likely, or whether he was at the junction where the group met the larger crowd. Or he could have been waiting near the vehicle. In any case, he had been waiting for this day, when he was sure he would be able to get to Katugala on the street. There was no way R—— could have entered the presidential grounds with explosives and ball bearings strapped to him. The bodyguards were unforgiving. There were never exceptions. Every pen in every pocket was examined. So R—— had to approach him in a public place, with all the paraphernalia of devastation sewn onto himself. He was not just the weapon but the aimer of it. The bomb would destroy whomever he was facing. His own eyes and frame were the cross-hairs. He approached Katugala having already switched on one of the batteries. One blue bulb lighting up deep in his clothing. When he was within five yards of Katugala he turned on the other switch.
At four p.m. on National Heroes Day, more than fifty people were killed instantly, including the President. The cutting action of the explosion shredded Katugala into pieces. The central question after the bombing concerned whether the President had been spirited away, and if so whether by the police and army forces or by terrorists. Because the President could not be found.
Where was the President?
The head of the President’s unit, who half an hour earlier had been told that Katugala was out meeting the crowds, who had leapt into the jeep and made his way towards the Silver President, had just reached him and was insisting that he return to the armoured vehicle and be driven back to his residence. When the bomb went off he was left miraculously untouched. The direct spray of ball bearings entered and were held within the body of Katugala or went through him and fell in a clatter to the tarmac in the few feet behind him. But the sound of the blast drowned out the clatter. And it was the awfulness of the noise that most remember, those who survived.
So he was the only human left standing in the silence that contained the last echoes of the bomb. There was no one within twenty yards of him save the Gulliver-like replica of Katugala, rays of sun coming through the cardboard, which the ball bearings had reached and gone through.
Around him were the dead. Political supporters, an astrologer, three policemen. The armoured Range Rover just a few yards away was undamaged. There was blood on the unbroken windows. The driver sitting inside was unhurt except for damage to his ears from the sound.
Some flesh, probably from the bomber, was found on the wall of the building across the street. The right arm of Katugala rested by itself on the stomach of one of the dead policemen. There were shattered curd pots all over the pavement. Four p.m.
By four-thirty every doctor who could be located had reported for duty in the emergency hospitals in Colombo. There were more than a hundred injured on the periphery of the killing. And soon rumours rose in every ward that Katugala too had been in the crowd when the bomb went off. So each hospital waited for the possibility that his wounded body would be brought in. But it never arrived. The body, what remained of it, was not found for a long time.
The general public first became aware of the assassination when phone calls started coming in from England and Australia, people saying they had heard Katugala was dead. And then the truth slipped across the city within an hour.
Distance
The 120-foot-high statue had stood in a field of Buduruvagala for several generations. Half a mile away was the more famous rock wall of Bodhisattvas. In noon heat you walked barefoot and looked up at the figures. This was a region of desperate farming, the nearest village four miles away. So these stone bodies rising out of the earth, their faces high in the sky, often were the only human aspect a farmer would witness in his landscape during the day. They gazed over the stillness, over the buzz-scream of cicadas which were invisible in the parched grass. They brought a permanence to brief lives.
After the long darkness of night the rising sun would first colour the heads of the Bodhisattvas and the solitary Buddha, then move down their rock robes until finally, free of forests, it swathed down onto the sand and dry grass and stone, onto