Photography by Diron J

Content warning: depictions of state violence.

The surge from the water cannon catches me square on the shoulder and I whirl around to regain my footing. The crowd is scattering fast. The sopping rubber of my slippers slaps the soles of my feet. Bony fingers grip my arm. Through the crush, I see they belong to a man who looks to be in his seventies. He tries to run while shaking off his broken slipper. I pry off his fingers and swing his arm onto my shoulder, gripping his waist to support his weight. We shuffle as fast as I can manage towards Galle Face Green where the protesters have set up camp. When we catch sight of the tents on the Green, he pats my shoulder and mutters in Tamil, “God’s with you”. My Colombo primary school education hasn’t equipped me with a response. As he hobbles off into the crowd, one broken slipper still lassoing his ankle, the feeling throbs through every bone in my body.

The ocean breeze can’t reach me through the throng, but if I drag myself to the parapet it might. I can see the familiar curly head of my neighbour Dantha towering over the rest. He’s standing on the rock parapet with a few others, craning his neck to look at someone’s phone screen. When Dantha spots me in the crowd he reaches his hand out and pulls me up to stand beside him. “Look at this,” he says, thrusting the phone in my direction. Through the spiderweb of cracks on the screen I can see an article by Vice News. Accompanying it is a photograph from the protest site that shows a bus on fire. Three figures dance in the foreground of the image as if the vehicle is a ritual sacrifice. My breath hisses out in one long thread. After weeks of peaceful protests and a flourishing protest site that takes care of the community, this is how the international media chooses to display it. Someone takes the phone from my slackened grip. They begin whispering urgently and my mind slips away. Today, my father will use what little petrol is left in our car to try his luck in a petrol queue. The cooking gas is running low, so my mother will need to manage with the hotplate. My younger sister is studying for her exams—if they don’t get postponed, again. I hope she remembered to charge the torches and lamps before the twelve-hour power cut. The pandemic was, in my mother’s words, “Enough drama to last me all my lifetimes.” An economic crisis two years later meant that in the third year of my four-year university degree, I still couldn’t tell you anything about my campus. My sister was almost twenty and she was still trying to finish her high school exams.

A persistent clicking burrows through my reverie. I turn and I’m confronted by the bug eye of a camera lens winking at me. I try to swat it away but before I get the chance the lens lowers. I see who’s holding it, and my heart catches in my throat. Her fingers flutter around her camera. Wisps of hair run free of her loose bun and dance around her face in the ocean breeze. She holds my gaze and nods grimly like we are soldiers crossing paths before heading out to battle. I close my lips instinctively to stop my heart from shooting out of my throat and falling at her feet. Every drop of water on my skin is a molten nail of embarrassment. I feel her rifling through my mind, testing the heat on my mother’s hotplate, flipping on the switches my sister forgot, reminding my father to hydrate through the long hours in the queue. Her gaze doesn’t dip away but slides horizontally as she continues to inhabit all of time and space. Whatever her gaze alights on is hers and I wish it would stay on me forever.

***

I keep an eye out for her. One day she’s talking to a pregnant mother at the protest line, the next she’s at the main tent recording food donations, and the day after that she’s helping some kids translate their protest slogans. She wraps herself in each encounter like it’s a warm towel after a cold shower. She’s unhurried, present, and needed wherever she goes. On the fourth day, I’m making myself a tear gas mask when I hear the click of her camera over my shoulder. I can’t let the opportunity pass. When I offer her the mask, she accepts it readily and gives me a smile. The timing is serendipitous. An hour has barely scraped by when a tear gas canister comes flying through the air and lands at my toes. Thanks to the Hong Kong protesters, we know the drill. I clap the traffic cone down over the canister and pour the contents of my plastic water bottle through the hole on top. The water puts out the charge that creates the gas, rendering it useless. I don’t have to strain my ears to hear the clicks; I know she captures all of it. I look at her and see that she’s still wearing my mask. Then more canisters clang to the ground. Smoke takes over my vision and I can’t breathe.

Recovering from tear gas is often worse than experiencing it. A group of us are sitting on the grass, pouring water over our faces and waiting for the stinging to subside when Dantha approaches. The front of his t-shirt is soaked, clinging to his wiry frame while rivulets run down his face. “Did you hear? Apparently, the tear gas they’re using on us expired twenty years ago!” I hear this story almost daily, and five years pass by every time. Dantha is the latest casualty in this twisted telephone game.

“It expired five years ago!”

“No, ten!”

“It’s fifteen! My uncle works at the Inspector General’s office and he told me.”

The numbers don’t change the stinging in my eyes, or the fact that people all the way in Colpetty are feeling the residual effects of the gas as it’s carried across the winds from Galle Face.

We need more water. I pull myself to my feet and shudder over to the tap, still blinking to free my eyes from the haze. Hunched in front of the tap, I only look up when a crisp voice says, “You’re missing the tap entirely.” Even through my streaming eyes I can see the bug eye trained on me.

“Did you know the tear gas they’re using on us expired twenty-five years ago?” I say lurching to my feet, water bottle limp at my side.

“Really?” Her voice rises in what could be excitement in any other context. I see the bug eye move up to where her face must be. “That has to be illegal.”

“Yeah,” I laugh, “but when has that ever stopped a Sri Lankan government?” The tears in my eyes are from laughter now and it helps the stinging subside. “I’m sure they’re really concerned about our health and safety while they’re shooting tear gas and rubber bullets at us.”

“That’s a lot to take on,” she says, her voice sombre. “You should take a break, at least for the sake of your eyes.”

“A break to do what?” I ask, my chest still heaving.

“To rest and recharge,” she answers. Her brow is furrowed and her eyes are clear. I notice now that she wears a thin gold chain around her neck and her eyes are outlined in black. The fingers wrapped around her camera have a pink sheen on the nails. There it is again: the molten lava of embarrassment pouring down my spine.

“A power cut isn’t enough for you? Do you also want a water cut?” Dantha’s voice slices through the silence between us and he materialises by the tap, screwing it shut. When I look back up, she’s melted into the crowd. I crouch and shoulder Dantha out of the way before undoing his work and letting the water gush out again.

Later, I feel bad for lashing out at him, so I give him the fish bun I procured from the food tent on our walk home.

***

That night, while my mother fusses over the hallway shrine in the lamplight, she tells me that my father spent eight hours in the queue, but the petrol ran out when he was just three cars away from the pump. I’ll have to walk up and try my luck in the morning. The Buddha smiles at us serenely from his shrine, the sliver of his eyes cast demurely at the ground.

I get to the petrol station in good time to snag a spot where I can see the pumps. I’m sandwiched between a middle-aged man sweating profusely in the Saturday morning sun and an old woman perched on her foot-tall metal drum. I settle into what’s going to be at least a three-hour wait until the bowser arrives and let my gaze idle at the supermarket across the street. The car park is empty, and the security guard is dozing in his plastic chair, his hat pulled forward to shield his eyes from the sun. When a van pulls into the car park, heckling the peace of the morning, he pushes his hat up. The van door, facing the petrol station, swoops open and three people spill out. They turn towards the supermarket, calling out to the rest of their group. I don’t recognise her immediately. Sunglasses perch on her head, teasing her dark hair away from her face. The knots of a swimsuit peek out from under her pale blue t-shirt. The three bug eyes of an iPhone stare out from the pocket of her rolled-up denim shorts. She disappears through the supermarket doors.

The petrol queue isn’t moving. I fix my gaze on my two empty fifteen-litre bottles on the dusty pavement and feel beads of sweat roll into my eye. I want to leave before she sees me, but I can’t leave my place in the queue. The minutes stretch out and the supermarket doors open. Her hands are weighed down by plastic bags while her friends cradle a cardboard box with bottle necks sticking out the top. If I move my feet, the thick roots they’ve sprouted will pull the pavement out with them. She swings both arms, depositing the bags on the floor of the van. With one fluid movement she’s inside, facing the open door. She grabs the doorhandle and just as she’s about to sweep it shut, someone makes a joke. She grins and looks up, and our gazes catch across the street. Her grin dissolves. I sweep the sweat off my eyebrows with one hand and let it hover in the air. Before I can decide to wave, her gaze dips and the door closes. My hand is still suspended midair when the van disappears around the corner.

***

My stomach plunges at the thought of seeing her at Galle Face, but on Monday evening she appears. Her dragonfly gaze skims over my face and darts away. She steps up to the parapet to stand beside me. The lapping ocean waves roar in my ears. “I saw you that day,” she says. I agree; I saw her too. She opens her lips, and they seem to be forming words before she purses them. Her camera isn’t hanging from its customary position around her neck. Her hands flutter, grasping at nothing, the pink sheen of her nails peeling from the tips.

“Were you heading to the South Coast?” I ask.

Her eyes flash and she holds my gaze for the first time. Squaring her jaw she says, “Yes, I was.” She looks towards the frontlines where a chant has picked up. I follow her gaze. Flags dance in the breeze, smoke rises from the tent where hot tea is being doled out. “Live without electricity for a month and everyone takes to the street,” she says. “When the government treats minorities like second-class citizens every day, there’s no outrage.”

“I’m here,” I hear myself say. “I’m here every single day. I have nowhere else to go.”

“Yes,” she says. “That’s important. But you’re here for yourself.”

“I’m here for everyone. I have to be here. I don’t have my life,” I say, my voice pitching up. “You don’t need to be here.”

“No, I don’t need to be. Maybe that makes it easier. Maybe that’s why you look at me differently now.”

“It’s okay for it to be easier,” but even as I say the words, I don’t think I mean them. I try again, “I mean, it’s good that you’re choosing to be here—” my phone buzzes with an unknown number “—I need to…”

“You should,” she finishes, and before I can say anything else, she steps lightly down from the parapet and sets off across the Green.

I answer the call and Dantha’s voice blares through the other line. “We’re taking over the television network offices!”

“Who is?” I splutter.

“I am.”

“You’ll be arrested for sure,” I say. “I’ll come with you.”

“No, you’re not my lawyer—yet”, he says. “I need you to go home and tell my mother the church is getting a bread delivery tomorrow, so she can stop stressing everyone out.”

“That could be a text message,” I say.

“She’ll be less worried if you tell her,” he says. “We all have our roles to play.” Someone calls for Dantha in the background and he cuts the line.

I’m standing alone on the parapet. The smoke is still rising from the tent, and the chants have multiplied. One call from the north of the Green, another from the south. The back of my neck prickles as the waves gather strength with each lap against the parapet.