One one things

I have time to kill so i’m going to write some more. I decided to stay awake so that I can sleep on the plane as much as I can. So I’m going to London tonight and quite a few people have been saying “ah be careful, never know when a bomb will go off” and I think what the hell, I’m Sri Lankan, I’ve lived all my life here and we know a thing or two about bombs. But, I seem to have taken for granted the lack of severe terror attacks in Colombo over the last couple of years. The first 16 years of my life was spent wondering when the next one will go off. Each time there’s a big bang I remember running to the phone (pay phone in school, what cell phones those days!) feverishly dialling my parents work places, then after getting to know where it’s exploded calling up people in those areas. The bombs that will forever be etched in my memory are the JOC bomb, Central Bank, Town hall and Ranjan Wijeratne.

The first bomb i remember is Ranjan Wijeratne’s blast. I must have been around 7 or 8 years old. For some reason aiya and I were dropped at my uncle’s place, which was in Thimbirigasyaya, very close to the explosion. I don’t remember much about it except that the adults were all very tense and I was feeling quite scared. My uncle took us to the blast site, which probably wasn’t too clever. I distinctly have a picture in my head of half a face of a man (ear and beard) lying on the floor near the pavement. I still feel sick thinking of it. Also I remember the Rambutan pieces scattered all over. I think that was the first time the war really hit me, I think I knew that there was a war in our country but it was then that I knew that it’s in OUR country and not just some place where we’d never set foot in.
If the Wijeratne bomb failed to convince me entirely, the JOC bomb left no stones unturned. I was in Royal in year 2 which is incredibly close to the then JOC. The explosion was massive and I remember the lights going out, we ran outside with the teachers. One image i’ll never forget is of a guy in year 4 or something running towards year 2 block whilst everyone was running away, apparently his little bro was in our grade. Reminds me of that famous Tsunami pic of that woman running towards the sea to save her kids. Most of it is hazy now, I remember the Nawarangahala was the place where injured kids were treated and I remember finding aiya somewhere there (he wasn’t injured thankfully). We were all told to evacuate to the senior playground and it felt like a stampede bc everyone was going through a small gap in the wall, and being three and a half feet tall doesn’t make things easy. We finally got home in the afternoon sometime and I sort of remember not talking for most of the day.

The Central Bank bomb occured a bit later on when i had a fairly good understanding of the war and its many brutalities. I was in my French class, third floor (F2?) in cis and there was a massive noise and I could have sworn the building shook. Everyone knew it was a bomb and I just ran off to find aiya and try and call our parents, it was so loud it felt really close but then we heard various stories one of which was that the bomb was in Nawaloka where thaththi works, my heart sank and I wanted to throw up but then the rumours stopped and we got to know it was at the Central Bank. The sheer magnitude of that bomb just shocked me and as I watched the news over and over I just got so depressed.

The town hall bomb that killed C.V. Gooneratne wasn’t the biggest bomb to hit Colombo but it depressed me as much as any other. It occured around early August and at the time I had been reading about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The town hall bomb cracked a mirror in our house, and soon after it happened I went into (by my standards) a bit of a depression. It’s best described as just feeling kalakirila about life in general, I remeber not talking a lot and also going over the Newsweek and Time about Hiroshima and Nagasaki repeatedly, including pictures, again not very clever. I probably just got sick of wondering when is it going to be me or someone in my family, when will one of us be “among the dead”.

Last year I was in Killinochchi and I met boys around my age, and they’ve known nothing other than that same fear for their whole life. When you see bullet marks on the walls of houses it probably hits home, literally. Someday, when we ACTUALLY finish this war, we’re going to have a serious issue in terms of sorting out the mental side of things. Living in fear all the time will certainly do things to you, we need to figure out a way to sort it out.