Thelma
Betting on the wrong horse
Darling Ma-hinder
I had always thought that your top man at the United Nations in the Big Apple, your big Kahuna on First Avenue was a bit of a (PRUN)E. Almost completely surrounded by some stubby grayish whiskers on his face and some stubby graying deputies on his person – albeit on a less frequent basis, the chap has tended to generally mumble through his facial shrubbery a litany of unmitigated rubbish on your behalf. No cojones that chap despite his name. Or as the Macedonian soldiers marching into Asia so aptly put it, no muda.
Thelma as you may have suspected has, because of your curious habit of allegedly wanting to pop people off for the merest slight to your family and fortune, had to travel far and wide herself. Thus it was – and may I tell you Jonathan Swift couldn’t have positioned his traveller better if he had tried – that by some freakish coincidence I happened to be at the side of one of those international human rights activist species you deplore, when the white flags were going up then down and finally buried in May 2009. So close was I that just the faintest flap of my shapely ears resulted in moi over hearing an entire conversation with your chap Koha who was then the secretary of all things foreign.
Koha is no doubt a chap who likes to make promises, and there the fellow was, giving minute instructions on how the chaps should crawl out of their hidey-holes and accompany their families, take the kerchiefs from their side pockets and hold them up as flags, turn left or right and cross a bridge or two and make sure and come forth nice and slow lest they fall on a banana skin and come fifth.
So judge of my surprise dear when just the other day I happened to be loping along to my Zumba class on 42nd street when I happened to pass the UN offices and popped in to chitchat with a media buddy and came across a large wad of statements by your chap, heartily promoting a separate state for Palestine and lamenting a string of human rights violations by the divinely chosen people. Apparently the committee which he heads had found some findings. to wit: ‘several egregious findings which might amount to a strategy to either force the Palestinian people off their land or so severely marginalize them as to establish and maintain a system of permanent suppression.”
Oi, I thought to myself. Vey, I concluded. Were this Koha part of the Committee or Commission you appointed to look into similar atrocities in Paradise. What Lessons you may have Learnt, How Reconciled you may have become. He may even have allowed the women of the east to cry as they gave evidence unlike that former AG chap Bulla who was in no mood to countenance the water works. In rugby and in life you accept your injuries and press on he may have thought.
But no. This kind of immaculate talent must be reserved for the holy territories of the Mediterranean. With little or no blush of shame on his cheek of modesty, with no pinching, prickling, pricking on his conscience or what’s left of it, for having been a willing and able player in some similar incidents of rather biblical proportions in the not so distant past in some other land – the rare and exotic Pal Koha of Paradise was strutting his stuff.
Like an Amalekite baring down on the Israelites in the lowlands of et-Tih, your Koha wrapped hard on the knuckles of the Jews for their Human Rights violations and shook his head with disapproval like an elderly Irish priest admonishing his errant congregation. Koha grumbles that the Special UN Committee which he chairs has had to conduct its investigations without cooperation from Israel.
Hmm! Familiar no? Now when was there another UN panel where the country being investigated declined to cooperate? Perhaps Koha’s name will go forever down in history when the Jews refuse to accept the validity of the UN Committee report and call it the Koha report instead, just like the name of that chap now what was it again…Dalrimple….no….Delaware….oh I remember……Darusman yes!
But let me chinwag a little about this feud going on over there in Paradise darling. The one which your kept press, so astutely calls – the locking of horns by the judiciary and the legislature.
Ichabod, my dear fellow, what have you done with your prize judicial bull. There she was only the other day giving you a free pass on term limits so you can be dick-tator for life and now suddenly this.
If I have told you once I have told you a hundred times ole sock, pay bally attention to the details. Haven’t you read the Hallmark cards. It’s the little things that count. Think man, think. Maybe you can salvage this beautiful friendship yet. Did your general factotum forget to add some kaha into the murunga curry when you two last had a meal together with the family. Perchance did your bitter-half Shiro in a fit of jealousy over Shira’s newly acquired Manipuri sari, refrain from paying her a compliment. Or worse did you comment on occasion that Shira might look a tad over weight in that dark pink sari blouse she wore to the Temple abode not long ago.
Maybe the cloak she wears on the bench is designed to cover not only her person but a life time of egg mcmuffins and vanilla milkshakes but that is certainly no reason for you to go about like a demented art critic commenting on it. Did you venture to comment on the way she walked, ate soup, pointed the cheese or wore her hair? If you did Thellie suggests you make amends as quickly as you can. Perhaps a gift card to Ramzi’s for a makeover and mani-pedi.
Be that as it may, now that the likes of Dilan Pee are sitting in judgment over Shira behind closed doors in the House by the Diyawanna Oya, suddenly bookie-pala’s curiosity has been aroused I see. Thellie is unaware of the frequency with which Bookie-pala attends peep shows in Bangkok and if he ever accompanied that poop Karuna to any of them during Karuna’s initiation into the world of taxi Abey in the early 2000s, but suffice it to say that the Pala is aroused. And when the Bookie is aroused legend has it that he must have satisfaction. Hence the need to peep me thinks.
The bookie has been lamenting – if your kept press and by that I mean all the press is to be believed – that he and 117 others who sent the sober one into the room of doom should not be deprived of their rights to see her squirm and fall. Tch Tch!
May be he wants to place a bet on the wrong horse.
thelma@lankastandard.com
Originally published in Ceylon Today