Listen,
I felt you straining against the wordiness of the last few letters and I am feeling a little worded out lately, so today I have postcards. Rest easy, there are no kadala love letters. This weekend, I hope you've had a chance to do something that grounds you. I hope you're well. Dive into this letter whenever you're ready.
Sunset Beach
#NoFilter
I can't stop thinking about last Sunday's sunset. I was aching for the beach and jumped at the chance to head to Mount beach for a walk. At first, the sunset was lukewarm pastel but suddenly, suddenly something in the sky broke and all these colours began pouring out. I was taking a picture and the colours on my phone camera started fluctuating between blue-pink-orange-red as though even the phone couldn't keep up with what was happening in front of its lens. We felt the photo frenzy around us as people pointed their cameras to the skies.
It was one of those life-affirming sunsets. I felt lucky to be there.
Monk, Monkfish
Pic from blog linked below
For the strangest reason, this old photograph of Gnanasara at Barefoot Cafe popped into my head. This picture stuck because it is in contrast to the usual imagery I associate him with. Did the monk enjoy his pan-fried monkfish? Did he finish reading the DailyFT before lunch? Does he like jazz? Where else does a monk – who commands a sizeable following and has a talent for whipping up mass agitation – go to relax in Colombo? I have questions.
I know monks have interior lives but I am particularly interested in the interior life of a violent monk who contravenes the philosophy he leads. When he was granted a presidential pardon last year, I remember how the country's mass communications apparatuses plunged into overdrive to humanise him, showing his frail, petite mother clad in white and weeping with joy at the return of her son while emotional music swelled in the background. I often think about what G-man’s return, emboldened and validated by the current political climate, will look like.
Mashrou’ Leila
Pic via NYT
I used to study at the bar in SOAS. There was a blank space before the evening rush and I liked working there. On some days, there was a cherubic bartender with a wide-ranging playlist and during his shifts, I'd find myself shazaming a good chunk of his music. He didn't know it but he took me out of my music comfort zone, introducing me to genres I wouldn’t have ventured into.
Mashrou’ Leila was one of the additions to my music library and their NPR tinydesk concert is now one of my favourites. This photograph and the story that accompanies it shattered me. What breaks me is the soft, blurry joy emanating from the picture and how this moment of happiness was taken away from her and weaponised so violently. We take photographs, selfies of ourselves frequently. We document our nights out, our meals, pets, our highs and lows. Some of it make it onto a public domain, most of it doesn’t. But we engage in this reproduction daily, without thinking too much about it. And I forgot. I forgot that a photograph in the wrong hands has the power to unravel a life.
Missing people
Illustration by Prageeth Ekneligoda (3,873 days is a long time to wrestle with an ambiguous loss)
International Day of the Disappeared was on 30 August. We have a day for dogs, for chocolate, tea, cats alongside human rights, cancer, cardiac disease, tall people. I don’t know what these days mean anymore. I suppose it gives everyone a day to publicly converge on one topic and cut through the noise for just a bit. I don’t know.
I am going to leave you with a few things.
This tweet-thread by Vindhya, this video of a protestor whose only photograph of her missing husband was taken from her by a policeman. And this line from a beautiful Granta essay by V. V. Ganeshananthan.
“…because in this country of grief, the best kind of shelter is to be understood, to have someone stop next to me and without asking anything, put their umbrella over us both, between us and the rain.”
I think about this sentence a lot. Isn’t this what all of us long for? To be truly seen, to be finally understood.
Yours,
Adilah
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Mashrou' Leila: is nice music, particularly for a bar:) It has the right kind of atmosphere and is not too loud.