A true Christmas story

The Christmas season coming at the exit of one year and the advent of another has assumed the veneer of a season of joyful celebration and goodwill. Ten years younger then and more inclined towards journalistic adventures, I decided to go Christmas shopping along York Street of Colombo, a hub of colonial memories.

Soon I was repenting the adventure as I got jammed in the crowd before a big shop and was unable to move a foot from where I stood. Who says the cost of living rises and people have no money? There flowed streams of Sri Lankans laden with Christmas shopping. Another human, a beggar woman squatted plump before me, herself made immobile by the maddening crowd.

"Give me a rupee" she kept wailing but no one gave her an ear or a rupee. As they jostled along, eyes greedily glued on Christmas trinkets. Soon a mother and daughter, like two mules on the Sahara desert emerged from the shop, laden with Christmas "shopping".

Beggar woman

"Give me a rupee" wailed the beggar woman but the two had their own problems, as to how to get to their car with all that stuff. The daughter now got an idea."For that one rupee we will get this woman to help us".

The mother was aghast. "She is a poor woman and she will run away with the stuff. These poor people are all rogues" "Mummy, don't say such silly things. How can it be like that?Are all poor people thieves?"

The two spoke in the colonial master's language that has cleaved our society.

I have read that when the Blacks started streaming into the Americas first thing ordered was for them to stop talking in their own language and adopt the lingua franca of the masters. That was a deterrent to the flare of rebellions that could erupt by inter-communication.

In our society the availability of two languages has made this cleavage possible and we can lambast our servile friends without their knowledge.

Two languages

Finally due to the democratic inclinations of the daughter, the woman was given some parcels and made to head the trio in case she decides to vanish. But alas, misery seems to haunt the already miserable and she dropped a parcel that happened to encase 12 cute wine glasses. The mother let out a scream that echoed around the city and the frightened woman squatted on the mess trying to weld the glasses together.

Commotion reigned for some time and then the mother and daughter disappeared. Dramas of this nature are not uncommon to human congregations and the interest in them subsides till a new drama erupts. However, a tourist had been watching it all. He edged towards me and inquired as to what happened. I told him the details and the woman came back and was again there with the glass pieces. She was shivering with fright, yet wailing for that one rupee.

Bethlehem

I am not sure whether the man that morning about three days to Christmas had come all the way from Bethlehem or Jerusalem carrying the compassionate spirit of Jesus, but he gifted the beggar woman with a crisp hundred rupee note.

Then he joined the procession of humans going down York Street and could not be identified from the others. I mean no halo or an aura in any other form distinguished him despite his gallantry. The woman, astonished at her good luck squatted on the floor after tucking the money into her breasts.Now she went on to retrieve a glass or two from the broken heap and succeeded in picking a large piece of glass, may be the main glass of the set now defunct.Either in her madness or in the post-confusion, she began to look through the glass. And I in my own madness or post confusion, saw the woman going into her shack, along Norris Road.

The hungry brats crowded round her crying, "What have you brought, amma?"

"Two" she says. "A 100 rupee note given by a white man and a piece of large glass" "Chee!" explodes her eldest son his head tied in a red bandana, "Of what use is a piece of glass?"

Let me have it, pleads her daughter and she held it to her eyes and exclaimed jubilantly.

Revolution

"It is much better than the Rs.100 note, amma. You can see beautiful colours through it. Pink, mauve, purpe, yellow, crimson". "Rot" said her brother, ready for a revolution that could massacre the capitalists.

"Can you eat colours? Can you eat beautiful things. It is all humbug they are trying to deceive us with".

He is preparing to join the Great Revolution by the Beira against the rising COL. In a mansion in Kollupitiya a mother and daughter are themselves arguing. The mother is still a volcano of anger on what happened and blames the daughter.

"It is all your fault. You have too much sympathy for the downtrodden".

"Downtrodden? I think you have read too much on the French Revolution and Marie Antoinette who said,

"If they do not have bread let them eat cake".

Her brother listens to the mother-daughter dialogue and says that Marie Anotinette never said it and that it has been taken off an imagined scene from one of the books written by the French thinkers, books that went on to ignite the revolution.

The father now joins in and says that it was very unfair of the French revolutionaries to put in the mouth of queens, things they had never uttered.

System

"That's unfair? Was it fair to cut their heads off to demonstrate against a system that has gone on for centuries? he thunders.

"Julius. That is okay. Just because your parents baptised you with a Roman name, You need not boil your blood on what happened so long ago in a distant country," breaks in the wife." Will you buy a new set of wine glasses to replace the broken ones? Remember they are a must for the Christmas party."

"That is no problem," declares the owner of "Millionairee Enterprise" that looms over the city.

The beggar woman by the Beira stretches her budget that could be covered for three days with the Rs. 100 rupee note while her son lets out curses and plans genocide on all those who hold leisured talks on revolutions while worms cry in his tummy. Times have not much changed.The Latter part of the tale is a hallucination.