Taking the Bitter with the Sweet

Around twelve years ago,  when I was hovering on the magical brink of becoming a symbolic 39, I went in for my annual overall check up and the reports came in with a positive diagnosis of diabetes.

Well, yours truly, Chands, was in shock for a while and thought it was some kind of mistake! This was an OLD PEOPLES disease! It was one of those incurable inconvenient things that happened after you are sixty or something! This went along with Alzheimer's, dentures and incontinence, in my list of geriatric issues.   This wasn't for me; I didn't deserve it,  I didn't really do any of the things I imagined would make me into a diabetic. Ok I was rather lazy about the exercise thing although on and off I would try to keep in shape, not for health reasons at all but because I wanted to wear some dress…and I liked having a coke once in a way but actually I couldn't even afford junk food, so why had this happened to me? I was by no means overweight, my BMI was acceptable, I didn't eat half the oil or ice cream that I saw my relations down day after day, (even the diabetic ones, once they had taken their daily insulin)- I was the careful one, probably because I was an older sister, and a mother, and we actually get used to giving up the food to other family members, particularly the sweet treats. Have you noticed? Most of the moms I know take home any chocolates they get at work to give the kids, and I was no exception.

So why me? First there was the hazy denial stage… Maybe this was a mistake and it could be reversed…maybe it would go away and just be a bad dream and not end up in me having to lose my left foot (something I have been paranoid about since signing up for a Life insurance package which gave you double bonus if you lost limbs on OPPOSITE SIDES …think about that carefully – to claim you need to lose a right hand AND a left foot… tricky, but I'm sure it can be organised if you remember to stick them both out at the last moment before the train hits! Looks like the insurance people think of everything !…pardon the deviation here) …maybe a completely starch free diet and running five miles a day would work – I didn't know Fanny Adams about diabetics and it looked like I would have to learn fast…here, I figured out,  were some of the practical downsides:

• anything you previously spent on chocolates and sweets to pamper yourself, you now have to spend on medications and strips for the tester machine;  those are quite expensive
• insurance companies automatically double the premium if they learn you are diabetic, and if they know you are OLD and diabetic they can even treble it
• you cant skip meals anymore, since you go into a stage of dizziness and nausea caused by having low blood sugar. So forget high pressure jobs, unplanned journeys or in fact any real adventure
• Diabetes also can make people feel sad, angry, or lonely because most of your friends are not watching their blood sugar levels! in Sri lanka you get a lot of unfeeling comments too, like " oh, you must have eaten lots of sugary stuff!" (as if you are the only one, and the person saying it completely abstains from any!) and " oh my, at this age ! How terrible !" (as if your entire future just went)

This is apart from the disease itself which involves gradual nerve degeneration and higher risks of cholesterol, heart disease and another boat load of more nasty sounding stuff, and of course, eventual amputation of feet.

Yes, it can be at first glance quite a damper on life…until-  in the spirit of Chands, you look for the possible positive bits! And here they are:

• You automatically get the exercise you need, because if you don't you get in actual trouble. So exercise is compulsory. And then little irritations in life, like 'having" to walk a further 200 yards because you miss a halt, become positive opportunities. Compulsory walking, you find is exhilarating, interesting, a time for creative thinking and saves on fuel and transport costs! And you retain a moderately youthful figure for free!!!
• Watching your diet becomes compulsory so now there is no fighting with your self control. You settle on a diet and you get used to it and its actually good for you! No nonsense with new year resolutions which you mess up in February!
• You begin to realise how good something gooey and sweet tastes, because you can't have it often. So you have a new perspective about the good things in life!
• You won't ever have to worry about growing obscenely, decrepitly, disgustingly old and being a gibbering, geriatric burden on your children. Statistically most diabetics are usually quite dead by 75 or something.

Ok, I have to end by saying none of this is expert medical advice of any kind, and Chands is just an average person with a common problem, now, more common than it ever was, sadly due to modern lifestyles. Why it happened and what will happen next I do not know,  but I can leave you with some useful and honestly playful tips by the real experts which I found here:

http://www.besthealthmag.ca/get-healthy/diabetes/19-tips-for-stable-steady-blood-sugar-levels

And the assurance that even if you get diabetes it is not the end of the world, and you can still be happy. Very happy.

 

The Life and Times of ALJUHARA

….ie  more of that rahu/ kethu/ aturu dasha crap

 

Its about two years since I last wrote for WOW officially and may I say I'm glad to be back. Quite a lot has happened in my life in these two years and you can be sure I will be updating you about it, in occasionally painful detail.

Now where do I start? .

I have a lovely young friend in office who studies horoscopes in her spare time. I mean it very seriously, its like you can have a Diploma in Mumbo Jumbo, supervised by a number of lecturers in various sub topics, the main one is the Astrology Diploma and the sub topics include stuff like Herbal Remedies, Exorcism, and Spells. (ok this may sound like Hogwarts to you but this is good old fashioned Mattakkuliya where she is studying this stuff from an ancient and venerable guru, the type who probably takes about half a minute to turn a yellowed page in his crumbling antique textbooks….using of course, a shaking, saliva-moistened old digit…) And she takes this very seriously and she is GOOD in this stuff if I do guarantee so myself.

Well about two years ago, after being bullied no end by me to read my chart, Sulakshani, for that is her name, told me that I would a) buy a land b) move out of my family home.

and c) become fat.

 

You may say this wasn't really a prediction, but rather a set of things I should do or would feel like doing, or as I prefer to think, things that I would subconsciously want to do once I had heard about the prediction. …however to me they were quite impactful, serious  things.And not really things you can do as easily as all that. Except perhaps the getting fat thing, but then would you want to?

 

Land is blooming expensive in this day and age and my salary barely keeps me alive from month to month, Ive been living in my ancestral (read:parents) home for the last 25 years and have established it as a comfort zone par excellence, mosquitoes, porcupines[1] and all,  and last but not least,  who on Earth wants to actually get fat because of your horscope?!?

 

Well, I began to sit around thinking what a materially useless life I had been having for the last ten years of working, although I enjoyed the work, there was nothing to show for it and although I enjoyed life I didn't know where I would live if I had to move out of this crowded nest…the more I thought about it the more I ached to have my own swamp, my own square feet, my own home to hang my hat in…this idea was followed by months of frenzied scanning of HIT Ad  and all the copycat adz pamphlets of rival newspapers…and week after week I had to carefully decipher what people wrote about their properties…I actually became pretty good at this " near the 122 bus route" sounded good, until you find out that this bus only passes through 3 times a day, the rest of the time you basically have to hitch hike on passing bullock carts, " peaceful country environment" means you have to walk 20 minutes to get a panadol and "close to the city" means your windows rattle every 7 minutes when staff buses go past. "in close proximity to the XYZ Balika VIdyalaya" had its own hideous implications which I leave you to figure out. And leaving all of that aside, the sheer price of these Sri Lankan "perches" was astounding. Translated into foreign currency Sri Lankan villagers were asking me sums of money per square foot which could have bought me good suburbs in many American States!…I was confounded! It just didn't seem to be something I could bring about…I went on a number of interesting and expensive land-spotting foreys and took lots of photographs of Kaduwela, Hanwella and romantic Labugama…up in these leech infested hills bordering onto Ratnapura, illiterate villagers continued to cheerfully gobsmack me with thundering quotes for their little (and completely deforested) plots of useless marsh land until I actively hated them. These people hadn't worked for this wealth, they had simply inherited stuff and stripped it, cut all the trees, eaten and of course drunk the proceeds and now were trying to rip me off royally by selling me denuded craters of slanted earth….but at the same time, man, was the scenery gorgeous, I could stand there all day looking around me…this was mother Earth in all her beauty and I wanted a small patch at least for my final resting place.

…and well, yes, I fell for one of the marshes, it is a very tiny modest little marsh, predictably treeless, although luckily bordered by rubber plantations and a distant river which they hadn't managed to pollute too much yet, in the salubrious surrounds of the former Sitawaka Kingdom, where long ago a king had boiled[2] a lot of monks because they would not absolve him of the crime of patricide…and yes I moved out of my nest, a big step for me, but since im 40 (for crying out loud, it was about time!)..

As to the getting fat part…Id say fat is a relative concept…I was probably fat to start with although with difficulty I am retaining my BMI within healthy limits to ensure that my diabetes dosnt kill me too quickly…But you know what? I kind of think Sulakshi does in fact know her astrology stuff quite well. Drop us a mail if you'd like your chart read too.J chandrika6@gmail.com

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[1] This is a completely different story

[2] Or drowned, I cant really remember 

Photograph is a random pretty pic of a bathing spot in Thunmodera, Sri Lanka 

Zeeny and the Pola Cats

So my friend  Zeeny sterilizes stray cats. Regularly. Obsessively. And persistently. She is happy that I told her how to go get them operated. You just have to grab them, starve them a few hours before, and make an appointment with a vet and take them over and then look after them for a few days afterwards till they heal. And then no matter how much you grow to love them, you have to release them back to the pitiless street from where you got them because most people are not very willing to give street cats a home.

People criticize us religiously saying that we are interfering with Gods plan. Or that we are accumulating bad karma and we should be childless in the next birth. But she cares about the cats. People who don't know her scold her and judge her and tell her that she will be barren in her next life. If you never had access to birth control, and you continued helplessly to have child after child after child would you be so judgmental ? Have you looked at a stray cat that has had kittens every six months for a few years? Have you seen how tired and haggard it looks?  You do not see the struggle that it goes through, to get food, with people chasing pregnant cats away continuously; you have not seen how much it suffers trying to protect its young on the street. Some people think of cats in human terms, and say that we should not interfere with Gods arrangement. They forget that unlike humans, stray cats or dogs do not have employment, and that they have young every six months if they are not spayed. Female stray cats do not have the support of their husbands. They also mate freely with their own siblings and parents and offspring and that leads to deformities.  Street animals are often neglected and diseased, and many cause road accidents and die, or steal food out of desperation and then are attacked mercilessly by people and left to die in terrible pain. I have seen female dogs with broken legs screaming while being gang raped because they happen to be in heat. Male dogs (and also clearly male Gods) don't think about these things, though as women we do. Often people like to ignore all these facts as they tell us about God's plan, or karma. Often I feel they can afford to be sanctimonious because then they don't have to spend time or money on spaying operations, they can just shrug and leave it to God.

A one-woman mission against stray overpopulation in Wellampitiya

Some of them tell us that they find homes for their kittens/puppies among contacts. But the truth is that because those homes are taken up by the animals that are bred, then there are no homes for the street animals who will continue to be neglected and unloved. Then some people say that they are animals of the forest and should be able to find food from the jungle. This is not true either because cats and dogs are domesticated animals and often there is not enough food for them in the cities, leading cats in overpopulated areas to forage among other species such as rare birds and rodents, to feed themselves. This is bad for the environment in the long term.

For all these reasons Zeeny will continue to spay the stray animals she finds and I will continue to try to find funding for it. Possibly both of us will be barren in the afterlife, but until then we are happy when we go to the pola and see the young females we have spayed living a carefree life without being gang raped, getting continuously pregnant or being chased with brooms or boiling water. 

For happy stories of stray kitten rescues search for Le Kittenarium on FB

The Little Witch of Modera

FAA AGAIN

So the next day I took the toy motorbike and gave to Nuzrath. I was feeling maybe that it was for his kid, Muad, but later I found that wasn't the case. 

Nuzrat didnt let me get away, he made me sit down and showed me how he had taken Amor's lost sock and sewed it onto the plastic biker guy, like a kind of body bag/straight jacket.
When Im doing this I have to undergo some rituals and I have to do some chanting , he  told me. And he had to draw a particular charm on a thin piece of copper plating which he stuffed into the stomach of the plastic doll. He had an ancient book with these charms drawn in it and he put on his glasses to look through this book. It looked as if the page corners were all worn out. He must have studied this book a lot.  

He also found ashes, they say from a crematorium.

In Sri Lanka there is a market for the ashes of dead people, which were unclaimed. So these may be ashes from some homeless person, or elderly beggar, which no one had picked up. They were used for black magic of various kinds. He had a supplier from the Modera Cemetery. He sprinkled the ashes all over the little doll, and also anointed it in a certain kind of oil that had been taken from a kind of rare lizard. I don't ever support animal cruelty, so I would not have allowed him to do this for me. But he seemed to already have these items in stock. Finally the doll looked and smelt really bad and he put it in a jute bag, which he was going to chant over 108 times.

He had a lot of strange little bottles in a cupboard in his office room, and I saw behind a curtain, he had small bottles of all sizes and shapes, with beautiful lettering all over them in a different language. It looked a little like Aladins cave, but without any gold. 

He showed me a strange wooden box that was painted and dusty. He took it from a compartment in an old cupboard which had an old black padlock to it. 

Do you know what is in this?he said. It looked like it may contain an ola leaf manuscript. It had a small catch on it and with some difficulty he opened the lid. There was something strange lying there, and slightly smelly too like fish bacon. I thought it was some kind of long animal like a sea slug. Or a piece of dried meat, but not dried to be completely solid, it was more like bacon, and red and brown colored. It was about eight inches long. 

This is a pilluwa. He said 

I had thought that a pilluwa was a dead person or a mummified corpse brought to life to do what the exorcist said..., I looked at him with the quesitons in my eyes.

A  mahasohon pilluwa is obtained from a special kind of person. It is the child of a pair of dwarves, and the exorcist keeps an eye out in the village if such a pair are to get married. Their child usually dies early.  Do you know how much we have to suffer to get this? How rarely this happens? The kattadiya has to identify these people. Has to track them for years. Has to ensure that the body is not cremated but is buried. Has to prepare for weeks before the ritual. He should be a person strong in mind who does not get easily scared.

He must find a similar assistant who is also very tough and brave. The assistant will prepare the offerings. Four kinds of demons visit during this ritual and if either the kattadiya or his assistant baulks, or shows the least amount of fear, they will smite them and turn their minds to fever and they will end up in the lunatic asylum after that. 

The ritual has to be carried out in the jungle near the cemetery. At a certain time of the month when the moon is a certain level, the ritual has to be initiated. The corpse of that child has to be dug up and kept on the ground. The incantations have to go on for hours.

The first demon to come takes the harmless shape, of a hen with some small chickens. The assistant has to throw rice grains at this hen and they will eat it and go away. Then a huge cobra slithers up hissing. The Assistant must not be afraid of the cobra, the chanting must go on, and an egg is given to the cobra.

Just one egg..? I said taking this all in.

Yes one egg. Then in the middle of the night an elephant comes which is pretty scarey. Elephants are not nocturnal so you know that these are demons. The elephant too has red eyes and is drooling. He proceeds to ruin the whole locality, charging about and roaring. The kattadiyas have to stand their ground and when he seems tired, they have to throw a piece of banana plant for it to take. Then it carries that and goes away.

Finally, Mahasoha himself comes.  He is so hideous with his jaws open that that is all you see, his lower jaw scraping the earth, and his top jaw blocking the sky. Between them the entrance to hell. He spends a lot of time screaming and destroying the area, and then when he becomes quiet we have to give him a live chicken.

I didnt like that part of the story because Im dead against animal cruelty. But I guess most people didnt care. 

Finally when it is all over, we can animate the corpse and it sits up and tries to extend its tongue and lick the gurunanse. 

At that point he must take a sharp knife and cut the tongue off. The Pilluwa is the tongue which is taken and preserved. The rest of the corpse is simply reburied. 

Are you sure you want to do this?Nuzrat checked with me a couple of times as he was going through the rituals. They were taking a lot of time and he took breaks from work every couple of hours. 

I'm sure about it.

There is no turning back from what may happen. He warned

Also, I cannot be sure what will happen. It might be nothing much. It depends on the position of his stars too and these days they are fairly bad. In fact they are aligned towards an accident of some kind. But do you know this is an evil thing you are doing and also you are making me do this. We will both suffer. Do you understand that?

Nuzrat insisted that he would not take payment from me.

Because it has to be clear that I am doing this because you asked me, and because you are suffering some kind of injustice. I should not be benefiting from this evil. If I benefit from this, my life will be negatively affected some other way. I have a wife and family. I don't want there to be any bad effects on them. I am only doing this to help you because you said you were so desperate. 

And another thing. said Nuzrat...I want to tell you. I received a message last night while I was in a trance. It is information for you. Are you these days in a secret relationship with a married man you care about?

This caught my attention and I sat up and stared at him, in horror. 

I started thinking hard about what he was saying. How could anyone know about Saki and me and how could I answer this question? I didn't deny it.

Do you eat meals sent by someone? Someone is poisoning you, to make you both break up. To make you hate him.

graphic source https://lakpura.com/pages/devil-dance

The Little Witch of Modera

Chapter One 

CHUBS

What would drive a man to cut off his dead lover's head?  Its not easy. That is the thought running through my mind as I race to meet my writing deadline at the Weekend Financial Review.

I am frustrated.

"No, you cannot interview the wife, because she is just too tired to talk anymore," says my editor. I stare angrily at him down the phone. I can picture him running around the office with his sleeves rolled up and his collar awry. He has nice grey eyes. He does not take leave, even on his birthday or on Ramadan. He goes home at 2 am, after everyone else has left the evening shift.

How will I write my piece on the Midway Murder? All I can think about is this buff sexy ole cop dude who has now hung himself in the middle of the jungle.  He had annoyingly taken the mystery with him. A mystery that has this entire island talking.

"How do you know the wife didn't have something to do with this?" says my mango friend Faa, in the middle of feeding her cats, in a rather manky dressing gown. Through the WhatsApp video, I can see them plowing restlessly through her house, on her laundry, on her countertops, on her washing machine, in her armchairs, under her bed. There seem to be cats everywhere, but there were only four at the last count. I told her not to increase her population of animals, but I know the next time she sees a kitten or some geriatric dog she will feel sorry for it. A crow popped its head in at the window and cawed raucously for food. Faa has named it Rasta.

"How do you know- she must have got fed up with this old bugger messing around with the girl and she must have done something. Like a hooniyama," said Faa.

Hooniyama is the Sri Lankan word for Voodoo. There is a God in charge of this process, named the God in Charge of the Village. I'm surprised at her because Faa is a Muslim.

"What kind of hooniyama can you do?"

"Anu knows we should ask her, there are lots of things… that can be done" says Faa, evasively. I feel that she has already consulted Anu and is not ready to discuss it yet. Faa was creative in thinking up ways to discretely torture her husband when he annoyed her.

This is interesting. Why didn't I think of this before?

As a journalist and an ex-wife myself I can begin to imagine the drama behind this murder story. And feel enraged for us all, the dead man, the murdered other-woman and the grieving wife and children. No one plans these things they have a way of happening. Well, sometimes wives plan things. But we will come to that later. I need to finish my article. My petrol tank has corroded and Im without transport too, which is bad in the middle of a pandemic. I have to get through all of this without getting this damned virus and spreading it at home. 

My current husband keeps trying to be funny with me but I told him to stay one meter away. 

An advert at a local Kovila in Hanwella saying they do not do Mantras or Gurukan, which is another word for Hooniyam, but that they do other things. 

Flying fist, noble heart

An appreciation of Grand Master Hassan Khalid founder of Fei Quan Do International

 

It was with the greatest sorrow I heard of the sudden passing away of our beloved martial arts Master the Grandmaster Hassan Khalid founder of the Fei Quan Do international school of karate in Colombo. He passed away last Thursday at a ripe age of 72 with nary a warning of his departure and having lived life to the very fullest. A couple of days before his sudden passing he had been conducting training as usual at his Wellawatte class.
I remember him from years of attending his karate classes in Dematagoda and Wellawatte, after my quest for personal security and independence, brought me to train in karate. In the first place I had always been inspired by the 70s film Kung Fu featuring David Carradine which introduced me to the silent and noble beauty of the Shao Lin tradition. Grandmaster Khalid's philosophies were very similar too, with more of an emphasis on internal mastery, discipline and effort rather than of crushing enemies or giving the ego-free reign.  I remember the first day I went to his class and was terribly worried as to what to expect, but he called new students to the front and made them feel welcome and very at ease. I also remember a lot of humour bandied by long-suffering Master Khalid where he compared our earnest side kicking to the clumsy slow actions of dogs pissing on lamposts...this still has me giggling even now...

To be frank, I was hopelessly lazy and slow, not to mention uncoordinated, but Master Khalid was immensely patient with us matured ladies and gave everyone a chance. (Thankfully ladies were allowed to do the easier form of push-ups so that their knuckles would not get scarred etc.) He was very motivational, not only in training martial arts but expounding the deepest philosophies collected from a long and eventful life of travel around the world as a mariner, prior to his opening of the School of Karate. Sometimes his training was quite exhausting but took us to levels of strength, courage and discipline that we did not know ourselves capable of. His training was with the purpose of mentoring a fully rounded and balanced person. Along with his success as a trainer par excellence, he also balanced a wonderfully large family of eight children and always spoke lovingly of his wife's good qualities. His noble mindset was that he was not interested in accumulating money, but wanted only to do a good service to his students and to be a breadwinner to the last. So he kept the class fees very reasonable and would often waive the fees for less privileged students.

 

Master Khalid was a shining personality who always lived life to the fullest, training and inspiring thousands of students not only in karate but in the other aspects of how to live a good life and find happiness. He himself was the epitome of strength, decency, integrity, tolerance, liberality and so many good human qualities apart from being a fearless karate pro, deft with his fighting skills.

From him, I learned, no matter that I was in a society that intimidates a weak female that I can be self-confident and unafraid. I remember telling him at the time that I was probably one of the few women who had a chance to occasionally use some of the fighting tactics we learned when I had to administer some punishment to a pervert in a bus. However as always advised in karate, I did not go pushing for fights but have always used it more as a confidence booster which I sorely needed, as well as to actually avoid conflict. Personally, I think that every young girl should train in martial arts to give them the confidence and security to face this world, especially in the light of various recent happenings. Karate training is also one of the best work-outs you can have today, which is why Master Khalid was extremely fit and full of life until practically the last day. I know that he would certainly have loved what he did and been happiest as he was allowed to keep doing the work he loved till the last.

Though he is no more, we will continue to be touched by the magic, charm and vitality of his inspiring personality and we will always have our Grandmaster in our prayers. We are honoured and enriched to have been his students.