I have.
On a hot, sunny day when I lived in Sri Lanka, two men in T-Shirts, jeans and flip flops, riding on motorcycles stopped me and my photo partner, Lipton, as we were just outside my house.
I couldn’t understand what the two men, who turned out to be cops, were saying in their language, Sinhala, but Lipton did.
They handed him a letter written in Sinhala. Lipton spent a minute reading it and he turned to me, “This says that we have pornographic DVDs and that we take photos of children.”
“What? Who wrote it!”
“It’s signed ‘Anonymous’.”
Lipton was as shocked as me.
I tried to explain that we were wedding and family photographers. Of course we took photos of children!
The blue jean cops insisted on going inside to see our supposed illegal DVDs. We had no choice but to show them upstairs to the TV room.
One cop picked a DVD at random from the three bookcases of DVDs. Unfortunately, it was “Candy” a video neither of us liked. In fact we never finished watching it. The cop began the movie, put his gun on the table – yes, his gun! The opening scene was of two people having sex. The cop replayed that scene over and over, a dozen times.
“Alright already!” I whispered to Lipton.
The cop got another movie. Both Lipton and I held our breath that it wasn’t that awful sex-filled Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise movie, “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Turns out the maid that we had just fired wrote the anonymous letter. She wrote to the police chief that our collection of “Sex and the City” DVDs was pornography!
Seriously?
She saw our collection of Carrie Bradshaw’s adventures and only saw the word SEX. Stupid girl.
Somehow we got through the horrid time with the two cops but then they insisted we had to go to the police station.
I wasn’t going to argue with the guy with the gun.
We followed the cops on their motorcycles to the police station nearby. They led us to a small building across the parking lot from the main station and led us to a small closet-sized dirty room with one table, a groaning guy handcuffed to the table leg, a bare bulb swinging from the ceiling and two chairs. The cop motioned me to sit down.
Lipton stood in the doorway ready to interpret.
“I want to call my embassy!”
“Not now, Madam,” the cop said as he stepped over the handcuffed man, sat down and put his gun on the table.
“No! I want to call my embassy now!”
The cop said something to Lipton.
“Lucy, you need to sit down, this is serious,” Lipton said to me, his face lined with worry.
Oh hell, I thought.
I sat sweating in the gross little room for five hours (yes five!) getting grilled, until they finally brought a nicely dressed man who spoke English, who asked me for my side of the story.
He handed me a piece of paper and a pen. He wanted me to write down my account. “But don’t write about the police entering your house,” he said.
Rrrright. I wrote down everything, especially about the cops bullying their way into my house with a gun!
I called my lawyer friend immediately after my release and he came down hard on the police chief. “Do you know who she is? She’s important, she writes articles about how wonderful Sri Lanka is! She was responsible for getting thousands of dollars donated after the tsunami!”
I almost left the country after that, but I stayed for several more years because I loved Sri Lanka.
What was a girl to do?…Whenever I drove past that police station I flipped them the bird! A dozen times!
Lucy Llewellyn Byard welcomes comments at lucywgtd@gmail.com
