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chapter six Conclusions from Tamil Colombo In here it’s deliberately dark so that one may sigh in peace. Please come in. How long has it been? Upstairs—climb slowly—the touch is more certain. You’ve been, they say, everywhere. What city’s left? I’ve brought the world indoors . . . . . . Listen, my friend. But for quick hands, my walls would be mirrors. A house? A work in progress, always . . . —Agha Shahid Ali, “Rooms Are Never Finished” (2002: 55–57) Colombo, a recurring site of anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka, is at the same time a city of many Tamil-speaking and other minorities, Malaiyaha Tamil, Muslim , “Colombo Tamil,” and Sri Lankan Tamil, along with Malays, Borahs, Burghers, and Europeans. Prime target of attacks by the LTTE in wartime, Colombo is also one of the places where Tamil remittances flow, where the call for prayer, the azaan, is broadcast daily on national Tamil radio, where famous Indian Tamil eateries and businesses abound. There are many sights that recall Colombo for me. They are, in keeping with my own linguistic bias, visions of a Tamil-speaking city. The long bustling markets in Pettah and Wellawatte, two of Colombo’s major Tamil areas (the former more Hill Country and the latter more Sri Lankan Tamil). The early evening chatter of children and adults out walking on Galle Face Green by the beach side favored by Tamils, Muslims, and Sinhalese alike of all classes, who come in their hundreds invading one of the more exclusive ends Conclusions from Tamil Colombo 229 of the city. The lodges that house rooms and rooms of Tamil transients, with all their belongings crammed in and their door open to greet those who walk up the stairs. The army and police checkpoints all across the city. The food huts by the wayside where I go to order the street food that all Sri Lankans love, which seems to easily transgress ethnic boundaries. The Muslim “hotels ,” open late at night, where we stop sometimes when I go out with friends to drink faluda and have a late night snack. So many sights I can list. These are crisscrossed with sweaty crammed bus rides with conductors shouting out the stops, their fingers interlaced with banknotes, and three-wheeler drivers with whom I constantly have to negotiate, talking sometimes about who I am and why I am in the city. I traveled Colombo on buses memorizing money and destinations, and like many Tamils through Tamil. I became skilled at picking out another Tamil-speaking person to ask directions, eating lunch at Tamil canteens and eateries, memorizing certain kinds of ritualized buying encounters in markets, and going to Tamil area markets for everything complicated. The months I would come back from Puttalam to Colombo late on Friday night for the weekend, I always went straight from the bus to the many Muslim shops dotted around the central bus station, where one could wait in safety to ask them to help finding a reliable three-wheeler driver. The money markets I changed my pounds in were in Pettah, the heavily Tamil central marketplace of Colombo. I took my grandparents to the Wellawatte Church of South India (CSI) church. There we met all those from the north whom we had known all our lives, now permanent residents in Colombo, supported by the remittances of overseas children. I very quickly slipped into a particular segment of life in the city, which was ever present but concealed. This is just one such segment in a city that is essentially comprised of constant presence and absence: 50 percent of Colombo live in multiple small slums and shanties positioned at the doorways and thresholds of respectable neighborhoods. Thus the city with all its securitization had a place for me and other Tamils . And, as I discovered it has historically always been a place of minority life. The question remains to what extent it can become a place for minority life. In this chapter, I explore, by way of conclusion, Tamil life in Colombo past, present , and future. The chapter traces a phenomenology of Colombo as a Tamilspeaking city that I was only one of thousands in traversing. The city appears both through the jostling ethnographic journeys traveled along ethnic lines, and also through a historical lens which shows that Colombo has to perform its Sinhala nationalist credentials constantly because it is “a city which is not [18.117.107.90] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 09:50...

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