5th Column

My dear King Charles,

I thought I should write to you now as the dust has finally settled on the Queen’s funeral and you take over the royal duties of being King. It must have been a difficult few days for you because, even as you grieved for the loss of your mother, you had to do so publicly with the whole world watching you.

I admit that I am also a little confused over what I should be writing to you about. On the one hand I feel I must condole with you for the loss of your mother. On the other hand, I must also congratulate you on finally becoming King at the age of seventy-three and fulfilling your lifelong ambition.

In fact, here in Paradise, there were quite a few jokes about you becoming King. That is because, it was only a few months ago that we too had two seventy-three-year-old gentlemen, ‘old Royalists’ like you, becoming King and second-in command unexpectedly, fulfilling their own lifelong ambitions.

I am not sure whether you are aware of it, King Charles, but our new King declared a public holiday for the citizens of Paradise on the day of the Queen’s funeral. It was said this was to honour her as she was also the Queen of Paradise for twenty years, until we became a Republic fifty years ago.

Many criticised that decision. Questions were asked as to whether a public holiday was needed when we are an economic ‘basket case’ right now and we need all the productivity we can get. There is some truth in that. A day of mourning would have perhaps sufficed instead of a public holiday.  

Then, there were those who also questioned whether we should be even mourning the Queen’s passing at the age of ninety-six when she represented colonialism and when it was her ancestors who were responsible for imposing taxes on Paradise and plundering our resources for well over a century.

I feel we should be civilised and decent enough to acknowledge that the Queen in fact, never ruled over us because, by the time she became Queen, we had already gained independence. So, she made no decisions at all about us. We also ought to be humane enough to be moved by anyone’s passing.

Still, this concept of not respecting someone because they, or their families, imposed taxes and other burdens on us and plundered our resources when they themselves lived the high life while being maintained by public funds is an interesting concept. Isn’t that what our politicians do even now?

Yet, we don’t disrespect our politicians. Instead, we hero-worship them. Even if we do oust them from power, we forget, forgive and vote them back a few years later to wreck the country again. No one complains when we honour them but they probably did more harm to Paradise than the Queen!

So, if some people want the Queen disrespected because of what her ancestors did to us, we should adopt the same standards for our own leaders. After all, there are two sons of former leaders wanting to be leaders themselves and two more sons of two other former leaders may enter the fray soon!

By the way, I don’t think our ‘old Royalist’ mentioned this to you during your little chit-chat, but we had a ‘struggle’ (or, ‘aragalaya’ as we called it) recently and the whole point of that was that these politicians destroyed us over the past seventy-four years, ever since Britain granted us independence.

Don’t get me wrong, King Charles, we are not suggesting that we want to become a British colony again. Many atrocities happened during that time. We are glad to be ‘independent’. To then say we ruined ourselves when we were ‘independent’ only tells you how poorly we managed on our own.

We also find it a bit rich that your country violated our human rights for well over a century during colonisation but is still lecturing us on human rights and leading the crusade against us at the UN. However, being only a constitutional monarch with no real power, you can’t do anything about it.

That picture of you with our ‘Old Royalist’ was a hit here. We like to know what you talked about because there is already a lot of speculation. Correct me if I am wrong, but was it about your shared experience of suddenly waking up one day and inheriting the power you longed for all your life?

We reflect on the Queen and wonder why she was special when she, unlike other celebrities, achieved little by herself. What she did was to be the only constant in a constantly changing world for seventy years but without a scandal of her own. There’s a lesson in that for you- and for our leaders as well!

Yours truly,

Punchi Putha

PS- In one of those typical British quirks, your national anthem changes when the monarch changes. So, after seventy years, we heard ‘God save the King’ become your national anthem again. Lately, some ask whether we in Paradise should have our own adaptation: ‘God save us from our Kings and Queens’!