"Why do the sensitive ones leave us so soon!" said the white banner. White flags and white paper ribbons curled along the road edge leading from the very public grave beside Kalutara Road to the privacy of his own family home.
Pavanna had been taken in the midst of laughter at the party. His shocked companions watched him fall back in his chair to the floor - dead.
Pavanna heard the sobbing close at hand; then later murmuring of two or three close friends who stayed by the grave into the night; finally alone except for the sound of motorbikes or the occasional three wheelers on Kalutara Road.
Is that a jackal howl that set the local dogs to barking? Pavanna can recognise his own dog Bala in the agitated chorus.
His original reaction to the party chair incident had been one of surprise. That had given way to a calm resignation. Now he did not feel more alone than usual.He realised that he had always been alone. Rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen was followed by isolation from his peers. An only son, there had been his Amma's warnings. "Don't run! Don't join in the sport!" Leaving home alone early each morning so as not to tax his young body with a hurried walk to school with his class-mates.
He felt a small twinge of regret though, about leaving his mother, so suddenly and without any goodbyes. He imagined how, had this journey been like any other journey, he would have readied up in his best kit and then she would have waited for him at the door - waiting for his parting obeisance. He would have bowed to her with clasped hands and would she have responded as she sometimes did, by clasping his hands and kissing him tenderly on the forehead? Now he remembered those fleeting kisses as the only tender kisses he had ever received.
At fifteen there had been awkward, giggling moments with village girls and a particular girl who had for months waited after school to let him walk her home to her house only ten doors from his, but there had only been some timid hand-holding.
At twenty, after memories of five years of injections had faded and unfamiliar feelings of health and virility stirred, he wondered whether he might make some more serious advances. It was then, that early one Sunday morning he heard of serious party preparations ten doors away from his home. That evening would be the farewell party for the young lady who had waited so patiently for him each afternoon after school. She had obtained a position as house-maid in Oman. His mother's chaste kisses remained his only experience of intimacy. Yes, it was sadness now that he felt for not taking farewell of his mother in the usual way.
The sounds from Kalutara Road became infrequent and there was a gentle thrumming of midnight storm rain on the earth above. Acceptance, relief and peace followed fast upon the other.
How clearly he saw that there was nothing to be done. That realisation dissolved into a deep sense of relief. He had now to do nothing more. There were no further expectations to be met. Family and friends had all returned home and expected nothing more from him.
There were no more tasks to be carried out; no more visits to be made to relatives; no more essays to be written for teachers; no more smiles to be maintained at parties; no more endless rounds of the Bo Tree bearing water pots. Others would slake the eternal thirst of the sacred leaves. All duties were at an end.
But relief was not enough - it was changing - transforming - the empty darkness was beginning to glow with a warm comforting light. There was no need to name this unfamiliar new experience. He knew that it was Peace.
So it had been here all along waiting for him. How often he had prayed for it; sat stiffly in bhawana to find it; read in newspapers how it would be won after just one more advance by the Armed Forces or after one more round of peace talks. How many friends had been killed in the struggle for it - victims of bombs on buses, of bullets in Jaffna, of internecine purges in the night? Yet here it was - unmistakable, fulfilling Peace. He knew he would never leave it. It would never leave him.
Dawn broke above, in the world of struggle and strife. A rooster crowed and the first three
wheelers of the new day sputtered along Kalutara Road. Pavanna did not hear them.
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