Protest diaries V

9th July 2022 Endgame

A strange and amazing day. I wake up thinking it will be ‘curfew’ today — the so called ‘police’ curfew declared the night before to stop people protesting. Curfew has been lifted, but the streets outside are still quiet.

Some friends are walking to from Mount Lavinia to the main Gotagogama protest site, and I want to join them, but have no idea how to get there. There has been a severe fuel shortage for the past few months and it’s hard to find transport. I walk down to Kirulapona town. As I approach the town, I see some vehicles passing on the main road ahead. A Sri Lankan flag waving, men leaning out of open trucks, cheering. For a moment this reminds me of 2009, and how people got on the roads when the war ended. But then the cheers were for the Rajapaksas.

The town feels like it’s a festival day, there is a celebratory air. More vehicles pass, motor cycles, cars, trucks, all carrying Sri Lankan flags. A group of women are standing near the police station with placards shouting ‘Aragalaya jayawewa’. The army soldier stationed across the road watches.

I wonder if I can get a bus, but all the buses are insanely crowded. So I walk. There is a steady stream of people walking towards Gotagogama. I don’t know them but it’s easy enough to fall in step with them. It’s a mixed crowd, young boys and girls in black jeans and T shirts, older people, even a couple carrying a toddler. Other people standing outside their houses wave, a woman holds a tray with plastic cups filled with drinks. On Flower road we pass a huge crowd of riot police with shield and batons, they stare at us, the protestors stare back, and one boy shouts half laughing. “Aiye Gahanna epa”, “Don’t hit us”. Nothing happens but I am relieved when we are past. They have shields, batons and guns, we have nothing.

Gotagogama is packed to the brim. As we approach the crowd gets more and more dense. There are crowds of people seated on the ground outside One Galle face mall. . I join them for a moment, my legs are threatening to give up. The girl and boy seated next to me have lost a friend in the crowd and are trying desperately to call him. I check my phone, there is no coverage.

I try to get near the main protest site in front of the presidential secretariat but there are so many people getting near involves near suffocation. There is the sound of chanting and drums, It feels like a huge carnival cum protest site. It reminds me of how things felt before the attacks on May 9th, and it makes me happy that this enthusiasm hasn’t been lost. I sit for a while on the wall looking out over the beach. A family is seated in front of me — father, mother and teenaged son. They look so normal, as if this was some kind of regular outing to the beach.

When I leave at around four thirty in the evening, there are people still coming in. An enormous crowd is outside Temple Trees, the Prime Minister’s official residence — cheering. The only place open is a food city and I’m now so hungry I go in and buy ice cream and eat it seated on the ground outside. It’s the kind of day where this seems normal.

The walk home is tiring but I can’t complain, all around me are protesters walking home, young people, old people, all walking — how far I don’t know. A car stops and offers a lift to a group, they are walking all the way to Dehiwala. A woman in front of me stops and tells her companion ‘Dennay amarui akkey” “I’m finding it difficult now’. She is laughing but also serious.

Later in the night I watch news and see visuals of the President’s house being opened to protestors and the Prime Minister’s house being burnt. Those are the pictures that will go around the world. But revolutions happen in quiet moments, moments that are often missed by the world because there is nothing sensational to report. What has been happening in the past few months happened not through violence but because of the sheer numbers of people involved. There isn’t a single faction organising it, which is amazing and also frightening. It makes it a huge force but also makes the future uncertain. But walking home from Gotagogama, with so many people on the road around me, knowing these people have walked far to get to the protest knowing that they will be going back to homes with power cuts, no fuel, and tomorrow they will wake up again to the struggle of staying alive — seeing how good humoured people are in spite of it — at this moment I feel nothing but pride. When it mattered they came out.