Broken Pottu
An infant in Menik Camp.
Many thousands of the IDP children have lost both their parents comes news from the Sri Lankan ‘welfare camps’.
Bright red pottu
Every morning
Never missed.
The point of your finger
Right here between our eyebrows
For both of us.
Amma puts hers first
Then she puts mine.
Remember me insisting
Me first, me first!
That day Dad give me a biggest hug, squeezed so tight,
Lifted me so high, laughing so loud.
At midnight he went out of the bunker.
Amma must have known he wasn’t coming back
But still she smiled at me.
The day she went out of the bunker
Her pottu was still shining between her eyebrows.
Then her pottu went right into her head
And red blood came all down her calm, loving face.
Before then I only knew how to cry.
Then I knew how to shriek, to scream
Holding on to your body, Amma,
Scream!
Scream!
Scream!
Here too our school is under the trees
But they don’t take the register.
I don’t mind, I’m used to it.
The only thing different is
There are no bunkers here.
Sometimes my heart beats so hard
It’s louder than the gunshots
And tears just shoot out when I think about you.
Please don’t ask me about pottu
If Amma can’t put it on me I don’t want it.
And please don’t teach us about parents,
I don’t want to hear about them.
It’s not only me; none of us want to hear it.
Poem by Mahesh Munasinghe
Translated by Prasanna Ratnayake
The pottu is the red spot traditionally worn by Hindu married women, more recently also by children. It is believed to protect them from evil. Usually a widow stops wearing her pottu immediately after her husband’s death.
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The Witness
There lies an eerie silence,
on the grassy fields pock marked
with craters scattered amongst the broken trees
and trampled flowers where,
twenty thousand died because they were,
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You are either with us or against us!
If you remain on their side, you will die like dogs!
But if you come over to our side, you can
live like dogs in barbed wire camps!
That was the ultimatum, before the bombs
and shells and rockets began to fall.
Those responsible for these humanitarian atrocities,
are now heroes in the eyes of the vocal majority who
celebrated the death of the twenty thousand,
while the silent minorities silently wondered if they would be next!
The swine flu infected majority thought,
this was a war without witnesses.
But they did not count on one witness,
that was too high in the sky to be destroyed or killed!
Like they did to TV stations and journalists!
A witness that was too far away to be intimidated or abducted in,
‘Unidentified Four wheeled Objects!’
A witness that was beyond the range of multi barrel rockets and artillery!
A witness that could not be insulted by state media!
A witness that could not be bribed into withholding evidence!
The Eye In The Sky Saw It All!
Satellite evidence that only blind patriots and idiots would deny!
Those who survived, can rest assured that,
the world will never forgive or forget!
Those who never lost their whole possessions in one day, saved for generations, those who never saw their family members get killed in front of their eyes and those who never lost a kin to a suicide bomber will never understand these poems.
Why can’t you live peacefully with the Sinhalese ask my Sinhalese friends. “Why do you guys want a separate homeland?”.
There is no dialogue between North and South. The governments since 1983 have mollycoddled the Sinhalese to the point they did not witness the fleeing Tamils avoiding landmines, artillery shells and often getting caught in the crossfire.
The govt. thinks it has successfully hidden its atrocities from the international community. How wrong it is.
This trend is increasing.
International aid and loans meant for the whole of Sri Lanka are being spent on the majority community.
Tamils are not all dead. Tamil s are resilient but they are not fools to allow this govt. party for much too long.
There is a saying in Tamil, translated reads,”If you keep on bowing your head while someone constantly punches you then you are a fool. When someone keeps punching you and you still allow him then you are a fool too.”
The gist is time will come when this govt. wakes up from the euphoria of a bogus victory and realises this vicotry has created a solidarity among Tamils everywhere and the majority Sinhalese are but a minority in the world order.
The economic power is still with the Tamils. The government has to compensate for every single Tamil who lost relatives, family and possessions. The loans and aid are for the rehabilitation of those affected by the war and not for the governing politicians and their immediate families.
You just wait and see.
Pearl Thevanayagam