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more thora and hendello Our fishmonger Nishantha's voice was heard no more after the tsunami. It was a raucous voice but friendly and respectful. It rent the Ratmalana air. It announced with unconcealed glee the varieties of fish he was selling each day - parav, thora, isso, kelavallo, balaya, and also the price. Handello was our favourite, and Nishantha knew it. He dropped by the other day more than six weeks after the fateful tsunami Poya Day of December 2004. The huge box, a kind of packing case, fixed on the luggage carrier of his push cycle was there but only with a single piece of less than 200 grams of parav. "It's good fish, cheap too," he pleaded, his raucous voice muted, and his sturdy, muscular figure reduced in weight. His weighing scale was also not there. "We still don't feel like eating fish, Nishantha," said my wife. Nishantha understood, but waited a while to chat. He spoke of the deep-sea fishermen who had lost everything, their shelter and their livelihood. They were in a refugee camp, but well fed and well dressed. They may not want to go to sea again; they may not want to leave the camp. They seem to have never had it so good. In any case, until they start deep sea fishing some day, Nishantha will continue to be a broken man. He has not lost his house but he has lost his livelihood, selling fish from door to door. He began from the time he left school -a livelihood that depends on the source of his wares -the deep seas fisherman- and the end-user -the domestic consumer. Nishantha
had, in addition to the 200-gram piece of parav in his big box,
a polythene bag. "I
have pawned my wife's jewellery to tide over. Hope everything will
pick up, deiyannge pihiten." That was a lot of money for Nishantha's family of three school-going children. It took less than half a day to earn it. Now, he earns nothing because people are not willing to eat fish. Down our lane, nobody buys fish, though Minister of Science and Technology Professor Tissa Vitarane was shown on TV relishing deep fried fish (no chips, though) at Moratuwa, in an effort to persuade people to start eating fish again. But some people have become total vegetarians after the tsunami. The tsunami refugee camps are still there, and they will be there for a long time. What is most poignant and depressing is that the men in them look broken. The women and children seem to be able to cope somehow. But women know that no misfortune is too great to bear if their men are whole. The problem is that they are not whole but perplexed, angry and depressed. The monstrous anger of the sea took its toll. In homes too the fathers have receded into silence. A young friend's septuagenarian father has not gone to see his bed-ridden nonagenarian mother after the tsunami although he used to pay her a daily visit before the tsunami. He has lost the will to live. He was a talkative man; now he is reticent man. His house, where he lived all his life, was inundated, and he wants to leave the area for a safer area. He, like many other men, is broken. He can expect no aid from anybody to put his house in order. The tsunami-powerful grama sevaka has decreed that he is not entitled to any assistance because all his children are employed. His view of life has been transformed negatively. There was another fishmonger David who shared the "trade route" in Ratmalana with Nishantha, like Kacchaputa and Seri, who sold bangles in Andapura in the late Ediriwira Sarachchandra's beautiful Kada Valalu. That other fishmonger has not been seen at all since the tsunami. Is he a broken man, too? |
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