In some places, I could still see the scars: craters in the concrete or chunks of masonry missing. Even now, Dehiwala railway station was without its outer walls. Other places had managed better, swamping the memories with traffic or a heaving crowd of commuters. But it was the sheer scale of the bombing that was so hard to comprehend. Between 1983 and 2009, explosions became part of Colombo’s routine, a sort of anti-landscape in which hundreds were killed.
This is very reminiscent of Tel-Aviv and Israel in general. We also had many years of explosive terror attacks. Especially in the 1990s and early 2000s.
