The Story Of A Tamil Boy’s Revenge
[ Casuarina Beach, Sri Lanka; Phtograph via Wikipedia ]
Prof. Mahesan Niranjan
Last week, I was invited to a wedding in Bridgetown. My regular drinking partner, the Sri Lankan Tamil fellow Sivapuranam Thevaram’s son Samaanthiram was getting married. Thinking it was going to be a Hindu wedding, where rituals are performed around a fire, I turned up with a portable fire extinguisher. Such is the level of health and safety training I have been given in my day job.
Welcoming the guests and congratulating the bride and groom, Thevaram said “One thing we Sri Lankan immigrants struggle with is the concept of the `best-before’ date on food packages. To me, if it looks and smells edible, I eat; but to Manimekali (Thevaram’s wife), if it says best before day-after-tomorrow, we should have consumed it day-before-yesterday!”
It wasn’t clear where he was heading, but he put me out of my misery when he continued: “Another area in which we struggle with `best-before’ is our culture. There are aspects of it we carry in the form of social structures and rituals, claiming these to be thousands of years old, but fail in attaching to them a `best-before’ date.”
“So, if we had stuck to these customs,” he said, addressing the young couple, “there would have been a priest, he would have lit a fire, jabbered ad infinitum in Sanskrit and you guys would have had to walk around the fire some even number of times. And if you get your count wrong, there will be a perfectionist aunt who will complain: “Now, that was odd!”
“What is your problem with Hindu priest, machan (buddy)?” I asked him later. “Rituals are harmless. Sanskrit sounds nice to the ear, there is deep meaning in it even if we don’t understand what it is and it is dead.”
“No priest. No, not when I am in charge,” he snapped, with a heavy emphasis on the I.
It was clear there was more to it than what met my eyes, which I was determined to find out. So, after the wedding, we adjourned to the famous Bridgetown pub and I bought the first round of Peroni. Liquid in, story out!
There is a little island called Couragenagar off the north coast of Sri Lanka. Some fifty years ago, a ten-year old boy, half asleep in the veranda of his house, overheard a conversation between his father and a visiting uncle. You might easily guess that the young boy is Thevaram and the father, Sivapuranam. Uncle Crinkle-Bottom (not he real name, but I have synthesized a double-barrelled name to illustrate his social standing in the village) is a regular guest at their place who reports a summary of his daily activities to Sivapuranam. It was mostly monologue, and, whether the recipient shows the slightest interest in the topic being narrated or not was never a consideration. It might as well have been in Sanskrit, as far as the eves-dropping young boy often wondered.
That evening, Crinkle-Bottom was particularly jubilant. “We stopped the hotel project,” he shouted as he walked in, “the village Council has voted against it and the Government Agent has accepted their decision!
“How can they even think of building a hotel in this sacred place of worship?”
Now, the place of worship is the lovely beach in the village. An exceptionally nice sandy beach with shallow water just up to an adult’s chest, half a mile into the sea. A sparsely populated region with a few fishermen and occasional local tourists which included Sivapuranam and his kids who went swimming and seashell collecting on a regular basis. Uncle Crinkle-Bottom lived a couple of hundred yards from the beach. He was originally a rice farmer but, probably having taken on-line courses on entrepreneurship, recently developed himself into a wholesale rice trader.
