We don’t kiss on the road, we don’t hold hands kissing on the road, our roads are not meant for kissing, our roads are in bad condition, we won’t be seen kissing on the road. We walk with our loved ones along roads and we’re conscious that we’re being watched, guaged and placed — contained, compared and gloated on. My guy is being desired and despised. My girl is being devoured and discarded.
Around the Kandy Lake, signs remind us: “Kandy is a sacred city. Do not misbehave”. For all i know, there are benches all around the beautiful (and semi-stinking) lake and couples harbour their day for a quiet moment of semi-privacy here. Couples come here for an innocent moment or two — cos, as we know, our country has no provisions for youth and for their desires, needs, privacies etc. To walk as a couple, therefore, has to be a public phenomenon and the private moment one desires with one’s loved one, is, in that public sense, a “semi-private” affair: like most of our factories and services.
No wonder the beauty of love is reduced and contained. People watch us and while, at different levels, hypocratically cutting lime on couples in public, simultaneously get tantallized by our semi-private moment of privacy. Can sharing a moment with my guy/girl walking or sitting in the vicinity of the beautiful Kandy Lake be “misbehaving”??? By whose decree? And what other alternatives do we have? Not that we’re choosing to be gloated and stared at. It is the debacle of the chanceless. The choiceless and the one’s with an “unfair” choice.
Kandy Lake
Malvathu Viharaya and the Dalada Maligawa stand on either side of the lake. Monks in the malvathu receive all kinds of banes and they willingly play the part of boon to all kinds of political gimmicks. The Maligawa is a den of petty politics and one of the most cruciel political pawns in the government agenda. How many acres of “preserved land” does the Maligawa possess? How many, the Malwathu chapter? Jealosuly guarded land at the best of the feudal tradition — make just one recreation park out of the 1000 acres! Just one recreation park and then — THEN — talk about “misbehaving”….if you must.
Give away a couple of acres for proper housing for a a dozen needy. There are people who need it man. Like people who get their only shelter buldozed at Gotabaya’s bidding. Or the kind of people who have no shit-hole to shit into… Just a couple of acres, Mr. Nilame and Rev. Malvathu. Be gentle in your misbehaving and we will then behave on equal terms. How “Nilame Elections” are worked out, how donors and donations come and go, how power is manipulated — and on the other side of the coin, we sit with our innocent hopes on the idle stone bench by the lake. For whom were these benches put? For what purpose were these benches put?
We walk what love we have around the lake, cos we are in want of the luxury of a top-knot hotel up front, a cruise or a joyride overseas. Our means are little. Our dreams are small. Not that we want the hotel and the cruise. Perhaps, if we got it all, our love wouldn’t have been the same. Perhaps our emotions would have frozen and turned into crystal or something. So, we’re happy with what we have — even though we’re being watched, commented on and pinned into various im/moral showcases. We’re happy even though we don’t speed-race along the Galle Road at midnight or don’t have fuckfests at 5 Star hotels with friends and their spouses.
Sign us off not. Cos the lakeside is all we got.
Tags: kandy, lake, love, maligawa, malvathu, temple of tooth
