Today was the third day of our fast. It is supposedly the hardest day of a fast because your body stops relying on whatever leftover food you had from your meals before the fast and it begins to realize no more is coming in. We are expected to start feeling much more sluggish from now on as our body fiercely tries to conserve what it can, whatever remains.

I find it ironic that this demanding day coincides with Sri Lanka’s Independence Day. Sri Lankans are celebrating while Tamils around the world remember it as the day that began a prolonged genocide. A little bit of history might help in realizing how this all began.

Sri Lanka originally was home to 3 kingdoms: 2 Sinhalese and 1 Tamil. When the Dutch and the Portuguese ruled the island, they ruled the kingdoms separately. When the British ruled, they ruled everyone jointly (as they are known to erase and create boundaries with reckless abandon) and when they left, they received false reports regarding demographic distribution and released control purely to the Sinhalese.

Independence Day, indeed.

What followed for the Tamils is somewhat analogous to the situation I described regarding the third day of our fast. At the very beginning, Tamils were able to rely on our reserves, like our deep-rooted cultural commitment to education, to help us begin to fight back, even with the loss of representation and the lack of a Bill of Rights in the 1948 Constitution. But as government policies quickly and systematically began to weed Tamils out of citizenship, higher education, jobs and life, we began our fierce struggle to conserve our identity. And today, over 60 years after “independence”, that’s where we still are, just trying to conserve our identity. Or at least, whatever remains.

Thinking of fasting made me afraid for many things. Like, how am I going to make sure I don’t pass out by the second day? Will I be able to keep up with law school? Will this actually force the US to protect civilians in Sri Lanka? What happens if it doesn’t?

I had a lot of concerns, but I was especially afraid of telling my parents about the fast.  I guess for most of my life, I thought that they had a normal parental concern over my nutrition. When I went to college, I realized that I had been seriously underestimating that concern.  It came out through our phone conversations, which went like this:

Me: Hi, Mommy!
Mommy: Hi kuddiyah! How are you?
Me: Goooood. How are you?
Mommy: Goooood. What time is it? Hmm…did you eat?
Me: Yup.
Mommy: What did you eat?
Me: [Lists everything I ate that day] Oh, oatmeal and coffee, and then a granola bar, and for lunch a tuna sandwich with chips and some fruit and ….

EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. That was the beginning to every single phone call with my parents for every day of my life since I’ve left home. Conversations with Daddy start the same way, sometimes even directly after I’ve talked to Mommy, even when he’s been in the same room as her during the conversation.  So it’s not just that they want to make sure I’m eating, it makes them feel better to know precisely what it is that I’m eating AND to hear it directly from me.  Hearing about big, nutritious meals would make them happy and hearing about the same meal too many days in a row was cause for concern (“You can’t eat a tuna sandwich for lunch EVERY day, can you?”).

I didn’t even realize that that’s what was happening or that it might be a weird way to initiate conversations until second semester when my roommate started greeting me by asking me what I ate that day.

So besides denying us a starting point for future conversations, I was naturally worried about how my parents would respond to me not eating anything all day, for days on end. When I prepared to tell them about the hunger strike, I braced myself. I was certain that my mom would try to convince me of all the reasons why it would be harmful and that maybe I should wait to do it for when I’m at home for break.

It was just early last week, when I let her know that some PEARL members were going to start fasting to try to pressure US action in Sri Lanka. She asked,

“What?!  When?”
“We’re not sure yet, we just thought of it. Maybe in a couple of weeks?”
“Oh. In a couple of weeks.”
“Why?”  [Thinking that maybe Mommy figured she had some time to convince me otherwise.]
“Well, it’s just that… there might not be anyone left by then.”

That was it. That was her response. I thought about all of our communal fears of nutrition and health and the political situation and I realized that we arrived at the same place. Soon, there might not be anyone left. And that’s really what we’re all afraid of.