Niluka Gunawardena is a Sri Lankan youth activist working and researching on issues of gender and disability rights. She has recently relocated to the UK to pursue a postgraduate degree.

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It was an accident you said
As in a corner you sat and bled
And in the midst of parting agonies
We contemplated probability trees

Life came by chance you said
Kin, Caste, Race, Creed and Stead
Names, claims and all these unique states
Most random circumstantial games

You whom I would die without,
What if we never met?
Would someone else have died instead?
Would someone else have killed as well?

We traced back all our epic tales,
Oh, what we remember and what we forget,
Celebrating selective memories,
Much of it censored in case there’s regret.

The tree started branching with our very first breath
The rest was “To be or not to be” as the great bard said
Capricious and cruel, let’s call the cold front “fate”.

But the tree, it gave choices with every branch made
Those who speak of Chance begetting equality
Clearly never saw or played the national lottery
An accidental world precludes predictability

But accidental folk seem to fear their own uncertainty
No wonder normal distributions have this great monopoly
To be accidental freaks, you and I are truly blessed

But then we went and gleefully shackled ourselves instead
And shouted and fretted about freaks – both us and them
And banished all freakery, and with it life itself

Heartily we laughed in the face of such absurdity
After all it had merely been a game of probability
All that while I ran to extricate from their stupidity
And build a holy, special, unique aura and philosophy

Here we are sitting on a tree of probability
Rejoicing in permutations stretching to infinity
As day would break, we would still part but now there’s no melancholy
Anything is possible, let’s celebrate in ecstasy
Could I have sat where you sit now?

You smiled and said, ‘Most probably.’

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