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    • 3 min read

Monthly Story, May 2022

Updated: Jun 22


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Image → A.Savin

Rasa → Karuna (compassion, sorrow), with Adbūtha (wonder) as secondary and tertiary bhībhatsa (disgust)

Archetype → Caregiver

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Although Siri’s hands were watering the turmeric plants with perfect automation, her ears and mind were elsewhere. The loudspeaker tied to the coconut palm down the street was screaming something from the political protest being held at the edge of her watta—the little suburban quarter that Siri lived in. It bordered the dirty canal. Siri didn’t care for politics; She saw it as a game already lost. But, this government has pushed things beyond loss. The prices were brutal. Business had been so bad; and most of her clients, being as broke as she was, could no longer afford to escape their homes or wives. So, she half-listened to the political clamour while wishing they would just shut up and elect a real human for President. Why is the President never a real person who has had to stand in the gas line, or walk on asphalt under the Colombo sun when the bus fares hike?


Why is the President always a clown, a thief, or a psychopath dressed in human skin?


She sighed into the plants. At least, the turmeric plants were doing well. They’re going for two-fifty for fifty now. Siri scanned the leaves, picked up a young snail and flicked it into the canal through the wire fence. She watched the snail float away in the black waters with a flicker of guilt.


Do we live in a world where we have to steal someone else’s opportunity to feed ourselves?


Siri told herself that the snail will find sanctuary on the drainage barrier stopping the leftovers of city greed from floating into the sea. She caught herself reflected on the canal waters, broken into streaks of small currents. Siri felt utterly alone. Her bedmate hadn’t come home this week either; He could barely afford to drive his tuk-tuk to Colombo after the fuel shortage. But, what made Siri feel more lonely was the realisation that she didn’t really miss him; she just wanted someone to tend to. She watched the slow flow of the waters, unconsciously pulling at old hurts that are better left lost.


Siri was Siripāla then; another man with a job, wife and kids. Everything changed the day Siripāla came home to find his wife Leela arrested by the police counter-subversion unit. Soon, all that was left of Leela were old clothes, photographs and a certificate of disappearance. Their two boys were sent to their grandparents amidst the hills and paddies while Siri rented a cheap bunk room in the city to save every possible Rupee. This is where Siri first shared a room with a man. In the strange years that came, there were fewer and fewer visits home to the boys. Siri thought of her two sons; Jayantha would be fifteen now, and Jothi ten. She briefly toyed with the fantasy of bringing them here to live with her, but quickly threw the thought into the canal to float away with the snail.


Too much had changed to go back again.


Knees creaking laboriously, Siri got up to her feet and stood over the turmeric patch. The smell of sea salt came with the wind, making a strange combination with the canal stench. The protest up the street was still shouting about the cost of living. Whatever said and done, Siri was glad to have her house; She was free from the weight of rent that hung over the many heads in her watta. The ownership certificate for this perch-and-a-half plot cost her life’s savings. The canal bordering it was filthy, and the house was mostly gypsum board. But it’s hers. Siri just wished it wasn’t so empty. The devilishly loud children next door were getting an earful from their mother. Siri thought of the pandemonium that surrounded her in the tiny rented house all those years ago when she had a family—in another life. A full moon was swimming on the black canal water; it also swam in the liquid in her eyes.


Like the ocean, like the river, like water… always one with the other.



  • MS
    • 3 min read

Monthly Story, April 2022

Updated: Jun 22


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Image → @eye4dtail

Rasa → Adbūta (wonder), with Bhayanaka (terror) as secondary

Archetype → Sage

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R.M.’s index finger traced his full name—Remus Molligoda—undersigning the no-confidence motion to impeach the President. He finally had enough signatures. His secretary should walk in any second now to say that the driver is here. R. M. resisted the urge to re-read his carefully worded speech for what would’ve been the twenty-second time. Instead, he picked up the worn translation of ‘The Republic’ by Plato from his desk, and opened the earmarked page with a particularly revisited text;


“One of the penalties of not participating in politics is being governed by your inferiors”, it read.

R. M. grew impatient wondering where his secretary was. The office door opened. But, it wasn’t his secretary that entered. It was a man with eyes like walls—fixed, impenetrable, unyielding. R. M. knew danger when he saw it. “Who let you in…?” he asked, reaching for the phone. But, the man’s hand shot up too fast, pointing a gun. R. M. felt his entire being compose into airless rock—like an animal first realizing it was caught in a trap. The world around him drowned in irrelevance. Then, something incredibly hot and hard shattered in from between his eyes.

R. M. saw his head hit the desk and a red stain grow like a mushroom on the no-confidence motion document while a loud storm of running footsteps and shouts took over the office. He spiralled out of the storm and into its serene eye amidst the calamity. In the stillness, R.M. watched half his mind wrestling with the stinging disbelief of this cosmic betrayal while the other half wept, beating itself for an answer.

‘Why?’ he asked. But, the face of the universe stood all around in absolute indifference.


R.M. realised that he was surrounded by a black ocean. This ocean had nothing but somehow, it raged against the last vestiges of his existence. He felt an utter fatigue of bodily limits as the weight of remembering pulled him further down into the depths. Something instinctive in him knew to start letting go. R. M. watched his life take flight around him in pictures; memories dissipating through the feeble gravitational pull of his naked mind. He watched a memory of a particularly warm March afternoon in childhood, hiding in his father’s study, reading books from the high-up shelf placed purposely beyond his reach; The memory left him effortlessly. He watched the distinct shape of his only son Ananda’s face begin to lose significance as it started to resemble the nothingness. A vaguely familiar, argumentative voice quoting political ideology to an opponent in the parliament was heard from behind the fold of time; Was that him?

He was positively earless and eyeless. But, what is the thing that is listening and watching?


The parameters of sensibility were already starting to fall away into the long, black expanse... He contorted to accept; to let go of clambering; to loosen the neverending grasp for meaning. Just then, a mirror of light appeared.

A mirror of light? He couldn’t comprehend it. Yet, there it was.


He felt the mirror of light dawn on like a sunrise on a strange island. Soon, it started to appear terrifyingly all-encompassing, blinding him. A wordless urge came to close in, to stop seeing; to welcome the unknowing as where the road to understanding begins.


Perhaps, understanding only comes in hindsight when we look back at the full view which includes the answerless.



>> Read the previous episode


  • MS
    • 3 min read

Monthly Story, March 2022

Updated: Jun 22


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Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow. Śāntam: Peace or tranquillity. Deity: Vishnu. Colour: perpetual white

Archetype → Humorist

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Johnny spotted his body hanging in the open cosmos—a fleck of matter suspended in a sea of consciousness. He had left its boundaries, blissfully afloat. He shone gloriously with all the blades of broken glass scattered on the beach,

which merged with the glittering silicone of the crystal sandy white,

which merged with the shimmer of quartz dotting the granite,

which merged with the mad dance of the Colombo sun on the water,

which merged him with everything, almighty. Stretching his hand out to the sea, he blessed it.


The gush of heroin ran through Johnny like April lightning across the equatorial sky—soundless but loud enough to mute everything in an acute numbness. He stood there staring at the newly constructed Marine Drive: the coastal road rolled out into the distance, charging into the next town. About fifteen feet from where Johnny stood was where his tiny house used to stand getting stolen by the ocean advancing steadily. When Johnny’s father was alive, he fished in the sea. His mother sold that fish, and Johnny grew up just watching them.

Two years ago, when the police gave official notice of relocating Johnny’s family to a new housing scheme and demolishing their makeshift house as part of the new urban developments, Johnny's mother wept. Johnny had never seen her like that—not even when the Navy divers brought back his father’s body from the sea. It was as if she had really lost everything.

“They’re moving us six kilometres away from the sea, you fool,” she had shouted at him.


But back then, Johnny had thought moving was great; They were getting a real house in a flat; Not a makeshift hut on no man’s land between the rail and the sea. He saw that old Johnny blowing in the salty wind—like a ravaged kite, cut loose to free-float along Marine Drive and get lost in the dust. Johnny gulped an oddly cubic feeling down his throat; It poked all the way down to his gut.

Maybe you can only truly have one home.


The sun was starting to set on the city. As if the strangeness of the proportions between time and the rate of change wasn’t enough, everything also started throbbing in a sharp, orange absurdity. Suddenly, the six pm train rushed by to the nearby station. Johnny watched the metal monster. Its tailwind enveloped him in a makeshift capsule immortal from time and space. For a second, he lost sight of how or why anything was the way it was. Everything floated free from reason, in an absurd choreography. Johnny held back the urge to laugh.


As the sunset matured into a deep red, commuters emerged from the station in ones and twos. The silhouettes of their large bags and bent bodies warped to ridiculous proportions by the setting sun dangling dangerously low to the sea. They walked, half dazed, half frantic, like waterhen birds striding along the beach looking to catch something to eat—all in an oblique dance to survive.


Another train trumpeted stupidly, about to leave the station. Johnny could no longer hold back the laughter.


He knelt down and

started laughing his heart out.

He pointed his hands out at the bewildered commuters on the slow-rolling train

and laughed, tears rolling down his face.

Some commuters laughed, pointing Johnny out to their friends. Some tried to hold back the twitching of their lips and failed. A few started filming with their phones. “You’re all so ridiculous!” he shouted through the fits of laughter to the people on the train. One young man seemed to hear what Johnny said and flashed a smile that momentarily reconnected Johnny to that place where he was one with everything. He stretched out a palm to the young man in blessing.


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