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    • 3 min read

Monthly Story, May 2022

Updated: Jul 30


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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.


 

>>Reading list for this MS episode



  • MS
    • 2 min read

Reading List, May 2022

Updated: Jul 30

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

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Rasa → Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं): Compassion, mercy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour: grey, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow, Bībhatsam (बीभत्सं): Disgust, aversion. Presiding deity: Shiva. Colour: blue

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Archetype → Caregiver

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Sadness is a rainbow; Low blues to brown dreary places and champagne-pink melancholia; From frantic orange distress and kind yellow glows of compassion, to the positively mossy green wet states of drunk-sad and everyday miserableness; The beige slow death of grief; Anguish cutting red and pointedly-purple brief displeasures; Grays—somber and dour—towering over the unmoving black waters of clinical depression.


The Rasa theory from eastern performance arts studies is one of our most useful storytelling tools. It’s a great viewpoint into human emotions and their enormous breadth. Among the Rasa theory’s nine elemental emotions, or aesthetic flavours, one of the most poetic rasas is karunā—a rasa embodying a range of emotional states from empathy to sorrow. Although not exactly a pleasurable emotion, karunā is an aesthetic flavour that has a curious ability to create beauty through vulnerability. This month’s story portrays the breadth and diversity of this emotion and the kind of beauty that it inspires. We’ve brought light undertones of two other rasas to add more dimension to the story; Adbūtha (wonder) voted most popular by our subscribers and bhībhatsa (apprehension).


We used the caregiver archetype from Jungian psychology to construct Siri’s character and explored some of its shadows like guilt and feelings of inadequacy. parallel to its strengths like the immense capacity to nurture and care.


In the reading list below, you’ll find stories, art and incidents that inspired us; from Joe Abeywickrema’s award-winning performance as ‘Wannihami’ capturing a father’s long-drawn sorrow, to the psychological disease ‘Munchausen by proxy syndrome’—where a caregiver fearing loneliness imposes nonexistent sickness on an otherwise healthy dependent.

  • 2021, Indigenous on ‘Performing the Goddess. The Chapal Bhaduri Story.’ by Naveen Kishore (1999)

  • 2001, Purahanda Kaluwara (Death on a Full Moon Day. පුරහඳ කළුවර). Prasanna Vithanage, Gemini Studios.

  • 2005, Brokeback Mountain. Ang Lee. River Road Entertainment.

  • 2007, Into the Wild. Sean Penn. Art Linson, Bill Pohlad. Paramount Vantage, River Road Entertainment, Square One C.I.H., Linson Film.

  • 2018, Roma. Alfonso Cuarón. Gabriela Rodríguez, Nicolás Celis. Espectáculos Fílmicos El Coyúl, Pimienta Films.

  • 2018. The neuroscience of sadness: A multidisciplinary synthesis and collaborative review.

  • 2002, The Hours. Stephen Daldry. Scott Rudin, Robert Fox. Miramax Films, Scott Rudin Productions.

  • Streets of Philadelphia, True story, what happened today. Kimgary.

  • Factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA), also called Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSbP)

  • “I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening.” - (1912) The Book of Lies. Aleister Crowley.

  • 1957, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung. Jolande Jacobi. Princeton University Press.

  • David Lynch listens to rain and reflects on art.

  • Pablo Bronstein, Hell in its Heyday.


  • MS reading list

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