An ‘Essential’ Lesson In ‘Essentiality’

By Ruwan Laknath Jayakody –JUNE 28, 2022

Ruwan Jayakody

Raving tentacles of writhing hopelessness, nourished by seething curses and boiling rage, undulating as they do, from the tributaries of languid bylanes, through to the torrents of main thoroughfares, and across the estuaries of filling stations and distributing centres, only to disgorge into the rapacious maw of dispenser pumps and cylinders, this is what queues in Sri Lanka, be they for fuel or gas, are.

Like the American art rock band, The Velvet Underground’s songwriter Lou Reed’s junkie in ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, who is feeling “sick and dirty, more dead than alive”, waiting for that fix which is “never early” but “always late”, Sri Lankans too are learning more than they care to, that one has “always gotta wait”. A lot, it seems. “That…that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting…but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistence.” That was a day in the life of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig’s obsessive protagonist in ‘Amok’, and it uncannily mirrors that of Sri Lankan citizens.

What is ‘essential’ about this devoted and long wait? There is another answer besides the obvious. Is it that we, the people, as British poet Philip Larkin further observes in ‘Next, Please’, being “always too eager for the future” have picked up the “bad habits of expectancy” of “something always approaching, every day”, something slow, wasteful, “refusing to make haste”, but a “sparkling armada of promises” drawing near, yet leaving us holding the “wretched stalks of disappointment”, as it “no sooner present than it turns to (the) past” or have we found, as American novelist Chuck Palahniuk notes in ‘Choke’, that “after you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.”

But if Lankans, weary of waiting and entombed within expectation, are expecting the unguent of “an arrival, an explanation, an apology” as a character in American novelist Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” would have it, such is- in the backdrop of the Power and Energy Ministry Secretary being unaware last week as to why an eagerly awaited stock of 92 Octane Petrol had been delayed despite a previous assurance by the subject Minister – an exercise in abject ‘manna from heaven’ futility.

Instead, they are, of late, being emotionally goaded like the bull is by the toreros, with a lesson on the semantics of ‘essentiality’ by none other than the peoples’ sworn protectors, the law enforcers, the Sri Lanka Police- that is when the latter is not fending off their counterparts in the Army, both groups manning fuel sheds at present, providing ‘security’ for the stations, upon their being deployed as ‘crowd control’ against the helpless and wretched masses who for their part have only managed one incident of genuine bloodletting (a three-wheeler driver knifing a motorcyclist to death), some minor scuffles amongst each other, and major ones with gun toting, sky shooters in khaki and camo who have also claimed a civilian life (Rambukkana).

In a backdrop of video footage being shared on social media platforms of various Police officers, sometimes the same cop, driving multiple vehicles that clearly do not belong to the Police, bypassing queues to the pump, and elsewhere, whisking off with can after fuel can (supposedly to power generators at Police stations during power cuts, per the Police Media Spokesman), and also not lifting a finger against a Government Parliamentarian’s ‘thug gone wild’ brother for obstructing duties, it was observed by the Police Department’s mouthpiece who also is a Senior Superintendent of Police and an Attorney to boot, that while Police officers, owing to the round the clock nature of their work such as responding to 119 calls, other emergencies and investigations, are not encouraged to queue up, the Police would however probe and take action regarding any public complaints replete with express evidence attesting to instances of alleged nepotism, the exertion of undue influence and thereby the misuse of authority on the part of Police officers to procure and secure fuel for family and friends. Duty calls. “So, we cannot afford to have our officers in queues,” the said Spokesman emphasized.

Meaning is derived in part from context. The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘essential’ as something that is completely necessary and extremely important in a particular situation or for a particular activity. By this working definition, it is a given that the Police ‘service’ is of vital essence, but by that same token, so too is the time (for those in queues, this is now measured in days and weeks), and the limited stock quota of fuel (to the degree that it requires the person in the queue to repetitively engage in a Sisyphean rigmarole [it is a rigmarole as one can never really know for certain which shed will receive fuel, how much, when, and of recent times, where the queue even begins]), for the majority of those in queues.

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