yarlpanam

Essentially a day-trip up to Jaffna completed for a high-end donor visit (the grand-daughter of an ex-US president and the president of a large charity organization in her own right and really rather sweet if a tad scatty) and a flight out tonight leaves me exhausted. As the plane whirled away from the tarmac, I saw all-too-briefly the shorelines with waters green and blue, deserted as it is in the high-security zone and therefore populated with army bases. It would have been high-end hotels if the land were free. I saw tobacco leaves, plucked and being dried on the eaves of houses, turning into cheroots under the burning sun. Tobacco is a cash crop, but detrimental to long term agricultural cultivation. I saw too for the first time, in those zones, from high up in the sky, houses with their ceilings bombed out of them, gaping helplessly up at the sky, forlorn structures of cement and stone. Somewhere among those houses was the house that my father grew up in, where I should have been born. There is so much political angst to write about, but it would be misinterpreted and it is yet unformed, and all I recognize are the wisps of rage and anger and confusion meshed together.

Cry, beloved country.