They also serve who only stand and ‘con’
View(s):Once a year, I make a pilgrimage of sorts to the Panchikawatte area. Not to buy “body parts” for my bike, but to renew the revenue licences for my motorcycle and car. In years gone by, the chore was fuelled by a rich mix of anger, agony, and adrenaline; equal parts of fury and frustration. At the end of my efforts, I felt a little like Hercules must have done when his labours were finally finished.
Happy but very tired. Things have changed these days. Getting your docket ticked is a cinch. No more a race against the clock, or the soul-sapping nerve-wracking energy-drainer of the years gone by. As a result of which, your common or garden motorist has some time on his hands once his documents are stamped and issued pretty swiftly, with a nod and smile to boot, over the counter.
The proximity of the licensing authority in Maligawatte to the main railway terminus at Maradana is one of the sweeter mysteries of life. Such propinquity is part of God’s plan for my life, dears! So, not being one to defy the sovereign will, I resolved to take another hour or so off to be the man who watched the trains go by on a Thursday morning. There was, however, one issue to be resolved before I could proceed with enjoying my destiny. Every cloud has a silver lining. Or is that the other way around? Never mind. Let’s stick to this story. We shall!
On riding up to the revenue secretariat, I had been accosted by a codger whose ancestry must surely go back by direct descent to the Artful Dodger. Scruffy, he hailed my motorcade, flagged me down into a tiny vacant spot into which Twiggy could not have fitted, and promptly regaled me with instructions.
“Come, great soul! Park your bike! Take your helmet off! Take this ticket! Go and do your work! When coming back I here! Pay and go! Here the ticket! Give the money!”
Now, as a good citizen of our fair republic (ahem!), I am only too willing to pay my taxes, rates, and price of the cost of living and dying under empire (oho!). But something about our babbler’s demeanour alerted me to the possibility of a scam. Sure enough, a closer inspection of the sorry item he referred lightly to as a “ticket” revealed that far from being an official printout of any recognized authority mandated to regulate parking, the article in question was a tattered, soiled, faded piece of paper on which the writing was a legible as a hieroglyph written in invisible ink!
Was I mad? You bet! Up to now, sensing villainy, I had avoided eye or hand contact. Now I plucked the cultural artefact from his grimy grasp and stared disdainfully at it. Something in my lofty manner made him shrink, withdraw six inches, and begin to slink away. When I returned, business concluded in less time than it takes to say “conman confesses to parking ticket crime” backward in Barbary Pirate-speak, he was skulking in a corner, not daring to look me in the Nelson. Returning the compliment and not deigning to favour him with a double Nelson, I mounted my steed in stoic silence and rode away at high noon like a Spartan who has held the pass (or, in Greek, “ticket”) and lived to tell the tale.
Lucky laconic me, eh! Between the grubby parking lot of the secretariat and the pristine surrounds of the railway haven I was fleeing to, my mind dwelled on the many minions of our infamous underworld who idle by dusty street corners awaiting their next victim. Surely the myriad tricksters and conmen who stand and wait for an opportunity to prey on unsuspecting motorists must have the patronage of certain influential thugs? Those gangsters may have links with larger ticks and fleas above them in the chain of our democracy’s denizenry, and they in turn be connected to unseen faces with fearful names in the upper echelons of the high command? How else would law-abiding citizens be able to account for the inordinate number of petty criminals who serve the nation by standing in the midday sun and parting fools from their petty cash? (At ten quid a pop, a hundred innocents would yield a cool thousand smackers a day for some greasy-fingered mudalali. A thousand such mudalalis could well cough up a million shekels for some Colombo robber-baron.)
Of course, the next hour spent idling on the platforms while sundry trains trundled by soothed the furrowed brow of your scribe. In the long run, though, these symbols of law and order are increasingly diminishing, while those who serve the nation by standing idly by and watching while crimes are done in the name of justice get off with impunity. The cop who directs traffic in the blazing heat like some modern Horatio holding the bridge is probably the gallant exception. More common today are the limp, long arms of the law, their truncheons drooping pointlessly, as un-uniformed hoodlums hold sway, rule by nail-embedded club, chase rightfully protesting citizens away. Uncle Adolf by the gates of Sheol awaiting judgment would be proud.
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