Rukshan Abeywansha was a photojournalist at ‘The Nation’. Centuries ago. We worked together. Although I called him Rukshan and he called me ‘Boss,’ we were friends.
Our ‘working together’ was not about assignments and delivery. There was that, sometimes, but for me and perhaps for him it was about an interesting exercise we would indulge in most weeks.
‘The Nation’ devoted an entire page in the features section of the newspaper for a photo essay. We mostly featured our own photographers but occasionally would accommodate outsiders, in particular students reading for a degree in Fine Arts at the Kelaniya University. Rukshan, easily the best photojournalist at the now defunct Rivira Media Corporation (Pvt.) Ltd., was naturally featured frequently.
The exercise was simple. He would submit a set of photographs on a single theme. The layout designer assigned for the task would ‘make’ a page using all or some of these photographers. They always left a blank space and room for a headline. That was for me.
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My task was to make sense of the overall visual and complement it with a poem that fit into the blank space. And so it went like this: I studied the ‘essay,’ started writing (conscious of the space available), somehow tied things up within the space, thought of some headline options and typed them out as well for the layout artist to complete the page.
Sometimes I had to struggle. Rukshan made it easy. He never failed to inspire. And I did my best to do justice to his artistry with the camera.
One of the essays was on birds or nests or birds building nests. Maybe it was just a single bird building a nest. I don’t know because I can’t remember. The only indicator is a photograph or a bird and a half-built nest. That’s the photograph I had picked out of the set to decorate a blogpost carrying the poem I had written for the page.
Now, years later, long after ‘The Nation’ was laid to rest and long after we were denied forever the magic born in the circle of Rukshan’s eyes, I realise that he was actually teaching me to see.
There was a nest before me. There was a bird before me. Both nest and bird and the act of nest-building were present and absent. Present because the photograph contained them, absent because they were symbols of something else.
The building materials of birds and beasts
Word twigs and mental notes
love letters and innuendo
discarded lines from forgotten songs
run-on lines and lost punctuation
a bit of sunshine
a moonbeam or two
pages from a favourite book
dog-eared days
the smile of a stranger
and inevitable misinterpretation
the building blocks
of our sanities
feathering of certainty
the strengths of fragility:
our lives and our eternities
woven in ignorance
and the arrogance of knowing --
still pretty
still made for a music score.
Houses are made of brick and mortar. There’s sand and cement, pillars and crossbars, roofs and tiles, kitchens and washrooms, bedrooms and living rooms. There’s labour congealed in all these things. And if it does become a home it is because home-makers and residents fill in the gaps that even the best masons leave behind.
Nests. They are homes. Offices are nests. So too the company of special people. The intangibles decorate but they do come together to provide foundation and platform or plug the fault lines.
Whoever heard of word-twigs? Whoever heard of dog-eared days? How can inevitable misrepresentation be considered material suitable to build a dwelling? I do not have answers, but I can tell you this much: Rukshan made me ask questions I never thought existed; Rukshan gave me eyes to see answers not readily available or came in disguise or were in fact invisible.
www.malindawords.blogspot.com.
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