It is not any different “a morning” to
other mornings, in fact it is like every other morning here, this First Day of
October 2018.
Time does not wait for no man, but years
have passed, decades and perhaps centuries, but in this pursuit of glory, we
all seem to forget glory is there every day, every moment, and we simply fail
to see it. Are blind?
I type this in my home this Monday
morning at 6 am, soon after the morning sun commenced its climb over the
horizon, but then again, this feeling is not all pervasive. Why? People have
completely changed their habits! While I seem to have regressed into the past,
or so it seems to others, but not to me, they go about their daily chores of
2018, getting their kids ready for the school bus that comes at 6.30am to take
kids to schools, in Minneriya or Hingurakgoda from this village Ratmale, often
with money for nutrition-less GRUB! Too lazy to cook it seems.
I am where the old village was a hundred
years ago, and subsequently abandoned, once the roads were built, and
electricity supplied. People left their freehold land in the village and just
squatted on state lands by the side of the roads, building their houses and
fencing their lands as theirs, that’s what happened.
So here I am by the side of the Ratmale
Tank on a damp morning after last night’s rain, feeling cool, hearing the birds
sing their morning anthems of praise for the return of the rainy season after
months of drought, and suddenly the whole place seems to be a sea of green, and
even my pond in front of my home, which was completely dry, is now half full,
with the loud kingfisher call as it flies.
A serpent eagle flew into the top most
perch of the tree to the right of me, while the wail of the peacock from some
tree signals they are ready to roll.
So, regressing with no power in my home,
or pipe borne water, just a well, that mercifully did not run dry this year,
and sleeping out in the veranda, where it’s open on three sides to the
elements, and light and to everything else, I feel satiated!
None of the village folk are able to
enjoy their village as much as I do, as everyone lives in a home that just
looks like any home in the country. They sleep in bedrooms, in houses that are
fully enclosed, even their windows are locked shut, and perhaps fans humming
inside, blissfully unaware of their forefather’s lives sleeping in verandas,
in days without power as the coolest place in Rajarata!
As I write this on a desk, in my open
veranda, which doubles or quadruples, depending on which way you may look at.
It is my bedroom, my study, my dining room and drawing room! After all it is my
LIVING ROOM! What is a living room for, crying out loud? It is the room that
one lives in after all, and this is my living room, where everything takes
place as it did in days of yore, now forever changed in the interests of
progress.
To all the local people, who come
through my land in the evening to bathe in the lake/tank and wash their clothes
as they did when their fore- fathers lived, where I now call home, they think
the lay-out of my home is so UNHOMELIKE that they call it the HOTEL! What an
unnatural thought, when it is more what has been forsaken for modern living
that no man wishes to re-enter. It smacks of no security to them, in days when
lock and key is the only game in town!
In the past no one closed their homes,
there was community living and sharing that took place, as women worked
together in walking into the fields to collect the raw material of the reeds to
clean and dry before they made their mats and other household items with cane
and reed for them, and then some for barter or sale for them to purchase that
which they could not supply.
One of the ladies in the village gave me
the last of the mats she personally made, before she died, GAVE ME MIND YOU! That
even her family did not value, and she realized I appreciated. There is no one
left in this village, to carry out that tradition, in this race for progress
and modern living steeped in CKDU.
I am the last home here that clings on
to wooden furniture that needs to be woven with cane, when it crumbles, but now
with the cane industry rapidly disappearing, it is plastic alternative to cane
that is used to weave, completely removing the feeling of air flow when seated.
To have one’s body ventilated on all sides in days with no fans is forgotten.
Damro heavy furniture is the preferred choice to display wealth, frowning on my
old fashioned yearnings for days gone by.
I am now confined to be a fossil in this
rapidly noise induced form of living, where music blaring, and loud temple
berating, from the adjoining temple, replacing its simplistic charm of natural
sounds of prayer and chanting.
By the time I have finished this essay @
6.30am, the KEMANA, an old form of fishing had yielded 2kg of Lake Fish "Korelli" for breakfast and then some. It was put into the canal last night, and the fish
going upstream from Kaudulla Tank get entangled in it and are today’s protein fix.
No wonder life is GOOD!
2 comments:
World Children's Day and World Elders Day - Isn't it ironic that they both fall on the same day?
In your essay on what might have been and what eventually was:
Today, when we celebrate/commemorate/ eulogize OLD PEOPLE AND YOUNG PEOPLE
It is best to remember that both elders and children were better prepared for their part in the past than either is today.
Children were both better educated in values in historic times (not necessary in Victorian Industrial Revolution which Sri Lanka is still wallowing in)
and Elders were better taken care of in extended family groups than they are now, who are effectively left to fend for themselves.
Therefore we did not need those namesake days to remind us unlike today. Now both these categories are neglected in the pursuit of greed that leads us no where. Progress at all costs has been the bane of our value system that keeps large parts of society stuggling to survive.
I have been asked how at 6am I could write such a detailed piece!
Well this was written in the short span 6am to 6.30am perhaps 15 minutes longer because of two interruptions, first of the serpent eagle up on tree about 50 meters away and secondly while I was writing the breakfast of the fish in the cage was brought to me while typing and so I wrote about that too, while taking a few photos to upload at the same time on my FBpage.
So before I posted here, I posted the whole article on FB with the photos and then posted the article here a few minutes later.
There was no read and re read and edit in this case. the word flow just came and I simply uploaded without spending time, editing and adding etc, which is done when one is preparing a dissertation, as this was not, it was just a call of the wild from the heart!
Thank you for reading, and hope you are inspired one way or another
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