The Whore cont'd

As she walked the streets of Manipai, she screamed at them; scolded them for their inability to see reality. The reality that she knew existed, a postmodern truth that could only be availed by looking at the binaries of existence. Reifying the truth, their unreal and her real, she would recast it to them, so that they would awake from their delirium.

The doctors had prescribed Prozac and Valium, but she was wiser. She knew that their concoctions would only limit Kali’s influence over her. So she dropped the pills as she walked out of the office- only to be cast out as the nutcase that would rain on and on about the fallacies of the world.

Have you ever imagined that the world we live in was a lie, that those that speak out of turn, those that would question, those that have been deemed as the radicals and the village idiots are the ones who in fact are sane? Well this was her reality. She thought us to be crazy, to be filled with delirious ideas of reality that were impossible to be reality. For her the truth lied in the heart, in the abstract and nuanced world that her mind and her subconscious delivered. The truth for her was cast in front of her, through her eyes and ears. Her world was one where the trees and birds spoke to her, where the grass whispered the conspiracies of the sky and the night; where the lone crow, through its cawing revealed the imminent dangers of the shells that were marked with death.

The crow’s message would save her that day in January when the Market was shelled out of existence by the Helicopters, built in the backalleys of a bombardier plan in Montreal Quebec. She knew to avoid that location thanks to the crow and his wisdom. But her neighbor, the one that made the stale rice with the chutney was not so fortunate. For him, she longed for, wishing that she could have taken him as her new beau, instead of the disheveled toddy tapper, that furnished her with his sweet elixir.

In her mind, the toddy-tapper was exquisite, representing the true Jaffna ideal- the hypocrite patriarchal delusions of grandeur. All the men in the village would frequent his hut to buy the sweet elixir that would taint their sights and hearts, make them behave like the blasphemous backyard peasants they hated so much, after having consumed enough of the fermented Palmyra blossoms. But none would allow the toddy tapper or his kin to enter their land, their homes or even so far as to gaze at their women. This would be the ultimate disgrace. To her, she knew the fragility of the argument that they had envisioned, based on years of oppression, propagated to sustain a societal structure that would be their demise. Thus, she allowed him to enter her and leave himself within her. She believed, as she was told by the myna bird, that the only way to reveal the façade created by the society was to take him on as her lover, then they would see that he was just like them, equal in parts and sum. With similar interests and emotions, with nothing less to loose than them.

In his eyes, he was doing her a favour by fulfilling her human needs. In some bizarre way, this was his revenge on this elitist nomenclature that had tormented him. Ever since he was a child, he was not allowed to play with his neighbours children even though he lived behind their house and was about the same age. Once he even heard the neighbours wife call him and his sister, those ‘parayas’ and she continued to say that he was only fit to become a cadre in their self-determination struggle. The frontline force that would enter the battlefield, to loose their lives for the cause that they will soon forget, once the infighting begins.

Similarly, She knew that on July 23rd, the trains would be filled with bodies, tainted with corruption as they bleed their way home. It was the gecko, her nightly suitor that had revealed this to her. As his songs infiltrated her heart and her mind, visions of the blood stained trains rolling into the Jaffna station was what she encountered as she closed her eyes to sleep. These bastards had robbed them of their so-called gift once the colonizers had left. Little did they know that this was the actual intent of the colonizers, to create a fragile space that could be re-colonized under a new rubric of democratic ideals and rights based rhetoric. So the peasants, not knowing any better attacked those that were privileged by their former master. For them, the lack of food was a sufficient reason to attack the northerners- could you really blame them? And the merchants and well to do elites, those that had managed to make a living off the backs of their brothers were now the target of racial and ethnic hatred. As the night fuelled the darkness, the evil in the eyes of the peasants became more and more apparent. They looked for all of the demalu in their neighborhood, so that they could rob them and kill them as their leaders had asked. As the leaders of the patriotic state sat sipping tea in the leftover tea cups of the colonial master, their new servants carried out their orders- kill the demalu, kill the demalu at all cost.

And then she awoke, shaking and crying in her bed in her room that she shared with her sister- the domestic. She could not help the tears, it fell out of her without warning and she then finally let go. She had managed to subdue her anger, her tremors and her nightmares; but this was fierce, like nothing she had experienced. She actually felt the fear and pain as if it actually happened. As she stared at her sisters homely face, she knew that something was wrong. Kali had never ever given her a vision of such clarity. She had experienced these truths previously but not this extent. She could not forget the bodies that the gecko had visualized- as if they were in front of her. At that moment, she called out to her mother- AMMMMAAAA, Ammma, where is Appa?