I had arrived in Sri Lanka in 1987 to help set up the regional bureau of the news agency, Inter Press Service. The favourite watering hole for my colleague Richard de Zoysa and me was Beach Wadia, which had not yet become the fashionably gentrified seafood restaurant for Colombo's chic category that it is today.
One evening in May 1988, Richard brought along his friend Sivaraman Dharmeratnam and we sat on the sand gazing out at the Arabian Sea waves crashing on an offshore shipwreck and talking about the Tamil liberation struggle. I was taking tennis lessons then, and was trying to buy a good racket. Siva sad he had a pair he could sell. The very next day, I bought two Slazengers from Siva for 50 dollars. We joked, wondering if Siva had passed the money on for the purchase of a six pack of 71mm mortar rounds.
Siva was taken from his home on the night of 28 May this year and killed soon after, his body found near the Sri Lankan Parliament outside Colombo. My old dog-eared Colombo address book is full of names of people who are now dead. Siva was just the latest. Richard himself was killed by a suspected anti-JVP death squad in 1989.
Sivaram, 46, was a Sri Lankan Tamil who was different from other militant contemporaries still alive today. For one thing, he came from a family of landed gentry. His grandfather was a member of the State Council from Batticaloa during British times. Siva dropped out of university in Kandy in 1982. After being rescued by a Sinhalese friend during the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1983, he joined the People's Liberation Organiation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), one of the numerous militant groups fighting for Tamil independence. Siva was the Marxist conscience in PLOTE, but eventually fell out with its leader Uma Maheswaran over the group's involvement in an anti-Gayoom coup in the Maldives in 1988.