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A funeral– an unusual end to an unusual life
By Rajpal Abeynayake in Batticaloa
The people of Batticaloa stood and stared as the hearse bearing the coffin of a son of the soil, Dharamaretnam Sivaram inched its way past the Lake View Hotel, a Batticaloa landmark, then turned the corner near the edge of the lagoon and wound its way towards the Alaiyadicholai cemetery.

It was Monday May 2nd, four days after Sivaram was gunned down in Colombo. One man said he doesn’t understand these deaths; he doesn’t want to talk about them. His people can’t relate to such killings in the East -- what they perceive, at least in large part to be as Tamil killing Tamil.

The cemetery lay in a High Security area, which in major part accounted for the massive police STF and army guard that surrounded the cortège and ultimately ringed the burial grounds. Somebody mentioned “Sivaram, who fought all his life for the Tamil cause against the Sinhala state, wouldn’t have quite liked it.’’ It’s not an accomplishment for the army either - - having to guard a funeral in this way -- from whom, from its enemies -- its friends??

But the politics blurs.
For many Batticaloeans, it mattered only that they had come to bury one of the remarkable sons of Batticoloa -- whose last major task was to write a scholarly commentary of the definitive ancient history of city, the “Mattakalapu Poorva Sariththirram.’’

The burial was over --- on time, despite the fact that the LTTE took the corpse away to their area and whisked it back to Stanley House, the ancestral home of the Dharmaratnems -- an old slumbering pillared colonnaded abode that took its name from the first British owner of the property.

People comforted Sivaram’s ten-year-old son – he had been dressed in a verti and was bare-bodied to play the ritualistic part of the male progeny at any Hindu man’s funeral - - except he seemed to be too young, and too oblivious to that role. But anyway, he had now changed to a T-shirt, and seemed to be tentatively yet, coming out of the daze of the last four days. How many more deaths then before this spiral of retributive violence ends -- how many more sons enduring only partial understanding of the circumstances of the premature and tragic deaths of their fathers?

A classmate of Sivaram broke down recalling the days they met under the Margosa shade, overlooking the silvery lagoon, calling themselves the “reader’s circle”. These were the first forays into the territory of intellectual exploration that formed the basis for the man’s later intellectual bent. The classmate broke down midstream. It may have been an ex-militant’s funeral. But, though some may like it and others may not, this militant was constellations ahead of the average gun carrying brute.

The politics was intruding everywhere -- a day of mourning in memory of Sivaram declared by the LTTE had closed down all the shops and brought civilian life to a standstill in the entirety of Batticaloa and the adjacent towns of Chenkaladi Eravur etc., The haratal seemed to be a pregnant pause posing the inevitable question: now what?

Sivaram had asked to be buried in Alaiyadicholai because his PLOTE brethren were buried or cremated there -- he had a great sense of beginning this man, even to the very end.

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