Retrospection

A month in Sri Lanka now - my adopted home- where I am served a large bowl of mixed, feelings, emotions, thoughts, closeness and distance...Sometimes wonder whether it is a glass menagerie or a kaleidoscope. May be a mix. Or may be neither.

It had just been a break of seven months away from the island, but it seems longer! Catching up with friends, window shopping and just hanging loose. Time off from planning. Time off from contemplation.

Could not ask for more than an extended dinner on the beach, where a calypso band that plays old Hindi and Sinhalese numbers and the roar of the sea combine to give an ambience worth living all night – in the company of friends. Early mornings are when the quiet and the sublime combine, especially if you are on a drive up the hill country… Phew! This island is more than a tear drop – it indeed is a pearl in the ocean!

Very rewarding to feel the absence of old check points in the heart of Colombo… lesser presence of the camouflage. Free movement. Less or no fear. More than a ray of hope among the common people. The real peace dividend of a common man? And for me, more than a reason to hope and continue my faith in this emerald island, which taught me to hope when everything failed; to rise up and smile and face the world when I had hardly anything to hold on to; to find a reason to wake up each morning when the purpose for which I came crumbled like a sand dune washed by the tycoon waves; this island guided me to discover the woman that was half asleep in me…

Nothing more is befitting than these lines by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his Ulysses to express the way I feel at this moment...

“Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield…”

And as he says…

“ I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...”

My Odyssey in the island began 14 years ago… and it is still unfolding itself...