A CITY UNDER SIEGE

Colombo. My city. A city under siege. Military checkpoints at every bridge and cross-road, guarded by boys who seem ill at ease in the khaki uniforms they wear, and not too certain of the workings of the weapons they carry. They have probably just graduated from provincial schools, what do they know of the city they are defending? If I were to stop my car at one of those check-points, and ask a young soldier the way to a nearby temple, or church, or supermarket, I doubt if he'd be able to tell me. Probably arrived last week from some hill-country station or a village down south, and hardly knows his way yet around his own camp quarters.

I remember Rome in the summer of 1960. Another ancient city, and in that year the city of the Olympic Games. Wherever one looked, there were policemen in dazzling white uniforms whose special job it was to direct visitors to the places they wanted to visit. The policemen looked splendid, but they weren't really very useful, since they had been drafted into the capital from the provinces at short notice, and didn't really know their way about. We found this out one fine evening when we had had supper at a trattoria, and maybe we'd had a bit too much wine, for when we came out into the street the two policemen in white standing to attention outside looked to me like characters out of a comic opera. The Pirates of Penzance, perhaps. And when we inquired of them the way to the Via Flaminia, they looked even more so, because they nodded their heads, spun on their heels in perfect synchronicity and pointed with assurance and aplomb in different directions! I remember collapsing, weak with laughter, on the seat of a motor cycle parked outside the trattoria. But the policemen didn't seem to mind. They just grinned at us, saluted smartly, and went their way.

The Italian policemen's ignorance had been a joke, one they were happy to share with visitors. The ignorance of the Sri Lankan soldiers is no joke: it can result at any moment in death, their own and that of others. Every day the papers carry headlines about suicide bombers at large in the city streets. The latest story is about a young woman, neatly and modestly dressed in salwa kamiz and shawl, who had asked a woman officer at a military checkpoint the way to the Town Hall. As the officer began to direct her, the young woman had placed the palms of her hands together in the familiar gesture of polite acknowledgement and detonated the bombs in the'suicide jacket' secreted under her embroidered tunic, killing herself and the officer, and deleting from the area around for fifty yards in all directions, every living thing and every standing building.

Despite such bizarre occurrences, the city's life continues. I have lived almost the whole of my life here, but I never cease to be amazed by the stoic resilience of my people, their refusal to be unnerved or discouraged by the knowledge that they live in the shadow of imminent death. In a city centre that had its heart bombed out six months ago, and should be nothing but a desolate waste of rubble and shattered glass, new buildings have risen on the foundations of the old. 'Business as usual' seems to be the watchword, and trade continues unabated. Churches, mosques, temples and kovils are filled with the faithful, the newspapers carry pages of marriage advertisements, family parties continue to take the air on the dusty desert that used to be Galle Face Green before the feet of the faithful stamped it out of existence at party political rallies, children go laughingly to school.

Is there something hysterical, even unnatural, about the national determination to act as if nothing of importance is happening? As a man whose job it is to record and report on events as they occur, I am conscious of incongruities, I register contrasts. While daily bulletins from the embattled North tell of the numbers killed and wounded, new discotheques, jewellery shops and fashion boutiques open every week in the city hotels. The buses in the streets are elderly and overcrowded, but the cars that jam our traffic are imported, and in every one of them sits an executive with a mobile phone soldered to his ear. In the suburbs young people with money to spend are rejecting the old-fashioned houses of their ancestors, razing them to the ground, and building in their place six-story mansions that combine the features of Disneyland and the homes of American prize fighters.

Against the background of a constant military presence, our national nonchalance must remind the foreign observer of Karel Capek's butterflies in The Insect Play: brightly-coloured dancers, we flutter on the brink of a volcano. It is in every way a dangerous milieu. We are fully aware of that, and even in the wary faces of European tourists at every beach resort one can see reflected a lively sense of ever-present danger. And yet, as if some special relationship with their homeland renders them invincible to the perils that surround us all, our astronauts return.

'Astronauts'. It is a term alien to our culture and our experience, imported to describe the new space travellers, children of the expatriates who left the island after Independence to live and work 'abroad'. Born overseas, educated and in many cases professionally trained in Britain, America, Canada and Australia, these young people know nothing of the conditions under which the people of this country have lived for fifty years. They should be content to make their lives where they are. Why, then, do they come back? Qualified and equipped to work anywhere in the world, it appears that they are eager, in the still current phrase, 'to find their roots'! This is amusing, because in most cases they have lost touch with their native languages, Sinhala or Tamil, and do not seem to understand that the soul of a culture is rooted in language.

On behalf of the newspaper for which I work, I have set up interviews with two such young people who have 'come home' to the island from different parts of the Western world. I have met many such, and they do not interest me - to be perfectly frank, their ideas and their aspirations bore me rigid. But the optimism of the astronauts is a welcome antidote to the gloomy statistics that come to us from the North. That is how my editor sees it; and he knows he can trust me to deliver the goods.

The young man I am to interview is a freelance journalist whose parents emigrated to Britain when he was seventeen. He has worked for a Manchester paper since he graduated from university.

'Are you here on a special assignment for your paper?' I asked him at our preliminary interview. 'An inside story, perhaps, of a kind available only to a person of your unique background, on the ethnic war that's going on in your parents' homeland?'

My tone gave nothing away was, as always, scrupulously polite.

'No, I'm working on a project of my own,' he said.

What that project was I could not, despite all my skill and experience, get out of him. Except, vaguely, that it was a novel, and it was to be 'about the war'. But it's early days yet, and he plans to be here at least three weeks, gathering his material. Not bad. The last one I met of his kind - he was here, writing a piece for a Canadian tourist magazine - could only spare ten days.
The other person I shall be interviewing is unlikely to present much difficulty, since she will be speaking to me on the subject of her 'research'. She is here on a grant, and the American organisation that is funding her work is keen to get itself the right kind of publicity in Asia. It's a familiar enough scenario. But there are some aspects of it that interest me, the main one being that although 'research' was the ostensible subject of our initial conversation, it soon became clear to me that the official purpose, whatever it was, that brought her to Sri Lanka two years ago from the USA has now given way to a romantic notion of a special relationship that exists between herself and her 'homeland'. She believes that her return could make 'a difference'; that she herself, and others like her, can actually 'make a contribution'.
What impudence! What effrontery! Such people are so secure in their space bubble of ignorance, so absolutely sure of having 'made the right decision'. Their youth does not excuse them, because they are intelligent enough to know better, and have enjoyed educational benefits which our own young people have been denied. But it would have cost me my job to tell her so. After all, as a journalist, I do not need to speak, my job is to listen.

And so, though our lives in this defiantly elegant city are lived between flashes of unease and danger, though the world about us (including the coffee shop with its gleaming granite floor, its tiny tables, and its dainty chairs, in one of which she sat thoughtfully sipping her iced coffee and saying these things -so innocently! -to me) tilts every day more steeply towards tragedy, I know very well the part that I must play. I will remain the pattern of all patience. I will say nothing.
