Red Go the Ironwood Trees

The leaves on the ironwood trees blush. The national tree of Sri Lanka seems to bleed in solidarity with its people. The leaves, withered and wrinkled like the back of an old man's hand, look like splashes of gore on the ground when they eventually shrivel up and fall. It's mango season, too. The tops of trees are full of still green, unripe fruit, far out of reach of the man on the bicycle with two broomsticks and a wire coat hangar all fashioned together into a long pole to pluck the fruit from the branches he can't reach by hand. A falling mango will make the occasional thump in the road. Bats favor them, too, and the pits litter the street, orange pulp clinging to what's left of the seed making a tasty treat for crows. 

The birds don't seem to commiserate the way the trees do. As during the pandemic, they are oblivious to the grim state of human affairs. They fly high above it, wake the same time every morning, greeting the rising sun with song. Their nonchalance and insouciance is a reminder that as dire as things seem, life goes on. Just as it did during the pandemic. Perhaps, then, this, too, shall pass. 

Two men standing in line for petrol swoon, pass out, and die, overwhelmed by the heat. The queues have grown testy, and there is at least one reputable report of a man stabbing another waiting for gas. Lorries and busses loiter for kilometers at gas stations. As of yesterday, there was no diesel at all. Anywhere. On the entire island. Don't even bother waiting, the authorities would caution. The well is dry. There should be some relief soon. At least on the fuel side. A loan from India will pay for a tanker parked offshore. We're just waiting for our ship to come in. Literally. The oil tanker will dock, and we will suck it dry like a litter of puppies scrambling at its mother's teets. A fleet of gas trucks will deploy from Colombo to points all across the island, slowly, one by one refilling every gas station in the country. The process will take time, and the gas won't last forever. A billion dollars of petrol and diesel will last a few weeks. Maybe a month. Then, we are right back where we started. No long-term solution in sight. 

A crowd gathered outside the president's house and drew the ire of tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets. They were eventually repulsed but not before setting an army bus ablaze. This is the second such demonstration in as many weeks, and signs point to things getting worse before they get better. A larger march is planned for tomorrow morning, despite the president declaring a national emergency and the government instituting nightly curfews.

At the grocery store, the entire shelf where the milk should have been was taken over by boxed coffee, as though we wouldn't notice and pour coffee over our corn flakes and put coffee in our coffee. 

We've bounced from birthday parties to teen pool parties to horseback riding, navigating neighborhoods plunged in darkness under the cover of the night, trying our best to maintain some semblance of normalcy while keeping a close eye on the needle on the fuel gauge and our own stock of UHT milk. We are better off than almost everyone else, an entire land exhausted, unable to sleep at night because it's too hot and the power cuts keep the fan from coming on, stumbling through their days after having been up all night. 

The kids had a short week due to parent-teacher conferences (here, three-way conferences because the student participates, too), still on Zoom. You can see the exhaustion rimming the teachers' eyes. Most of them live further outside of central Colombo where power cuts are more frequent and last longer. Most of their homes don't have generators. We didn't glean much from the conferences on academics, but we did learn Clementine has been assisting a student who only returned to in-person learning last month reacclimate to the classroom, Sam is quote-unquote, "The glue that holds the classroom together," and Peter has been asserting himself more in Language and Literature (L&L). So, at least the kids are all right.