But the sad truth is that the ethnic divide is alive and well in the country. I have plenty of friends who are Tamil and Muslim and I hug them and hang out with them not for a moment thinking of them as anything but my friends. Having been brought up by educated parents and sent to an International School, I have escaped the ideals of the Sinhalese people. It angers them when a Tamil person rises above them, the notion of a Sinhalese working under a Tamil is met with horror and talks of how deep that particular Sinhalese has fallen.Tamils are supposed to have a separate colour, smell and believe me, I have tried sniffing my best friend who is Tamil and in school in the UK but he normally smells of aftershave and maybe a hint of man-sweat! The Sinhalese people around me tend to talk about the Tamils as if they are a whole different species. For me, it is bigger and uglier than the "black-white" race tensions in the Americas. The Sinhalese-Tamil gap is probably the worst divide in my world. ![]() Not that it matters to me, I don't think of myself as one and whenever I do, it is with regret. ![]() I hadn't read any books written by my compatriots until then, probably because of the natural distrust you develop against your own kind.īut I stand corrected! Nihal De Silva, now dead and gone, spun a wonderful tale of intrigue and adventure coupled with a haunting romance between a Sinhalese soldier boy and a Tamil terrorist girl. ![]() I got a rather, mussed-up copy of this novel from the dying remains of the library of the British Council in Kandy a couple of months before the movie came out.
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