5th Column

My dear Arjuna,

I thought I must write to you because you seem to be always in the news, even when you are not in the country and nowhere to be found. You have even caused a dispute between our Paradise and the country which once wanted to be like us, but is the country that we want to be now – Singapore.

It was only a few years ago that the signatures of you and your friend, Bond Ravi, were on currency notes that we all used. Bond Ravi hasn’t done so badly – he is back in the team after spending some time in the dog house, but you have become a fugitive with an Interpol Red Notice issued on you.

We know all about how someone should be presumed innocent until they are proven guilty in a court of law – and you haven’t been found guilty yet. However, if you are indeed innocent of what you are accused of, the big question is why you are not coming forward and defending yourself in courts.

You could even go before the big court, file a fundamental rights application and ask for an order that prevents you from being arrested – that seems to be the fashion these days. If you don’t know how, you can always ask Wasantha or Gota – and you can certainly afford to hire Romesh as your counsel!

We are wondering who is responsible for your actions. We all know that you were appointed only because the Green Man insisted on you. In fact, he wanted to re-appoint you too. However, he now says he is not responsible for that and that it was Aiyo Sirisena who signed your appointment letter!

You have vanished into thin air, leaving no trace of your whereabouts, although everyone seems to think you are in Singapore which, after all, is your home country. That is now escalating into a spat between the two countries, with Aiyo Sirisena opening his mouth and putting both his feet firmly in.

Aiyo Sirisena told us some time ago, when he was about to visit Singapore, that he would be asking to extradite you. Of course, there was nothing wrong with that. On his return, he proudly boasted that he had made the request from their PM – and he thought you would be on the next flight to Colombo.

That was many months ago and we haven’t heard anything about you being sent back. Aiyo Sirisena probably didn’t realise that Singapore’s PM was just like our PM – he would have promised to do so and said ‘salakala balannam’ or words to that effect, and conveniently forgotten about it thereafter.

Now, running out of slogans as he prepares to run again for office, and running out of partners after Mahinda maama and the ‘pohottuwa’ chaps have told him in no uncertain terms that they won’t be supporting him, Aiyo Sirisena has blamed Singapore’s PM and his officials for not deporting you.

Aiyo Sirisena wouldn’t have counted on someone in Singapore to respond to it. Unfortunately for him, they did, saying that they haven’t received the documentation that was required to send you back. We are left wondering as to who is speaking sense and who is not – though the answer is quite obvious.

That is because Aiyo Sirisena himself says that he does not know what is going on. Only the other day, he was lamenting that our position in Geneva was decided without his knowledge. Poor chap, he goes to sleep at ten o’clock and finds out what is going on in the next day’s newspapers!

You need to be careful, Arjuna. Aiyo Sirisena is quite hurt that he won’t be on a ‘joint’ ticket with the ‘pohottuwa’ and we all know that hell hath no fury like a Sirisena scorned. So, he will use your issue to lash out at the Greens and try to get the courts to go after Gota to stop him from contesting.

You must be biding your time until the next opportunity arises. Now, you should not rely on Bond Ravi. Instead of having his powers cut when he was found to have rented a million-rupees-a-month apartment from your son-in-law, he has now been given the job of being in charge of power cuts!

Even if you never set foot on our soil again, Arjuna, you can rest assured that your place in history is assured. That is for destroying, along with Bond Ravi, the great hope that people had when they chose the Greens four years ago – and it is a close fight as to whom among the two of you contributed more!

Yours truly,

Punchi Putha

PS: I think you missed a trick to get out of the mess you are in, Arjuna. Aiyo Sirisena said in an interview during the crisis he created late last year that he couldn’t get 113 MPs to support Mahinda maama because their price had gone up to Rs500,000,000 each. Had you offered some of that bond money at that time, you would have been a free man by now!