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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
Grief and Memory in Sri Lanka | The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended
In Sri Lanka, grief is as public as traffic lights, but does it help to believe in impossible things?
The light is very pale, mere whiffs of blue in a transparent, barely sapphire sky, and I sit on the edge of my high veranda, watching the valleys beyond stir. It is almost 6 am.
My mind is as near-perfectly blank as any mind can be that has stirred from a dreamless sleep.
No cars, no man-made sounds, no man-made anything, in fact, impinges on my reality except the building I sit within.
Beyond me, in a treasury of trees, I picture a Sri Lankan Adam and Eve getting ready somewhere else, to arrive here later and cause all the trouble newlyweds like to.
The day, at least right now, is mine alone to plan.
It is so different from how it was just 10 hours ago, when the electricity failed at 8 pm.
Power cuts in Sri Lanka are as familiar here as the engaged tone you hear when you call any call centre in any country in the world.
Suddenly, nothing works. In the darkness, you reach for the phones you forgot to charge earlier, then turn to the candle and matches you misplaced last time. The air conditioners stop; even the fastidious aromatherapy humidifier is disabled.
But the consequences are manageable. For a time, even gift-giving.
The sounds of the night emerge more clearly. The night porcupine eating my shrubs. An owl. A nightjar. The hum and moan of nameless millions of industrious insects. Fireflies illuminating a tiny space with an eerie green light. A solitary frog. A distant dog barking – or perhaps a deer. Something that looks like a civet or a fishing car leaping from a coconut. And from far off, the stampede of the bashful family of wild boar that like to roam the estate when we, the disruptors, are asleep. Or meant to be.
Were I on the street, in a hospital, at a party, or giving my all at the karaoke in Kandy's Slightly Chilled Rooftop bar, it would all feel very different. Not at all gift-giving.
When the government collapsed back in 2022, and fuel and foreign exchange reserves ran dry, power outages lasted up to 13 hours a day.
Now they average 10 to 30 flickers daily, and long before the power cuts back in, that ceaseless wonder of life here in the jungle, the generator, that divine descendant of the Industrial Revolution, kicks in and restores all that seemed lost.
But in the brief moment when everything stops, you are reminded just how very fragile life can be.
Fatalistically, you realise that, without electricity, our whole world would break down. And in so doing, make the metaphor clear – for the power cut is a metaphor for death.
“The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” wrote John Ellerton in his great Anglican hymn back in 1870 –
“the darkness falls at Thy behest;
to Thee our morning hymns ascended;
Thy praise shall hallow now our rest.
We thank Thee that Thy church, unsleeping
while earth rolls onward into light,
through all the world her watch is keeping,
and rests not now by day or night.
As o'er each continent and island
the dawn leads on another day,
the voice of prayer is never silent,
nor die the strains of praise away.
So be it, Lord; Thy throne shall never,
like earth's proud empires, pass away.
Thy kingdom stands, and grows forever,
till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.”
Ellerton, deeply moved by life's terrible impermanence, let alone that of empires, clung to the hope that God and life endure despite the endless mortal interruptions of the day-to-day.
Even as he wrote his hymn, Ellerton found unexpected solace and support from distant Rome, where, in the very same year, 1870, Pope Pius IX officially proclaimed, as Roman Catholic dogma, that the pope was infallible.
In a Vatican Council vote that went Pius’ way, 533 to 2, the bishop of Rome became the Eternal Shepherd.
For him and his church, the day the Lord gave may be busy ending here, there, and everywhere, but not for Catholic believers, protected by a kingdom that stands and grows forever.
Eternal darkness can never blight believers. For these, the lucky ones, the electricity will always flow. The lights will always come back on. They are at one with those pundits and latter-day messiahs of solar, wind, and wave power who tell us that a total and permanent breakdown in power can never happen now, in our modern and always improving world.
But I am with Alice on this one, for she wisely told the White Queen in Wonderland, "One can't believe impossible things."
The Queen, who clearly had decades of practice in the ways of civil servants and flatterers, memorably called Alice up short and sharp.
"When I was your age,” said the Queen, “I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Alice very sensibly believed that believing in impossible things was simply impossible, - though whether this extended to the most impossible thing is something Lewis Caroll never got round to confirming.
But no matter. Ellerton and Pius IX were already on to it – though their faith in the generality of eternity is of little comfort to the multitudes who, like me, live in a world in which religion has failed. The alternative is either shopping, or, even more impossible, figuring it all out for yourself.
This is no easy task, for the small things, the things that move you or me, cannot be known forever. Within the closest of families, within two or three generations, all memory of what has passed will be gone.
“Don’t cry, wrote the great Sri Lankan poet Anne Ranasinghe, “Because the pot is broken / It had long been cracked.” Ranasinghe, a Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Germany shortly after witnessing Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, made a life for herself in Sri Lanka from 1949. Her home was just a few doors down from that of the Bandaranaike family, whose husband-and-wife duo, Solomon Bandaranaike and later Sirimavo Bandaranaike, enacted the anti-Tamil laws that helped prompt a civil war that disabled Sri Lanka for decades.
Rarely have so much grief been inflicted on so many by so few people. “Grief,” noted S.J. Sindu, in her remarkable novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, "is an impossible meal, so we cut it up into little pieces, dress it in ritual, and take it like a pill."
Sindu’s 2017 novel tells the story of Lucky and Kris, whose parents immigrated from Sri Lanka, and who marry to stay in the closet. But the closet is not all bad; it is too little frequented and enjoyed. Not so grief. Grief in Sri Lanka is never in the closet even if, as Ashok Ferrey felt, it was a “dish best eaten alone, in a cold room.”
For most people in Sri Lanka, grief is the most public of activities.
Buddhists, of course, see death not as an end but as the start of a new form of existence.
But it is not one that goes unacknowledged.
For several days, the body of the just departed is kept at home, visible to all in an open casket as scores, hundreds even, of mourners come to pay their respects, all dressed in white. White flags fly at the entrance of the home, and the grieving family, with no time to grieve, is kept busy pouring hot tea and handing out biscuits.
Around the body, monks recite their mournful prayers and occupy themselves with rituals as white cloths are offered to indicate the detachment of worldly possessions; as water is poured to assist the transfer of karmic merit so that the just-departed may have a better chance of reaching a nobler realm than the one so recently vacated.
When Latha Walpola, the “Nightingale of Sri Lanka", died in 2025 after a career that chalked up nearly 700 songs and 600 films, Independence Square was mobbed as hundreds of thousands of mourners came to pay their respects, including the President, Prime Minister, and so many other politicians that no parliament could ever claim to have been better attended.
Not that her cremation would have brought much rest to her family. After a typical cremation, everyone comes together again for an Alms-Giving ceremony, repeated 3 months later and then 12 months later.
The monks do rather well in all this; their prayers being rewarded by gifts of food and more useful practical essentials
Tamil Hindu rituals take even longer; their ceremonies often last up to 16 days. Only the island’s Muslims and Christians get on with matters at speed, the Muslims burying the dead within 24 hours and the Christians well within a week.
The life of the dead may be placed in the memory of the living, but even for Latha Walpola and her extraordinary creative output, forgetfulness will gradually descend like a Fog of Forgetfulness until eventually, as Shehan Karunatilaka put it, “Nothing is forgotten. We don’t remember where we put it.”
We expect answers to all this, and of course, the lucky believers aside, there are no answers. The big stuff looms over us like the shadow of a great cliff.
We can escape much of these awkward questions in the West for there death is shunted away like false bottom drawers in marvellous beautiful desks; in hospices and discreet funeral parlours. They are never places where Gloria Gaynor could go and sing out loud: “I Am What I Am.”
In Sri Lanka, you are constantly reminded that the very opposite is true. It is unavoidable. Here you open up your closet as it were and, lying there so calmly and fatally composed, sing out loud like Gloria: “Life's not worth a dam till you can shout out, I am what I am.”
There is a compelling virtue in this, an aid memoire, a post-it note on your over-busy brain:
"Memento mori," whispered the mandatory slave in the ear of whichever victorious Roman General was enjoying his public triumph in his four-horse chariot. "Remember you must die". And that, like nothing else, helps you plot and plan your day-to-day regardless of any interrupting power cuts. It spurs you on, a mindful thorn you would be foolish to remove from the sole of your foot.