Up close and personal | 2 May 2019

‘Can you fly down this evening?’ she was asked by her boss in the Delhi office of the BBC. ‘Yes, of course. I have to,’ replied Ayeshea Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist. She was talking from Colombo to David Amanor of the World Service’s The Fifth Floor, which looks at current news stories from the perspective of those intimately involved with them and is always worth catching for its alternative, less formal approach and Amanor’s gentle probing to find the real story. Perera described the chaos on arriving at the airport in the Sri Lankan capital on the evening of Easter Day and the weirdness of going to see the Church of St Anthony next morning to find that from the outside it looked just as she had always known it. Only when she looked more closely did she notice the scattered shards of glass, the bloodstains on the road, and that the church clock had stopped at 8.45.

‘When you have a connection, as a Sri Lankan, it’s difficult to report the facts,’ said Perera. It’s physically and emotionally exhausting; there’s more at stake. People were thrusting mobile phones at her to prove they had been there, inside the church, when the bomb went off, showing her pictures of overturned pews and worshippers covered in blood. Others were screaming, shouting, moaning for their loved ones lost in the bombing. It was like walking into ‘a wall of raw grief,’ Perera said.

She grew up in Colombo when it was still a heavily militarised city, with roadblocks everywhere, before the civil war of 2009 put an end to the sporadic bomb attacks. As a teenager, she could be stopped three or four times just on her way to buy a takeaway after a late night out.