Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

RO GUNETILLEKE

RO GUNETILLEKE Sri Lankan–born Ro Gunetilleke writes in Hermosa Beach, California. His poems and short stories have appeared in Catamaran, Muse India, Poetic Diversity, and the Best of the Net 2006 anthology (Sundress Publications, 2007). His work has been featured at Artwallah (2004 and 2005), Beyond Baroque’s Spring 2005 poetry series, the New Short Fiction series at the Beverly Hills Public Library, and the Newer Poets reading, part of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Aloud series. He recently completed his first novel, Bad Karma Girl. I lived through the 1983 communal riots in Colombo Sri Lanka and shed my national identity. I see myself as a Sri Lanka-born Californian. Lost Column For Richard de Souza Bite marks on the wall, boot stains on the rug, your crumpled red tee shirt chokes on the wrecked bed. They sniffed around in your room for hours, clawed through the shadows, lifted prints off your thoughts, left with your satchel, spilling words along the lawn. No scrapbook of your columns, no tin box of your poems, no pirith chant, no séance. 99 In the belly of the jungle, on a pyre of tires, they erased you word by word. Spirited Away After the third dram, he lifts the shot glass to the gas lamp, looking for that last drop of coconut arrack, the slurred words come looking for me. Marconi shortwave radio coughs to the crackle of coconut-shell firepot, grandpa’s lap feels like our satin couch, I sink in. Grandpa shuttles the radio dial, I hold the hairpin antenna, wiggle it just a hair this way or that way, and we are off, across the world in Greenwich meantime, to a world that meant nothing but was everything. Grandpa’s thumb nimble on the dial, 100 RO GUNETILLEKE first stop Lucknow then to Moscow, Swan Lake he says, sways his chin like a metronome. We hear ten languages in one night, music and gibberish like shadow puppets, we make up names for the song, the tune that finds us, we make it all our own. It is 1956. Fires burn Jaffna to Colombo. Mani’s bakery charred, no more honey-buns with sprinkled sugar caps. Mani went away with the Red Cross, fifteen years bundled in a gunnysack. Grandpa shuts the window downs the third dram, kindles the firepot, and sinks into the chair, all arms and legs. I bend the hairpin to the North we run away again. RO GUNETILLEKE 101 ...