Columns

It was a rather chilly late spring night in 1971 in Chicago as I walked down Division Street, one of the city’s most notorious streets where gangsterism seemed to be the prevailing occupation.

Gang warfare was not dead even then, though many people were. Just over five years earlier, riots and clashes broke out between the city’s Puerto Rican community and the police and went on for three nights with widespread destruction, damage, and injury to people.

I could not have expected more when I heard the names James “Big Jim” Solocimo, Johnny Torrio, and even more notorious Al Capone escape from the lips of my walking partner on my left.

Which journalist, who is a regular film critic/reviewer, among other things, for the newspaper he was working for, would not have heard of Al Capone, if not others, sometime or other during his journalism career, though it was still less than a decade when I ended up in Chicago that night?

By my side was a long-time friend from his days in Colombo when he served as Brazil’s ambassador posted there in the 1960s.

His name started with Antonio—not a rare name for somebody from his part of the world—and so he was always Antonio to me, and
not because we shared Portuguese surnames.

Portuguese was Antonio’s national language, but it was not mine, yet Antonio it was to me from the time I knew him, though I might have preferred to call him Tony simply because it was shorter, but I doubt he would have appreciated it, and I never asked.

Anyway, we did meet regularly and did several trips too during his Colombo posting, learning much about Latin America, Brazilian culture, culinary habits, and music, for I adored
Latin music. And so Maria Bethania continues to be one of my favourite Brazilian
vocalists even now.

One trip we did was in search of Sri Lankans of Portuguese origin who still held on to the earlier cultural habits of their ancestors.

And we did so in distant Batticaloa after some inquiries. After contacts with them, Antonio and I travelled to Batticaloa.

He went to talk to them while I sat in the parked car listening to Latin music until he returned three hours later with astonishment written all over his face.

Neville, you won’t believe this. They spoke Portuguese 400 years old, and I could understand only bits and pieces. We must come again.

But if I continue with the Ambassador Antonio story, the man with a sharp attractive face and a gracefully pointed beard reminding one of copybook pirates, I will not get to the story on our own country that I started to tell, a story of yesterday that surely circled the globe thanks to the news wires even if it might not have grabbed the headlines everywhere it went.

There was a time when Nuwara Eliya, with its Scottish-style houses, beautifully laid-out gardens, colourful flowers, and vegetables regularly seen at mealtime on tables of western planters, then settled in mini-manors that surely beat their houses back home, had been turned into a hill station called “Little England”.

Spread out from there as far as the eye could see were carpets of green and the tea they produced which could be smelt long before they were brewed by those who bought them in England.

Whatever our pseudo-nationalists calling for an end to our plantation economy and one-time culture, a flourishing hill country centred around N. Eliya—if I might call it that—was a glorious region to live in, as I did partly in my school days, and is now likely to turn into a centre of tourism.

But Sri Lanka needs another name. So, some people think and are working towards it. And I cannot speak for the millions of others.

We call ourselves—or rather, the Constitution does—and probably so do a few others who helped draft the Constitution. The world calls it the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.

Others have given it more colourful and perhaps far less honourable titles in later years, but then its original author has not been here to hear it.

But it was essentially Junius Richard Jayewardene’s grand illusion, or to employ more acceptable lingo, a fabulous fib. And now little by little it is becoming unstuck, like overused sticking plaster and his nephew’s political proselytising.

But when we talk of Chicago and listen to Antonio seated in his comfortable home about what the city was from the last century to what it is today and about powerful Latin gangs that controlled the city and others that tried to seize power and bootleggers and gambling businesses, one begins to wonder whether we are going to turn into a clean city as perceived by this government.

Or, as the Lankan population ponders, will we turn into a Chicago of the past and the gangsterisation of a country that has as its bedrock the Buddha’s teachings preached by our politicians from the highest to the most despicable?

What the people of this country have seen of it, and so has a shocked world that is not short of violence, is a rise in indiscriminate violence, sometimes at the heat of
the moment.

But those who make a study of the rising tide of violence generated by varied motives find it is becoming more and more difficult to rule out not only politics when politicians launch violence as an essential piece of strategy and elimination of the enemy, but also the place of violence in the game of economics and money-making.

Having heard and read of the insanity—or so it would seem to many of the carefully planned killing in the courthouse this week, it would come as no surprise; despite all the plans of men and mice, this nation
will implode, particularly so if the answer to the problem is
violent retaliation.

But then what happens if the brains of the planned attacks live outside the reach of our power?

(Neville de Silva is a veteran
Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later, he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.)