Tears and heartbreak of terrorism's victims
This is the picture that tells it all. The heartbreak, the grief and the tears of a widowed mother and a fatherless daughter upon hearing the news that the family breadwinner had been shot dead by a terrorist gun. The day the sun died. When the lights went out. And the earth stood still.
But even as Vijayakala hugs her daughter to comfort her in shared tragedy on that fateful day when her husband's body was brought home to lie lifeless in death, it was also a scene being enacted in hundreds of homes in the country.
In the South the Sinhala widows wailed as their soldier husbands came coffined home. In the north, Tamil mothers grieved to see their sons who had answered Prabhakaran’s call to take arms come home late at night dead.
Death was the great equaliser and death knew no divide: no north, no south, no east no west. The grief, like blood, was common to all -- like the tears that flowed down every cheek had their spring from every grieving heart and was the moving flood that stained every epitaph -- and knew no creed or caste or race but only sorrow only the bereaved can feel and know. And tear.
But if this was the scene at Gregory’s Road after Vijayakala’s 42-year-old husband was shot dead by a Tamil terrorist assassin at a Hindu kovil while at prayer on January 1st 2008, the same grief, the same heartbreak was being experienced in countless homes throughout the country, except that no photographer’s bulb flashed as it did in a Colombo 7 mansion to capture the moment of utmost woe simultaneously taking place in a humble hamlet.
Vijayakala has known what it means to lose her husband due to terrorism. What a tragedy that, despite it all, she still wants for terror and the inevitable grief that accompanies it to visit her people again in the North. And make more women widows and their children fatherless in the North whilst she lives it up, living her life to the full in Colombo 7 enjoying the proceeds of her late husband’s shipping business whilst her sistering remain doomed to poverty and struggler to eke out a living.