Beautiful but tragic places make for good poetry. This is Ondaatje country in Colombo's Welawatte neighbourhood, where a small river meets the sea, where Pablo Neruda stayed for a while during his journey across the world as a young Chilean diplomat, and where he wrote the saddest lines. Re-reading the verse, there is a near-Latin American sense of tragic drama in Sri Lanka these days.
Beautiful but tragic places make for good poetry. This is Ondaatje country in Colombo's Welawatte neighbourhood, where a small river meets the sea, where Pablo Neruda stayed for a while during his journey across the world as a young Chilean diplomat, and where he wrote the saddest lines. Re-reading the verse, there is a near-Latin American sense of tragic drama in Sri Lanka these days.
Flying in at midnight on one of the first few flights into Colombo after the daring airport raid of 24 July, the plane came to a stop on the taxiway and the pilot shut off the engines. Passengers rushed to the windows to look at the wreckage of dead planes outside. In the ghostly yellow light, the Airbuses looked like whales that had been slaughtered on a beach. The planes' fuselages were twisted and charred. Their broken wings were still pointing at the sky while the dismembered tail fins with their stylised peacocks had collapsed on the tarmac. The pilot came in to ask everyone to return to their seats: the plane still had to be towed to the parking slot near the terminal.
Even in a country that has been numbed by the carnage of an unending war, terrorist attacks and the murder of moderates, the airport raid was the psychological equivalent of a hard blow in the stomach. It was designed to kill hope and sustain the fatalistic rage that has kept this war going for the past 12 years at a cost of 60,000 lives. The world has got used to this war, so the media networks have moved to other theatres like Macedonia and Mindanao. And they only take notice when dramatic footage of burning airliners can be flashed across the world. Even then, the interest dies out in a few days. In Colombo itself, within a few days of the event the headlines are back to the dissolution of parliament and the political skirmishes over President Chandrika Kumaratunga's call for a referendum.