This is My Moon

This is My Moon

One night, in Sri Lanka’s northern war zone, a battle rages between the government forces and Tamil separatists fighters. A Sinhalese army soldier cowers alone in his bunker, indifferent to the bombardment and slaughter taking place around him. Suddenly a trapped and frightened Tamil woman falls into the bunker. She submits to his rape in order to his save her life. After two nights alone with the woman the soldier throws away his gun and deserts the army. He heads back to his village, but she follows him.

When he returns, he finds his village stricken with drought and despair. The people eke out a living by scratching at the scorched earth which yields unwillingly to plough and spade. There are no jobs and little money. Their only hope is that their sons, brothers and husbands will join the army. Then they can live off the soldiers’ wages, or reap the windfall of the compensation payment of their men are killed in action.

The deserter walks into this maelstrom of discontents, unwillingly trailing another woman and thus upsetting the order of things. As a deserter he gets no wages. If he returns in a coffin his family would have got the compensation payment. If he returns alone the woman he left behind when he joined the army could have now married him and laid claim to her share of his future, dead or alive.

And there’s this Tamil woman. Her presence in this border village, heightens the sense of uncertainty and absurdity in the community, brought about by the war and its unrelenting demands on the country’s poorest people. Jealousy, betrayals, hatred and lust now stalked the village. And in her belly she carries the deserter’s child.

If there is salvation and sanity in the midst of the scorching destroying “sun fire” of the war, then it perhaps to be found under the soothing and life-enhancing “moon light” of the latent sisterhood of woman and the innocence of children.