Music, Menace, and a Night in Negombo
Music, Menace, and a Night in Negombo
Inthose years – the nineteen-seventies, full of static and scent, full of the small rebellions of boys who wanted to be men – beat shows were the closest things we had to freedom. Not the state-endorsed kind, sealed in paper and promise, but the nighttime kind: noisy, accidental, flung open to the sky.
We were eighteen, which is to say we were invincible, idiotic, deeply nutty. Music belonged to the record labels – locked behind office desks, guarded by men who wore ambition like cheap cologne. So young artists climbed out through the cracks. They took their guitars and their voices and their borrowed amplifiers to school quadrangles and church fêtes, to fields packed with dust and teenagers. The world seemed easily influential. And dangerous.
There were my friends – Cyril, the protector with the brave tongue; his younger brother Edward, always hungry and cigarette in his hand; Leonard, cautious but loyal; and the others, Nelum and Suneth and Rajah and Mahinda, each one a note in the wildly off-key orchestra of our friendship. We lived for these shows because they made us feel like participants in the world, not just spectators. Moratuwa and Negombo announced their carnivals that weekend – two rival planets pulling us with equal gravity. We chose the nearer star, Moratuwa.
I dressed like a proclamation. Bell-bottom trousers that flared like outrage, a yellow singlet the colour of roadside marigolds, platform shoes that tipped me toward the sky. My hair, sliding down toward my shoulders, felt like a political gesture. I was beautiful in the way the young are beautiful – carelessly, defiantly.
Moratuwa greeted us with disappointment. The stage was small, the sound tired, the carnival stale as an old biscuit. The night grumbled. We exchanged glances – that silent, adolescent democracy – and decided to migrate north, like reckless birds. Negombo would save us.
On the bus, under the low hum of fluorescent lights that blinked like forgetful angels, something shifted. A man – older, swollen with the entitlement that floats through the subcontinent like an invisible mist – touched me. A quick, filthy gesture. The kind of touch that turns the body into a battlefield.
Anger rose in me – not a spark but a flame. I stood up, shaking with it, and my voice came out like a stone hurled at a window:
“You bloody bastard! You want to abuse young boys?”
Cyril rose beside me, dangerous in his certainty. Suddenly the bus was a theatre of tension – passengers startled into silence, the man shrinking, shuffling toward the front like a disgraced animal. But he wasn’t finished. Nearing Negombo he turned, and from the safety of distance hissed:
“I’ll get my boys. You’ll see what happens here. I will teach you rascals a lesson.”
Threats in Sri Lanka were not abstractions. They were promises. They carried weight – the weight of men who had friends in every lane, in every drunken, dust-heavy pocket of the night.
So when the bus sighed to a stop, we split ourselves like worried cells. Three groups. Three strategies of survival. My group – Cyril, Rajah, and I – slipped away to a restaurant with shadows long enough to hide in. The others scattered to toilet walls, dimly lit bus stands, deserted corners of the carnival grounds. It wasn’t fear of what we’d done. It was fear of what they could do.
But the carnival pulsed on, that stubborn organism. The sea breathed somewhere beyond the lights. Vendors fried their usual oily offerings, speakers crackled. And then, as if summoned by fate or memory, The Gypsies appeared on stage – radiant in white, their music a kind of reckless joy.
They were legends even then. But to me they were more than that – they were familiar. Quintus Lal, their keyboardist, had once sat beside me in class at Aquinas University College, his laughter small and warm like a secret. His family lived in a house filled with wires and tape reels. I had visited it. I had watched sound being made there, like witnessing a magician’s first trick.
During the band’s break, I slipped backstage. Quintus was the same – sharp-witted, kind-eyed, carrying fame lightly as though it were a borrowed coat. We talked, and the world shrank to a small, safe circle. In that moment, the menace of the bus felt far away, nearly fictional.
The night thickened. Music rose and scattered like sparks from a matchstick. Girls spun in their skirts. Boys strutted. The Gypsies sang with a wild, joyful indiscipline that made us forget our secret fear. For a while, we were simply young.
The show ended deep into the night. Past midnight, the lights dimmed, the vendors folded their counters, and the last echo flattened itself against the sea breeze. But there was no bus home. So we walked – three groups again – each group carrying its own private dread. The road stretched under a sky smeared with moonlight, and for the first time that night, we felt small.
The train at 1 a.m. was salvation disguised as steel. We did not take a chance in going back to the bus stand. Once aboard the train, with the night sliding past the open windows, we finally exhaled. We had outrun something – or perhaps it had simply turned its back on us.
Years have passed like storms. Cyril now speaks more softly; Leonard’s hair is now dyed black. Suneth is on a wheelchair. Quintus left The Gypsies long ago and now runs the family business. I visited him once. We laughed about the old days – the music, the madness, the night in Negombo.
But sometimes – when I remember the man on the bus, the hiss of his promise – how Cyril rose to my defence, I think about how fragile freedom is. How easily joy can be interrupted. How, in Sri Lanka, the tribal instinct still lies under the skin of ordinary men like a dormant beast. On a whim, someone can summon violence. A gesture, a look, a word – that’s all it takes.
And yet, we went to beat shows. We danced under broken lights. We trusted the night with our young, foolish bodies.
Because in that delicate balance between menace and music, we learned who we were.
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