A rendezvous with a secretary

The Independence Square which now subsumes the Race Course precincts is an absolute joy. I get high on the jogging track and dote on children paddling their green-coloured rented bicycles, long after the sundown. The once aging city is expressly on a comeback and Colombo is a paragon of what one man can do.

I bumped into that efficacious mortal on the jogging track he built. I apologised prodigiously helping him back on his feet but the amiable Defence Secretary said no apology was needed and he was happy to see young and old enjoying the beauty and splendour of the new Colombo.

Here’s the man in whose hands ideas take wing. I wasn’t about to let him jog away in a hurry as few ideas of mine too begged to be freed from their bondage. He listened intently about a Mass Transit Cable Car Network bridging high-rises from Battaramulla to Fort and Fort to Mt. Lavinia; nodded perceptively to a History Walk of Milestones at Independence Square. He tripped anew at the idea of a Sky Walk at World’s End. I had to console a heap of other ideas promising them that their liberator would now call me up for a meeting. As Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the warrior, the builder and the man disappeared into the night, I walked into Race Course Pavilion’s spanking new shopping and restaurant arcade but not before signing in at its comely washroom. Talking of toilets, here’s one you didn’t know.

The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has 284 washrooms, twice as many as is necessary. Built in the 1940s, it had to conform to the state of Virginia’s segregation laws requiring separate toilets for blacks and whites. Since Navi Pillai doesn’t visit, the toilets at the Pentagon are now only used to flush out civilian casualty figures in Iraq and Pakistan; you won’t hear of any resolutions against the US, folks. Just ask former British Deputy Premier Lord Prescott if he thinks one million civilians killed in an ‘unjustified’ allied war in Iraq amounts to war crimes!

It has been a while since I went to the movies; so the opening night of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ kicked up happy hormones. The film was shot in 16 locations in Sri Lanka and the audience included the local cast. For most children in the audience it was their first glimpse of a woman’s mammilla since they were last breast-fed and in a kooky way, this particular scene was a first for the grown-ups as well.

In a goofus portrayal of pietistic conservatism; an aristocratic father sends for a young physician. He is blown away at the sight of two maids standing on chairs holding a cloth screen over the young female patient. The father says she was suffering from stomach pains. The mystified doctor’s prying eyes are drawn to a circular opening in the middle with an elongation of about a foot. As the camera moves to a close up the audience sees the woman lifting her blouse revealing her belly. In the next couple of scenes the befuddled physician returns. This time the colleen is inflicted with chest pains. The third visit is to treat a headache and for the first time the doc and patient make eye contact; only to fall in love. Ever heard of a man falling head over heels over a stomach and move his way up?

My 12-year-old son wants to be an actor. He, of course, got the inkling long before this scene. As someone once said, how many men would get to examine a woman’s breasts to have her husband pay him for it?

It’s never too late to start anew. I think I’ll go to medical school.

(Dinesh Watawana is a former foreign correspondent and military analyst. He is a brand consultant and heads The 7th Frontier, an integrated communications agency which masterminded the globally-acclaimed eco tourism hotspot KumbukRiver. Email him at [email protected].)