The Rajpal Abeynayake Column

The Rajpal Abeynayake Column By Rajpal Abeynayake

A murder that our social conscience cannot take
Dharmaretnam Sivaram was assassinated, but for many who read the news it wouldn't occur that he was one of the great intellects of our time.

That makes it all the more disgusting, this killing. Ram was my friend - one of the closest, if not, as a matter of fact, the closest. That friendship intrigued many people, who saw us to be from the opposite ends of the political and ideological spectrum.

The fact that people didn't understand that friends could be ideologically opposed but still be friends tickled Siva no end. Who knows exactly why they killed him?? Those who aimed that gun at his head probably never heard of Foucoult and Derrida and if they did probably thought these were new fangled nom de gurre's for some Tamil guerrilla cadres.. Omar Khayyam was a name that would have stumped them completely.

For Siva however, Omar Khayyam was a passion. He possessed a bound copy of his works, which he took out of the book-case when he was in his intellectual and emotional element. His assassination to many would seem to be one more in an unceasing wave of killings witnessed in this nation since the decade of the 80s. When hundreds - thousands --- have died violently, one killing may to some people sound like a cipher in an endless list.

It will be utterly crass to say that Siva was another number in a long compilation. You ask for reasons?? It may seem laughable to some, but I say, having known the man, that in his grain he was a pacifist. I find it difficult to think that anyone who reads Omar Khayyam with his kind of passion was anything other than a pacifist!

But that's a different matter. He was a cosmopolitan, who counted the best among Sinhala intelligentsia and elite as his friends. A cursory list of his friends in Colombo if divulged here would boggle the minds of many and maybe even embarrass more in the bargain. The outsider would probably wonder how a man who was perceived to be the enemy of the 'Sinhala nation'' so-called, could be on first name terms with the best elements of Sinhala society.

Now that he has been killed, the best of Sinhala society seems to be in a daze. They feel that they have let themselves down badly; the obituaries that I have read so far of him lend abundantly to this feeling. Those who were opposed to him, at least at an ideological level, seemed to be having an attack of conscience. The unmistakable undertone of their jottings is: why were we so hard on him when he was living -- we shouldn't have been?

They were harsh on him very probably because they never bothered to delve beneath the surface of what they perceived him to be : the Editor of TamilNet, the Website of the Tamil Tiger. Their prejudices on account of this single fact stopped them from giving the man a fair chance. I came to know him more than most - partly because he afforded me a chance to get to know him as someone more than just the Editor of the Tamilnet.

For example, I know for a fact that Siva has more respect for the Nalin De Silvas and the Gunadasa Amerasekeras of this world, to whom he was opposed ideologically, than he did for the NGO wallahs of this world. Some may still say it's hard to think that's plausible -- and after all dead men tells no tales.

But Siva was able to tell a man from a mouse and a courageous man from a wimp - -and to him, the Gunadasa Amarasekeras had the courage of their convictions, while the NGO wallahs in the main were those who knew the meaning of one thing best: the bucks they received from the NGO industry.

Perhaps Siva was forced to do some things he didn't like, but, his most raucous belly-laughs were reserved for the hypocrites he encountered when he did some of those things that went against his grain. But then Siva had imbibed from the best of what literature and letters had to offer. With his almost freakish - no, I would say definitely freakish -- ability to assimilate knowledge, Siva was a walking data base of wisdom, and by extension therefore, a wise guy who could see through guff and artifice effortlessly.

Ask his biographer Mark Whittaker, and American who had great fascination for this one man show. Whittaker found it hard to sit down with his subject. On many an occasion he made the effort to sit down with him -- but the subject wandered off, forcing the biographer to be in instant pursuit of his quarry. I say -- it needs a biographer to make an appraisal of his short 46 year innings. There is no such thing, really, as an abridged Siva obituary.

But, his death should throw an open challenge to society. They couldn't see the man in his many dimensions as a few among us did, and was therefore guilty of a collective narrow mindedness which it now finds difficult to bear upon its collective conscience.

The same political leaders now issuing copious statements upon his death branded him a traitor once; I daresay I was sometimes this "traitor'"s sole companion in the Sinhala south, where once upon a time sitting down with Siva for a drink became, for some many people, either a risk they didn't want to take or a compromise they didn't want to make.

To even those who considered him an enemy I say if you did not have the courage to engage him you were cowards, because here was a man in your midst. You cannot physically engage a Tiger commander or a LTTE political wing leader, but you could yet have sized up at close quarters the man who edited Tamilnet with an uncompromising professionalism. Those who didn't engage him missed a great deal - for the simple reason nobody could come away from conversation with him without being intellectually enriched.

But, that's beside the point. Those who didn't engage him were pusillanimous. At best, they were too preoccupied, and didn't understand that a man in your midst is an asset; you don't ostracise him, if you are smart you cultivate him. Of course there is a prize. Siva for instance paid the supreme prize, but I have read somewhere that the old Greek sages went to their deaths laughing because they knew the human body was only a tomb that encased the mind - -and that a fine mind can never really die, a fine mind can only be reborn - - and will of course, even in the Everyman's sense of understanding, be immortal.

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