WE HAVE DRIVEN TO THE EAST of the island, Chitral, Shanthi, and I—east of Kandy, where the road descends steeply from the central highlands, east of the Mahaveli Ganga, the island’s largest river, east where another Sri Lanka presents itself.
It is poor here—radically poor, almost entirely undeveloped. Vegetation is sparse. Here and there you come across vast reservoirs and dams, some with signs indicating which Western nations have financed them. (I thought of Stanley Kirinde when I saw these. Sri Lanka would need international assistance to build again what the old Anuradhapura kings built, he had said as we looked at his paintings.)
Here and there in the east you pass through market towns. But outside of them it is difficult to see how little hamlets of three or four primitive houses spread along the road manage to survive. The land is parched and ungiving. The rice paddies, which are occasionally large but mostly tiny terraces, require irrigation and seem to yield a tough variety bred for harsh equatorial heat and aridity. There is nothing like industry.
Chitral has a new case out here, near a town called Dambana. There are, in fact, several cases, and there are to be several more by day’s end, for one will lead to another, and then another: police blackmail, arrest on fabricated charges, arbitrarily applied statutes, an uninvestigated murder, and so on. Law is enforced here even more unpredictably than it is elsewhere. One of the most powerful men in the district appears to be the wildlife conservation officer, who seems able to bring or threaten charges of poaching, trespassing, illegal occupation, and other such offenses more or less at will. He is feared in Dambana, the way the police are feared elsewhere.
DOWN A LONG DIRT TRACK, with a strip of thick grass in the center, we come to a clearing in the forest. We are in a village called Henanigala, and we have come to visit a group from the Uruwerige tribe, an indigenous people native to the Dambana district. It is here the tribal elders have asked Chitral to come.
Progressively since the 1930s and 1940s, the Uruwerige have been treated roughly the way white Americans once treated Native Americans. After independence, successive governments made successive promises—land, funding, support of various kinds—but then failed to deliver on them. Eventually the great Mahaweli dam projects got under way, and the Uruwerige were forced to move from the forest that had been home—a forest in which they hunted, a forest that fed them—onto a small patch of designated land, in effect a reservation. Roughly eighty families were promised a new forest, some rice paddies, and supplies.
“What were you given?” Chitral asks.
“Rations provided by an international organization—the U. N., I think. Dahl, rice, oil, salmon tinney. We also got some money to build latrines and wells. But no forest.”
The man who is speaking is a bearded, solidly built sixty-three year old named Taepal Bandiya, who is the deputy chief. He is clear-eyed and wears his hair bound in a topknot. He is in native dress: necklaces, no shirt, a colorful sarong, a small canvas bag filled with betel nut at his waist, and a keteria, an axe-like tool used to cut meat. Bandiya is reserved and he is angry, though he contains his anger by concentrating as he talks on the preparation of some betel the elders will share.
Another man, whose name I am told later is Uruwerige Lokubanda, said, “Now the seventy-nine are a hundred and nine. Others have also come. Altogether we have four hundred to six hundred families here now, and the same amount of land. It is not enough.”
It is an involved case, a story Taepal Bandiya and the chief, Thalavarige Daiyar Bandiya, have told many times before. Chitral is taking notes. The tribal elders are speaking in a dialect—something close to Sinhala but still requiring an interpreter.
Sixty families, it emerges, have already returned to the original forest, and others plan to do so. “We’ll be happy to live as we did for many generations before we came here, Lokubanda said.
But there has already been trouble. The sixty families who have moved back began to build houses. And this prompted the wildlife officer to begin arresting them. When they reach this point in their story, Chitral begins to advise them: what they can do for themselves, what Janasansadaya can do to help them help themselves.
I AM ABLE TO CONVERSE very little with the Uruwerige. They are welcoming to the stranger who is even stranger than the strangers from far-away Colombo. But they are much taken up with the details of their predicament: It is plain that they consider themselves in a crisis now. They have reached out for help and are eager for it. Equally, there is the matter of interpretation. For me to converse we must go from English to Sinhala by way of Shanthi and from Sinhala to the Uruwerige dialect by way of the young man interpreting for Chitral. A reply comes back by the same arduous route. Under the circumstances, it is too much to ask. Later, when we share a noonday meal and walk through the hamlet of a dozen or so thatched huts beyond the clearing, it will be easier to talk.
For now, something else tells me to remain silent. I am not on the rug.
The rug is maybe nine feet by twelve feet, woven in a geometric pattern of red and black. The tribe had set it out on a clear patch of earth amid some shade trees. There are six men seated on the rug: Taepal Bandiya, Uruwerige Lokubanda, the chief (a ninety-five-year-old who speaks little at first), and three other elders who do not speak. Younger members of the tribe surround this group and listen attentively, their toes coming up to the edge of the rug but not touching it. All the women and children are some distance off, gathered around the doorway of what turns out to be the old chief’s hut.
Chitral, like me and like the young men of the tribe, is not on the rug. Only when he begins to speak does Chitral take off his shoes and step onto it.
What is the rug? What is the topic under discussion? They are the same in a certain respect. The rug is the public space of the Uruwerige. It is reserved for the elders, those who lead, those who guide, those who decide in matters relating to the tribe: Where will we go next? When shall we harvest? Where shall we hunt this year? Where shall we fish? These are matters determined on the rug—public matters, whether the rug is actually there at a given moment or not.
The discussion on the day of our visit was especially complex in this respect. It concerned another public space—the public space called “Sri Lanka.” This was the point of the long story the elders told, beginning with the promises of the first prime minister after independence. The old chief, who finally began to speak a little more, remembered them. Taken all together, they were promises of a place in Ceylon, and then in Sri Lanka, but no such place had ever been opened to them. And now they were rejecting it, as if to say, “We do not want to be part of the public space called ‘Sri Lanka.’” Hence Lokubanda, the man who spoke after the deputy chief: “We’ve decided to go back to the forest,” he had said.
So the un-modern rejects the modern. The public space of the rug is preferred to the public space of what is supposed to be a modern nation.
As the story the elders told drew to a close, the enormity of the moment became clearer. They had defended their rights and way of life for years—in Colombo, before various international agencies dedicated to the world’s indigenous peoples. Now it was court cases; now it was “back to the forest,” laws and conservation officers notwithstanding.
After lunch, we take a walk through the hamlet. The paths are of earth pounded smooth by bare feet and the soles of sandals.
Chitral asks, “Are the young ones following the rituals?”
Lokubanda replies immediately.
“Not really,” he says. I give this way of life ten years, and if there’s no solution to the land problem we’ll disappear with the older generation.”
This provokes some discussion. Then Lokubanda continues.
“When we were in the forest we knew how to use it. When the Mahaweli diversion project started in the early-1980s, that’s when the destruction of things started. The younger generation is different. Look at the way they’re dressed. They wear caps and T-shirts. They don’t even know the language. When we try to teach it they’re not interested. It’s not taught in school, so the children get used to Sinhala.”
Chitral put in, asking the young who were walking among us, “You can learn whatever you want in school, but why not cling to your own language?”
Another lively debate erupted. Someone whose name I did not learn said, “We’re supposed to keep our community intact. It’s not only the dress, but also the language.”
Then Lokubanda again: “They may go to school, but they don’t have jobs.”
Amid some trees at the far end of the hamlet, we come to Taepal Bandiya’s hut. It is a single room with thatched walls and roof, raised on a neatly shaped mound that lets the rain drain away. The floor is smooth, hard earth, neatly swept. In a corner there are a few simple belongings beneath a wooden platform that serves as his bed. There is a single window and a door, both open.
“I rebuild it every few years,” Taepal Bandiya explains to me. He is a bit house-proud.
“I imagine you’ve never lived any other way—and won’t, will you?”
The question is translated. Taepal watches me as he listens to the interpreter.
Then: “How could I feel the wind? Or smell the rain when it’s coming? How could I hear the animals? How could I listen to the trees at night? How could I see the stars?”
AT DINNER ONE EVENING IN COLOMBO, a man begins to complain to me about the discrimination against Tamils all around us. “It is never stated, but it is everywhere.”
He is Tamil himself, a barrister and also a wealthy business executive: well-dressed, well-spoken. He knows, despite his success, that he is also a victim: It is his society that is collapsing. He lives amid the violence, too. He lives amid all the signifiers—the advertising, the posters, banners, signs, symbols, all subtly declaring Sinhalese superiority, relentlessly and therefore invisibly.
He pulls out his identity card, the usual document covered in clear plastic. Even the Uruwerige had identity cards.
“This is what I mean,” the business executive tells me.
We are sitting at a table on the lawn of his club. It is evening, and I can see the card but not what is on it.
“This is what I mean,” he repeats. “If I am Sinhalese, my identity card will be written in Sinhala. That is all. If I am Tamil, it will be in Sinhala and Tamil. As soon as a policeman asks for your identity card, he is informed: It tells him what you are.”
Difference, I have long noticed, is most important when there is no difference.
IN NUGEGODA, THERE IS a Buddhist temple near my house. It is just the opposite side of the lane leading off Stanley Tillekeratne Mawatha, the busy commercial street. At first glance it does not look like a temple. It is a windowless block of a few stories: It could be anything. Only after a few days do I realize that the featureless block is a Buddhist community center, with some monks within and a place to pray.
In the evenings, I developed the habit of sitting on the doorstep of my house. In the cool of the hour or two before nightfall, I would fix a gin and tonic and gaze at the flowers in my garden, the quiet lane beyond the garden gate, and the flowers climbing the walls of my neighbors’ gardens. At a certain moment servants would emerge from the house just opposite with garden hoses. The splash of the water on the leaves of the bigger plants made a pleasant sound, a sound well-suited to the day’s end.
Then some chanting would begin, a thick, wave-like collection of deep voices, all those of men, washing over the neighborhood. I listened, understanding not a word but sensing, or imagining I do, the reverence for life the Buddhists profess. In the many voices made almost perfectly one, there seemed embedded an acknowledgment of profound belonging. In the persistent, unfaltering drone I imagine I hear some suggestion of shared suffering and burdens.
The chanting would continue for some time, and I would always try to wait until it finished before going inside with my emptied glass. The light would fade and the mosquitoes gather, but the chanting would go on. It covered the neighborhood, and the neighborhood, it seemed to me, was oddly accepting of it. There was no sense of intrusion. The chants were simply part of the daily life of the quarter. They covered the quiet of Thilaka Gardens, but they were part of the quiet, too.
Then it would stop. Quite suddenly, with a clean, abrupt silence, the chanting would come to an end. I used to wonder if those chanting read from a book, as in a Christian church—‘Please turn to hymn number 235”—or chanted from shared memory. I lingered over this point on some evenings and finally guessed the latter: It was all from common memory—or so, once again, I imagined.
The instant the chanting stopped, the cacophony of the busy commercial street took over, filling the empty air of Thilaka Gardens. Before the chanting, I had not even heard it.
In those first days after my arrival, I liked the chanting at the end of the afternoon. It added to the calm, settled atmosphere that pervaded Thilaka Gardens. It reminded me that I was discovering a new place. Then, after a time, the Buddhist chanting revealed itself in its proper context. I had begun to understand language and religion and culture in Sri Lanka. I had begun to understand the question of public space in Sri Lanka. And I never listened again to the chanting in the same way.
IN MOUNT LAVINIA I MET a jeweler, a dealer in gold and stones. His name was Faahik.
He was a stout, kindly man, and he had a younger assistant (perhaps a nephew—I was never sure) named Nazar. I liked them. I tried to visit Faahik’s shop whenever I went to Mount Lavinia, and eventually I bought a small aquamarine, a stone rather specially identified with Sri Lanka.
Faahik and Nazar were Muslim. And in the course of my visits, we developed a kind of running conversation, the three of us. We always spoke honestly and easily among ourselves.
“You have been in Sri Lanka for a long time now,” Faahik said one afternoon after I had made numerous visits. He was accustomed to the tourist trade. How long does the average tourist stay—a couple of weeks at most, perhaps? I had been there far longer. Faahik seemed a little mystified.
“I’m researching a book.”
“A book. What kind of book?”
I never welcome this question. It is always difficult to summarize one’s intentions. But Faahik was becoming a friend. It was an obvious, harmless thing to ask.
“It’s about, well—it’s about how Sri Lankans live. It’s about some institutions—the judiciary, for instance. It’s about how people think, you could say. There is some history. There is some… psychology.”
With this last I pointed my index finger at my temple and rotated it a few times. I had no idea whether Faahik had grasped anything of what I meant. To describe any book in a few sentences of conversation is a nearly impossible task. To discuss one as yet unwritten is entirely so.
Faahik was instantly intrigued.
“You’ll write about the Muslims,” he said. It was partly a statement, partly a question, partly an exclamation of surprise.
“In the course of things. But tell me about the Muslims, Faahik.”
And so Faahik and Nazar did. Faahik told me about property in a neighborhood he knew—“a good neighborhood,” he said—that was purchased by a Muslim family, the first Muslims to move there. Afterward, there had been trouble with the deed. There was an official investigation, and the family lost the property.
Nazar told me about his children’s school and how the boys and girls were separated according to their religions, which means according to ethnicity. At this Faahik nodded. “We are second-class citizens,” he said.
I had heard much of this before. I met a senior government official, a prominent jurist and a member of numerous commissions, who happened to be Muslim. Over the course of several days we discussed corruption, bribery, the penal code, the constitutional council. All of this we covered in careful detail, topic to topic, question-answer, question-answer.
Then I put my pen down and closed my notebook. As so often when one does this, the conversation changed.
“There is something else,” said the official, whom I am bound not to name. “It’s about the Muslim community. There is a climate of fear among the Muslims. You cannot see it. You will have to look to find it. But it is there. I am a Muslim. I can tell you, we are very frightened. We look at what they have done, and we ask, ‘Are we next?’ It is not a far-fetched question.”
They: The Sinhalese majority.
Have done: Done to the Tamils.
The official had taken me aback. I had met him during my first few days in Sri Lanka. And no, I had not yet seen the fear among the Muslims. And I had not yet understood the meaning of the Buddhist chanting. And I had not ever heard a senior government official express such fear of his own government—not in Sri Lanka, not anywhere else.
Faahik once told me another story about his neighborhood.
“We have a call to prayers very early in the morning. You have heard this before.”
Again, half a statement, half a question.
“Many times,” I said. “It can be beautiful.”
“It is not intended as a disturbance. It is not intended as a provocation. It’s very brief: just a call to prayers and that’s it.”
He paused, gazing at me across the glass counter in his shop.
Then he said, “The Buddhists decided they didn’t like this practice. Do you know what they did? They began waiting until after the call to prayers. And then they put hymns and chanting on the loudspeakers all over the neighborhood for an hour and a half every morning. An hour and a half. Do you know what we found out?”
Faahik paused again briefly. There was no point in replying.
“We found out that there was no one chanting. A monk was setting his alarm, getting up, putting a cassette in his recorder, turning it on, and then going back to sleep.”
Faahik smiled a sardonic smile, the bitterness of which was plain.
“How did you find out about the monk and the cassette?”
“We found out. In the neighborhood.”
I never discovered how Faahik knew about the cassette and the monk getting up and going straight back to sleep. It was not inconceivable. There was also a question of intent—also unanswered. How could it be known, short of a discussion with the temple authorities, whether the hour and a half of chanting at dawn (was it an hour and a half?) was at all related to the call to prayers? And so far as I could make out there had been no such discussion. It was idle to conclude one thing or another about Faahik’s story. But again, it was conceivable. And this seemed enough—or, rather, too much—by itself. It was enough to see that a Muslim merchant, doing a good business in gems and jewels, raising children, living in a “good neighborhood” himself—it was enough to see that he believed the story he had related.
Faahik said once, in the course of another of our afternoon chats, “In the villages they are calm. Communal feelings are less.”
Then: “There are two expressions I will explain to you. In the villages they say, ‘Apey rata.’ It means ‘Our country.’ In the city they say, ‘Apey Jathiya.’ This means ‘Our race.’ It means our”—Faahik searched for the word—“Our Sinhalese-ness.”
Politely, respectfully, Nazar corrected Faahik.
“Actually,” he said, “in the villages they don’t talk about either one.”
A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE END of my stay, I left my house in Thilaka Gardens and checked into the Galle Face Hotel. It seemed sensible. My lease on the house was up, and I would have to renew it, or pay extra charges, if I were to stay. It was time to begin organizing my notes and then to make notes on the notes, as writers must, and this was best done without the bother of daily housekeeping. Better to do it in one of the sprawling rooms at the shabby, old Galle Face, the wooden floors creaking, the westward ocean crashing below, the ghosts of many generations about me—and the green, that complicated remnant of what once was, just outside.
On the Saturday of my departure, Shanthi came for me in the family car. We were to drive to Panadura one final time. It was hot, and the traffic dense. But we drove and talked, neither of us paying any attention to the hour. My flight was not until after midnight.
The previous afternoon, the Asian Legal Resources Commission, the group associated with the one that sent me to Sri Lanka, had lost a long-pending case—a police abuse case, as usual. The judge had found that the accused officer had, as charged, inflicted injuries with undue force, but that this did not amount to torture. As Shanthi put it, the judge had simply ruled, “No, I will not convict.” Her mood was grim.
She said, “It wasn’t just the case itself. It was something larger. Why should anyone hope? We’re all upset in this respect. We tell people to hope. They fight for years. Why should they? Now the harassment will get worse.”
I saw the point, of course. Hope is a complicated matter in Sri Lanka—hope, an idea of a better future, an idea of a society free of conflict and corruption. Many people look forward with hope and with these sorts of ideas. But at this point it is hope and no more, because no one seems to have a very specific idea of just how Sri Lanka is going to do better, how it can escape from the trap into which it has fallen. Hope may sustain you, but it can also, as at such moments as the one Shanthi described, betray you.
I also began to see the government’s predicament. To acknowledge one wrong, to find for the defendant in one case against a police officer or a ministry or a bureaucrat, would be to acknowledge many thousands of wrongs. It would be to find for the many, many thousands of victims—the victims themselves and all those close to them. In the end it would be to enter a judgment in favor of all Sri Lankans. And it would be to begin a process Sri Lanka has not yet begun: the rewriting of history, if not the writing of a history for the first time.
We were on the road I normally saw from the curtained window of a bus: a rail track, the ocean beyond it, a long row of illegal shacks alongside. And on the other side: more shacks—legal, these—and hawkers’ stalls set among them. There were fishmongers, with fresh catches spread out in the sun and quick with flies. Then we came to a river: broad but calm, here and there the poles fishermen used to tether their nets.
“That river,” Shanthi said as we rumbled over the bridge, “they used to find bodies floating in it.”
Again, a question of history. Consider the fishermen and the families dwelling in the shacks nearby and the fishmongers and the women in saris with plastic bags on their arms, going from hawker to hawker. They would all know about the bodies floating in the river—it had been only a few years earlier. They would remember, but they had no history, and that is a very different thing. History is not the recording of memory. It is the way people are able to escape from memory. When history is properly recorded, people can begin to forget. The burden of memory can be lifted. But without history, the weight of memory remains, memory being all people have.
So it would be for all the people who lived by the river Shanthi and I had just crossed: There is no proper history of what happened. So the past had to survive in their memories. Every one of them, consciously or not, would live with this burden.
In Panadura I was to meet the sister of a torture victim. I had met many such people by this time. I knew roughly what to expect: an abuse incident, an attempt to invoke the law, an outcome that was more or less discouraging, or (as seemed the usual case) an outcome that had been awaited for three, four, or five years—the outcome of no outcome. But each of these stories had told me something. I wanted to hear this one.
By that morning in Panadura I had come to relate what I was doing to the matter of history in some small way. In the ideal, every single story would be recorded. In an ideal Sri Lanka, there would be an immense project—an oral history project, a video-history project, a written history project, a testimonial project, a truth commission—in which all the stories of all the victims were set down, captured. The mode would not be important. The important thing would be the production of history. And I, having sat with a pen and a notebook across a table or a desk from a victim, had assumed a certain responsibility simply by virtue of holding the pen above a blank page while someone spoke. In that circumstance it was one’s obligation to produce some small shard of history, a tiny, irregularly shaped piece of the shattered vase of Sri Lanka’s past.
AMITHA PRIYANTHI IS a slight woman, and her almost fragile figure makes all the more noticeable her outspoken habits in conversation. There is also a kind of body language with Amitha. She is relaxed—in her legs, her arms, her posture. She moves with a freedom that, I realize as I watch her, I have grown unaccustomed to seeing among Sri Lankans. There is a reason for this ease, it turns out.
“My home is Payagala—south of here—and I come by bus.”
“Come? Do you come often?”
“I work at Janasansadaya.”
What brought Amitha to Chitral’s office was the fate of her younger brother, Lasantha.
“The Payagala police arrested him, tortured him, and killed him. In the course of taking legal measures regarding this incident, I met with Janasansadaya. He was arrested in 2000. He was twenty-three.”
She spoke with a command and efficiency I had also never seen during my interviews with either victims or their relations. Had Amitha always been like this? Had there been some psychological turn? I could not tell and wondered if I would learn.
“What had he done?”
“He was a soldier in the army, but because of the war he was not given leave. And so he came for a holiday and he didn’t go back.”
There was an inconsistency, and Amitha recognized it at the same time I did. She said, “He had permission for a short holiday but stayed on.”
“Do you mean he deserted? Is this what we are talking about?” I had heard this was not uncommon in the Sri Lankan military and that it frequently happened in precisely this way: A soldier takes leave, then disappears in the village, absent without leave. There were many cases. The problem was apparently acute enough that the army looked the other way if a deserter returned within a short period.
“He had no intent to go back,” Amitha replied.
“Why?”
“They continuously kept him in Jaffna, and there was no one to look after his wife and baby.”
“Did he have a view on the war?”
“I think both influenced him. He wasn’t happy about the war, and then the family situation.”
“Had he seen combat?”
“Yes.”
“Did he have a view on the ‘ethnic problem,’ as it is called?”
“There was a sense of frustration in him.”
We continued along these lines for some time. Lasantha, by his sister’s account, was opposed to the war but had not given it much thought and had no “solutions,” as Amitha put it. It seemed more a matter of an individual unsuited to the military fighting a war he knew little and cared less about. As Amitha spoke, I had to remind myself that Lasantha was a villager and would’ve had a villager’s perspective. It was unlikely he shared his sister’s attitudes or her poise.
Amitha said, “He stayed about six months. Then the police asserted he was an army deserter. Then the arrest and assault. He was five days in the police station. Initially we were told they would take him back to the army. But later he got word to my mother he was being assaulted and that she should tell the army.”
“Are you able to tell me how he was tortured?” It was a question I often thought better of asking. But Amitha remained calm, answering matter-of-factly.
“A person in custody with him gave evidence saying they placed heavy books on his head and then hit the books with clubs.”
Shanthi put in, speaking softly, as if delivering a voice-over narration, “It causes serious internal injuries but leaves no external marks. It’s not the first time.”
Then Amitha again: “They put him on a bench and hit him on the soles of his feet. They bathed him afterward. This person”—still the person in custody with Lasantha—“said on one night they had both been assaulted together. Thereafter they remanded him. He had taken ill, and they took him to the prison hospital. He died there.”
Here Amitha ticked off a list, gesturing with her fingers as if counting. “Internal injuries. Internal injuries leading to haemmorhages. Haemmorhages infecting the kidneys.”
The legalities began immediately: a complaint to the Human Rights Commission, a fundamental rights case filed in court. Amitha, with her five surviving siblings and her parents behind her, won eight lakhs—eight hundred thousand rupees—in the fundamental rights case: a significant ruling, she thought because it created a precedent regarding the rights of the next-of-kin to seek redress through a fundamental rights application to the Supreme Court. She also won a case in magistrate’s court when a doctor testified that it was homicide—death by assault. Criminal charges—culpable homicide—were then filed against one police officer.
Then came the complications. The non-summary inquiry in the homicide case took six years—until March of 2006. The case had gone to the high court, but the attorney-general had yet to file an indictment. In the course of these delays, the officer charged absconded.
“It was during the tsunami. He played a victim and disappeared.”
No, Amitha said, it had not gone well, apart from the ruling in the fundamental rights case. But it had changed her. At Janasansadaya, she worked with others making their way through the legal maze. Two counselors, an Austrian psychologist and a former priest, had trained her, and now she, too, counseled other trauma victims.
At thirty-seven, she was also a stepmother. The baby Lasantha had deserted the army to care for was now eight.
“The boy’s mother left. My parents are getting on. There wasn’t anyone else.”
I have not reproduced Amitha Priyanthi’s many remarks about justice and her determination to seek it. Others portrayed in this book have said similar things. “I wanted justice for my bother and to insure this never happens to anyone else,” she said. And: “It’s important the rights of people in this country are safeguarded.” And: My work involves the quest for justice.”
But there was something else—something Amitha showed me rather than told me. There had indeed been a transformation in her. It had something to do with her thinking—the way she understood what had happened, the meaning she had found in it. No, her brother had expressed no strong opinion about the war. He was a villager with a villager’s views. Amitha had a larger view. She had said, “people in this country,” and had spoken of “implementing the law.” There was also Amitha’s pride—a fearless pride, not without sadness but certainly without diffidence. It reminded me of the pride I had sensed in the old accounts of, say, the Bracegirdle incident, or the pride that came through in the stories Vijaya had told me as we sat on his verandah.
She was not a victim, Amitha, any more than Vijaya had been in his younger days, or the people portrayed in Stanley Kirinde’s paintings. She stood in public space, as they had—now one of a very few. But in the past we sometimes find at least the suggestion of a possible future.
AS I WAS BEGINNING this project, a professional acquaintance asked me about the nature of it, and the topic of the war inevitably came into the conversation. The war is all most people outside Sri Lanka know about the country, and this they understand only in its broadest outline. “What can they possibly be fighting about?” my acquaintance exclaimed. “Tamils and Sinhalese. What’s the difference?”
He was American, a senior editor at an influential international newspaper. And his question, I remember well, stunned me into silence for a moment or two. It seemed to me the height of insensitivity, some Orientalist failure to grasp even the most evident details of other people, to say nothing of their history. What ignorance, I thought to myself, and in such high places. It was a wonder to me.
Now I wonder something else. “What’s the difference?” Can ignorance give rise to a question that is interesting despite its origin?
Near the end of my visit—perhaps it was on that final day—Shanthi confided in me. “Few know this,” she said. She seemed to have come to a decision about what she was about to tell me. We were driving, as we often were during our long conversations.
“I am half-Tamil. In the family we never discussed it. It didn’t matter to anyone. And I speak no Tamil.”
Then she told me a few details about her upbringing. Her grandparents, on both sides, were unusual people, she said. At St. Bridget’s there were certain rituals. When the Tamils in class had to stand, she was required to stand with them. Everyone had to stand in this way—the Sinhalese when the Sinhalese were called to stand, the Muslims when their turn came. Much later Shanthi wrote to me about this: “It made us conscious that there was a difference between us, and for me it was also confusing—was I Tamil or Sinhala? And why did I have to choose one parent over the other? It was my mother who gently advised me to stand when the Tamils were called, ‘because Dada was a Tamil.’”
It put Shanthi in an altogether strange position: A witness to some distinction invested with great meaning, a distinction that had torn the country into two since one fateful decision in 1956, but one that, from her perspective (and from her life as she had lived it), had no meaning.
At the end of her revelation that day we were driving, she asked the very question my American friend had put to me. “So there is no visible difference. No one can tell. This I know for a fact. What is the difference, then? It is history. It is what is carried in the mind.”
HISTORY IS PUBLIC. History is the past of public space. All public space is historical by its very nature: There is always within it a reference to history, to what came before, to what is known and recorded. History validates public space. Without the historical dimension, public space would lose all meaning. It would become a matter of memory, and memory, as opposed to history, is private.
People who live without history suffer. As I have already suggested, they must keep the past alive in their memories because there is no written record of it. Memory thus weighs on people, and in time on their children, and in more time the whole of a people’s consciousness is colored by memory. They become a burdened people, such as the Mayans in Guatemala, or the Cambodians. Or, like many younger Cambodians, they lose all relation to the past because they have no history and memory alone is too burdensome for their parents to pass on.
This is why the work of truth commissions in places such as South Africa or Central America or Indonesia is important. The past is recorded. There is a written record of “what happened.” There is history—an authentic history of the past as it was truly lived. And when there is history people can begin the important work of forgetting and the building of a future.
To despoil history, then, is to despoil public space. To neglect it altogether is to neglect altogether what is commonly held. In a nation without history there is no public space—not in the true sense. In the final analysis, there is no nation—only individuals with addresses and memories.
“It is history,” Shanthi had said. “It is what is carried in the mind.” She was right about this, but only partly. In a land where one needs an identity card to show that one is of one “ethnic group” or another, where “I and thou” becomes “I and it” in the blink of an eye and “you” become an “other,” what is carried in the mind is indeed essential. It is practically all there is. This is Sri Lanka: It is what is carried in the mind that counts.
What about history, then? On this point Shanthi was wrong. Yes, there have been formidable histories of Ceylon and Sri Lanka. Notable in this respect is the work of K. M. de Silva, the historian in Kandy. But de Silva’s book, A History of Sri Lanka, is not the history Sri Lankans share. It does not define the past of public space in Sri Lanka—not as people commonly think of it. The past in Sri Lanka has been both despoiled and neglected. And it is the despoiled and neglected past, not history, that Sri Lankans carry in their minds. The paradox is plain: History matters in Sri Lanka, but there is no history.
Instead there is a mythical past, the past of Vijaya, the legendary voyager from northern India who, with seven hundred companions, is said to have come to Sri Lanka sometime in the fifth century B. C., whereupon the Sinhalese became Sinhalese. This is the past of great kings and great stones and great tanks. It is the past of we-were-here-first and ours-was-the-great-civilization. It is not a human narrative; it is not inhabited in the way history is by definition (and certainly not by those we now call the indigenous, who arrived at least ten millennia before Vijaya).
Neglect is the malady of modern Sri Lanka. In the past quarter century the nation has created a problem of historical neglect that will require at least as long to resolve. I have touched upon this matter already in previous pages. What did Clifford Perera mean in his improbable talk of civility and its relation to medical-legal reports? Without even knowing it, perhaps, he meant to assert the importance of the making of history.
In a country where estimates of the disappeared range from thirty thousand to double this figure—in a country so unknowing of itself—the work of history is more or less endless. At this moment, based upon all of the accounts I have heard concerning the police and the judicial system, the direction of things has not been reversed: Ground is still being surrendered to neglect, the enemy of history, the enemy of public space.
AMUSEUM, MOST EMPHATICALLY a national museum, is among the most public of spaces. It is also a text. One finds in a national museum what matters to the community it serves—the way it thinks, the structure of its idea of itself.
This is who we were and how we got here, a museum of this kind will tell you—and therefore (the subtext, always) this is who we are. Attentiveness is important: There is what counts and what is valued most, and then, in the absences, there is what matters less or not at all. One can read a museum like a book.
Sri Lanka’s national museum is commonly called the Colombo Museum—a small but interesting point in itself—and it sits, like a grand old matron dressed in summer whites, on a road called Sir Marcus Fernando Mawatha in Colombo 7, one of the capital’s best neighborhoods. The first thing a visitor notices, apart from the building itself and its rows of arches, is a great enveloping bodhi tree, a ficus religiosa, off to the left of the entrance. And then in front of the tree: a sitting Buddha. And then at the entrance: a large, commanding limestone Buddha from Toluvila, in the Anuradhapura district, dated 800 A. D., the middle Anuradhapura period, carved in the samadhi pose, “connoting the perfect mental state of the Buddha.”
In the seven decades the museum stood under British rule—it was built in 1877—it seems primarily to have housed early artifacts—pots, tools of stone and bone, a burial slab. Much of this survives and takes up several of the ground-floor galleries. Then one passes into the periods from which more detail survives, the periods that bear the museum’s message.
There is Vijaya, of course, who enters the narrative by way of a text on a plaque:
The transition from Pre– and Proto–history to the historical period in
Sri Lanka begins with the Indo–Aryan settlers headed by the legend-
ary ruler Vijaya from North India around the 5th century B. C., thus
commencing the Sinhalese race.
This is sloppy logic and very sloppy writing—sloppy and provocative. There is the problematic word “legendary.” Are we acquiring a notion of history in these galleries, or a creation myth? Was Vijaya an historical figure or not? Was he, as some scholars assert, a composite, a figure created out of multiple figures to bear forward the story of “the race”? We are not to know. But we are to understand, nonetheless, that pre-history ended and history began rather precisely with the arrival of the Sinhalese.
Then the problem of “the Sinhalese race.” By even the most lenient of definitions, the Sinhalese are not remotely a race. And the scholars of our time are moving further and further away from any such notion: Contemporary thinking is such that the very notion of race is losing its validity. In any case, one has never heard of an heroic adventurer arriving somewhere and “commencing” a race. It is, prima facie, an impossible idea.
We then enter the era of the kingdoms, which, along with Anuradhapura, are enumerated: Mahagama, Gokahna, Kalyani, Nagadiya. Then:
In the 5th century A. D., yet another temporary fortress kingdom was
founded by Kasyapa at Sigiriya. Trade and political inroads of the
South Indians gradually increased the settlements of the Tamil
population as well.
So do the Tamils come, a bit sideways, into the story.
For the kingdoms there is much detail—much of it quite interesting. There are explanations of agriculture and irrigation, health and sanitation, the use of coins, language and literature, the evolution of script, and so on. There is a captivating model of one of the early irrigation tanks, indicating the mechanics of how they were managed and how they distributed water. They were ingenious, these feats of early engineering.
Then it is back to the Tamils, if briefly. A plaque reads:
The presence of Tamil rulers in Sri Lanka from pre–Christian times
indicates the practice of Brahmanical or Hindu faith, yet in a subservient
tone due to the pre-eminent position of Buddhism.
And so on. A few galleries in, and we are already quite beyond mere sloppy writing. Sinhalese history is to be told from the inside out: It is ours. Tamil history is to be told from the outside in: It is theirs.
There are some very fine Hindu sculptures—bronzes. But there is a problem with them. We must question their provenance, it seems—where they came from. Possibly they are not Sri Lankan because they are so well made.
A plaque explains the case:
The portrayal of these bronzes is of such high excellence that they were
considered to be products of South India. However, several distinct features,
such as the mode of dress, the attitude of sitting, etc., are peculiar to Sri
Lanka, and as such some of these sculptures would evidently fall into the
category of products of a Sri Lankan repertory.
Some. Evidently. The category of.
It is ordinarily a little uplifting to see schoolchildren being led through a museum, one object or another capturing an imagination or two and bringing the past suddenly to life. In this case the groups of fidgety, crisply dressed children, some in white shirts, some in blue, seemed a sad sight as they moved swiftly past the glass cases. I found myself hoping that they would miss the point entirely.
At the front office I asked for the curator. There was some confusion, and then a man appeared. His name was Ranjit Hewage, and he was not the curator: He was the museum-keeper.
Young, apparently innocent of the narrative advanced in the museum he oversaw, he was proud, most of all, of a recently completed renovation on the ground floor, the galleries that contained the story of the Sinhalese. The central attraction, he told me, in a room all its own, was the throne of the last king of Kandy—originally a gift from the Dutch, then booty for the British, and then returned by Edward VIII in 1936.
“It is all rather heavily Sinhalese, Mr. Hewage. Don’t you think?”
He seemed not to register why I would ask such a question and gazed somewhere off my right shoulder.
After a pause he said, “But we have a good collection on Hindu. We have very beautiful and unique Siva images. They are in Gallery Four, with Parvati, Siva’s wife, and some other figures. In Gallery One you can see Surya figures, ‘surya’ meaning ‘sun,’ and Kali, one of the Hindu goddesses. And there are many Hindu stone objects in Gallery Seven.”
And so on.
There was one other thing I wanted to see, and I asked Hewage about it. “Are there any exhibitions having to do with modern history, Mr. Hewage?”
There were, in fact, and I would have to walk through an unrenovated part of the museum: up a staircase, through two galleries, go outside and follow the porticos, go past two galleries of early paintings, past a collection of watercolors by Andrew Nicholl, a colonial-era painter, through another portico, past stacks of empty display cases, through a gallery of old furniture piled as if in a second-hand shop. And there I would find it: modern Ceylon, modern Sri Lanka.
It began to sound as if Sinhalese history would be told elaborately, Tamil history briefly as someone else’s, and modern, national history, shared history, was not to be told at all.
The stairs creaked as I climbed to the upper floor. In the vast galleries at the top, my footfalls echoed, knocks on wood. There were a couple of dozen superb kolam masks—the satirical caricatures depicted in the old folk dramas: pretentious ministers, village headmen, heckling housewives, drunks. They made me laugh aloud, as did the pali masks—masks of demons, which were mixed in with the kolam pieces.
In another room, there were collections of indigenous artifacts: bows and arrows, fishing gear, kitchen implements, baskets, none with an explanatory plaque. These galleries had not been touched in forty years, Hewage had told me. This was a museum for the great tradition, not the little.
Along the old verandahs, through more galleries and the storerooms, past the doors of still others, I came to a filthy, musty room with a door giving on to a walkway. Inside, it was like standing in a stranger’s attic. There was no order. No care had been taken. I switched on the light.
Along one wall there was a massive desk, larger than a billiard table, and on it an ancient telephone with a thick, frayed cord. In front of the desk, on a raised platform, sat an elaborate horse-drawn carriage with intricate brass fittings and a lacquer finish dull with dust. On the walls around me were rows of water-stained photographs.
Whose desk? Whose carriage? Who was in the photographs? I could tell nothing, for what caption cards had been written were in Sinhala only.
I stood still for several moments and gazed around. The walls were peeling, and there were signs of leakage near the windows. Two fluorescent tubes lit the room—a third being out of order. Above me, a ceiling fan creaked. It was the only sound, and it made me wonder: How long had it been since anyone had come to this, the gallery of modern Sri Lankan history in the national museum?
THE CORROSION, OR CORRUPTION, OR NEGLECT, or misuse, or ignorance of public space and its value is hardly a problem unique to Sri Lanka. One could say it is a problem in one way or another throughout Asia—without a single exception—but this would be too narrow an assertion. Public space is a problem practically everywhere, including in the societies that invented it in its modern form and claim to be its champions and defenders today. The Americans in Iraq, claiming that they can somehow transplant democracy in another nation, are defrauding all those who take the thought of public space at all seriously. Democracy is not an export item; it does not arrive on ships or cargo planes. By definition it must spring from within—a point Americans ought to know better than anyone. Beneath this argument for the export of democracy lies another: an argument for the creation and maintenance of public space. But it is the same: Public space in Iraq, whatever form it may eventually take and whatever the influences it comes to reflect, will be of Iraqi design. Americans, in any case, have little to teach or give the rest of the world by way of public space. Their own is under considerable threat and cannot, in the way it actually works as opposed to its ideal, be taken as a model for anything.
The most enduring symbol of public space we have is the Greek agora, a marketplace that evolved into a forum and became, during the period of classical Athenian democracy, the center of public life. This consciousness of public space, among the greatest of the gifts of the Greeks, was reflected again in Rome and, many centuries later, at the start of the modern era in the West, in Britain, France, and the young United States. The public architecture that survives from this period tells the story well enough. But the best-preserved agora we have is in Izmir, which the Greeks called Smyrna, and this suggests a story, too: The notion of public space developed primarily in the West, but this does not mean there is anything especially Western about it.
In the East, the emphasis was less on public space in the Greek or Enlightenment sense and more on families, clans, and extended households. It was by way of these that interests were defined and then advanced in the public sphere. So it was a different model. But we should think less in terms of radical distinctions than of tendencies along a continuum. There was always public space in Asia, even if it was only a rug, and there were always great families asserting themselves in Europe and America.
What about Asia, then—Asia now?
Setting aside the evident decay of American institutions and Europe’s protracted effort to find a new, more inclusive idea of what it means to be European (or French, or British, or Spanish, and so on), how does the question of public space apply to modern Asia?
The answer to this will vary from place to place. Public space in India can be fairly described as corroded, but India has one great advantage: Its institutions are fundamentally sturdy, however deep the corruption in some of them. Public space is an established fact. In China, the greatest contention of our time concerns public space: the struggle of citizens to establish it, the rulings party’s determination to make sure none develops. To look quickly at Singapore, one might conclude that it is blessed with a vibrant notion of public space. On close inspection, of course, all such space is monopolized by the governing party. The mainland’s leaders, we can say, would like nothing better than to make China a gigantic Singapore—1.3 billion producers and consumers but not a single citizen, not an inch of public space to walk across.
Against this background, Sri Lanka is especially tragic in the way it has destroyed its public space. It has not proven sturdy, like India’s—not as manifest in its institutions and not in people’s minds, the edifice within, the public space within. There are two reasons this great lapse can be called tragic. They are simply stated and closely related: They are need and opportunity.
LET US GO BACK TO GALLE FACE GREEN. Let us stand upon it, or (if they are still trying to bring the lawn back) along the graceful promenade that runs between the green and the strand of beach where the Indian Ocean begins. Maybe the sun is setting—maybe it is one of those slow hours at day’s end, for which the green is justly famous. So we look westward, we watch the sun, the clouds, and the ocean, and we contemplate some things.
What did the British colony called Ceylon have in 1948, when it became a dominion (the last bit of the empire to be so designated)? It had needs. It was a multicultural society, it spoke several languages, and it was multi-religious (or even multi-multi-religious, given the extraordinary mix). All this had to be accommodated. And it had a population of seven million or so, almost all of whom were considered and considered themselves to look upward from below, and almost none of whom had ever entered public space.
Ceylon at that moment also had opportunities, and the list is somewhat similar: It was multicultural and spoke several languages. It was multi-religious. It also had the institutions the British would leave behind. This would be complicated. The British could not give Ceylon democracy or public space any more than the Americans can give these things to Iraq. But it had, by history’s circumstances, a basic endowment of public space that could be expanded and adapted to remedy the above-and-below question—to accommodate the unaccommodated, to include the never before included.
So the needs and opportunities overlapped.
It is rarely of much use to compare one nation with another. They are all too different. Of greater benefit is to compare a nation with two other things: what it was and what it could have been—that is, to compare it with itself. This brings us to Sri Lanka’s tragedy: what it was, what it is, what it could have become. It had four and a half centuries’ experience with strangers in its midst at the moment of independence. It had two millennia or so of cohabitation of two peoples from two different part of the same mainland, not to mention the centuries it had been home to Muslims, Burghers, Malays, and other minorities. Could it not have become the very model of late-twentieth century multiculturalism and secularism, a model of tolerance and diversity others could only look upon with envy?
There is also the question of language: Stripped of its political and psychological charge, stripped of all sentiment, could not English, now the global language, have become every Sri Lankan’s second tongue, rather in the way of the Dutch? As it is, the language phenomenon is now among the world’s oddest: The older a Sri Lankan is, often the better his or her English is likely to be; the younger, the worse. It speaks for the whole: A relatively new nation with one of the most promising opportunities to develop a global identity to its advantage now sits on the sidelines of the global century, left out of the coming and going Naipaul wrote of, inward turned, absorbed in differences that make no difference.
TO RE-ENTER PUBLIC SPACE IN the Sri Lankan case is to re-create it. And to re-enter it is, indeed, the only way to re-create it. Context counts for much. To vote, to go to court, to insist that the law be upheld: Elsewhere these would signal one’s acceptance of constituted power. In the upside-downness of Sri Lanka, where it is a transgression not to transgress, the law becomes an instrument of subversion. In Sri Lanka the ordinary acts of voting or of going to court amount to acts of resistance. Such acts seem the logical way forward, as people such as Chitral Perera understand.
I met many people (though few as a proportion of the whole) who have, in one way or another, stepped into the vacancy of public space. I have described some. There were others. They seemed to share something. Like Chitral, none had any idea of heroism. None was sentimental. They had an idea only of what, in their circumstances, needed to be done.
When I knew I would spend time in Kandy, I decided to try to meet K. M. de Silva, the scholar whose book, A History of Sri Lanka, I had often used as a reference. He had had a stroke some years earlier, and it was not at all clear he would be able to see me. On the telephone his wife seemed gracious but protective.
But there were questions I wanted to ask. What was his view of Bandaranaike and the 1956 language law? I was still mystified by the habit of many to overlook the calamity of the language law and credit him with “giving a voice to the voiceless,” as it was often put. What was his view of the future? How could Sri Lanka imagine a future different from its present?
De Silva received me in his office at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, which he had directed since it was founded in 1982. Cool, shaded, simply furnished, quiet—the place was a sanctuary up a narrow lane that ran off a main thoroughfare. He spoke slowly. “I’m coming along all right,” he said when I asked about his health, but I could see he would tire easily.
So we moved from subject to subject quickly. We covered Bandaranaike and 1956—“a disaster”—the judicial system—“the C. J. is an embarrassment more than anything else”—the war in the north and east—“a political conflict, not an ethnic conflict, that has got out of hand”—and a solution to it—“a federal state giving Tamils and other minorities greater influence in political affairs than they have at the moment.”
I did not ask the question I was most curious about. It could not be usefully posed. He would either answer it or not in the course of our exchange.
A History of Sri Lanka did not strike me as a book without flaws. It left things out, notably in its sections on post-independence history. It had a tendency to favor the “great man” view of history, as opposed to the work of a scholar such as Nira Wickramasinghe, a younger historian who considers how ordinary people lived and came to think of themselves—influenced, perhaps, by the approach made famous by what is known as the Annales school. Still, I wanted to know why de Silva wrote the book. It seemed an attempt to give Sri Lankans a past that they could legitimately call their own—common property of a sort. It seemed a response to the question I had formed the night of my arrival: It seemed to say: This is what it means to be Sri Lankan.
Even before the end of our conversation I had the answer to my unposed question. He was an historian (of whatever school) and this made him a public man. The book was a small stone, made of the past, upon which a small bit of a future might rest.
“Do you consider Sri Lanka a ‘failed state’?”
It turned out to be the question that stirred de Silva most. In his reply he took the care a conscientious professor would with a student.
“Not a failed state,” de Silva exclaimed. “It is failing and could fail, but it isn’t ‘failed.’ The state still provides services to people. When all is said and done, there is law and order.”
The question was much in the air at the time. A few months earlier, an American research institution had rated Sri Lanka twenty-fifth in a ranking of troubled states, and the survey had drawn much attention in Colombo.
Failed or failing: It was not a distinction that, in the end, seemed of much interest. One way or the other it changed nothing. But I acquired the habit of posing the question whenever I thought the answer might be illuminating.
FAILED.”
I am talking to Victor Ivan, a noted journalist in Colombo, a stubborn occupant of public space. And I have put to him my question.
We are in his offices at Ravaya, the newspaper Ivan founded in the 1980s, the journal many say is the only one left in the nation that reports truthfully—“without fear or favor,” as the expression goes. There, with a dirty ashtray between us on his desk, he is offering his reply.
“We have to accept the fact that we live in a failed state. It is us. It is ours, an ugly country.”
“Let’s say ‘failing,’ I suggested, recalling de Silva. “Not ‘failed.’”
“Failed. It’s not a theory. It’s not just an ethnic war. It’s the whole thing: public transport, schools, all of it. The media are a problem. The intellectuals are a problem—they will never come out and articulate their views independently. The judiciary, the bureaucracy, civil society. Show me one thing working in a really nice way.”
Ivan spoke like this, in his gravelly voice, the voice of a heavy smoker, a voice that made the word ‘nice’ seem rather strange. He was given to rapid-fire phrases. He was blunt, acerbic, without sentiment of any kind. I liked him immediately. One of his hands was bandaged—an injury from long ago, sustained during the insurrection.
He had lived most of his life in public, so to speak. While still in his teens he became heavily involved in the once-radical J. V. P. and the first insurrection, the one it launched in 1971. Seven years of prison followed, years that changed him. He read and he played chess. The chess gave him discipline, and the reading led him through all the old revolutionary texts and down many new roads, and finally to Gandhi. The day I met Victor, Ravaya was running the fifty-sixth installment of an apparently limitless series of articles on the Mahatma’s life and thinking.
After prison came his own books—thirteen of them by the time I met him—and a series of court cases that lasted more than a decade. He launched the paper in 1986—“during the troubled period.”
His path had led Ivan to think, in a kind of distilled manner, about a very few things. My notes from our various conversations show him returning again and again to those things: ignorance, education, understanding.
“If you want a big change you begin with education,” he asserted in one conversation. And later: “Educating people—it’s very hard.” And then later: “If the society can understand, they will remove the top strata and start to build a new state so people can live peacefully and with dignity.”
Ignorance, Ivan told me more than once, was as great a problem as corruption. “Ask the legislators. Ask the judges, the media, the bureaucrats. You’ll see: They don’t know what their role is. They don’t even know what it is they are supposed to do.”
Ivan offered me a story. Like all good journalists, he put a headline atop it. The headline was, “Why is a society all cut up?”
He said, “Two years ago I attended a conference on investigative journalism in Copenhagen. Five hundred people, all the big guys: Time, Newsweek, The New York Times—all there. I did a Power Point presentation. I showed what had happened in Sri Lanka, focusing on the story of the chief justice. After my presentation I got a big cheer.
“Then a professor asked me a question. He was from the University of Chicago. He said, ‘Your story is unbelievable. But what is the reaction in society?’
“I said, ‘I don’t know how to explain this to you. But we’ve had two insurrections, one ethnic war, nearly a hundred thousand killed, a million displaced. Our people are living, but some parts of them have died. They don’t have social consciences. They don’t have souls. They’re human beings, but without a lot of things.’”
Ivan then resumed speaking to me directly, outside the frame of the story. He said, “They need treatment. You have to treat the whole society. It isn’t normal. It can’t be one by one—you have to take the whole and treat it.”
He seemed to mean “treatment” in a clinical sense, as if he were talking about a pathology.
I thought of Chitral and Kanthi and Mrs. Malkanthi and the others I had met. I thought of the hundred children who had come to the cafeteria in Kandy. I thought of the court cases piling up in the Supreme Court, the appeals and inquiries accumulating in Geneva. I said, “One by one or all at once, you’re still talking about changing minds. It comes to the same thing.”
“Of course. Minds. It’s where everything has to begin.”
“Where does that leave us, then?”
Victor did not seem to hear the question. He was lighting a cigarette. With his good hand he fixed a matchbox in his bandaged hand, then struck it. It was an awkward gesture, but I had come to understand, between Victor and myself, that I was not to offer to help. And I didn’t.
