Mahendra Martin Raskolnikov

Back in the day, Mahendra Martin Raskolnikov worked at Rupavahini. I believe he was an intern there. He was young, as was I. He was partially employed, I was unemployed. I can’t remember if universities were open or closed, but one night we walked along the railway line from somewhere near Bambalapitiya to Wellawatte.

Mahendra Martin Raskonikov and I had not exactly lived parallel lives, but there were commonalities when it comes to matters of the heart. It was as though we were destined to be confronted by all manner of love-facets. What faces we saw were jagged-edged. They reflected unbelievable light, they cut deep without warning.

We talked much in those days and less in recent years. Some conversations are remembered for they are so memorable to warrant re-telling. Over and over again. Among them are a few that have made their way into various articles. Mostly stories he related. Some of his own and others of people he knew.

A young boy once received a note from a girl. ‘I love you, boy; send me 18 yellow roses.’ He was 18 and she was 14. He didn’t know anything about girls. Or roses. Or the color codes of roses. He had to ask around and was told, ‘You are still in school.  Roses are expensive. Yellow roses are very expensive.  You can’t afford it. Forget it.’ He did.

Time passed and pathways crossed. There’s a story there worth telling, but then all his stories are tell-worthy anyway.

But today I remember that evening somewhere in Wellawatte, watching and listening to the ocean. I remember telling him that I was reading Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment.’  Mahendra Martin Raskolnikov, a voracious reader, immediately brought up what to him was the telling moment of the novel. It so happened that from what I had already read, it was this particular moment that had captured me most.

More than thirty years later, the very same moment came back to me. This time, in an observation made by Martin Wickramasinghe in his biography, ‘Upan Da Sita’ or ‘From the beginning’ (or, better still, ‘From the cradle’). I was re-translating the book, an exercise which began as a would-be edit of an effort made more than twenty years previously, in segments, for the ‘Sunday Island.’  

Here goes:

‘As a young man, there was no novel that troubled my mind as did Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. I felt as though someone was running a rasp across my brain while reading it. Unable to figure out Dostoevsky's mysterious notions of the human mind at the time, I read the book like one who was trying to find his way in the dark.

'Raskolnikov, who murders an old woman who made a living out of usury, suffers much pain. I felt that the book contained nothing else but the vivid description of his suffering mind. Finding no one to alleviate his pain, the educated murderer finally encounters a word of comfort from a prostitute named Sonia. He finds relief like a thirsty man who drinks a sip of water. Moved by this, he falls at her feet.

‘“I kneel down not to you, but to the untold suffering of humanity that finds expression through you.”

‘When I reached this point of the narrative, I was extremely disturbed. This turbulence acted like a bolt of lightning illuminating for a moment certain mystical points that are found in Buddhist stories and then disappearing altogether. My mind was a vessel that was filled by compassion. It was because of Dostoevsky's stories that certain mystical ideas in the Buddhist stories became clear to me.’

And I remembered something I had forgotten: I had, upon the invitation of Dr Ranga Wickramasinghe, written a foreword to a new publication of his father’s book ‘Buddhist Jataka Stories and the Russian Novel.’ I can’t remember what I wrote though.

I remember Mahendra Martin Raskolnikov, who, not having read ‘Upan Da Sita’ had somehow been as perturbed as the great writer by the very same passage of play in the novel. I had too, but I had not the keen and analytical mind of my friend and of course not of the great man of letters, Martin Wickramasinghe. We shared the same sentiments. Mahendra’s words that night were almost a one-to-one quoting of Wickramasinghe.

Mahendra’s story is a novel that he won’t write. Neither could I. I know only this: there’s untold suffering and inexpressible delight that finds expression through him. Not in what he says, but the way he lives his life.

Mahendra is a Roman Catholic. He knows a lot about other philosophies. He might be one of the very few people I know who could from THAT point of the narrative obtain something that he could (but would not) describe, following Martin, as follows:

‘‘When I reached this point of the narrative, I was extremely disturbed. This turbulence acted like a bolt of lightning illuminating for a moment certain mystical points that are found in the parables of all religious doctrines and then disappearing altogether. My mind was a vessel that was filled by compassion. It was because of Dostoevsky's stories that certain mystical ideas in all religious parables became clear to me.’

That’s how Mahendra Silva, at this moment of writing, I re-christened as Mahendra Martin Raskolnikov.

And I hereby offer this, in lieu of 18 yellow roses, as something he can offer to whoever has captured his heart at this moment, more than 30 years after our Dostoyevsky Moment and probably almost 40 years after that first rose-petalled palpitation referred to above.

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Reclaiming the everyday with solidarities of tender fury

I am eternally grateful to my friend Mahendra Silva for urging me to watch the movie The Life of David Gale. It happened when he quoted from a lecture delivered by the principal character, played by Kevin Spacey, in the course of clarifying something.

'So the lesson of Lacan is, living by your wants will never make you happy. What it means to be fully human is to strive to live by ideas and ideals and not to measure your life by what you've attained in terms of your desires but those small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality, even self-sacrifice. Because in the end, the only way that we can measure the significance of our own lives is by valuing the lives of others.'

More than fifteen years later I was privileged to listen to a lecture delivered by another friend, Kanishka Goonewardena. He introduced me to the work of the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s work on the idea of ‘everyday,’ as a space colonised by capitalism characterised by neglect and exclusion as well as a site of struggle.  

There are everyday-struggles. Individuals in various spaces, collectives concerned about issues, even countries trip over the everyday even as they design and execute plans to inscribe meaning  to it. Everyday. Everywhere. Everyday and everywhere there are ‘small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality and even self-sacrifice.’ Everyday and everywhere people consciously or otherwise ‘measure the significance of [their] own lives by valuing the lives of others.’  The mainstream media doesn’t report any of it. Oh, they do know, but selectivity and absenting is part of the game of producing what Lefebvre called ‘intermediate residue’ not only in the deliberate exclusion from ‘everyday’ but in ghosting those who inhabit ‘everyday’ in ways that make the exclusionists, if you will, squirm.

Everywhere and everyday, for example, people are protesting the absolutely genocidal attacks on Palestinians who by the way have been sequestered in their own lands for decades. The mainstream media is largely absent and the grandmasters of social media platforms, let us not forget, are doing their best to toe the lie-line, but each time someone raises an objection, something of the everyday is recovered.

Why should the Puyallup Tribe living in the North Western coast of the USA bother about what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, about the demonstrations vehemently condemning the Israel Government, the complicity of the USA, UK and other countries in the crime of genocide and the large swathes of silence in Media Land? For them it was simple: ‘Land-back includes Palestine.’

What did they do about it? They marched. They protested. Their objections expanded to a water resistance with indigenous water warriors taking to the Puget Sound in traditional canoes in order to block the cargo ship MV Cape Orlando, believed to be loaded with weapons headed for Israel. That’s solidarity of a high order. That’s recovering a piece of the everyday. That’s love, as Calina Lawrence, a Suquamish water warrior stated: ‘To the people of Gaza, we love you from Coast Salish Territory and beyond!’

Then we have the Organization of Port Stevedores of Barcelona in Catalan refusing to load or unload military materials onto any ship bound for Israel or any other war zone where they could be used against civilians.
 
‘We have decided... not to allow shipping activity in our port that contains military equipment, with the sole purpose of protecting any civilian population in any territory,' the union stated, insisting that ‘no cause justifies sacrificing civilians.’

Right now, as I write, a Melbourne shipyard has ground to a halt after trade unionists, long with Palestinians and Jews, ‘called for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the genocide in Gaza and justice for Palestine.’

All these people are recovering the narrative. They are refusing to be residue or residual. They are enlarging their Everyday Footprint.

They are doing all this because there are 10,569 Palestinians who will never ever be able to wrest one cubic milimetre of the everyday they have all been denied, as individuals and as a collective, among them are 4,324 children and 2,823 women. Tomorrow has been erased from the everyday of their lives. They are dead. Killed. I don’t know what the numbers will be by the time I finish this piece and I don’t know what the numbers will be by the time you read this. I do know that the perpetrators are under scrutiny unlike never before.

Let’s return to Lacan. We are seeing innumerable moments of integrity from all across the planet. We are seeing compassion and rationality. Other lives are being valued. People are redefining what it means to be fully human. They are making shoes for themselves and fellow travelers so that their stories can walk to all corners of our planet. And so our footprint on the everyday grows, one story at a time, one protest song at a time, one conscious act of objection at a time, held together with solidarities of tender fury. 

*I borrowed 'tender fury' from Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation by Subcomandante.

['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 264th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

malindadocs@gmail.com

Other articles in this series: 

An Aussie broke a SLan heart in Ind for Afg

Writing magical pieces about something beautiful when time permits

The scattered archives of art and protest

Friendship that keep friends permanently at 16

Amherst: silent, rural, poetic and serendipitous 

The virtues of unemployability

A breathless hush at the close

Ahmed Issa, fearless and audacious in Gaza

Let us take a deep breath now...

How Grolier Poetry writes 'Harvard Square'

Let us write beautiful poetry

Following children and their smiles

Let's plant words in cracks and craters

Re-weaving lives and love

When the earth closes upon us...

Let us now march to the battleground of words

The most pernicious human shield

Who bombed Frankfurter Buchmesse

The truly besieged 

Love's austere and lonely offices

The mysteriously enjoined in the middle of nowhere

Serendipity now!

Reflections on the unimaginable 

Jackson Anthony is a book and will be read 

A village called Narberth Bookshop

Gateway drugs to A-B-C

'Irvin' and other one-word poems

Earth pieces Kerala and Sri Lanka

Obligation as bomb and ocean

In the land of insomnial poets

In and out of shadows

Over to Eve

When you don't need an invitation, it's home

When the Canadian House of Commons applauded a Nazi...

Touching the touch-me-nots

The importance of not skipping steps

No free passes to the Land of Integrity

Hector Kobbekaduwa is not a building, statue, street or stamp

Rajagala and the Parable of the Panner

Let's show love to Starbucks employees!

You've got mail?

Octavio Paz and Arthur C Clarke in the stratosphere 

Enduring solidarities 

Coco 'Quotes' Gauff!

9/11 and the calm metal instrument of Salvador Allende's voice 

What a memory-keeper foregoes 

Whitman, Neruda and things that wait in all things

Thilina Kaluthotage's eyes keep watch

Those made of love will fly

Profit: the peragamankaru of major wars

Helplessness and innocence

The parameters of entirety

In loving memory of Carrie Lee (1956-2020)

Mobsters on and off the screen

Transfixing and freeing dawns

We're here because we're here because we're here

Life signatures

Sha'Carri Richardson versus and with Sha'Carri Richardson  

A canvas for a mind-brush

Sybil Wettasinghe's shoes

Love is...

A stroll with Pragg and Arjun along a boulevard in Baku

Meditation on tree-art

Daya Sahabandu ran out of partners but must have smiled to the end

Gentle intrusions 

Sleeping well

The unleashing of inspiration

Write, for Pete's sake

Autumn Leaves Safeness

 Sapan and voices that erase borders

Problem elephants and problem humans

Songs from the vaekanda

The 'inhuman' elephant in a human zoo

Ivan Art: Ivanthi Fernando's efforts to align meaning

Arwa Turra, heart-stitcher

Let's help Jagana Krishnakumar rebuild our ancestral home

True national anthems

Do you have a friend in Pennsylvania (or anywhere?)

A gateway to illumination in West Virginia

Through strange fissures into magical orchards

There's sea glass love few will see 

Re-residencing Lakdasa Wikkramasinha

Poisoning poets and shredding books of verse

The responsible will not be broken

Home worlds

Ownership and tenuriality of the Wissahickon

Did you notice the 'tiny, tiny wayside flowers'?

Gifts, gifting and their rubbishing

History is new(s)

Journalism inadvertently learned

Reflections on the young poetic heart

Wordaholic, trynasty and other portmanteaus

The 'Loku Aiya' of all 'Paththara Mallis'

Subverting the indecency of the mind

Character theft and the perennial question 'who am I?'

Innocence

A degree in people

Faces dripping with time

Saji Coomaraswamy and rewards that matter

Revolutionary unburdening

Seeing, unseeing and seeing again

Alex Carey and the (small) matter of legacy

The Edelweiss of Mirissa 

The insomnial dreams of Kapila Kumara Kalinga 

The clothes we wear and the clothes that wear us (down) 

Every mountain, every rock, is sacred 

Manufacturing passivity and obedience 

Precept and practice 

Sanjeew Lonliyes: rawness unplugged, unlimited 

In praise of courage, determination and insanity 

The relative values of life and death 

Feet that walk 

Sarinda's eyes 

Poetry and poets will not be buried 

Sunny Dayananda 

Reunion Peradeniya (1980-1990) 

What makes Oxygen breathable?  

Sorrowing and delighting the world 

The greatest fallacy  

Encounters with Liyanage Amarakeerthi 

Beyond praise and blame 

Letters that cut and heal the heart 

Vanished and vanishing trails 

Blue-blueness 

A forgotten dawn song from Embilipitiya 

The soft rain of neighbourliness  

The Gold Medals of being 

Jaya Sri Ratna Sri 

All those we've loved before 

Reflections on waves and markings 

A chorus of National Anthems 

Saying what and how 

'Say when' 

Respond to insults in line with the Akkosa Sutra 

The loves of our lives 

The right time, the right person 

The silent equivalent of a thousand words 

Crazy cousins are besties for life 

Unities, free and endearing 

Free verse and the return key

"Sorry, Earth!" 

The lost lyrics of Premakeerthi de Alwis 

The revolution is the song 

Consolation prizes in competitions no one ever wins 

The day I won a Pulitzer 

Ko? 

Ella Deloria's silences 

Blackness, whiteness and black-whiteness 

Inscriptions: stubborn and erasable  

Thursday! 

Deveni: a priceless one-word koan 

Enlightening geometries 

Let's meet at 'The Commons' 

It all begins with a dot 

Recovering run-on lines and lost punctuation 

'Wetness' is not the preserve of the Dry Zone 

On sweeping close to one's feet 

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California

To be an island like the Roberts... 

Debts that can never be repaid in full

An island which no flood can overwhelm 

Who really wrote 'Mother'? 

A melody faint and yet not beyond hearing 

Heart dances that cannot be choreographed 

Remembering to forget and forgetting to remember 

On loving, always 

Authors are assassinated, readers are immortal 

When you turn 80... 

It is good to be conscious of nudities  

Saturday slides in after Monday and Sunday somersaults into Friday  

There's a one in a million and a one in ten 

Gunadasa Kapuge is calling 

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California 

Hemantha Gunawardena's signature 

Pathways missed 

Architectures of the demolished 

The exotic lunacy of parting gifts 

Who the heck do you think I am? 

Those fascinating 'Chitra Katha' 

The Mangala Sabhava 

So how are things in Sri Lanka? 

The most beautiful father 

Palmam qui meruit ferat 

The sweetest three-letter poem 

Buddhangala Kamatahan 

An Irish and Sri Lankan Hello 

Teams, team-thinking, team-spirit and leadership 

The songs we could sing in lifeboats when we are shipwrecked 

Pure-Rathna, a class act 

Jekhan Aruliah set a ball rolling in Jaffna 

Awaiting arrivals unlike any other 

Teachers and students sometimes reverse roles 

Matters of honor and dignity 

Yet another Mother's Day 

A cockroach named 'Don't' 

Colombo, Colombo, Colombo and so forth 

The slowest road to Kumarigama, Ampara 

Sweeping the clutter away 

Some play music, others listen 

Completing unfinished texts 

Mind and hearts, loquacious and taciturn 

I am at Jaga Food, where are you? 

On separating the missing from the disappeared 

Moments without tenses 

And intangible republics will save the day (as they always have) 

The world is made of waves 

'Sentinelity' 

The circuitous logic of Tony Muller 

Rohana Kalyanaratne, an unforgettable 'Loku Aiya' 

Mowgli, the Greatest Archaeologist 

Figures and disfigurement, rocks and roses 

Sujith Rathnayake and incarcerations imposed and embraced 

Some stories are written on the covers themselves 

A poetic enclave in the Republic of Literature 

Landcapes of gone-time and going-time  

The best insurance against the loud and repeated lie 

So what if the best flutes will not go to the best flautists? 

There's dust and words awaiting us at crossroads and crosswords 

The books of disquiet 

A song of terraced paddy fields 

Of ants, bridges and possibilities 

From A through Aardvark to Zyzzyva  

World's End 

Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse 

Street corner stories 

Who did not listen, who's not listening still? 

The book of layering 

If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain 

The world is made for re-colouring 

The gift and yoke of bastardy 

The 'English Smile' 

No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5 

Visual cartographers and cartography 

Ithaca from a long ago and right now 

Lessons written in invisible ink 

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness' 

A tea-maker story seldom told 

On academic activism 

The interchangeability of light and darkness 

Back to TRADITIONAL rice 

Sisterhood: moments, just moments 

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging 

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha 

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows 

Sirith, like pirith, persist 

Fragrances that will not be bottled  

Colours and textures of living heritage 

Countries of the past, present and future 

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched 

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains 

The ways of the lotus 

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace 

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville 

Live and tell the tale as you will 

Between struggle and cooperation 

Of love and other intangibles 

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions 

The universe of smallness 

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers 

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills 

Serendipitous amber rules the world 

Continents of the heart

  

The allegory of the slow road

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