The morning after Sri Lanka's top leaders had once again agreed to disagree, the people of the northern city of Jaffna handed them a beginner's lesson in solidarity.
Under a darkening sky and to the patter of some of the year's final monsoon rains, they left the doors to their businesses bolted and stayed at home. The usually busy streets were left to a handful of cyclists and a few hopeful shoppers with nowhere to spend their rupees. The gates of the Bank of Ceylon were chained, and the ticket office of the national airline was closed all day.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a guerilla army and budding civil administration whose demand for an independent state had helped kindle and then perpetuate Sri Lanka's 20-year civil war, had called a general strike after a teenager handing out the group's newspapers had been shot at by soldiers.
Back in the capital, Colombo, there was paralysis of a different sort. The president and prime minister had failed to break a stalemate over who should run the defence ministry, and, as a result, have responsibility for moving forward a stalled peace deal signed with the Tigers in April 2002.
The Tigers' threat of a possible resumption of the war if the deadlock stretched on, and the potential loss of a peace dividend worth billions of dollars in aid, had taken second place to what is widely accepted as a very personal feud between two very driven people.
That day in mid December, Sri Lanka's two ethnic and political poles seemed as far apart as ever. The government's soldiers - almost to a man drawn from the Sinhalese south - gazing out from their bunkers at the Tamil city around them looked every inch an army of occupation.