The Seventy-Six-Year Curse: All Has Been Washed White
LITERATURE, 1 Sep 2025
Udaya R. Tennakoon – TRANSCEND Media Service
Limmat Thesis –# 1, Zürich, 23 Aug 2025
Preface: The Burden of Writing
Some things resist being written. To write them is to be caught in a web of visions, distortions, and expectations. To remain silent would have been the easier path. Yet silence has its own weight, and so I write. Whether you agree or not, whether you exist in this perspective or outside it, I write—and after this, I will pass from it.
The Moment: Ranil’s Trial
It was an evening, close to six or seven o’clock. Ranil Wickremesinghe was being brought from the Criminal Investigation Department to the court. I learned this not through the news but through a WhatsApp group call. By the time I joined, the discussion was already raging about Ranil: his past, his deeds, what he should face now.
We were two worlds apart—Sri Lanka and Europe—yet bound by a shared history of familiarity and proximity. The talk was not formal, not analytical; it was raw, a mix of anger, hatred, jokes, joy, and spite. It was not a conversation in the true sense—more a venting of passions around a long-awaited moment.
A Question That Disturbed the Flow
“What’s your opinion?” they asked me.
I stayed silent.
When asked again, I replied simply:
“What exactly is happening now?”
That question was enough to scrape against their momentum. They knew I thought differently. They wanted a statement, perhaps a confession of alignment. But the moment was too charged for a simple or fitting answer.
The Feast of Justice and Its Shadows
Ranil was sentenced—not to 14 days, but to years. For some, this was a victory, a feast of justice. Friends in Sri Lanka expressed elation, pride, even intoxicated joy as they watched the scenes unfold near the court.
Yet within the same conversation came calls to arrest protesters, to shoot them, to send them to “rehabilitation camps in the Kandakadu.” Who were these protesters? Citizens, organized groups, opponents of the moment’s triumph.
The discussion quickly revealed a deeper truth: the lust for punishment outgrew the crimes of those punished. The cry was no longer for justice, but for vengeance.
The Seventy-Six-Year Curse
Is this the curse of seventy-six years—the inheritance of a nation still haunted by its own unfinished covenants? Is this the Buddhist karmic retribution in another form, the old covenant rewritten for modern times?
Society has become a desert of hatred. We speak of Buddhism, but what we demand is no longer “eye for an eye,” it is “eye for flesh.”
The Machinery of Justice and Its Game
Courts are no longer seats of justice; they are stages. Judgments are not truth but consensus, schemes, games. The judiciary, the media, the political parties, foreign actors—all interwoven, all contaminated.
People who cried for Ranil’s punishment now demand more than what he ever did. In their quest for cleansing, they have become the very thing they denounce. All has been washed white—but not clean.
A Nation in a Copy-Paste Age
We live in a copy-paste society: institutions destroyed, rebuilt on the same flawed foundations; promises of renewal without substance. National identity has not yet been born—it is trapped in a cage of manufactured crises, a product of global and regional games.
Lenin’s liberation is over. Dharmapala is over. We now play corporate games, partnership games—never a national game that holds all together.
The Weapon Called Law
The current government’s strongest weapon is not trust, nor belief, but law: blindfold the people, hold justice in hand, and perform. They promised punishment for the corrupt, an end to corruption. This is not a homegrown product; it is branded like a cheap local copy of a foreign good—Bata slippers, Nestlé coffee, sold as ours.
Shakespearean Theatre of Punishment
What is happening to Ranil is less a reckoning than a performance—a Shakespearean drama played on a modern stage. In the Elizabethan theatre, everyone was an actor.
If we can say, “We are not like that,” there lies greatness. Beyond that, there is nothing. Beyond that, all has been washed white.
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Udaya R. Tennakoon – Lives in Switzerland. Poet/ Diaspora Writer, Journalist, Dramatist, Peace, Human Rights and Political Activist. Master of Art in Peace and Conflict Transformation. More about the poet may follow this link
Tags: Literature, Writting
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 1 Sep 2025.
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