41 children studying Grades 1 – 5 has now 430 students enrolled, all the way up to the eleventh grade. The student population however is in a constant state of flux as the parents unable to stabilize between one place and another keep coming and going. It used to be a prominent boys’ school but is now a co-ed institution as not enough of a student body has grown to re-open Khadija College, the former girls’ school. That school has meanwhile been taken over by some 16 families who share the two toilets between them and refuse to leave as it offers a free roof over their heads, something more than their brethren have.
“The local government bodies are not giving us the few aids that they give the others as they say we are staying here illegally,” say the residents. “But we are not leaving. We are entitled to land and houses as people originally from this area and if they won’t give it to us, we won’t vacate what we took over either.”

Khadija College

The community meanwhile exists amidst many troubles of livelihood and survival. Most of them make a living in the iron trade (selling bits and pieces of scrap metal) or as pavement sellers but both industries are subject to abuse. The police fine us absurd amounts for being pavement sellers but that is our traditional livelihood,” says Imthiyaz (47). “In Puttalam, the residents would not trade with us so we had no income. In Jaffna, the residents willingly buy from us but the authorities are cracking down unnecessarily.”

And so the community keeps on fighting for its rights. Many have lost hope and taken to alcoholism. But many also remain strong and committed towards a better future for their children. It’s an ongoing struggle, they have lived with now for 22 years.

(Picture credit: K. Dushiyanthini and lankamuslim.com)