Columns

As I watched video clips of our indefatigable Health Minister and a few of her cabinet colleagues drop pots of whatever into the waters of different rivers, I was reminded of an old Sinhala saying. Why, I really don’t know. The departing devil, it said, delights in breaking the pots and pans.

This is not to say that Health Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi and her colleagues were devils in disguise banging utensils around as they prepare for quick exits from where they are. Oh no! It would be quite uncivilised and demeaning to describe such noble and dedicated ministers as Wanniarachchi, Gammanpila and others as being departing devils.

What they intended to do, it seems, is save the pots with a magic potion, the ones supposedly containing the secret anti-coronavirus, from falling into the wrong hands by heroically diverting attention from the rival pharmaceutical manufacturer who claimed the other day they were just a month away from marketing their own product.

It would indeed be a shame if Sri Lanka failed to breast the tape, as it were, announcing to the world that it was the first to produce the corona antidote and did so with the help of our patriots and the tri forces that valiantly fought the unseen virus and paved the way to rescue the planet’s people from extinction, never mind if the Sri Lankan people fell by the way side in the process.

In fact, it was told that the country’s rulers were locked up in some secret corona impenetrable hideout in intense discussion on whether the dead from the dreaded virus should be cremated or buried.

With what seemed to be the last lap to the ‘finish line’ as scientists the world over in ultramodern laboratories worked night and day to stop COVID-19 from sowing more havoc on people, never mind their nationality, ethnicity, religion, caste, colour, shoe-size and all those other demographic details that matter to some of our pseudo-nationalists with time on their hands and nothing in their heads.

Suddenly, the people found themselves confronted by the opposite of the devil’s drama. It is said they had earlier witnessed their beloved ministers with and without face masks readying themselves from dawn in regimental discipline to battle the alien devil.

Give the devil his due. It was no mean task. Such was the potency of the poisonous virus, wherever it came from, it seemed invincible and an exhausted world was already talking of surrender if no successful solution was deemed possible by year’s end.

Just the other day an epidemiologist of repute said that we must be ready to battle the beast for another two years as it would not go away anytime soon.

Here we have the flip side of the devil’s drama. Instead of breaking the pots and pans, our ministers, so conscious of civic duty never mind of their political obligations, were seen down by the river side–as that song from our school days remind us–were doing their best to save the secret antidote before it was whisked away by Mike Pompeo in what resembled the last days of Pompeii before he disappeared north of the equator with his supreme boss blowing the last post on his trumpet.

But then there are others too, like that noodle-eating secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who has been in search of some recipe for the virus after their experiment into biological warfare blew up in the face in Wuhan as the now defeated President Trump repeats ad nauseam.

What is so bewildering is how the medico-scientific brain produced this potted virus killer in such secrecy when almost every medical researcher and his second cousin have been trying to break into our laboratories and beheth kades in search of arulu, buralu, nelli and Kerala ganja believing that therein lay the secret.

Ever wondered why Russians were walking around in Galle or thereabouts and all sorts of unsavoury chaps including so-called kudu and kaha kudu vendors from across the Palk Strait and Maldive fish smugglers from the south are roaming round the country searching every nook and cranny when corona was spreading even more rapidly and widely now than during the “first wave”? They must surely be up to something rather insidious and nasty which our own spooks-dyed, revamped, rearranged and replaced were obviously unable to spot.

Yet our medico-scientific genius with state awards glittering in the noon-day sun managed to hide away from the spies in the sky, sea and soil. Not until a week ago did the name of the inventor of the decoction (one assumes) emerge.

It was only when ministers with pots in their hands headed to rivers with video cameramen trailing behind that the name of Dr Eliyantha White made an appearance in the news cycles after many months, if not years, of silence. Even then it was all low key and somewhat hush-hush. We apparently did not want the whole world to know until the pots sailed away, so to say, and reached their destinations.

What if the pots all ended up down Diyawanna Oya at that holy of holies and polluted the whole place. Of course they had a ready-made isolation hotel there. After all it is not being put to any productive purpose these days, except perhaps to provide subsidised meals to the country’s worthy or a few more vicious viruses would have nestled in Mother Lanka 20th Amendment or not. But what would have happened to our nation with the crème de la crème of our intelligence and thinking class in splendid isolation.

One can quite imagine what sort of comments and colourful epithets have passed on social media–often called anti-social modayas by a derisive political class. But then most of these ‘recently-born’ politicians are hardly taken seriously by much of the populace that have come to understand them only belatedly.

If whatever Dr White has put into the floating pots–vaccine, decoction, concoction or multiple guli–proves not to be a success, there is a lurking danger which we hope never comes to pass. The other day Health Minister Wanniarachchi promised to throw herself into the Indian Ocean if it would help save Sri Lanka from the cursed virus.

One hopes the leaders and other miracle workers and faith healers will join together to stop Minister Wanniarachchi from making such a sacrifice. What a loss it would be to this “Resplendent Isle” besides contaminating further the Indian Ocean which is already clogged by plastic bags and other pollutants not to mention world powers and regional states exchanging vitriolic rhetoric in our waters.

Just a couple of weeks ago a whole lot of pilot whales beached somewhere in Lunawa. I don’t know whether social media realised the importance of this amphibious landing. But the truth is that this ‘flotilla’ of whales had come in anticipation of Minister Wanniarachchi taking to the sea and plead with her not do so–if not for her sake, the sake of the ocean that surrounds our island.

So disturbed were these whales by the threatened sacrifice and its consequence on the Indian Ocean and beyond, that several of the mammals themselves committed hara kiri much to the everlasting sorrow of environmentalists and animal lovers who valued the life of one whale to a whole cabinet.

Unfortunately nobody present was able to communicate with the whales. Had they been able to do they would have told those near-200 worried mammals not to take the promise the Health Minister made in parliament seriously. After all nobody else does.

 (Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor, Diplomatic Editor and Political Columnist of the Hong Kong Standard before moving to London where he worked for Gemini News Service. Later he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London before returning to journalism.)