March is the beginning of the season of the sun. Sun doesn’t forget to shine in the middle of the sky even for a day and melts everything, showering us with sweat. Sun is most powerful and doesn’t want us to lose the memory of him even for a second. Therefore he works really hard to heat up everything so that even at night we feel like we are living inside an oven.

It was the end of March but just the beginning of the tough crisis in the country. Even though the whole country had to drown in darkness for more than half of the day due to a power cut; or crisis, there were still some places where you had power. Lucky are those who had power even in the middle of a crisis. Somehow the place where I live was one of these Lucky places, until that day when we also had the power cut.

I was just trying to study when the power went, for the second time of the day. It was 6.05 p.m. and we had to light ourselves with candlelight. It seemed romantic except for the unbearable heat and the nuisance of mosquitoes. My Dad came home early but Mom was late. I was roaming around the house complaining about everything. I carried my phone flasher as a light.

Without power, everything seemed so annoying. Just like the stone age. I was thinking whether the cartoon ‘flintstone’ would become real. It was about 8.30 p.m. when my Mom arrived home. She was late due to a delay in the buses. That was another crisis too. The fuel crisis hit hard on common lives. 

By that time I hadn't even had dinner and I was sitting madly. My Grandma and brother were sitting outside in the courtyard to cool themselves down a bit and Mom was with them too. Just then Mom called me outside. “Come and see, I got you something.” I am a person who loses all self-control in front of candy. That was well known by family and friends and they never miss a chance to feed me with sweets. So greedily I thought my Mom bought me some candy so I rushed to her. But instead of taking me to her handbag, my Mom took me outside to the courtyard. I was having my phone flasher turned on and all I could see was darkness which could be cut into pieces. 

“Turn the flasher off,” said my Mom and I did so. That was the moment I saw ‘magic’. The sky was full of twinkling stars. Each and every one of them glittered like in a competition. Just like a fairyland. I have seen stars all over my life but I have never seen stars with such brightness before. The western sky had a blink of light that the sun left but it was very pale. The whole sky was ruled by stars where the sun was ruled earlier. And the starlight made everything visible in such a colourful way. 

It was indeed magic and I realized that I was gazing at them with my mouth open wide. A light wind blew through my hair, cooling me down a bit. My eyeballs had traces of nothing but the shiny stars. They really seemed like diamonds thrown into the sky by someone and I was right under those diamonds. I wanted to touch them, own them, lie among them while they were mesmerizing me.

When I came inside after being hypnotized, I truly understood that stars have the power to light up the night sky and night world. It’s just man-made lights that barrier them. How can artificial lights replace the glamour of those stars? The stars don’t want to fight back with lights so they just shine and disappear with the sunrise. If they were caught in the right eyes, nothing can prevent them from being mesmerized by them. I heard the words of the stars; the stories of how they show the way to the naval and people in the desert for hundreds of years. How they make such an amazing cover over the Earth. Yet get refuse to be appreciated because of some artificial light. 

Stars have the power to make the whole world bright. I believe that is why most magical and miraculous things happen at night. Only the stars witness that magic. Then on I started loving stars unconditionally, eternally. 

 

Sathini Sasmini Weerasinghe

Department of Linguistics

Faculty of Humanities