Take rock and shatter the mirror we are both resident in

It is said that the poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi mirrors back to us an ocean of woven speech too intricate and dynamic for any grammarian to untangle.  Reading this observation by Coleman Barks in a collection titled ‘The Essential Rumi’ it occurred to me that perhaps I am privileged in that I am happily oblivious to grammar rule out of sheer ignorance and interrogative sloth. 

This does not of course translate automatically to enhanced ability to extract value from Rumi or, to put another way, to swim in more exhilarating ways among the poet’s word-ways and silences.   Rumi reads to us, but we listen, talk back, get entangled and slip life-knots in accordance with our readiness  and ability to hear the music between syllables and inhabit the miniscule spaces between intertwining thought strings.  We come to our own conclusions.   We get lost and found to the extent we subject ourselves to abandonment and suffering.  Our end point is a journey, if we really want to see things that way.  Bliss involves a willingness to unfetter from known comforts and securities, and the insane sanity of seeking residence in a conversation-wave that is the word and is not, affirms as it disavows and transcends all categories and definitions.

Rumi has always intoxicated me with the logic-less but utterly lucid sobriety of his intoxication.  Each read gives insight.  A random page of a good translation (how I wish I had the language or perhaps the ignorance to judge translation-fidelity!) makes me want to stop writing even as it urges me never to stop. 

Coleman Barks recounts an encounter, that of Rumi, born in the year 1207 in Balkh (in what is now known as Afghanistan) and then Shiek in the dervish learning community in Konya, Turkey, and a dervish he met in 1244 by the name of Shams of Tabriz who had travelled what is now called the Middle East looking for someone who could endure his company.  Shams asks Rumi who was greater, Muhammad or Bestami, the latter having said ‘how great is my glory’ while the former had mused in prayer  (to God), ‘we do not know You as we should.’  The question had literally floored Rumi, Barks tells us, but he finally asserted that Muhammad was the greater because ‘Bestami had taken one gulp of the divine and stopped there whereas for Muhammad the way was always unfolding’.  Thereafter the two, Rumi and Shams became inseparable even when circumstances forced the latter to ‘disappear’ creating a void that was filled with Rumi’s transformation into a poet who began to listen to music and sang hour after hour, whirling around.

Shams returns and the reuniting kindles old jealousies in the community which eventually leads to a second disappearance, this time final, for Shams was (reportedly) murdered.  Rumi went looking for his beloved friend all the way to Damascus where he stopped in an interminable moment of eternity: ‘Why should I seek? I am the same as he. His essence speaks through me. I have been looking for myself!’

 I remembered an unforgettable conversation that drove home the point. A man knocks on a friend’s door. The friend within asks, ‘Who is it?’  He hears the response, ‘It is I’ and is dismissive, ‘Go away!’  He does and comes back a year later and is asked the same question. This time he responds, ‘you’.  The door opens: ‘Since we are one, there is room for two of us’. 

I have read many versions of this anecdote but the one in this particular collection came with an elaboration: ‘The double end of the thread is not what goes through the eye of the needle; it’s the single-pointed, fined-down, thread end (and) not a big ego-beast with baggage’.

Let Rumi elaborate further, for he is both master and slave of of both explication and confusion:

We are the mirror as well as the face in it

we are tasting the taste this minute

of eternity. We are pain

and what cures pain, both. We are

the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

Would you rather throw stones at the mirror, Rumi asks and answers with mirror-shattering sublimity: ‘I am your mirror, and here are the stones.’

The fascination with the false dichotomy of ‘you and I’ and of course with ‘mirrors’ and the seeming contradiction of the constant disavowal with word of their own utility (incessantly calling for silence) are recurrent themes in Rumi’s poetry.  The beloved is Shams and it is also Rumi.  God, as referred, is not an entity that is external but is one that is resident within patiently awaiting acknowledgment.  It is the ultimate humanizing of the divine and the elevation to divinity of the human, a concept that makes sense to theists and atheists both. 

Perhaps I am both empowered and rendered incapacitated by my grammar-lack, but I like to think that the beloved, even as he/she is I, even as it is Shams or the particular name that torments and gives bliss to heart at a given moment, is also that other impossible and infuriating creature we raise arms against: the enemy (so-called) that raises arm against us. It is someone else, and it is I. Self.  We make our own paradise and our personal hells.  All because we believe ‘I’ is tenable.  True exhilaration, if I’ve understood Rumi correctly, arrives through submission to truth (or god, if you like that idea).  He spoke to me this morning thus:

‘I saw you and became empty.

This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,

It obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,

Existence thrives and creates more existence!’

‘And also nothing, a beautiful nothing,’ I would add this morning when I realized that I am a Sufi and that Rumi was a Buddhist. 

This article was first published on July 6, 2011 in the 'Daily News'

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer.  Twitter: malindasene.  Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com.

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When you want to run away, just fly!

DISCLAIMER:  This is for kids.  Adults be warned: you may rediscover a child within you. 

There comes a time when everything goes wrong, when everyone seems to treat you badly, when even your friends, your brothers and sisters, and even your parents are so, so, so unfair.  That’s when you wonder if you were adopted.  That’s when you start thinking of running away.  That’s when you want to go far, far, far away from everything that bothers you. 

At moments such as that you don’t think about a place you want to be.  You just want to get away.  You just want to go somewhere.  Anywhere. 

It is NOT a stupid idea.  You’ll tell yourself that it will probably be very difficult.  First of all you probably won’t have any money with you.   Well, maybe you have saved a bit of money, but it is unlikely that whatever you have saved will get you food for more than a few days.  You could always find work, you’ll tell yourself.  The next moment you will tell yourself that no one will hire you.  After all you are just a kid and a kid doesn’t really have that many skills and certainly not skills that others will pay for. 

But you have hands, you’ll tell yourself.  You can work as a laborer.  “A gardener, maybe,” you’ll tell yourself.  You’ll get excited about it.  Then you’ll realize that no one will want to hire you.  They’ll ask questions.  That’s the problem.  Questions. 

Wherever you go, there’s bound to be some stupid, responsible (oh yes, you’ll curse responsibility) adults.  And they ask annoying questions. 

What’s your name?  Where are you from? Who are your parents? What do they do?  Do they know where you are?  Annoying, utterly annoying.  Yes, you can dish out a few lies, but sooner or later they’ll figure out that you’ve run away from home.  Adults are annoying in that way.   They’ll somehow bully you until you tell the truth and then they’ll hand you back to your crazy, wicked family.  Or they’ll hand you over to the police. 

Suddenly you get an idea:  ‘I will beg on the streets, that’s it!’ 

It would be fun.  You will tell tragic stories unsuspecting people who will instantly feel sorry for you and give you all the spare change they have.  You’ll talk of a wicked stepmother or stepfather.  You’ll tell them how you were orphaned when your parents died in an accident and your uncles and aunts refused to take care of you.  You’ll tell them how you were separated from your family during a carnival.  You might tell them that you fell off a bus, hit your head on the pavement and lost your memory. 

That would be fun, right?  Well, not if you’ve actually seen beggar children. 

The problem about running away is that those who want to do so are usually highly intelligent children.  It’s only because they can think that they come to the conclusion that they cannot stay with their families any longer.  That’s the problem.  They can think.  Since they can think they’ll always think about the possibilities and they’ll invariably come to the conclusion that running away is not a good idea at all. And then they are stumped.  They can’t stay and neither can they go.   

So what would you do if you find yourself in that situation? 

Well, since you can’t stay and you can’t really run away, the logical thing is to fly, right?  And that’s exactly what you can and should do.  Fly! 

Close your eyes and think of a place you would really love to visit.  It could be a carnival, a circus, a cricket match, the top of a mountain, a garden full of flowers that carry only your favorite colors, a library with your favorite books, a place where you can play all the video games you like, a castle made of chocolate with free ice cream, or a vast field where you can sit and whisper a wish that will be instantly granted.   

Close your eyes.  Think of where you want to be and what you want to do.  Close your eyes and be very still.  You’ll be right there immediately.  Close your eyes and you won’t hear your parents complaining.  Close your eyes and you can fly.  You can fly like a bird or a jet or a rocket.  You can do somersaults in the sky.  You can be a bandit or a hero, you can ride a dragon or slay it, and you can laugh or just be quiet and still.

You can fly.  That’s it.  There’s no reason to run away when you can fly, right?  So don’t run away.  It’s silly.  Really silly.  It is really, really, really silly because it’s tiresome and tiring.  Why run when you can fly.  The best thing about it is no one will ask you any questions.  More than that, there won’t be adults unless you want some adults around.  They won’t bug the devil out of you though.  Yes, don’t run away.  Fly. 

One of the greatest delights in my brief career as a journalist was writing for the kids' section of 'The Nation'.  I wrote over fifty articles in my last year at that newspaper.  I have resumed the series, which is now published in www.nightowls.lk.  Scroll down for other articles in this series.  

Other articles in this series

Stop and say hello to an angel 
Three-wheelers are tortoises and hedges are sentinels

Besties are butterflies

I don't have anything to wear! Un-cluttering is an art

It begins with the first soiled spoon

You have loads of time, you know

A puddle is a canvas Venus-Serena tied at love-all
Some jokes are not funny
There's an ant story waiting for you
And you can be a rainbow-maker
Trees are noble teachers
On cloudless nights the moon is a hole
Gulp down those hurtful words
A question is a boat, a jet, a space-ship or a heart
Quotes can take you far but they can also stop you
No one is weak
The fisherman in a black shirt
Let's celebrate Nelli and Nelliness
Ready for time travel?
Puddles look back at you, did you know?
What's the view like from your door?
The world is rearranged by silhouettes
How would you paint the sky?
It is cool to slosh around
You can compose your own music
Pebbles are amazing things
You can fly if you want to
The happiest days of our lives
So what do you want to do with the rain?
Still looking for that secret passage?
Maybe we should respect the dust we walk on
Numbers are beautiful 
There are libraries everywhere 
Collect something crazy
Fragments speak of a thousand stories 
The games you can and cannot play with rice
The magic of the road less-traveled
Have you ever thought of forgiving?
Wallflowers are pretty, aren't they?
What kind of friend do you want to be? 
Noticed the countless butterflies around you?
It's great to chase rainbows
In praise of 'lesser' creatures 
A mango is a book did you know?
Expressions are interesting things
How many pairs of eyes do you need?
So no one likes you?
There is magic in faraway lights
The thambilil-seller of Giriulla
When people won't listen, things will
Lessons of the seven-times table

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Care to walk along the highway of death?

It is known locally as El Camino de la Muerte, that’s Spanish for ‘Road of Death’.  It is a 43 mile road from La Paz to Coroico, 35 miles northeast of La Paz in the Yungas region of Bolivia. It is also called the Yungas Road.   It has been christened as the World’s Most Dangerous Road and it is estimated that 200-300 travellers are killed annually.  Built in the 1930s, during the Chaco War by Paraguayan prisoners it is one of the few routes connecting the Amazon rainforest region to the capital city of Bolivia and is marked by extreme drop-offs, single-lane width and lack of guardrails, muddy roads and loose rocks from the hillside above, with rain and fog often making for low visibility. 

The road was built by humans of course.  The drivers who err and send vehicles down steep precipices and die along with dozens of passengers are also human.  However, the intent is neither suicide nor murder.  Some situations/conditions are made for accidents, some less so, and this Road of Death belong to the former category.  There is tragedy pregnant in the air, one feels, even just looking at images on the internet.  And yet, the tinge of innocence in the most human flaws associated with this avenue of life-end is unmistakable.  Forgivable.

And then there are other roads.  Other human interventions; deliberate and devoid of such innocence where accident is not waiting to happen but massacre is orchestrated with dispassion.  Unforgivable. 

The internet informs that an alternative, much safer road, connecting La Paz to Coroico has been completed.  Soon, hopefully, this Road of Death will be abandoned, the natural process of erasure will get activated and what remains will be photographs on the internet.  Not so easy is the evacuation of other roads. 

I am thinking of the roads, well paths would be the better word, of My Lai and MY Khe where a unit of the US Army, Charlie Company, massacred more than 500 Vietnamese civilians (the majority being women, children including infants and elderly) in cold blood.  It all happened within 3 hours on March 16, 1968.  The soldiers had been sent to ‘search and destroy’ suspected communist fighters.  Not a single shot was fired at the soldiers of Charlie Company.  The 48^th Viet Cong Battalion, the intended target, was nowhere to be seen.  Charlie Company opened a path. To death.  Human-made. 

There are other ‘roads’; those that did not have names then and are unknown today. Roads in Vietnam.  Paths, perhaps, things that helped a villager get from A to B.  I am thinking of Agent Orange, a codename for a herbicide capable of defoliating trees and shrubbery in dense terrain where the enemy was suspected to be hiding.  It was one of a set called ‘Rainbow Herbicides’, ironically.  Between 1965 and 1970, close to 12,000,000  gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed in Vietnam, eastern Laos and parts of Cambodia by the US military to defoliate rural/forested land, depriving guerrillas of food and cover, and as part of a general policy of ‘forced draft urbanization, by destroying the ability of peasants to support themselves in the countryside.  Approximately 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with birth defects.  Another highway.  Of and to death.   Man-made. 

Let’s get close to today now. We have another highway.  It has a name.  Highway 80.  It is a six-lane road that runs from Kuwait City to the border towns of Abdali (Kuwait) and Safwan and then on to Basra.  On the night of February 26, 1991, US aircraft and ground forces attacked retreating Iraqi military personnel, after US Marine aircraft block the road with anti-tank mines and bombed the read of the massive vehicle column. Casualty figures, depending on source, range from 200 to tens of thousands.  The Iraqis were no saints of course, but there’s something utterly distasteful in the sanctimony that US officials regularly shower on the rest of the world.  These were, let me repeat, retreating military personnel.  No effort was expended in securing a mass surrender. 

How can I forget the lost highways and other avenues lined with trees and carrying memories of journey and heart, love and abandonment, in Nagasaki and Hiroshima?  What is it about bombing that makes it ‘ok’ whereas point-blank shooting unpardonable (and that too, only if perpetrated by those who do not belong to the Blue-Eyed-Boy Club of the UN)?  Such nuances do not provide relief for victim (dead) and survivor (deformed, decapitated and distraught).   

There are roads, then, ladies and gentlemen.  They are made of and for journeys.  Necessary journeys where one decides ‘I shall got o B’ and sets off from A and unless fate strikes in unpredictable ways, reaches B safely.  And unnecessary ones, planned by others for their purposes and all leading to death.  That’s Assassination Avenue, friends. 

On July 24, 1984, a bus veered off the Yungas Road and into the canyon, killing some 100 passengers.  The road didn’t plan to kill them. Neither did the driver.  Accident.  A death is a death, after the fact.  And yet, there’s something rainbow-like about these deaths.  The reason perhaps is that such tragedies have the ‘human error’ stamp.  Then there are others.  They are not tragedies.  No, not ‘accidents’.  Crimes against humanity. Un-investigated.  Forgettable?   

Time passes, we move on.  We must not forget, though; not least of all when we are rapped on our collective knuckles because some interested party dressed conjecture as fact and because the knuckled-rapper is either handicapped by ignorance or empowered by the privilege to be selectively naïve and blind.

Did I hear someone in Washington DC talk about war crimes?  Military excesses?  No, I don’t think I did.  Must be a middle aged Vietnamese woman from a village that Charlie Company named ‘Pinkville’, a village whose residents were evacuated (by way of death) by these same Good Samaritans.  Or was that an echo doing the rounds from decade to decade, continent to continent, war to war, from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, through Abu Ghraib, dissolving in a rainbow shower called Agent Orange and gathering as scream and silence along Highway 81?  I am not sure. 

 

But I am sure that a man called Ban Ki-moon will enlighten me, after telling me who was responsible for the murder of Patrice Lumumba the first Prime Minister of the Congo, the country he visited the other day to take part in celebrations to mark its 50^th anniversary of Independence.  And after relating to me the fascinating story of King Leopold II of Belgium and the avenues of death he constructed for some 10 million people.  After completing the maps of Palestinian Tragedy.   

This was first published in July 2010 in the 'Daily News'.  

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. Email: malindansenevi@gmail.com. Twitter: malindasene.

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Local government elections and the widening democracy deficit

The controversy over the appointment of the Central Bank Governor was almost like an exercise to obtain the answer to the question ‘who’s the boss?’  The then incumbent, whose tenure was marked by matters which discredited the office and dented investor confidence, was defended.  The President himself expressed displeasure and even stated that he wanted the man removed.  Possible replacements were named.   In the end, bruises suffered by the main protagonists notwithstanding, a person of competence and standing was appointed.  As for the who’s-the-boss question, let’s call it a tie if not for anything but for the collective restoration of dignity in the office of the Governor. 

That, however, is not the only question that had to be answered.  Indeed there is a more important question that this Government has been dodging.  No, it’s not the 20^th Amendment – an important democratizing measure that is being dragged simply because politicians are loath to conceding advantages currently enjoyed.   

The question that irks and which will probably turn into yet another political crisis has to do with the postponement of Local Government Elections. 

First, let us flag the fundamentals pertaining to manifestos and mandates.  Here’s a term: good governance.  What’s that about?  Well, it’s about things being above board.  In other words, nothing naughty, no hanky-panky.  Straight up and honest.  Transparent.  Accountable.  Here’s another: democracy.  At the core, it’s about representation.  It’s about electing people to office and the elected representing the electors as per their (the voters’) will.  

So what do these things have to do with the Local Government Elections? 

First, the lies.  Their terms have expired and no one knows when fresh elections will be held.  ‘Soon,’ we were told.  ‘Next January,’ we were told.  ‘Before the Sinhala and Tamil New Year,’ we are being told now by the subject minister, Faizer Mustapha.  Most of the defenders had what appeared to be a legitimate defense: delimitation.   The 19^th Amendment contained the relevant clause.  However, for it to make sense electoral reform had to happen.  That’s the 20^th Amendment.   So what we have is a script that is full of safeguards – not for the people but for those in power.   It’s made to make excuses.    The problem, however, is that the Elections Commission is not buying any of it.

Way back in the early days of the Yahapalana Government, delays in tabling the 20^th Amendment was put (once again) to ‘delimitation’.  ‘It cannot be done before the next General Election’ was the excuse trotted out then.  Even back then, the Elections Commissioner said that it would take a couple of months.  He didn’t say ‘we need more than a year’.  And just the other day, with respect to local government bodies, he has said that delimitation is not required in the case of the majority of councils. 

Minister Mustapha came up with another howler when he said that the bodies will continue to function smoothly because he will see to it that they do!  If that's all that is necessary for 'democracy', Mustapha could get President Sirisena to dissolve Parliament and indeed resign as President since he, Mustapha can ensure that there won't be hiccups or humps!

Anyway, what all this means is that everyone who attempts to explain the delay in holding Local Government Elections is guilty of deceit.  Secondly, they are thumbing their noses at the basics of the yahapalana pledge, namely democracy.

Remember, that this is a government that is toying with ideas about devolution that border on if not are happily located in the separatist agenda.  If ‘devolution’ is what is desired then there’s something funny about balking at holding elections at the ‘grassroots’.    

Devolutionists, delusional and otherwise, could ask ‘If you are not serious about local government elections, how can we trust you to deliver at provincial levels?’ 

Representation is fundamental to democracy.  Representation at the local level is a must in any democratic edifice.  This is something that the good governance gurus that this government prefers to listen to will tell them.  It counts.  An ‘F’ in this regard will not give you an overall passing grade in the Democratic Test. 

During the tenure of Mahinda Rajapaksa, most if not all elections were held in a manner that gave an extra edge to the already considerable advantage of incumbency.    The then Opposition ranted against the deliberate fiddling with election dates and the staggered structure of elections especially for the Provincial Councils.  The whine was picked up by a largely sympathetic ‘international’ community which, one must note, was less interested in democracy than in having friends in power.   However, even a friendly international community would be hard pressed to applaud the antics of this government on this issue. 

Delays, it must be noted, can and usually do backfire.  Sirima Bandaranaike’s two-year extension resulted in an unprecedented electoral debacle.  J.R. Jayewardene’s fraud-ridden referendum held to subvert the notion of proper representation rather than affirm it led to a near-total collapse of all democratic institutions and pushed the country to bloody anarchy.  Mahinda Rajapaksa’s removal of term limits cost him the presidency, it has been argued.  Postponing local government elections, in comparison, may be considered a lesser wrong, but it is nevertheless a wrong.  This is a good-governance regime or one that promised good governance.  It will be and should be held to higher standards simply by invoking its manifesto, the key elements of which were ‘change’ and ‘democracy’. 

Take out representation and you bury the idea of democracy.  The government, and not the Joint Opposition or anyone else, is pulling the rug from under its own feet.   Next up: tripping over one’s own rhetoric and a massive credibility deficit.

  

This article appeared in the Daily Mirror (July 7, 2016) under the title 'Next up: Local Government Elections'

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. Blog: malindawords.blogspot.com.  Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com.  Twitter: malindasene

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Ambushed at the intersection of word and silence!

This article was first published on July 5, 2010 in the 'Daily News' under the title 'On getting ambushed at the intersection of word and silence'

Some stories get written, others are still-born.  We break narrative into chapter, fracture sentence with punctuation, for purposes of coherence and to give reader breathing-moment, but there always comes a moment when the inkwell of memory runs dry and the carbon of recording runs out of time and is appropriated by other authors and is arrested by other narratives.  This, more than coherence-requirement and reader-relief, is what makes narrator call for full stops. 

I am not a story-teller but this doesn’t mean I don’t have things to say. Sometimes we have things to say but we don’t know who to tell it to or how.  Or we have nothing to say but say any old thing and are called excellent story-tellers.  Sometimes we say what we need to say but are heard in ways we do not intend to be heard.  We were never given words; we have to steal them and once they leave fingertip they belong to someone else.  Our stories were not ours when we write them and once written are appropriated by our readers. 

Is silence refuge? No. Whether we are endowed with word-bag or not, whether we have some word-cocktailing skills or not, it matters little: silences too are read, for there is so much space between word and word that sentences are made of both letter-configuration and blankness, just as ambience is obtained by light-shade play.  

I went to school.  Before that I went to a pre-school.  Before that I learnt the ayanna-aayanna from parents and aunts.  I use a laptop computer; letters fly from thought and heart through fingertip to keyboard to screen and across invisible lines to a newspaper editor, through subeditors, layout artists, printing press to newsstand and reader. My pre-school story, I realized, stayed with me in school, university and post-university.  The smell from the wood-made jigsaw of the provinces does not graze my nostrils as I cross the Western into Sabaragamuwa, but that varnish-wood blend is as representative of any of the many fragrance that make my nation.  My teachers still teach me, some from the Great Beyond.

My pre-school story hasn’t ended.  My adult story never began.  I will die without living and my life is death and dying. In the middle of it all, I write stories.  I am not sure, often, if I should.  This is a real exchange. Well, almost. 

‘No, that story should not be continued.  It is too sad.’

‘Are there happy stories in this world?  Isn’t it true that we want joy, contentment and triumph as our constant companions but that they are just random travelers crossing our paths now and then?  They may stay awhile and chat but will move on.  All those grand moments that we call magical, they are preceded and succeeded by things that are pretty shitty.’

‘Still!’

‘A fairy tale then; with a lived-happily-ever-after ending?’  

‘No. That’s not right either.  But what was this story about?’ 

‘Do you want me to write the story or just trash it?’

‘Don’t write it.  Just tell me what made you want to write it.’

‘That would take away the charm of the story and if I ever finish it, you would not enjoy it.  I mean, I don’t know if it is a sad story or not, but if it was not you would find it quite flat even if it was the best novel ever written.  And if it turned out to be sad, your eyes would not fill with tears.  That’s important you know.’ 

‘I don’t care.  You won’t write it.  I don’t want you to write it.  And you shall not.’

‘Are you my agent or something?’

‘Do you want me to be?’

‘No. I am not interested in publishing.’

‘Then why write at all?’

‘I don’t know.  It feels nice to write things down.  Sometimes if I sat down to think something out I get nowhere, but when I write, write anything and not necessarily about what is bothering me, things that I earlier found to be complex or obscure unravel. Writing clears my throat.’ 

‘How can writing clear your throat?  Maybe you mean it clears your mind.’

‘No, definitely not. I meant my throat. That’s where things get stuck.  Words, mostly.’ 

‘You are funny.’ 

‘I am a clown, didn’t you know?’

‘Tell me the story.’ 

‘It’s a short story.’

‘So?’

‘You will be disappointed and will ask me what the fuss was all about.’ 

‘Can you stop foot-dragging and just tell?’

‘That’s the way I tell stories.  I go round and round until people start wondering when I m going to get to the point.  The point is there is no point.  Stories are pointless things.’

‘Ok, can you start this pointless story?’

‘You are not letting me tell it.’ 

‘Well, do you want to tell it?’

‘Since you asked, yes.’ 

‘Then can you start now?’

‘You are hurrying me.’ 

‘I am your audience and you have to find a way of capturing my attention and you are failing badly here.’

‘I am the story-teller and I tell stories at my own pace or not at all.  Sometimes the throat doesn’t clear and you have to wait for the right moment.’ 

‘What is the right moment?’ 

‘Not now.’ 

‘You are impossible.’

‘Would you prefer me to be possible?’ 

That was a merciful conversation stopper.  That conversation stopped. Word and silence did not die. Did not live either.

Years ago I raised the following question: The belief that a story ends when a chapter is closed… is this the greatest illusion or the most innocent claim?  Chapters don’t close. Stories don’t begin.  And in the snap of scissor-blade heart gets sliced, blood drops peep out, poetry written and read and all men and women forced to spend a hundred years in solitude and as such denied a second chance on earth.  Nothing, except perhaps love and its capacity to die, be murdered and yet resurrect itself or be re-born, can change these ‘verities’.  As for me, today, Sunday, July 3, 2010, 12.34 pm, I am lost in the intersection of word and silence.  Ambushed.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com. Twitter: malindasene.

 

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And Amjad Sabri came to stay

During the tense days of the Russian Revolution when victory and control were not assured, Leon Trotsky purchased some defeat-insurance in the form of an emphatic statement: “We will leave, but we will slam the door so hard the world will shudder.”  Several decades later, Joseph Goebbels would spin it thus: “If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe with shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.”

In the case of Britain and the European Union it was not about defeat or eviction.  It was a straightforward exit from an arrangement that the majority decided was against the better interests of their country.  Interestingly, large and influential sections of the international community including the articulators of the radical right and left wing positions among academics and political commentators, screamed out their horror at the decision.  For the ‘Left’ it was about objecting to those who championed Brexit, i.e. in terms of their ideological orientation.  The ‘Left’ after all has to object to the ‘Right’.  As for the ‘Right’ in these matters, it was about the subversion of hard won coherence in Europe for the right and enhanced ability to plunder those bits and pieces of the earth and her people that the bigger brothers of Capitalism had yet to touch. 

What’s important is the noise levels.  It was loud.  It is not that the world shook and shuddered or was made to stand back in stupefaction.  That was clearly the intent.  The world was to take Brexit as the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.  Well, cheers to that! 

What’s important is the noise levels and for reasons that had nothing to do with European angst or possible repercussions for the global economy.  It’s important because even as the shrill-level went higher on Brexit, there was a silencing that went unnoticed. 

I had never heard of Amjad Sabri.  The belated introduction came last week through a chance post on Facebook.  And it is as though I’ve known him for decades and lifetimes.  And then I listened.  I listened to him singing in a language I didn’t understand and yet Amjad Sabri made me understand everything he had to say.  I understood something of his faith and his devotion.  He took me to all the Sufi mystics whose poetry I’ve read, re-read, shared, talked about and loved.  

This is what I listened to first:

I did not know then what the words meant, but I’ve read the translations since.  For example, the following translation of “tajdar-e-haram” a song composed by his father, Ghulam Farid Sabri.

What should I tell you, O Prince of Arabia,
You already know what is in my heart,
In our separation, O Untaught One,
Our sleepless nights are so hard to bear
In your love I’ve lost all consciousness 
Tajdar-e-haram, tajdar-e-haram

 

Amjad hails from a family of qawwali singers, going back according to some to Mian Tansen, the great composer and musician in the Mughal court of Emperor Akbar.  This is not the place for a biographical sketch.  Suffice to say that he loved and was loved in return.  Tens of thousands attended the funeral of Amjad Sabri.

Amjad Sabri did not die a natural death.  He was gunned down by the Pakistani Taliban.  He was all about love for the divine in which he believed and perhaps inspired love even among non-believers for his devotion if not his faith, a man who delighted and moved people to tears as he played (no, ‘prayed’, he would have said as would other exponents of the mode of worship he preferred) both with voice as well as his own tears.  He was ‘exited’ by those inspired by a doctrine or rather a reading that was all about hate.  Amjad Sabri sang the praises of Allah.  He was killed in the name of Allah.  Both were ‘acts of devotion’ and both about ‘deep’ readings of the faith.  Oh the irony!  

We have Amjad Sabri’s voice.  And yet, it is as though we’ve lost something of a language that brings people together rather than push them to kill one another.  It is as though in this particular silencing, this particular ‘eviction’ a door was closed.  Yes, a door was closed but not with the kind of bang that Trotsky talked of.  Yes, there would have been noise – that’s normal when it’s about guns and bullets.  And yet it is as though Amjad Sabri left quietly, closing the door soft as though he didn’t want to disturb those he left.  The people of Pakistan heard, the world however was largely silent – the world was fascinated by the noise in Europe.  Not anyone’s fault, but it seems to me that the world’s obsessions (constructs mostly) are obnoxious and scandalous.   

Amjad was praying.  He was singing and still sings.  He believed and would believe if he went where he thought he would as per his faith that he sang and sings, respectively, in the court of heaven.  His voice, his passion and his love were indeed heavenly simply because it was ‘out of this world’.  Yes, it rose and still rises above the cacophony of other exists, lamented and celebrated, shouted out to a world that is forced to listen to the shouting. 

I listened to his last rendition of his love song to the Prophet and of course to God.  I close my eyes.  I hear again and again the soundless closing of a door and the opening of a million windows, the turning off of a light and the brilliance of a sunlight whose source cannot be our sun but is still life-giving and illuminating.  I realize that nations come and go as per the dictates of cartographical fixations and the relevant balance of power but that these shifts of earth and line are far less newsworthy in the chambers of the heart than the arrival of a man who had to go for him to visit me. 

Amjad Sabri did not knock on my door, but I heard him at the door.  I did not ask who it was, but he said, as did and do people of his faith, “it is you”.  I did not say as those of his faith would (and mine too) “since we are one there’ room for both of us”.  Amjad Sabri stays.   And all I hear is his voice singing that last qawwali.  There is love in the houses that count.  Thanks for coming and thanks so much for staying, Amjad Sabri.  

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com.  Twitter: malindasene

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To all my brothers and sisters in whose arms I reside

I would never have known of a man called Mark Knopfler had it not been for my musically inclined brother, Arjuna.  He was so talented and so dedicated to whatever he set him mind to accomplish that he was all about the particular musical instrument that had caught his fancy at the time. He just soaked up everything there was to know.  Not everything, for that’s impossible, but quite a bit and certainly volumes more than I could even imagine.  

For him it was piano, violin, the bamboo flute and the guitar; in that order.  Most times it was some curiosity, something that he needed to figure out for himself perhaps.  Once he got his anxiety out of the way, the instrument too would go.  I never understood.  He once told me that he gave up playing chess after he figured out how to checkmate with just bishop and knight: ‘you need to drive the opponent’s king first to the corner square of the colour opposite to the one controlled by your bishop before forcing it to an end that your bishop can control; the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, I learned.’  That was a profound explanation, but then again he’s brilliant in coming up with something philosophical to explain away things done and said for relatively pedestrian reasons. 

It was different with the guitar though.  I think Knopfler was such a hero that not only did he want to be like him, he wanted to be better.  He had posters of course.  He had the music, he had the motion and yes, the boy could play.  He knew all the Dire Straits songs (he could sing too).  Me, I was just the kind-brother-in-awe then as I am now.  Certain things are not allowed to be outgrown. 

Looking back I remember just one song and just one line of that song, ‘Brothers in arms’.  I think that was the title song of a Dire Straits album.  Just one line: ‘We’re fools to make war on our brothers in arms’.  I checked the lyrics and the following caught me: ‘Someday you’ll return to me your valleys and your farms, and you’ll no longer burn to be brothers in arms’.

I am not sure to whom these farms and valleys will be returned or by whom.  We do burn, though.  It is as though this is all we know about community and solidarity.  It is as though brotherhood is extracted and not cultivated or allowed to grow; enforced and not the result of an organically unfolding process. 

The easiest brotherhoods are those that are given – those over which choice is not a factor.  We say ‘family’ or ‘blood-tie’.  We cling to similarity of colour, clan, faith and conviction.  We die for these brothers and expect them to die for us if necessary. 

My brother Arjuna was in Colombo one day in May or June in the year 1991.  It would have been past midnight for him, but I saw him in the full flush of early spring sunlight in Boston.  He would have been fast asleep but I saw him fully alive.  He would have been silent, but he was making music.  I saw a young boy, hair about as long as his, playing a different guitar but making the same music.   Only the skin tone was different apart from the minor detail that my brother had never been to Harvard Square.

I wrote to him:

‘I saw you this evening

floating down the sunbeams

cleaving through the dark clouds

this springtime suddenly.

 I saw you shine, brother,

long hair falling over your beautiful face

skinnier than when I saw you last,

a cigarette stuck on your guitar

sipping the high notes you couldn’t quite reach.’

The boy could play but I never saw him again.  There are so many brothers and sisters in that category of never-to-be-seen-again.  We see them all the time and we are blind to them too, because we are taught that the Brotherhood of Blood is thicker than that of shared humanity.  We are one in our suffering and this means that we can be one in our solidarities too. 

In 1973 I was forced to buy a ticket for a stage drama that was to be performed at the Navarangahala.  It was the first play I saw all by myself.  It was called ‘Pahanen Pahana’ if I remember right.  All I remember was that Sinhala fighters were fighting the British army and that a lot of people died.  I remember an ‘afterlife’ scene where soldier embraced soldier without worrying about uniform colour or skin-tone difference. 

‘It is written in the starlight and in every line on your palm,’ Knopfler claims.  Yes, we are fools to make war on our brothers in arms. 

‘We have just one world, but we live in different ones,’ the song observes. I’d like to flip it.  We have different worlds and we can choose to live in these isolated from one another. We don’t have to. We can live in the same world. In fact we do, but are loathe to admit the fact.

Arjuna Seneviratne is my brother. One of them, to be more precise.  I have no quarrel with him.  That’s not on account of blood-tie.  I should try not to quarrel with my other brothers and not because they are not named Arjuna.  

This was first published in the Daily News (July 5, 2011).

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be reached at malindasenevi@gmail.com.  Twitter: malindasene

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The beginning and end of exploration

Not all great quotes have known authors.  Some great lines and thoughts are quoted so often that one or another of the 'echoers' gets credited.  If you google the following, ‘Ask not what your country can do; ask what you can do for your country’ you will find many websites containing the quote.  They will attribute it to a man called John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States of America (1961-1963). 

 

 The sentiments were expressed several decades before by the Lebanese mystic philosopher, poet and writer.  He was imploring his countrymen to revolt against the Turkish occupation of Lebanon.  Kennedy is dead.  Kennedy is accused of plagiarism because Gibran had something down in print that resembled what he said.For all we know, Kennedy may have not heard of Gibran or the relevant lines.  For all we know, Gibran may have picked his lines from some record of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Memorial Day speech in Keene, New Hampshire on May 30, 1884: ‘It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return’.

The long preamble is a gentle reminder that we don’t own the words we use. They were born elsewhere, lived within us for a while, and then proceed to destinations we’ll never see and even die, sooner or later.  And sometimes they come back to us wearing new clothes and fresh accents, and we hear them as though we are hearing them for the first time.

I remember reading somewhere that a man travels the world in search of the truth and comes home to find it. I don’t know who said it first nor will I know who will say it last.  I know there are truths I’ve travelled the world to discover and come home to find.  There are also homes that contained truths which I never labeled ‘home’. 

If home is metaphor then the ultimate residence has to be self.  Siddhartha Gauthama, our Budun Wahanse (‘our’ because Word belongs to no one and therefore to everyone), spoke of self-homes and the truths therein waiting to be discovered.  This home and this truth are both ever-present and yet so elusive. 

A few hours ago I listened to a bikkhu.  We recognize readily effect but seldom think of cause.  In fact we first comprehend effect and then focus on cause.  We don’t reflect on the thilakshana or anicca (impermanence), dukkha (sorrow) and anatta (non-self), and if we did, we are better able to understand the world.  The bikkhu used a story to illustrate the point, that of the Arahat Chula Panthaka (younger of the two Panthakas who attained enlightenment after listening to  our budun wahanse).  Here’s a nutshell version.

Chula Panthaka could not even memorize a four-line stanza.  Poverty of intellect had been his lot lifetime after lifetime because at one point in the sansaric journey, as a teaching bikkhu of an order founded by a previous Buddha, he had ridiculed a student who was slow of mind.  The Bikkhu Chula Panthaka nevertheless  quelled all his defilements (kleshas) consequent to reflection on a single white cloth which got soiled by and by as drops of his sweat fell upon it.  Our Budun Wahanse had offered that particular koan because in a previous lifetime Chula Panthaka, as a king had chanced to wipe sweat and discover discolouration in a pure white handkerchief.  Sansaric memory was stirred, perhaps, and Chula Panthaka, the slow of mind, discovered through reflection of ‘self’, the truth about non-self, impermanence and sorrow.

Our answers perhaps are not elsewhere but within us.  If this is so, it should be applicable to both individual and collective.  We can talk of our ‘impermanences’, our sorrows and our lack of self or rather the non-tenable nature of self.  Neither is my word mine, my body does not belong to me either. Likewise ‘self’ is untenable.   Our home contains these truths whose dimensions we would do well to examine.  Our collective defilements are resident within an artificial boundary that defines nation.  It is precisely this recognition of transience and artificiality that yields humility as well as wisdom, both so necessary in making the best of what we have and who we are. 

The beads of sweat and the other impurities that soil our national flag, are our own.  It is by recognizing this that we can make a symbol more meaningful, i.e. by seeing symbol as reflection of substance and that it means nothing if in substance we are lacking. 

Why roam the world in search of truths that are right here at home?  Why ask what others can do to enhance self when reflection on self can show how silly enhancement-seeking is and indeed that the thing sought to be inflated is transient, made of and for sorrow and of course is not? 

The most telling of defilements are not those etched upon us by the outside but the product of our own greed, ignorance and ill-will. 

For the individual, it’s about deconstructing self so its constituent parts, their impermanence and illusionary qualities become apparent and therefore meaning recovers relevant dimensions.  For a collection, for example a nation, it is about getting the particular house in order.

Self, perhaps, is not a bad place to start.  Or end. 

This article was first published on July 4, 2011 in the 'Daily News' under the title 'Reflections on the beginning and end of certain explorations'.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com. Twitter: malindasene

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