Progress: More than a walk in the park…
Just the other evening, I took an amble in the arboreal environs of Colombo. I mean the park which now bears the name of one Eastern queen, which once equally regally bore the name of another Western monarch. V Park – as I refer to it in honour of both royal ladies – is a hop, step, and short trip across the road from many central locations in our garden city. And many tired corporate types, obese gents and unfit dames, as well as more athletic youth, know it. Maybe it lacks the sophisticated chic of I Square, or the culinary 
attractions of G Market. Perhaps G Face has a greater pull as far as the hoi polloi go. But this other Eden, this demi-paradise, has its own subtle charm that its more modern, upbeat, urbane fellows lack. Even if none but the cognoscenti can discern the difference. Plus, after all, a park is a park is a park. Except, of course, when it isn’t.
Stay with me and I’ll try to explain myself. But first, some context:
When the war (which, in itself, was hardly a walk in the park) ended, one of the demographics that soon began changing was the physical contours of what had once been wastelands. Colombo – as much as, say, Colombuturai – had been ravaged by the savage internecine conflict that had been waged across many terrains over thirty years and more. So when the green grass of growth and development began to flourish again in abandoned lots – where once but gusty winds had wrapped grimy scraps of withered leaves about our feet – we could only weep. Some with joy; others in jealousy or stone cold grief with no marked graves. Some because they could still remember; others because they could not ever forget. A few at first; but more as time went by, because they wanted to remember to forget.
And the parks became parkways became piers and promenades and plazas. Soon, even diehard dissenters were lulled by the prospect of a run, a walk, a dalliance there.
This spring was the cruellest season, breeding blue lotuses out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with delayed rain. In the bitter aftermath, nothing could keep some of us warm; covering earth in forgetful carpets of flowers and tarmacs of shrubbery; feeding what little life was left with dried lentils.
Then, a summer surprised us, coming over the ocean and all over the island with a shower of latter rain. We stopped under the spreading colonnades, and went on in sportive sunlight, into the well-lit stadium, and drank sweet milk tea or MacDonald’s gruel, and talked about Michelangelo or some other genius who had made a desert and called it peace.
(But why do I feel I have lost you? Let those who have ears, hear!)
The point is that, for one reason or another, the blessed isle became divided into two camps. Not majorities and minorities – although there were some who would have separated us thus. Not patriots and traitors – though there were others who could have alienated us like that. But the bifurcation was this: those who would not go for a walk in the park; and those who would.
My feeling is that those who would not go for a walk in the park for political reasons began their refusal to perambulate with good reason. How can we, they may have reasoned, celebrate life and liberty and a long stretch of the legs when so much remained undone, unseen, unknown, and unaddressed? As time went by, though, and the wheels of justice – like the mills of God, grinding slow – began to move, it became increasingly difficult to make the stay-putters and sitters-down-to-critique and pointers-of-fingers move. They had a grudge – and they would not budge. If the poet Eliot (from whom I have borrowed freely above to say badly what he would have said well) had been around, he might have captured their sentiments with some pithy phrase: “Liberty and justice for the other first, then a life for oneself.” (Or words to that effect! You get it, don’t you, dears?) There are those who won’t walk in the park until the park-makers walk the talk… on peace with justice, reconciliation for all, equity and equality among all demographics, and other pretty petunias all in a row (so, how does your garden grow?)!
Mary, perhaps, is being too contrary. Maybe she – and we – need to (metaphorically speaking) take a walk in the park? My plea to all these folks now is this. Come walk with me, come talk to us, and we will walk and talk awhile of what is past, present, and future. Even though there is still something rotten in this state as in that state (who is without sin, may that state cast the first stone). For I too have been in Arcady. There is another point of view that becomes apparent only from deep within the wooded paths of V Park and I Square and other pleasant terraces from where we can see towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie, open to field and sky. It is this. Justice (whatever that may be) will be done – or not – whether you walk in the park – or not. Better walk for yourself while the lovely wooded paths last. Or you last. Who knows, the fresh air and cool wind and warm dew might fill your soul with a whole new spirit. Better that than sullen sulking isolation because the park-makers won’t play ball. Or the play-makers are moving the goalposts.
So let us walk. And perhaps change the ballpark. Or at least even the playing-field. There will come a time when a park is not a park unless we all we walk in it and talk about the bygone times when some of us would not walk or could not talk. Until that time, let’s walk.