Mud Ghecko

Marina* is our 'Cleaning lady,' an attractive, dark, late thirtyish Muslim woman, with a sweet and humble smile,   who glides around the place keeping things clean and silently goes away dressed in black. She is the only person in office who doesn't have her clique, dosnt eat with us at the lunch table, the usual office rules don't apply perhaps since she is considered  a 'menial', or uneducated...but she's used to that. She never fails to make a delicious wattalappan on Ramzan day, for the whole staff. ​ She is in her late thirties I imagine, and has a son ​, who is the most important person in her life​ . The main people in her life are her son and her sister, who is the only sibling. This sister has a son, and this tiny family have only each other.  14 years ago, her husband and her sister's husband were caught in a train accident, while going in her husbands three-wheeler, to distribute wattalapan on Ramzan day, I assume. Since ...

  C Gadiewasam.   Death is a great leveller, they do say. Meaning that whether you are rich or poor, ugly or beautiful, good or nasty everyone gets to die at some point in their lives. Oddly enough that's just when people start being honestly religious, including the dying person invariably and their friends, relations and neighbors. Your author just recently got to know the extent of some religosity by analysing the amount of sheer drinking and serious gambling that goes on at latterday Sinhala "Buddhist" funerals in a more  recent development of tradition, but that is just too unsavory to go into here even on this undead page. Instead we will just talk about bodies and spirits and dead things, as per custom with your friendly book-of-the-undead. In some countries in Asia would you believe it,  water buffaloes  really get the bad end of the deal,  and depending on how rich the dying person was a lot of buffaloes get sacrificed, so as to help that person go to...

If you think that vampires, ghouls and slithery things are creepy and scary this story is going to give you the shivers for some time to come, mostly because it’s not a legend but factually correct! Today’s narrative is about a creature called the guinea worm , which though that name sounds quite tame, is in fact one of the most horrible ways to suffer and sometimes die, in the tropics. See, from ghouls and vampires you can run, but this creature, much like those hideous internal parasites in Aliens Vs Predators, actually lives inside your body and moves around like a flesh eating train inside your system! And there is no way of getting it out, not even extensive surgery, because if you damage the worm and it dies it becomes septic and poisons you! The pain of the worm travelling around has been described as similar to being on fire, which is why the ancient Israelites called it a Fiery Serpent from Hell, although it is known by scientists as  Dracunculus m...

And so by strange and wonderful coincidence the two sweetest guys in my life were born on the same day….although, eighteen years apart. In families I have heard that this happens quite often but  no one can really explain , how out of three hundred and sixty five to chose from, my tiny son decided to take his first deep breath of air, on my brother’s birthday …amazingly these two resemble each other too and would have looked almost like twins at the same age, tall, fair skinned , gangly and knobby jointed, with spiky hair, and sticking out ears…   The first thing I remember long ago about my kid brother was soft flannel , a sweet milky baby powdery smell and a cherubic face in a woolly cap; and then as now, an overwhelming sense of pride and protectiveness in possession of such a kid brother ….. (not that they will allow themselves to be protected by us). My son too is the kid brother of his elder sister and in this wher...