Two stone lions guard one of the entrances to the Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya. The pedestal upon which they’ve stood watch over the comings and goings of students, teachers, non-academic staff and visitors are spacious enough for one or two people to sit. I have sat there often. Sometimes alone and sometimes not.
They’ve been there for decades. Long before I first saw them. They still stand. Observing. Eavesdropping.
The placement and stature of these beasts make them hard for anyone to miss, especially undergraduates in this faculty. And over the years, naturally one could say, they’ve lent themselves to symbolic expression in all kinds of poetry, love in particular.
Love and revolution with two stone elements as witnesses. What they’ve ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ are but grist for a poetic mill, nothing more, although one may argue that poetry can feed the resolve to placate the anger of the world. Anger and perhaps sorrow as well.
Theoretically, a poet can give life to anything and everything and not only as symbols. Inanimate things can be given eyes and ears. Hearts and minds can be conferred upon them. And of course voice. Pablo Neruda has an entire collection dedicated to ‘ordinary things,’ which include a lemon, wine, the onion, salt, tomatoes, a large tuna in the market and a chestnut on the ground. His poetic genius willed life into all kinds of things and he encouraged thereby others to recognise the animate in that which is commonly considered not to have volition.
‘Why don’t they train helicopters to suck honey from sunlight?’
Why don’t they, really, whoever ‘they’ may be? Policy advocates, makers and implementers will not be moved though. On the other hand, such formulation could perhaps persuade the deciders in ‘rooms where it happens,’ to approach matters differently, see that which is almost imperceptible and draw inspiration from the vast world that exists out of easy equations and clinical policy papers framed by theories which are also too easy in that they toss things resisting categorisation and quantification into the easy-bin called ‘externalities.’
But those two lions spoke to me a few days ago when I, along with a few batchmates, decided to visit our undergraduate haunts before moving to the Peradeniya Rest House for a reunion.
What are your thoughts now
after so many flowers bloomed
so many dreams wilted
and so many convictions buried?
Did soft words grow hard enough
so they could acquire greater tenderness
did betrayal strengthen surviving friendships
guilt obliterated by deliberate forgetting
and nausea cured by new verbal remedies?
There was a girl here, I remember,
two perhaps or more
and words decorated with metaphors
heard so many times that they flew
to untraceable registers smudged by rain
animated analyses flew from determine eyes
but I ignored name-drop and term-drop
(frequency taught me that);
but this is what I need to know:
where is that boy now (forget the girls)
buried in an avalanche,
renamed by tragedy unexpected and enormous,
broken like all great plans
hatched in these gardens,
frozen mid-flight
as he flew on dream-wings
and scattered like raindrops
in monsoonal frenzy?
All of this in a fraction of a second; subliminal communiques that came in code and had to be deciphered somewhere near the waters of the Basavakkulama several days later as a setting sun, a cloud-formation above a stupa and single oruwa in silhouette related others stories in various degrees of animation.
I don’t know the answers and I don’t think anyone who has been interrogated by one or both of the gal-sinhayas would know either. I figured that the questions were actually an invitation to remember things lost and forgotten, a doorway to nostalgia perhaps. I didn’t accept.
The university of that other time is no more. The university of that other time, paradoxically, is as alive as it was then. I didn’t say ‘say cheese’ and didn’t have to. The lions never stop smiling, although there are times I’ve wondered if it is a smile or an almost polite laugh. I didn’t smile or cry. No exchanges of niceties. That which was once is no more, as happens and as it should.
I never owned Peradeniya although I believed I did. Peradeniya, all of it, owned me. In another century and in a country I cannot revisit. I tiptoed away. And that’s my story of the gal-sinhayo of the Arts Faculty, University of Peradeniya.
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