Columns

A retired friend of mine here was overjoyed when the organisers of the Mustangs Enclosure announced the dates of the next Royal-Thomian match. He could catch two for the price of one. Go a few days earlier and watch the Aussies at play smashing the white ball, red ball, and any other ball like crazy politicians smashing coconuts at religious places.

That double take was not all that was in the kitty. My friend was happy he had something new to take home as gifts and have family and friends falling at his feet. With his mother country running out of coconuts and cooking salt, the new government did a double take of its own.

It stopped digging for upper-class bribe takers and denouncing lower-class economists from international lending institutions, like they used to before the elections. They released the best of their ministerial clan to chase monkeys off coconut trees or drive tourists from holiday beaches as they dug for salt before those long queues wound their way round street corners like in Gota’s days.

Remember it was only a month or two ago that an unholy rumpus erupted when red rice, so needed for auspicious occasions, disappeared from grocery stores. Fingers were pointed at a Mafia as though Godfather Vito Corleone or his survivors had suddenly decided that enough was enough, and hereafter they would only eat spaghetti made of red rice, or some lower-order ruffians were going to bite silver bullets.

Just in passing, one might wonder why every time there is a shortage of something, except politicians, it is always the Mafia that has done it. Don’t tell me one way of drawing tourists by the thousands is to offer free visas to the world’s mafioso with the proviso they bring their own red rice and coconut and bring a pinch of salt too.

The problem is that by the time this column appears, there will be some other shortage somewhere or a blockage at the port preventing ships from offloading the imported nuts. So, the poor consumer keeps taking a constant beating from one nut or another, waits patiently till they change the system, and sends a few more nuts to see where the coconuts disappeared to.

But the salt, for heaven’s sake! We are surrounded by sea, and even the Indians are trawling in our waters and threatening to go to the United Nations, or is it the International Criminal Court, when they get shot at for not only trespassing in our waters but also taking our fish away to make Kerala curry or whatever they do with it.

But don’t tell me they take the salt away, too. Why can’t they bring their own salt when they come here, violating our waters? After all, there is so much Himalayan salt right behind them; trespassing Indian fishers do not need to take every pinch of salt that we produce.

Surely, they should know we need more than a few pinches to react to the promises that our politicians make and will continue to make unless we freeze them and keep them permanently iced. Over there, they have millions more politicians than we do and so should know better.

So what is all this fuss about a few missing coconuts? If there are no coconuts in the stores, all you miss is a pol sambol or a kiri hodi. How would it enrage the C-7 entrepreneurs and their upstart children who feast on a chateaubriand with enough bearnaise sauce unless the chap who used to make the kiri hodi had by some administrative error been transferred to turn out the bearnaise sauce in the course of this system change?

In all this hullabaloo of system change and giving the Indians a few presents and promising the Chinese some more, we heard the other day from an ideological dissident of Marx or Engels, after he had been planted in a new seat, that nothing would have happened if the natives of this Resplendent Isle had stopped eating pol sambol and left the nuts to the monkeys.

It took mankind so much time to reach this conclusion when the monkeys had known it decades ago. Why do you think they have been throwing coconuts at the two-legged kind who have been walking under the trees and minding their vast plantations?

Instead, the wise ones started more coconut plantations and exporting the nuts to make more money to start more plantations and export not only nuts but bolts and even coconut fibre to help the car industry.

Of course, some would point to a lacuna in this economic thesis. I mean, if we produced more and more nuts, we should not be having a shortfall, would we? Unless, of course, we produced the wrong kind of nuts, which ended up with prefixes before their names and suffixes after them, that the nuts were not growing up the trees but proliferating under them.

Long before this recent rumpus about the post-graduate qualification of the newly elected but quickly-departing parliamentary Speaker and others elected and selected to the Diyawanna Oya abode rushing to check the Parliament’s website to ensure they have not been promoted, demoted, or left dangling their “O Level” qualification, former minister Bandula Gunawardena was referred to as professor or doctor or some distinction for his years at turning out economists.

Seems like they went later to the IMF or a similar institution, which accounts for the bad times the country is having from those clever coots.

Meanwhile, my retired friend, who thought he had hit the jackpot, seemed rather crestfallen when I met him a few days back. With coconuts selling at around Rs 200 a nut at home, only some nuts could afford to buy them.

My friend, who will remain anonymous, thought that with coconuts selling at £1.50 for two over here, this would make a good present for family and friends—at least the accompanying salt would.

When he next went around to check the prices, they had shot up to £1.99 a nut. Shopkeepers being what they are—like the Mafia back home—they were buying cheaper coconuts from the Caribbean or Africa and selling them at Sri Lanka’s jacked-up prices.

There went his worthy presents. But at least he could bring home some nuts for the nuts at home.

When I checked two days ago, the price had dropped to 89 pence a nut, but still way above the previous selling price.

If there is a moral in the story, it is simply this: don’t try to outsmart the Mafia. Not even smart alecs.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was assistant editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later, he was deputy chief of mission in Bangkok and deputy high commissioner in London).