Chapter Three

The flowers hung like ornate ear rings. The whole arrangements of blossoms at the very end of the long dangling threads was in the shape of a pyramid. A number of pinky brown buds formed the base, some even touching the ground, and above them at the apex were one or two half opened or fully opened flowers.

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At Sinhala New Year time, Lata was overcome by nostalgia. Her folk used to celebrate it with all the time-honoured rites and ceremonies, her mother and village women helpers busily making the customary rasa kavili. Kam did not observe Sinhala New Year. He scoffed at the 'labour intensive' sweet meats that were churned out monotonously every year and regarded the whole gamut of ceremonies as a mere meaningless show case of customs that had outlived their relevance to modern society. Kinship ties were going out, he informed Lata. What had come to stay were the nuclear family unit and a very rational outlook on life. It was his usual practice to escape the hot weather during April by going to his up country estate where he spent most of his time entertaining house guests, having bridge parties and playing golf in N'Eliya. He did not observe the holy full-moon days nor even the full-moon day of Vesak but the occidental New Year was a time of celebration for him which he observed with the customary rites of feasting, drinking and dancing but again there was no family centredness in them. Lata wondered at how quickly she had exchanged her rural conservatism for Kam's atomistic cosmopolitan life style although she did not, as yet, quite subscribe whole-heartedly to his materialist ethos.

While indulging herself at a shopping mall frequented by the city's elite or new rich, Lata ran into Sepalika, an old school friend, who was dressed very smartly, though modestly, in the western style. When she saw Lata with her boyish hair-cut and daringly casual westernized clothes, her smile froze. Her eyes strayed from the thin straps of her black T shirt down to her bare legs below her very short shorts. "Lata! What on earth has happened to you?" her expression begged the question. Lata felt a trifle uncomfortable. "Its so hot" she said almost apologetically. "So I cut off my hair."
"You had such lovely thick long hair" moaned her friend. "It is a crime to have cut it. How you have changed!" "And you not at all" "Yes, I am the same old person, true to my upbringing." That was an unkind cut. Lata felt it was a barb aimed at her. She winced inwardly. "Nice to have met you, darling" she said almost like Maya. "I have to rush off. Kam's waiting for me in the car. Bye now!" she knew her eyes had taken on a defensively brazen expression and her manner of exaggerated affectation may not have fooled her friend. But who was she really trying to fool? There was no Kam waiting for her, patiently in the car. Why had she lied? Was she trying to make out that everything was O.K. and that she was in control of her life and knew what she was about? "To hell with it!" she thought. "1 will live my life the way I want" But was this the way she wanted to live her life? She did care about what her friends and particularly her family thought. Her family did not approve of her relationship with Kam. They had strongly advised her to break off the relationship but she had defied them stubbornly. Consequently, she had incurred their displeasure and so was inhibited to visit them. Very often, Kam would invite his male business colleagues to bridge. This was the only social routine he subscribed to with concentrated seriousness. It was something that concerned his bread and butter, not because their stakes were Rs. 10/- a point, but the game did require his careful attention. They were dignified stag affairs. Lata moved about quietly behind the scenes, a shadowy figure, playing the role of a retiring hostess, unobtrusively supervising the kitchen staff and assisting them to bring out trays of short eats and, later, serving up the dinner. It was when she was bringing in a tray of hors d'oeuvres and about to set it down on the liquor bar that she overheard Kam and Ragu, one of his business colleagues, conversing together in low tones. "Is the shipment on the way?" Ragu's words were spoken in a low tone but they were quite distinct as she opened the pantry door. "Which?" "The...er ;hardware, of course." "Yes. They are on their way. We received a fax this morning." "No. We had to make a snap purchase from a dealer in Hong Kong;" Kam broke off when he saw Lata from the corner of his eye. As she set down the tray on the bar, he frowned into his glass of whisky, giving her the indelible impression that he wanted her out of the way. She quickly turned and left. "Did you get them from the same source as before?" That night, when the guests had gone, she tossed him the question that was uppermost in her mind. "Kam, does your firm import arms and ammunition for the war in Jaffna?" There was a pause before he answered her. "What makes you think we do?" "I overheard you and Ragu talking together in undertones and I suspected it was something to do with arms for the LTTE terrorists." There was a loud silence between them as he sat on the edge of the bed taking off his shoes and socks. He stuffed the socks inside the shoes and threw them across the room towards the shoe rack with a sudden violent movement of his arm that alarmed her. "I will thank you to mind your bloody damned business, without coming to pry into mine!" He shouted "I dislike, I resent eavesdropping and interference." "I wasn't eavesdropping" she protested. "You need not shout. I am not interfering, I merely asked. ;" "Don't ask questions about things that don't concern you. This has nothing whatever to do with you and me." She kept her face a mask but it seemed he was reading something she was concealing behind the mask. "Don't try to tell me what I should do and what I should not do. I don't want any bloody female meddling in my affairs!" At that moment, the enraged brutal face she saw before her, looking at her menacingly, as that of a total stranger. An icy stream of unease coursed through her body. She lay down on the bed, numb with hurt and fear, unable to think, feeling utterly shaken and alone. Waves of panic swept over her as she contemplated, wide eyed, what appeared to her to be a yawning gap widening between them. A sense of void began to permeate her being. Nevertheless, as she lay miserably fragmented and alone in the dark, sleep did manage to invade her stricken brain. As she felt herself sucked into a welcome oblivion, a clear strong masculine voice with the crisp diction of a television news broadcaster delivering an eye witness account of an important event arrested her attention. There were a series of crackling atmospherics before the voice tuned in very distinctly. "The rains have come at long last to Kalegamvehera in the Vanni though in a wayward desultory manner" the voice informed "The red earth shows patches of new green. The vegetable gardens of manioc and maize flaunt their meagre bounty with quiet triumph. Beyond the hamlet, the flat land sweeps up to the edge of the jungle. A few coconut and plantain trees stand like sentinels among the forlorn, cheerless huts. This is "No Man's Land". "The place has the air of a village in the jungle described by Leonard Woolf, almost a century ago, where death emerges from the dark forest in the form of a wild boar, or eternal indebtedness holds the hapless victim in a strangle hold. But they are not the overriding evils here, though they are not unknown to take their toll. "Kalegamvehera, its former three hundred and sixty families now reduced In one hundred and six is just one of many similar villages scattered over what is known in military phraseology as a "No Man's Land" These villages are situated over one hundred kilometers, north of Anuradhapura beyond Madawachchiya and even Vavuniya in the North Central Province Hundreds of vulnerable villages like Kalegamvehera, Kabetthigollawa, Herat Halmillewa, Bogaswewa, Weli Oya, Monara wewa, Ethavetunu Wewa, Thambuttegama, Bulnewa share a common fate Attacked by Tiger terrorists again and again relentlessly in a brutal, savage campaign which has ethnic cleansing as its avowed objective and the carving out of an exclusive Tamil state and extending it over the entire island, these battered villagers, experiencing brutal decimation, yet hang on to their pathetic little homesteads desperately After each attack, the villagers left surviving live out their traumatic lives, clinging to whatever that remains of their homesteads and families;" The report which flashed into her sleeping brain with such clarity of diction had towards the end blurred smudgy passages which the atmospheric crackling took over completely and the broadcast went off the air, as it were. On waking, Lata's conscious mind supplied the blanks with the names of the villages with which she was quite familiar. Towards the early hours of the morning Kam stirred awake and without turning round, felt for her with one arm thrust behind him and drew her body close to his, to the encompassing warmth and comfort of his sensuous flesh. But it was not her sheet anchor and refuge any more. Not the oasis she had indulged in before, although she clasped and entwined herself around him with the passion of desperation.
