So farewell, then, Thavisha Lakindu Peiris (25). I never
knew you personally, but I do know all about your hard working career
mindedness. I can see from the published photographs (in your graduation photo you look
old enough to be your own father) that you were a credit to your family in Sri
Lanka; until you were stabbed to death on your last night as a pizza delivery
driver, only hours before starting a new job as an IT consultant.
Of course you never did start that job, because your-young-life
was-cut-tragically-short.
I would apologise for addressing you in this clichéd manner;
except, if you will permit me to talk past what actually happened to you, I
think it is the cliché rather than the actualité which I should be addressing.
I’m not convinced, you see, that the telling of your
terrible story is as it purports to be: a sign of how much we value human life.
I suspect that Young Life Cut Short On Last Night Of The Pizzas, is really a
way of saying: his real life hadn’t
even started; he was just about to emerge from that shadowy, zombie existence
comprised of not-quite-human creatures who either can’t cook or who can’t get a proper
job. (It could easily have been said about you until recently: still delivering
at Domino’s two years after graduating in 2011? Must be something not-quite-right.)
Or, if your story is especially poignant because you weren’t
really a delivery boy any more, what does that say about the boys – some of
them are as old as your father – still stuck behind the wheel with the cardboard boxes in a padded bag, not going
anywhere else? Supposing their lives are like a scene from The
Walking Dead, it surely shouldn't matter any less when they get stuck with a knife.
Of course the context all but confirms the clichéd account. You died
at the wheel of a foreign-made car in a cul de sac on a large-scale council
estate – one of the many failed projects of Britain’s 20th century, on
the edge of a Northern industrial city in long-term decline.
Even the name of the street where you died is doubly inappropriate,
i.e. ideal for an ‘ironic’ cliché: Southey Crescent. Ha! Because there’s nothing
rising, no crescendo coming up from
here; and not even the faintest echo of the eponymous Robert Southey – Lakeland
poet, essayist, man of the Enlightenment.
Yet the cultural conservative which Southey, like Wordsworth, later became, might have agreed with the reactionary subdivision embedded in the stock account of your death; the subdivision between people who count versus people who don't really count as people.
Sadly, Thavisha, you were fatally stabbed while crossing the border.
Sadly, Thavisha, you were fatally stabbed while crossing the border.
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