sri lanka is a place where the truth has vanished. The twisted limbs of the beggars littering the streets mirror the country's political brutality. It is the darkest and maddest country I know. While the days break with relentless perfection, the nights bring a claustrophobic shroud-the lack of electricity exacerbated by the fear of violence.
Arriving when I was 24, I believed in the romance of poverty and the righteousness of political struggle. I worked for a small Marxist organisation, run by a Sri Lankan Che Guevara. Focusing on the bestial labour conditions of Sri Lanka's tea plantations, the organisation, like many in developing countries, worked to improve both the conditions of the poor and the social standing of its own employees.
When societies fracture, rumour is often the only glue that remains. So it was in Sri Lanka. It was the dry season of 1997, and the place crackled with stories of mass graves. The Tamil militants in the north were making a final push to recapture Jaffna in their battle against the Singhalese-dominated state; the equally militant Singhalese counter-insurgents (a species of Buddhist Ian Paisleys, except that they were Marxists) were making a comeback. Meanwhile, the government was busy applying the veneer of nationhood with preparations for the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Kandy, the country's Buddhist heartland, was being transformed. The thin whitewash on every surface did not quite cover the diesel stains and tropical decay. The Prince of Wales had cancelled his trip and we all knew that the country's most important Buddhist shrine, the temple of the tooth, was going to be bombed.
When the temple roof was blown off, it woke us up. Our house nestled above the lake and behind the temple, backing on to the jungle with its troops of monkeys, wild mangoes and rambutans. The bomb should have shattered the windows but I later learnt that sound and shock waves do not travel well uphill, preferring to rush down the valley floor. Wandering down the hill in the morning, we met large crowds around the building, curious and festive, not yet the brutal mass they were bound to become.
As the day progressed the marches began, with groups of Singhalese young men dressed in white, punctuated by the angry saffron robes of the monks. By night, the crowd slipped into violence as easily as some shed their saffron robes. All the Tamil shops were stoned and most were set alight. The Tamil Hindu temple burned throughout the night. The riots lasted for three days. While many died, we held all-night curfew parties and got drunk on duty-free embassy beer, chaos, violence, and the stories of long-term expats. "Not as bad as 1989," they would say, referring to the year that 15,000 young men disappeared, and bodies were displayed on the town's main roundabout. Several smaller bombings followed over the next week, targeting the headquarters of the main political parties and trade unions. No one claimed responsibility for the temple bomb or any of the following ones.
Violence in Sri Lanka has transcended the inexplicable and become the inevitable. In such a society, the truth is no longer important. Plantation workers sell their children as domestic staff to wealthy Colombo families to save them from the grinding poverty of the tea estates. Many of these children are raped, beaten, murdered or simply disappear-sold into the sex slave trade by unscrupulous brokers. One of the tea-pluckers I knew, Chithrani, had lost several of her children, and I wanted to know what she made of the recent violence. She was in her mid-thirties, her hands blackened by the tannin in the tea leaves, her forehead permanently indented from the weight of her basket, her teeth rotted to stumps from the betel she chewed to suppress her hunger. Her eyes alone sparkled with life.
The bombing, she explained, was carried out by the nephew of a senior government minister who had recently acquired a job lot of white paint (the same minister, I knew, who had been supplying us with drugs he brought into Sri Lanka in his diplomatic bag). She patiently described how the subsequent bombings at the headquarters of the political parties and trade unions were carried out by the political parties and the trade unions themselves to win public support. She explained all this calmly and cheerfully, without a hint of confusion or anger.
Was this weird conspiracy theory true? It seems that it might have been, but somehow the truth did not matter. There have been further bombings; the president has been injured, losing an eye to a Tamil suicide bomber; and the war has escalated, with some of the fiercest fighting in 16 years occurring in the past few months. National elections are taking place as I write. No doubt we will catch a few glimpses on television.
I left Kandy a year after the temple bombing, no longer believing in the romance of poverty or the righteousness of political struggle. I had learned to appreciate the thrill of violence, to recognise the baseness of human struggle, and to believe in nothing. n
