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AFTER THE TRAGEDY SONALI FINDS A SLICE OF LOVE IN BIG APPLE: Sonali weds Fiona Shaw in New York

On Boxing Day, not even six hours after the Christians had celebrated Christmas and switched the lights off their Christmas trees after unwrapping the gifts family and friends had bestowed upon them, all of Lanka from east to west, north to south woke up to discover on that Poya morn that nature had unleashed its torrent and left thousands dead in Lanka.

And in that morning hangover when Lanka awoke to hear how three waves had caused such devastation, still blinking in disbelief of the awesome power of nature to cause such havoc and leave a trail of grief in its wake, one tragic example of the most extreme kind, rose from the tsunami debris to illustrate the poignancy found incarnate in one woman’s tragedy.

Sonali Deraniyagala, a Cambridge graduate in economics, married to an Englishman Stephen Lissenburgh, annually took their Christmas break in Lanka, and Yala was their special hot spot in December. Devoted to her parents she always made sure that they too accompanied her on their annual sojourn.

But the annual pilgrimage to Yala in the December of 2004 when the Indonesian-born tsunami struck the isle shores of eastern Lanka proved to be fatal: and caused a personal tragedy of unimaginable grief not to her alone, not only to Lankans but to the whole wide world.

In one brief sudden massive wave, her mother, her father, her husband, her two young sons, just four and five, were swept away. Only she survived, clinging, as she relates in her book ‘The Wave’ hanging on to dear life on a tree.

One cannot even dare to fathom the trauma she would have suffered these last fourteen years when every hour of her day and every minute of her night would have only served to recall and relive the horrific moment when she, marooned on a branch whilst the tsunami waters still roared beneath her refusing to relent its fury and ebb and return to the shoreline, cried for help and answer came there none; and when it finally did, only to discover that her loved ones, her mother, her father, her husband, her two young sons had all been washed away by one wave of indecipherable fate. And that she was left stranded on the shore to face the world and its gloom all alone.

As she graphically recounted in her best-selling book ‘Wave’ :

“I suffered an internal injury as the jeep turned over, and when I regained consciousness I  was spinning around and around, bleeding, naked from the waist down, covered with mud, and with my  mouth full of sand. I was quite alone. There was no sign of the rest of my family. For a while there was a strange calm: I was floating on my back. A flock of storks was flying above me. Then I saw a child floating towards me, a boy, clinging to the broken seat of a car.

For a moment I thought it could be one of my sons, but I realised as the child was swept past that I was mistaken. I stared into this unknown landscape, still wondering if I was dreaming, but fearing, almost knowing, I was not.

“I am rescued and it becomes clearer with every passing minute that I am the only survivor of my entire family. And then the realisation dawns on me that my entire world has come to an end. Someone suggested I take a sleeping pill. I refused the pill. If I sleep now I will forget. I will forget what happened. I will wake believing everything is fine. I will reach for Steve, I will wait for my boys. Then I will remember. And that will be too awful. That I must not risk.

“As I am taken away to my aunt’s house in Colombo,” she reveals in her book, “ I stayed beneath the covers of my cousin’s bed, hoarding sleeping pills for comfort and solace, stabbing myself with a butter knife and smashing my head on the sharp corner of the wooden headboard of the bed.

“I continually surfed the internet to find painless ways of killing myself. I needed to know how to do it successfully, I couldn’t mess it up.”

Imagine for an instant the harrowing ordeal Sonali would have suffered these last fourteen years reliving the nightmare every minute of that fated moment in time  when a wave washed away everything she held precious. A nightmare that must still haunt her and will continue to stalk her for the rest of her life.

Time, it is oft said, is a great healer. And yet, though the wounds may heal, the scars will still remain indelible, etched in the hearts of those who, once the general sympathies by all around have dissipated, perforce must bear alone the pain for all time.

No balm on earth exist to eradicate the loss she must feel even now, no squeezed olive that Zeus himself can offer will serve to assuage the sorrow of knowing that her parents had been snuffed out in an instant, that her husband and her two sons had been erased from her life forever; and that she is left condemned to mourn and mourn alone their wholesale loss each time when flashes of the tsunami wave flood her eyes in tears.

But then life is such that it’s no endless one way street of sorrow, a tunnel with no redeeming light at its end. Nothing lasts forever, not even sorrow’s seemingly endless dark night. And having undergone the pain and anguish more than anyone born has been destined to bear – pain and insufferable anguish as she has borne which brought her to the very brink of suicide, the sun it seems has mercifully and finally risen in Sonali’s horizon  to cast with its rays of summer sunshine a welcome  spell of matrimonial bliss.

As the London Daily Mail revealed this Monday, the high flying Cambridge economics graduate has found love and happiness after marrying Harry Potter actress Fiona Shaw recently.

The newspaper reported:

“Killing Eve actress Fiona Shaw has found love with a female economist who suffered excruciating heartbreak when her entire family was wiped out in the Boxing Day tsunami, MailOnline can reveal.

“The Harry Potter star recently told how she was ‘loving’ domestic bliss with her partner Dr Sonali Deraniyagala.

“Speaking of her contentment, the acclaimed stage actress, 60, said: ‘I married and that calms you down. I didn’t really have a domestic life because I was always working. But I do have one now, which I love.’

“For her partner the wedded bliss comes after a life blighted by unimaginable tragedy after her husband, parents and their two young sons all perished in the Indian Ocean disaster.”

Lesbian marriages, though frowned upon by many, are the new wave in town. But whatever one’s own personal opinion of such marriages may be, can one find in one’s heart the grace to grant Sonali, after all the hell she has been through, that little piece of heaven in the arms of her love Fiona Shaw?

BENEDICTION: Gota genuflects before Big Brother Mahinda to receive his indispensable blessings

Rajapaksa Family anoint Gota new Pope, but party still to send white smoke signal

In the manner the Vatican at a conclave of cardinals elects the Servant of the Servants of God and send out white smoke to herald the advent of the new Shepherd of the Lord to lead the Catholic flock, the Rajapaksa ‘Royal’ Family met last week at the Wijerama Mawatha residence of its protagonist to exclusively elect its own pope Gotabaya Rajapaksa to carry the family flag and champion the Rajapaksa faith at this year’s presidential polls.

The ‘royal’ clan contemptuously did so without any reference to the peasant members of its political party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, on which ticket Gotabaya is set to run to regain the lost Rajapaksa throne for the family, to reclaim it and hold it in perpetuity as the prized family heirloom. For in their considered opinion, in their conditioned state of mind as to their divine right to rule, none but a Rajapaksa was worthy to occupy the royal seat of Lanka. The Rajapaksa writ ran; and what the oligarchic family decided had to be obeyed and followed by the rest without murmur or question. It was the unsaid rule of the party as it had once been the unwritten law of the land from 2005 to 2015.

But when the Rajapaksas dined that night to finally decide which Rajapaksa should lead the pack to restore the family pride and power, no doubt they would have been in a quandary to find, to their dismay, their choices running out. As they gazed around the table, they would have seen dynastic doom staring at their faces.

The fates had catapulted them to heights of temporal power. The same fates had brought them down to ground zero; and though the opportunity loomed large before them to grab the Grail again, all the knights at that round table had been rendered impotent to launch the crusade to win it back, no matter their zeal and dedication to restore the family honour and power and have the family crest emblazoned on every road hoarding as the national symbol of the land.

How much Mahinda Rajapaksa would have wished he could be in the contestant’s shoe but, having being constitutionally excommunicated from seeking a third term, he was reduced to seek his rightful heir from the ranks of his own flesh and blood. Ideally, his choice would have been the Dauphin, his own son and heir to assume the mantle but, alas, once again JR’s constitution which forbade a young pup to bear the purple until he had reached the age of thirty five, effectively castrated all the grandiose hopes he held in his fond heart. That left the eldest scion Chamal but, though  he had made many gestures indicating his willingness to run in Lanka’s Royal Ascot, none was sure whether, given his age,  he had the stamina to endure the course. That left Gotabaya and Basil, one an odds on favorite steed, the other the punters gave only ten to one to pip the post.

But there, too, was a snag. The Yahapalana 19th Amendment had already pipped them at the post even before the two could saddle their horses and make it to the stalls. For, they were knackered in the yard of having one foot in Lanka and the other in the United States.

With mind tethered to feeding on the green grass of home to win power whilst their avarice feed them to seek and delight on the green notes that grow in abundance on the more inviting side of Uncle Sam’s fence, the last two remaining patriots of this nation faced the dilemma of how to free themselves of the dual nationality they held with the United States in order to go for gold in Lanka. They wish to eat the cake and have it too.

But the 19th Amendment would have none of that. It made it crystal clear that a person holding dual citizenship simply cannot seek election to public office. That none can have one leg in Lanka and one leg abroad and legitimately claim to represent the people of this island. And to make matters worse a full bench of Supreme Court had given its judicial pronouncement and established formidable precedent when it held in the Geetha Kumarasinghe case that she enjoying dual citizenship with Switzerland couldn’t sit in Parliament under the 19th Amendment.

Impaled thus on the horns of  this dilemma whether to forsake his US citizenship to serve his country, Basil’s instincts immediately drove him to get off the bull. But not so Gota. After toying with the idea for long, sparked by presidential ambition and fuelled by media reports that he was the man of the hour and the nation awaited his entry into the political field to crown him, he finally decided to throw his hat into the presidential ring and, in order to be eligible to enter it, made his formal application to the US embassy in Colombo two weeks ago to renounce his citizenship.

He had procrastinated for long. He had needed his family’s backing. The golden seal of approval from his elder brother without which he would have been on a suicidal course.

Thus emboldened he made his political debut last Sunday in some Badulla auditorium where he gave a small speech as to the importance of discipline, giving an inkling to how life would be under his thumb and jackboot. The occasion was significant, for none of the Rajapaksa family members graced it with their presence, neither did the Pohottuwa seniors.

For though the family may have anointed him as the candidate, the SLPP, which is to be the flotilla on which he intends to ride to power, has still not officially nominated him as the party’s presidential candidate.

Parliamentarian and DLF Leader Vasudeva Nanayakkara commenting on the candidacy said a final decision had to be taken by the Alliance. “But unofficially we have learnt that, Gotabaya’s name has been adopted by the most important persons concerned so far, the family. But that alone is insufficient. It won’t be easily adopted by the Alliance. Now that the matter has been determined by the members of the family the matter now will have to come before party leaders in the Alliance. The Alliance will officially look in to the matter and come to its own decision which is likely to be the same.”

Winning the grudging benediction of his elder sibling was only the first hurdle he had to jump. Many others stand in his way.

One is the indispensable need to tap into the mother ship, the SLFP vote base.  And that is not something that he can take for granted. Not all in the party believes that this Johnny come lately into politics solely on the strength of his family background is the new messiah they had all been waiting for to lead from defeat to triumph.

Already an SLFP big gun has fired the first salvo. Last week SLFP stalwart Kalutara district MP Kumar Welgama boldly declared his opposition to Gotabaya. He said: “My preference is to have a leader where people can sleep at night without fear and uncertainty. I believe in a leader who can protect the democracy of the nation and who allows the public to criticise the Government and its leaders because the media and the public have a right to criticise the Government. I don’t like to see that right being taken away. I don’t want to mention anyone’s name. But I expect a leader like that. Every government killed people to be in power. I personally don’t like such things.”

Then, of course, there is the main obstacle of winning his right to renounce his dual citizenship status. On March 6, when he formally handed over his application to the US Embassy in Colombo, it was only the start of a long process to be done by the US Government as to whether he could be allowed to renounce his citizenship or whether there were certain debts, certain obligation which had to be first met before granting him release.

When the local US embassy entered his duly filled application form into the system, the globalised US State Department system automatically computer generates the process. The application gets wetted at every relevant US government agency, from the Department of Homeland Security, to the Pentagon, to the Department of Justice, the FBI and The Treasury.

The task of these agencies will be to ascertain whether the applicant seeking renunciation of citizenship has been involved in money laundering, in any criminal activity, in drugs, whether he is or she is in divorce proceedings, in tax evasion, in short, in every gamut of activity that, in their discretion, may hold their attention.

Depending on the case in hand, the process can take three months to three years. For US law sets no period and leaves the investigative agencies to take their own cool time to furnish their report.

Even if he is given the all clear on all these matters, one problem must nag Gotabaya. What if the Tamil Diaspora – if they have not done it to date – or, for that matter, any other US citizen were to file a suit in court alleging human rights violation?

Weeks before it is formally granted, the US Treasury is legally bound to publish a notice in the newspapers announcing such an intention and inviting the public to place their objections, if any. With such kind of notice, it is hard to see the American Tamil Diaspora, not leaping into action to petition the US courts to prevent the US Secretary of State granting Gotabaya the right to renounce US citizenship to enable him to contest the Lanka presidential polls.

As the SUNDAY PUNCH commented on 20th January, “the Courts may hold otherwise and deny them their request. But wouldn’t the sands of time have run out in the hour glass before the presidential poll is held this year. For time is not on Gota’s side. And time is of the essence.

Then, not to forget, of course, the high speed Lankan courts before which Gota currently faces many criminal charges. It’s a race against time. Whether he can outrun the judiciary before they pass judgment upon him before nomination day or whether justice will beat him to the post.