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| Sunday, 30 January 2005 |
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Letters from Los Angeles : Signed with love for evermore by Wilfrid Jayasuriya Said the young man in the song as the girl left to find her fortune in the film world. Our readers doing the General English for the A Level text will recognise it. But the Editor did not limit me to a postcard. A squirrel runs along the boundary fence as they do in Colombo. "What do ordinary people think and how do they live? Readers don't like long pieces. Make it light to balance the heavy stuff." We are seated in the large living room of the Pereras in Culver City, where movies were made before Hollywood. Outside stands a white ash tree and around the house is the mild wintry landscape, the perfectly clean roads, lawns and flower beds and neatly spaced houses made of wood and brick. The ash trees have all got their regular hair cuts to look like large mushrooms standing by as the cars pass smoothly and sedately. The white trunks remind me of the white skeletons of trees immersed in the Kauduluwewa in Polonnaruwa, when I worked there in the 1960s. Though we are very close to the city centre of L.A. there is so much space and order. Nita works from home. "Hello!" and "Hey!" intersperse the conference call she is conducting with her colleagues Chula, Kannan and Condrad as they babble on in incomprehensible telecommunication jargon, staring at her computer while she's been at it from the time she finished breakfast. I catch a flying sentence. "How can we configure this into the existing architecture?" She is so intense in her engagement with her work though there is no one in sight listening to her. We sit in the living room and listen to her and watch her through the open door of her home office. "We are so fortunate." Says Saras tells me. "They came here and got god jobs." Saras is watching TV. The woman on the screen says, "I took off thirty pounds. I'm happy. Maybe I'll take off twenty pounds later." Nancy is Nita's neighbour across the road. She is seen crossing the road and entering our premises. When we open the door she has come to borrow some detergent for the washing machine. Like Alice Nona asking for a piece of Sunlight because there is no one to go to the boutique. Nita introduces us. "You come from Sri Lanka? From the tsunami Sri Lanka? Oh my heart broke many times. Did you hear of the man who saved twenty five orphans?" We sat speechless. "The Red Cross couldn't cope with all the telephone calls. Dollars poured in from the people. The people gave more than the 350 million that the government promised." Nancy is a woman about fifty. She looks as if she hadn't slept well. Nita gives her a small plastic packet of detergent. Nancy sits down with us for a chat. "Love the dhosa. The long white pancake with the potato stuffed inside. Perhaps you know to make them!" hopefully to Saras. "Sure. Its like making pancake." "I'm not working now. I have time to make dhosa. When the kids are able to look after themselves I'll go back to work." She knitted her brows. "See you again." I look outside. On the road opposite, the Christmas bulbs are still blinking away. "An old man lives there alone. He's bent like this," says Nita, imitating a question mark with her body, "but I see him on the roof everyday. His daughter and grandson used to live with him." We watch Nancy walk up the short, plant cluttered drive to her house opposite. She had room in her heart for the tsunami victims. I feel a little sad for her. She looked so forlorn. Everyone in this vicinity has a house with about 2000 square feet of space. There is a car or more often two parked on the porch ready to take the occupants away to shop, school or work place by 8.30 in the morning. The yellow school bus stops at Nancy's to pick up her two kids. The 'bent like a question mark' old man steps out and turns on the sprinkler with a hiss of water. Nita feels a twinge of regret that she is house bound because she works from home. "I know all these guys whom I speak to but its not like seeing them." Her separate business telephone rings. It's a caller from India. From Chennai where the company has an outsourced office doing its computer programs for the new product that she is designing with her three colleagues. Saras switches the TV on. ABC News has pictures of the earth slip at San Diego by the coast where the houses of the rich built on mountain slopes to command a view had spilled over the edge of the cliff like a pot of boiling rice overflowing over the rim. Eleven people died. Another item shows a dam beginning to leak because the heavy rains had swollen the reservoir and 86 families lying below the dam are evacuated before it breaks. I am reminded of my youthful years in Gal Oya 40 years ago when the Inginiyagala dam began to spill and the water rose to within one foot of the top of the dam. The helpless management could only contact the makers Morrison Knudsen and Co in Kentucky and inquire what would happen. People fled from the Gal Oya Valley, which would have been engulfed by a tidal wave comparable to the tsunami, if the dam broke. "If the water does not spill over the top of the dam, it will hold," was the far from re-assuaring reply that came back from the other side of the world. Well it did not overtop. We are here on a winter holiday. The sun shines brightly but it is cold. This winter is colder than usual. And we have grown older from the time we first visited America twenty years ago. Robert Frost, the American poet talked about how he too would like to have some winter sleep, like the squirrel that passes to and fro on the palisaded fence outside. "Essence of winter sleep is on the night... The woods are lovely dark and deep. But I have miles to go before I sleep. Miles to go before I sleep." |
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