Love-residue on benches that have disappeared ~ Malinda Words

I am fascinated by seats of any kind including parapet walls and steps on which you can sit and watch the world age and regenerate.

It’s the same with roads, especially byroads, un-tarred and uneven including tank-bunds. They make me think of absences, people who have been there, have walked, conversed, reminisced, planned, were distraught or elated. They make me wonder about who would come later and whether their thoughts would be, in essence, similar to that which has crossed other minds in another time.

Benches are special though. They can’t hold many people. Two, best. Three’s a crowd for the architecture makes conversation awkward. Two, best. Especially if for those seated the world is made of and made for love.

It is not always a happy place of course, for the course of love is seldom smooth. Love is a poem, after all, that is inked with a smile and a tear. Benches know of such things, I am sure. They may not know the names of those who sat, spoke and were silent, but they know the language of words, of love and the more eloquent tongue, silence.

Just the other day I got to know about a singular bench. Singular because it refers to a particular love story; singular also because Ruwan Bandujeewa wrote about it. And singular because it held some tears which, along with the bench, were invisible to all and, in fact, is no longer there.

This is not the first poem that Bandujeewa has written about love and the pain of love using the ‘lake’ as witness and ally, but this, written a few years ago I believe, is sad beyond description.
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නුවර වැව ළඟ බංකුවක් මත
තුනී කළ කඳුළක් දෙකක් ඇත
නුවරු මේ බැව් දන්නෙනම් නැත
එතැන දැන් ඒ බංකුවත් නැත.

It is not easy to translate:

Upon a bench by the Kandy Lake
a tear or two thinned out reside
citizens know not of these, indeed
even the bench is no longer there.

Bandujeewa plays with the ‘nuwara’ of Nuwara Wewa (Kandy Lake). 'Nuwara' is also 'city,' and ‘nuwaru’ refers to citizens but could also be ‘The people of Kandy.’ I can’t capture the rhyme in translation. Someone else, I hope, will. But all that is incidental.

Benches are nondescript things. We see them but do not wonder about who may have sat there, what kind of conversations they had. Not everyone leaves a tear behind and not all tears that are in fact the residue of love get etched into the wood or cement of the benches upon which love was declared or withdrawn. Benches go unnoticed and benches, noticed and unnoticed are sometimes removed. Where are they taken? Are they turned into firewood? At what point does the signature of tears become unreadable?

Years ago, a well-meaning friend decided that I had lost my mind. He said, ‘You are going zig-zag on the 138 bus route!’ Those who know the route, i.e. from Pettah to Maharagama and sometimes Kottawa or Homagama or else, turning at Kottawa towards Mattegoda or Rukmalgama, would understand. There’s a lot of traffic and many irresponsible drivers.

He insisted that I would get knocked down.

‘There are no buses on this route,’ I laughed.

He laughed too.

And then I said, ‘there’s no such road either!’

And we couldn’t stop laughing for a long time.

There are benches and roads that are sat upon and along which people walk, respectively; lovers included. They own those benches. They own those roads. The bench and the road do not become less private although others use them. Like the sky, as my father once said.

But who erases them from the landscape? Why? And where are they thereafter stored? Memories are for lovers or rather those who loved but were not loved in return or else were loved in return but only for a while.

People don’t see. They don’t have to. Sometimes people will not suffer love and lovers. They are written out of narratives, along with bench, road and tear. And lovers, those who had words and spoke them softly and thereby enabled them to write upon the walls of hearts, are not only banished but are gagged as well. And yet it is possible to argue that the greatest tyranny is that of the beloved who will not love or claims heart-ink has indeed dried out. When it comes to that point, poetry gets written on benches with tears and benches themselves are spirited away.

There was a time when they came easy
but words came slow and slower still
not because hearts ran out of love-ink
but unnamed tyrannies shut the valves,
and yet, in impoverished times
heartbeat is word enough
and memory a notebook that will not burn.

The worlds we inhabit are so easily erased. Poetry lingers, even long after the beloved has evicted poet from the heart, tears have dried and benches that transcribed the most magical and tragic love stories are turned into firewood and ash. Thus are the seeds of love scattered across the earth.

And yet...

We write even when we don’t
and read splendid stories
on pages decreed to remain blank.

On benches too. Even if they no longer exist.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 285th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

06 December 2023

Love-residue on benches that have disappeared

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