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