April Reflections

 

Today, two musings on two unrelated topics, because reflections don’t have to be connected.

Musings on Friendships: On a zoom session recently, one woman who I am only just getting to know, was singled out as being good at maintaining long-standing friendships over decades. It takes effort and intention to maintain friendships, as in other relationships.

All too often, our friendships are what we will get to ‘when we have time’. We may bring our left-over selves to our friendships, after family, work, errands and other social commitments. Sometimes, the friendship pays the price, withering away to nothing. There doesn’t need to be a big blow-up, just a slow fading, perhaps as one friend backs away, realizing their effort is not reciprocated, wondering if the friendship doesn’t matter to the other as much as they thought it did.

But in our later years, we learn to value the true worth of these relationships. Because a spouse or partner or child can never be quite the same as a friend. What if we consistently brought our whole selves and not our left-over selves to the friendships we value?

Thinking About What I am Reading: Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan, a novel set during the Sri Lankan civil war which spanned decades, from 1983 to 2009. The story centers around one Tamil family living in Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka (across from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu), and is told by the female protagonist, Sashi, who is the sister of four brothers.

I listened to a podcast where the author was interviewed about this book, which took her twenty years to write. Because she is part of the Tamil diaspora and didn’t live in Jaffna (she has family from there), she knew she might be criticized for not having enough authority to write the book. To counter that, she talked to many people who were there, because this is recent history, and those people are alive today.

I’m reading the book slowly, and while reading also googling facts about the Sri Lanka civil war. Although I was aware of the war taking place, I did not, at the time, concern myself with a lot of the details. However, during that time (it might have been in the late 90’s), I was working (here in Canada) with a young Tamil man. And then, suddenly one day, he stopped showing up for work, and shortly after, my other co-worker and I began receiving numerous propaganda-type emails from his personal email address about the Tamil Tigers (the LTTE, the militant separatist group fighting for an independent homeland for the Tamils in Sri Lanka). We didn’t know what to make of it, and being young, we paid little attention to the details of the war raging so far away.

But this book, and Sashi’s brothers and friends who kept disappearing from the village, brought back not only the memory of that young man who disappeared from our office, but also the realization how war is never just black and white, never just good versus evil, never only the one narrative we hear. Because we never truly know how the everyday lives of people are forever changed and often erased.

In the book, Sashi often addresses the reader – you – to try and give an explanation the reader might be looking for, because we may have been fed a different narrative not only about that war, but any conflict or situation where a difficult decision must be made.

“You are thinking, as anyone would, as everyone has, at least in passing, about what you would have done. If I were in his shoes, I would never, you might have said to yourself; or perhaps you are sure you would have done exactly the same. There is no way to know truly, without standing where we did.”

It’s a sentiment that we are aware of, have heard often enough, yet easily forget: there really is no way to take the moral high ground if we have not stood amidst the turmoil.