A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Richard: Whose Life Guides My Own

Richard de Zoysa

My mother, who, together with Babbia Sinnamma had rushed out the house
on hearing my wails of pain, whispered urgently for me to be quiet!
I didn’t know why she asked me to be quiet, but I was hushed into
silence by her unexpected tone. I could see Babbia Sinnamma’s quietly
sympathetic face hovering over my mother’s shoulder. It was only later
that my mother—my ordinarily fierce and over-protective mother— told me
quietly that Porgy and Bess were “like children” to Babbia Sinnamma
“after her son died.” She didn’t tell me how he had died, or why. Simply
that he had. It was important to my mother at that moment, not to hurt
the feeling of my grand aunt, her aunt, who had been through so much. It
was only much later in life that I understood the significance of that
incident.
I remained largely untouched by Richard’s death during my adolescence.
Babbia Sinnamma moved out to a place close to our home, and my mother
visited her regularly. I heard Porgy and Bess had passed on, and much
later, Babbia Sinnamma too, passed away. The murder of my uncle only
came back to haunt me in my twenties, in my mother’s disapproval of my
career as a journalist. While she has never explicitly said the words,
‘I don’t want you to be a journalist because of what happened to
Richard,” she has in every other way, emphatically and repeatedly,
voiced her displeasure at my involvement with anything even remotely
linked to politics. My airy defence, “I didn’t choose journalism,
journalism chose me (#fact),” does little to reduce her disapproval.
With time, as I made deeper forays into journalism, my understanding of
the circumstances surrounding Richard’s death became clearer. What also
became manifestly clear to me, first as a cub journalist, and later as a
more established one, was that the memory of the life and death of
Richard De Zoyza belonged not solely to his family, but also to a larger
cause and conversation. His name would come up habitually in the
circles I frequented, and the conversations would invariably make me
uncomfortable. Here, he was discussed as though he were a cardboard
pin-up, a face on a poster, a stranger. And while people were mostly
kind in their thoughts towards him, there were times his loyalties were
questioned, his sexuality disparaged and the word ‘elitist’ bandied in
too malicious a manner. And through it all, I remained quiet, just as my
mother had once asked me to.
As a journalist in Sri Lanka, I am all too aware of the numbers of that
have fallen. Beginning with the assassination of Thevis Guruge in 1989,
the attacks against the media have been perpetrated with indemnity and
impunity. Richard’s murder, in 1990, was the first by state-sponsored
actors—and the incidents of intimidation, assault, murder and
disappearances have only continued. There have been no convictions to
date, and the absence of accountability is proof that the current
respite is only temporary. Had there been any justice in Richard’s case,
and the countless others that preceded and followed, my preoccupation
with his murder and continued contemplation of the futility of justice
may have never occurred. But the lacuna continues to breathe life to
Richard’s death.