By Kiribanda De Silva Sumanasekara –

Dear Madam,

This is an urgent letter, and I like to cut out all the decorum. I want this to be straightforward. Period! Oops! ‘Period’ is a political slogan here in Sri Lanka these days. I meant the other period. 

Perhaps, you remember madam that I take pleasure in writing to some diplomats every once in a while. Beyond that pleasure principle, I have some urgent matter to bring to your attention. You know that we love elections in our country, and it is our national pastime after cricket. But of late, our cricket has lost its ability to move us into happiness, and the rumor has it that the game has fallen into the hands of the moguls of betting business, who are also in the most profitable industry of our country: politics. Well, cricket and the rest can wait. The matter I want to focus on is citizenship. No! I am not a NGO big shot working on some ‘citizenship project’ seeking some dollars.

This is about the citizenship of GR, the Great. We want to be absolutely clear that he is a hundred percent patriot. He is going to save our nation. He did save our nation about five years ago but we want to him to save it again. 

Last time he saved our nation while being a dual citizen. At that time he had his hands tied by absolutely humanitarian laws of your country because he was a citizen of that great country. With the fear of your laws over there in the US, our man (well, your man/our man) could not fully enjoy driving his favorite white vans. He was afraid that he would not be able to return to his beloved American home when become tired by saving our country if he were to have too many white van races with journalists and dissidents. 

And he did not know that the US would tolerate any killer as long as he supported ‘AI.’ (No! It is not ‘artificial intelligence’, I mean,  but your ubiquitous buzzword ‘American Interests.’) Perhaps, he found it out last time as all Rajapaksas were able to find safe houses in beautiful California. Well, the world knows that many former dictators, killers, money launderers from around the globe were able to make America their home as long as they were not at least mildly socialist. So, our man who had a soft spot for white vans realized eventually that, even American citizens can drive any white van anywhere in the world for any purpose, as long as those vans do not get in the way of corporate capitalism. 

 And our ‘good fellas’ were able to come back safely to Sri Lanka barely months after forming our government of good governance in 2015. And as the gentlemen of good governance caught robbing the central bank of Sri Lanka, they lost their moral superiority, assuming they had anything of that nature, and could not trace the stolen money into various banks around the world. They struck a deal, then another deal and then, many other ones.  

Well, let me cut this short. Our hero is about days away from becoming the president. We have all our white vans oiled up and geared towards to a great future. But how can our future become great if our hero’s heart is split into two: one half in Sri Lanka and other half in the US. After all, the US is our arch enemy. We hate your country so much that we send thousands of applications to the green card lottery every year, so that we can come over there and teach you a lesson on your own soils! 

So, Madam, we really want to know that our savior is no longer a US citizen. Could you please send us some letter, even a fake one, saying that he is an absolute patriot of this land of Dhamma? Please don’t say it ‘fake’, however, until he wins the election.  If he wins, he will have a brother as the media minister running all the government media outlets, and the latter will make his president brother nothing else but a patriot. He will have another brother taking care of judiciary and he will make every single fart and part of the president absolutely legitimate. And he will have another brother as the minister of finance and he will make the president truly legitimate by printing his portrait on every single bill of rupees so that we will feel that he is absolutely patriot. And the president will have his cousins, nephews, and in-laws as diplomats in every single country telling world that the president is a supreme patriot and he led even Vietcong soldiers in many a battle against America. 

But madam, all those have to wait for a few more days. Right now, we need to know for sure whether he has renounced his American citizenship. It is even better if you tell us that GR, the great never had his American citizenship and he refused it when the US government offered it to him. But I know that American diplomats do not lie. 

Please don’t lie and tell us that he is now totally Sri Lankan, so that we can make him the president of our country, until a younger Rajapaksa comes of age to be the next president. 

Yours faithfully

Kiribanda de Silva

PS

And please check your spelling before you send it to us. Don’t say “cancel” for “cancelled”