“Tiger, tiger, burning bright.
In the forests of the night…”
Once again, it was spring-cleaning time. Spring-cleaning my old computer, that is. From time to time it signals that I have strained its capacity and I must do some pruning. So I sit down and go through the directory, trying to figure what to throw out.
So there I was, engrossed in this task, resisting the temptation to read through every old letter and document, before deleting it. Trying to find out what "C:\pw\Chitra" stood for, I suddenly came upon a letter starting "My dear Tuna". Now, why had I filed a letter to Tuna under "Chitra"? I eventually figured out what had happened was: writing to Tuna, I had built it round bits of an earlier letter written to Chitra. The pieces I had thought worth repeating had remained deep-frozen in the computer's memory, retaining their freshness. Re-reading the letter brought back the details of the experience and my reactions at that time. Now, more than a year later, I could piece together the memories with a little less emotion.
".... you know how I got involved in raising a corps of raw volunteers for front-line duty in the east. It began, as usual, with an appeal for help to raise one and - you know me - my ego did not let me say 'No'. So, like so many times in the past, I said 'Yes' (when I shouldn't have) and got into deep water. What was happening was that we were trying to raise a group of about ten thousand to send out to the eastern front, to relieve regular troops for the push up north....."
It was a quixotic scheme, with more "gung-ho" than common sense. The funny thing was that it worked. The call had come one night. "I say, Somasiri, you are not doing anything special these days, or are you? Good! Look, there is this thing we've got to do - I said I would do it – and it's what you and I did once before, so there's nothing new to it. Only thing is, its sort of urgent. So how about tomorrow? Good. Well,……" And that's how it began - twenty years after I had retired from the Navy!