Survivors guilt

I feel ill and there's a churning bitter bile rising in my throat.

It's not the the usual glad rush of getting "last-minute-gifts" for a friend going away. No chocolates, clothes, toys or novelties are required. These are distractions they have no need for.

So I have sent Shanti on her way with a bagful of medicines. Remedies for all types of bodily ailments. But she needs remedies of a different nature. She needs to be able to be. To laugh. To hope. To Live.

She carries the bag carefully not wanting to appear ungrateful. But I know that it is just weight in her hands and I am sorry I am sending her off, with this heavy bag. Heavy with my guilt and hope. Guilt that I am me and she is she and that we live such different lives though we are no different in the eyes of those who classify and demarcate according to ethnicity, race and other glorious things. Hope that we could be equally free to live a life of our choosing.

As the car pulls away I pass by the early morning flurry of people going on with their lives. They are standing at a counter of a new and sleek-looking sales outlet sporting a board that proclaims the sale of "fresh fish at cheap prices".

I swallow down the bile rising in my throat.

Shanti is on her way home, back to Jaffna.

7.56am outside the Expo Air office in Colombo on 14th June 2008