I often wonder why dust ‘settles’. Or why we expect it to ‘settle’. Is it because we forget? Is it because we stop caring? Is it because we are forced to move on by socio-political circumstances shaped by our leaders? This ‘settling’ unsettles me. 

I wish I could forget all my minute memories about the Easter Attacks that occurred on Sunday 21 April 2019. I woke up at 9 am, after a peaceful night’s sleep. Amma had mentioned the day before that she would be visiting St. Anthony’s Church in Kochchikade with my aunt. Although I did not understand the miraculousness accorded to the space, I understood her need to visit the church on a significant religious occasion such as Easter. While everyone else at home was fast asleep, Amma had gone to church. My phone was chiming with news alerts from a local news service. St. Anthony’s Church had been bombed – ten years after majoritarian politics in the country had convinced us that constant terrorist attacks were finally ‘over’ following the three-decade long battle with the LTTE was overcome by the government. The Civil War that continued until 2009 was fueled by continuous policies of discrimination against the Tamil minority by the Sinhala majority-led government. By 2019, we had not forgotten its atrocities but had been forced forward with promises of peace and reconciliation. When I frantically called Amma on the day of the Easter Attacks, she answered the phone. For more than ten seconds, all I could hear was the loud rumble and tumble of a road crowded with agitated pedestrians and fearful passenger cars. I had almost hung up when she finally said, ‘I am okay. I was too tired to go to Kochchikade so early in the morning, so I just went to the local church. But they say there is a bomb here, too. I’m in a tuk-tuk and will be home in five minutes.’

The Easter Attacks were a reminder that terrorism had, in fact, not left the country, nor had racial discrimination. A series of suicide bombings occurred over a single morning at three churches and three luxury hotels. A few months later, it was found that the attacks were led by a militant Islamic terrorist group, National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ). This was the second time a local, religion-centered terrorist group had shocked the entire country, reminding us of the racist undertones pervading our governing structures as well as day-to-day interactions between citizens. 

The rest of that Sunday is a blur, but my sister heard that her friend was missing. She had been waiting tables during the Easter Breakfast at the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo, which was attacked soon after St. Anthony’s Church. After more than 24 hours of searching for any news, there was no news. Her father and a family member finally decided to visit the mortuary – only to find her deeply injured, unrecognisable corpse. There were multiple funeral processions at the Borella cemetery in Colombo on 24 March 2019, at the same time my sister’s friend was buried. 

I remember watching the funerals around me, even though my presence was only required at one of them. The dust at these processions was not the usual kind that ‘settles’ on furniture. It was the dust of ashes, vapours, and the blinding fog of funeral pyres. This dust could not wait until weekly cleaning day. It could not and would not ‘settle’. It would continuously enter the thin air in Colombo for weeks and weeks as the deaths continued. 

Two years after the Easter Attacks, as I write this seated at a local café facing the Independence Square in Colombo, I am forced to think about what dust ‘settling’ means to me, as a Sri Lankan. The Independence Square monument signifies the end of colonial rule in 1948 – a free state of free beings regardless of ‘race, religion, language, caste, sex, political opinion, place of birth’, as Article 12 of the Constitution of Sri Lanka states. The Easter Attacks in 2019 jolted my conscience into a state of confusion about suffering, which has prevailed for most of my life as a result of direct violations of Article 12. Soon after the Easter Attacks, my Christian friends were in mourning, my Muslim friends were in hiding, and my Tamil friends were watching from a distance concerned about being accused of wrongdoing once again. The past five decades have now become an ultimate manifestation of suffering that we cannot remove from our memory. 

I had been rarely directly affected by suffering, as a member of the second generation of the Sinhala Buddhist majority born after British rule. The years of violence my parents’ and grandparents’ generations experienced as a result of the Civil War and prolonged colonial rule before that were still unfamiliar, yet suddenly so familiar. As I stare at the monument that celebrates Sri Lanka’s ‘independence’, I know I will carry the burden of the memories of the generations before me about the darkest chapters of the Civil War as well as my own memories of the war and the Easter Attacks. I know it is not an easy burden to carry. Such collective burden, almost like dust, would never go away or ‘settle’. I also know that many of us feel like we cannot let the dust ‘settle’, because we receive zero transparency from our political leaders about the actualities of the Civil War as well as the Easter Attacks. 

Zadie Smith, in Intimations (2020), refers to how suffering is ‘absolute’, as opposed to privilege, which is always ‘relative’. What is absolute does not discriminate. While the absoluteness of death is abundantly clear, the absoluteness of suffering takes a while for one to come into terms with. The Civil War and the Easter Attacks are just two instances that make me wonder about suffering and its absoluteness. The generational burden of these two events embodies suffering. This dust will not ‘settle’, even though the ashes of those who died as a result may have already disappeared into thin air. We spend a lot of time trying to decipher how to live happily, devoid of burdens. We try to avoid suffering at any cost. The large number of immigrants who left Sri Lanka during the war is testimony to this. Despite such efforts, suffering does not end, and it never favours any communities or genders or political agendas or ethnic or religious markers. The more I think about it, the more I feel that the dust of Sri Lanka’s recent history will never ‘settle’. Perhaps the generations after me will continue to experience the burden of this dust. We may move forward, but this burden will not quieten. It will chime on and off, reminding us of inequalities, inequities, frustrations, and difficulties of the decades of collective suffering we have gone through.