Where the hell have all devils gone?

‘Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again’

- BY PRABATH SAHABANDU

A drive through the city of Colombo is far less frazzling around midnight, when most asphalt cowboys (read private bus drivers) are in dreamland, and others move like a breeze, having to mind only an occasional wheeled contraption trying to break the sound barrier or policemen in high-vis jackets with flashing traffic wands.

Driving back home after work, some time ago, at an ungodly hour, as usual, yours truly beheld something that opened the floodgates of nostalgia. A devil was staring at him through the rear windshield of a vehicle. An electrifying sight—indeed!

It was actually a sticker of a colourful, apotropaic devil mask—fascinatingly fanged, adorably goggle-eyed, and so endearingly familiar to southerners who grew up among devils, so to speak.

A little over a year ago, a devil beckoned to the writer similarly on the Southern Expressway while he was on his way to Matara with his family for the traditional New Year, which invariably makes him succumb to the irresistible pull of his southern roots.

Well past the witching hour, tossing and turning in bed, in Matara, the writer found something amiss in an otherwise perfect southern night. There was no rub-a-dub of yak bera (low-country drum). During his childhood, pulsating tom-tom beating at thovil or devil dances in his neighbourhood would lull him to sleep.

On that sleepless night, the writer kept thinking to himself, “Where the hell have all the devils gone?”

Coexistence with devils