Rasanayagam from Jaffna and Philip Fernando from Colombo wer...
By Admin
•
September 19, 2022
•
443 views
Advertisement
Rasanayagam from Jaffna and Philip Fernando from Colombo were room mates at Jayatilaka Hall, University of Ceylon, Peradeniya in the early fifties. They became good 'friends and ever since then whenever an anti-Tamil riot broke out in Sri Lanka Rasa sought refuge in the of Philip in Wellawatte. In July 83 Rasa does the same, but this will be Rasanayagam's last riot with his Sinhalese feiend Philip emigrating to Australia to join their adult son and daughter who are well sittled there. both of whom have retired, are friend Pyip. In ten days' time Philip and his Colombo Tainil wife Sita. But this evening .in July '83, before Rasa arrives, a complication between Philip and his wife Sita comes to the surface. Sita reveals that she has really become very unsettled. She has developed a sympathy . for the Tamils; her own feelings of being a Tamil, long buried under her westernization as a Colombo Tamil, are being awakened and she traces its beginnings to the day in 1981 when she heard of the burning of the Jaffna Library. This is indeed a complication, as Philip has always been a strong 'advocate of the Sinhala position. However, he tells Sits that whatever feelings she may have developed on the Tamil question won't affect their marriage.
Site challenges Philip's assertion that their marriage will be unaffected. She points out that though Philip and Rasa have been close friends for nearly thirty years and Ilti NV been together during every riot, neither of them has ever brought up the Tamil question for discussion. They have avoided the subject to keep their friendship .going. So she sees this as evidence that it is not possible. fora Sinhalese who advocates the Sinhala position and a Tamil who advocates the Tamil position to be friends unless they avoid the subject completely.. She says that this will not be possible in-their marriage because she, unlike Philip and Rasa, will want to discuss the matter openly and without reservations. Philip then says that, unlike with Rasa, he will not find any difficulty talking about the subject with ber because they are man and wile. Sits sees this logic as flawed,on .formal.grounds. What difference if the people are married'? it could only mean that Philip will hide or compromise on the revelations of his feelings in dealing with Situ. Their marriage relationship will now become insincere. But possibly Sita fails to realize. that even if the logic is flawed, formally, there could be in it, a substance which formal logic cannot eope with, that is, another dimension is created when a historical commitment to marriage is taken into consideration.
The allegorical in the play begins to surface. So, Sits is stubborn. She insists, that to prove that they can live together while openly and frankly exploring the Tamil question, Philip opens out on the Tamil question when Rasa conies later that evening. Philip refuses, saying that it will put his friendship with Rasa at risk. This will be the last time that Philip will meet Rasa before Sits and Philip emigrate to Australia;
114
op clt.1 to ] the viol of ; dell
ver den
aft ext has wit hoi hot ref
so Philip will not risk bringing up de Taaii 1, question with Rasa that evening. Sita withdraws, showing hurt, Philip begins to feel bad arai suggests a cornpromiae to Sita. After Rasa arrives Philip will go into his room on the pretext of having to complete some final clearance tax papers and leave Sita to see if she aan get Rasa talking on the Tanifquestion. If Sita manages to do so, then Philip will see how he feels about joining in. There is la hint that Philip is confident that Rasa will not open out on the forbidden subject. Sita refuses to cooperate and rernstns in sullen sileace. A crisis point a knock on the door, Rasa has arrived. End of Act One. has been reached. There is
Act Two begins with Rasa's arrival and the telling of a story how he escaped death at the hands of a mob: They showed him a bucket and asked him what it was. This is a method by which mobs distinguish Tamils from Sinhalese. Tamils call a bucket VALI and Sinhalese BALDIYA and Tamils, it woUld appear, cannot pronounce the Sinhala B sound because their phonetic system does, not have that sound. But luckily for Rasa, thirty years ago at Jayatilaka Hall, Peradeniya, in connection with some ragging by seniors who came to bucket him (dousing the victim with a bucket of water) Philip had taught him to pronounce the word Baldiya properly. So now on the 25th of July 1983, thirty years later, Rasa escapes death thanks to Philip's tuition of so long ago. They now relax, drink and talk of the happy days of their youth at Peradeniya. After a while, Philip says that he has some urgent work to complete in connection with tax papers which have to be handed in the next day. He withdraw to his room leaving Sits with the option he offered her at the -end of Act. One - to attempt to open out Rasa on the Tamil question. Now Sita, left alone with Rasa, provokes him to such an extent that he speaks loud and passionately on the subject. But just at that moment Philip returns but makes no immediate comment on Rasa's outburst. li Philip is very depressed by a BBC report that he just heard of the violent destruction in Colombo and the killing of Tamils in the course of the riots that night. Evert though he believes that BBC report he is angry
and upset that the BBC reports all this in a way that brings great discredit to Sri Lanka. But Sita takes the it opposite view. She is grateful to the BBC for reporting the facts. Sita and Philip clash over this. After the quarrel subsides; Philip tells Rasa that he overheard Rasa's earlier outburst and then sets about explaining to Rasa the Sinhala viewpoint. Rasa then puts across the Tamil point of view and, just as it appears that the Tamil and the Sinhalese can in fact talk these things over peacefully, a deadlock position is reached and violent altercation develops. Luckily the ringing of the phone interrupts the momentum. It's a female friend detainees. Rasa is alerted and asks Sita to enquire whether there is news of one Doctor Rasamanikam, a very dear friend of Rasa who was taken in under The Prevention of Terrorism Act, for leading a illegal 14 demonstration. Sits confirms that he too has been massacred. Rasa breaks down and never really recovers after that Now Philip comforts him in his self as Rasa's lifelong friend and Rasa finds comfort to some extent in his friend's feelings for him. Soon there is another telephone call from the wife of the DIG, who has also been a friend of Philip and Rasa at Peradeniya University. DIG Anton is suggesting through his
of Sita married to the DIG, calling to give details of the Welikade prison massacre of Tamil political
wife that Rasa may not be safe at Philip's horns that night. This time the mobs are going around with
hoUseholders or voters' lists to identify Tamil homes, but they are using the same lists to check on Sinhala homes to see whether Tamils are being given refuge. So DIG Anton has arranged to move Rasa to a refugee camp just behind Philip's home, He will be sending two armed policemen to accompany Rasa to
115
the camp. But because the mood of the mobs against the Tamils is so ferocious and as the Government has situation, no Tamil can be seen in fact lost its ability to give protection to Tamils in such an overwhelming -walking the streets of Colombo accompanied by two armed policemen, So Anton has arranged that the two policemen will wait a distance behind Rasa as if there is no connection, but will move up to him only if there is danger. For Anton is confident that Rasa speaks Sinhala well and can cope with mobs who stop people and show them a bucket and ask them to say the word for it. The mobs are doing just Oat at the moment. Sita is furious about this situation and the result is a violent clash between Sita and Philip on what Sita sees as the abandonment of the Colombo Tamils by the State. Philip tries to explain to Sita that the arrangement that DIG Anton has made has nothing to do with the State. It is personal help from a friend in a hopeless situation. Sita is unbending and Rasa departs with the two policemen in such an atmosphere.
Finally Rasa is killed by the mobs on his way to the camp. When stopped and shown a bucket, in his utter depression, he fails to respond. He remains silent, and the crowd is too huge for the policemen to cope with. The irony is that Philip, the Sinhalese, grieves deeply for his friend. But Sita's feelings are restricted to political rage.
In the short epilogue at Singapore airport, ten days later, as Philip and Sita are on their way, emigrating to Australia, they talk about these things. They read in the papers about a horrible massacre of Sinhalese men, women and children and Buddhist nuns by Tamil terrorists in a small town in the North Central Province. They decide that they have a historical commitment to keep their marriage working, while maintaining their individual personalities, the way all good marriages are.
ACT TWO
(Act Two begins with Sita seen moving forward from the position in which we saw her at the end of Act One. Philip is offstage, having gone to the front door to bring in Rasanayagam. Even before the two friends come into sight of the audience, the rushed excited talk of "Rasa" can be heard against the background of mob sounds, as we heard at the end of Act One. But his description of the outside world carries no trace of the fear for their lives that his fellow Tamils are feeling at that very moment, all over Colombo. Rasanayagam's style of delivery, rather, is the demonstration of a man who has done it so many times, and lived to do it over and over again, that he has taken his personal inununity for granted. He is yet to discern any qualitative difference in the riot of '83, even though he has noted the increase in scale.
Rasanayagam, unlike his friend Philip, was not really an Anglicised Colombo man. True, his education at Peradeniya was 'Western" and he had been the room mate of an Anglicised Colombo Sinhalese. But is was his growth at Jaffna Hindu College, till he first crossed Elephant Pass in 1953 to get to Peradeniya, that became the important part of his being. In the sense that the core of Rasanayagam remained Jaffna peninsular, his lineage may even be traced back to the 30s and the 40s when these specimens from 'another land" were humorously referred to as He Comes From Jaffna., as they began arriving in Colombo in numbers sufficient to create a noticeable social phenomenon. In fact, He Comes
116
From Jaffna is the title of e 0. a very popular play of those times which extracted its laughs from the social contrast been the newly arrived from Jaffna and his Anglicized and very sophisticated counterparts from Colombo. In time, the gap nan'owed as the offspring of those who came from Jaffna got churned out in style, and content, no different from itihala boys and girls in Colombo schools which were good colonial copies of publiC schools in England. But the appearance after Independence of a single University of Ceylon in the central hills *of Kandy, drawing its entrants from schools all over the island, produced a second wave of He Comes From Jaffnatypes. There is no doubt that they were also a second variety, one which would not assimilate, totally. Rasanayagam may be counted as one of those. But the anti-Tamil riots in the second part of the series, beginning 1977, gathered a momentum and ferocity that stirred even the thoughts and feelings of the Original Colombo: Tamils as the whole thing in July '83. Now, about half a century after "they 'came from Jaffna" and had settled in Colombo, Kandy and other big towns of the South, the socio-political relationship with the Sinhalese seemed to have come full cycle. Amongst those not wholly Anglicised or completely integrated with the Sinhalese, there was talk, of "going back to Jaffna".
The bustling Rasanayagani, bulging overnight bag in hand, makes his entry. Philip close behind carries Rasa's briefcase, as he takes' in the description of the violence.
RASA
(Beginning out of sight of the audience) Very bad this time, very very bad, never been like this before, never, never. Must be all like this as well, but we can see only what goes on in Colombo. Crowds, crowds, everywhere, and the government seems to be unable to control the situation
(Now coming into sight of the audience as he walks in ahead of Philip. Though Sita is directly in line of 'sight of Rasa he continues to pay attention only to Philip. Philip is on Rasa's right when they come to a standstill facing the audience, and Sits on his left. But as he is positioned facing Philip excitedly in talk, his back is to Sita who continues to be ignored.)
... Everybody is talking about the State Funeral for the thirteen soldiers .killed by the terrorists. They say that the President will speak at the funeral. And the area of the Kanatte Cemetery is very bad.
(As he pauses for breath, his body shifts a little to the left and he then acknowledges' Sita's presence)
117
Advertisement
Share with Classmates & Study Groups:
Help fellow students
5.0 / 5.0
Found this study material helpful?
Rate our website service and free notes repository on Google Reviews!
Discussion & Study Inquiries (0)
Ask questions, request missing past papers, or share revision tips
No comments yet. Be the first student to start the discussion or request past papers!