Pyrrhic
I was having lunch with a friend and her friend this afternoon when I get a text from Singapore reading “Tamilselvan is dead!” I blinked and read it again. I interrupted the conversation between the two girls and said “wow..Tamilselvan is dead.” None of us knew what to say - we didn’t know each other particularly well so we didn’t know how reactions would be greeted - I think. I didn’t know how he had died, and I knew I was happy but I felt bad to feel happy if he had died of an illness or something. I got back to office and was inundated with emails and messages with the news. It quietly sank in..their number 2 was gone. And he was hit by the air force that was battered, physically and morally just a week ago. It was fantastic for us, militarily, politically. BBC front page, even they were saying it. I was happy. I worried for a bit about retaliation, but hey, that can wait, this was great. Tamilselvan..dead. I was happy, I’m sure. “Let’s put an arrack and celebrate, machan.” Yeah, even arrack.
I came home that evening and was watching the news and soon after his death was announced there were explosions in the night. They were just firecrackers, but in Colombo we’re edgy. I asked the chaps downstairs about the noise and MA said, “ah araya maruna ne, ithin rathinya daanawa kattiya.” I shrugged. Years ago whenever I heard crackers for no reason my first thought was hey Prabha might have died. War does strange things to people. My evening was quiet, I was distracted, so I let myself drift. I drifted back 12 years, almost to the day. It was late in the night and I remember being woken up by my mother with tears in her eyes. “Podi aiya’s plane is missing.” I cried my way to my uncle’s house. I don’t remember a lot, everyone was there, we had the radio on waiting for news. Every time the phone rang the room held its breath. But nothing - we had hope, that was the worst part. His girlfriend didn’t stop crying on the bed, my uncle didn’t say anything but he was never the same again, my grandmother couldn’t believe she lived to see a grandchild die - I, I just cried. My cousin was in the air force and the Antonov he was flying was shot down. We never found a body.
We cried, they celebrated. And today it’s the other way around. Except I don’t really feel like celebrating.
