Village Life in the Forties: Memories of a Lankan Expatriate

1

Cannibals Invade Village

Pathegama (low-lying village in Sinhala), which I have chosen to write about in these sketches, was my birthplace. Those days, it was a sparsely populated simple village whose people were so dirt poor that they could hardly afford to possess anything even resembling a modest luxury. Buddhism had taught them that excessive craving (tanha) was one of the major interdependent factors that engendered sorrow (dukkha). They had very little, yet they were content.

Had an economist visited Pathegama before the outbreak of World War II, he or she would have classified it as underdeveloped. But the low-lying village, with no natural or man-made attractions to offer except for the hilly terrain named Maligakanda (Palace Hill) about one thousand meters from the main drag that marked the front boundary of our ancestral property in a semicircle, rarely attracted outsiders of any significance. Those who climbed Maligakanda through the groves of cinnamon, assorted berry plants, and touch-me-nots did so to get a distant view of the Indian Ocean to the south.

The coastal town of Weligama (sandy village in Sinhala), known for the huge moss-covered bolder called Kushtarajagala (which contains a 3.65-meter carving of the Mahayana bodhisattva figure of Samantabhadra) and the private villa called Taprobane Island (once owned by Count de Mauny of France) on the bay, served as the global gateway for the people of Pathegama.

Three or four kilometers separated the town (on the west coast of Weligama Bay) from the village (on the Batawala-Pitiduwa dirt road) toward the northwest. The narrow, dirty, rutty track amply suited the needs of the peasants whose major mode of transportation was self-propulsion on foot or bicycle. Heavy goods reached the village on bullock carts, and the village heavies rode on ox-driven buggies. This main drag, which turned muddy during the monsoons, was not meant for smoother, faster motor vehicles.

The villagers had heard of Colombo, the island’s major city, but not many had gone there. As a result, they had fantastic notions of the country’s capital—exaggerated fabrications of human imagination that kept snowballing among the village folks until they reached supra-real proportions. Yet, some unsuspecting peasants believed them. The one who had physical contact with Colombo always found a ready audience at any time or place. The braggart would recount his city adventures with utmost relish and often add color to his stories with a flourish of the hand and an aside such as, You see, the sky over Colombo is not blue—rather red and very fascinating.

The unsuspecting audience would huddle together to listen to the braggadocio with gaping mouths and unmitigated curiosity. The village cooperative shop and the few tea kiosks and grocery stores along the winding main drag provided the venue for such spontaneous gatherings. The storyteller would survey the audience to be sure that none of those who had visited the big city was present in the vicinity before the delivery of his tall tales. So the raconteur kept the audience in rapt attention while relating his capital exploits, thereby engendering hopes among the youngsters to visit the paradise if they could save enough money to make the 144-kilometer trip in what the village kids called the Kolomba Duwana Yakada Yaka (the Colombo-bound iron behemoth), a metaphorical reference to the train.

I don’t say that everybody had faith in these tall tales inasmuch as some had common sense though illiterate. But I can still honestly say that quite a number of the villagers, particularly women, were happily gulled.

Our village did not have any massive buildings. The poorest of the villagers lived in wattle and mud houses, and the more well-to-do folks lived in whitewashed ones. They lived according to their means in conformity with the Buddhist principle of small is beautiful. They were also caste conscious with people of the Goigama (farmer) caste dominating in the village in comparison to Weligama where the Karawa (fisherman) caste dominated. Thus, vestiges of feudalism lingered on. People married within their caste, class, and creed.

At the time of my birth in 1940 until well into the next decade, my maternal grandfather was the village headman, an office that commanded much prestige and respect around the World War II era in the Matara District of the Southern Province. Another perk of this exalted office was the material benefits he received from the hoi polloi as gifts for the duties he performed as the Ralahamy, the popular title by which the headman was known. Though poor they may be, even the poorest villager would bring a gift of some fruits, vegetables, pastry, and so forth when visiting him. Village tradition was not to reject gifts from visitors even if the donor had intended it as a bribe.

As I recall, my grandfather was a vociferous man probably in his fifties or early sixties, very grave in deportment, and much feared by the village folk. He was born in a village in the Matara area and subsequently bought rice paddies and land in Pathegama—not to be confused with the more populous Pathegama near Koattagoda, some sixteen kilometers northeast of Matara—where he settled down as a landed proprietor.

He married a woman from Kelaniya in the Western Province. The couple produced four legitimate children: two daughters and two sons. My mother was their first offspring. Purportedly, my grandfather was the illegitimate dad of a few other kids, even though his mistresses never acknowledged the fact.

During my early childhood, our extended family lived together in the Maha Gedera (ancestral home), my grandfather’s property, a large, whitewashed, tiled house about a hundred meters away from the main road, which encircled almost half the expanse of land around our house.

The year must have been either 1943 or 1944, for I could not have been more than three or four years old when a certain memorable event unfolded that frightened the villagers and took them by surprise. I cannot tell which day of the week or month of the year it was, but I know that it was morning. My elder sister and I were playing in the compound when we noticed a sudden rush of people making frantic turns on the road, running and creeping into all the byways, thickets, and houses, and skulking and sneaking with obvious agitation.

My mother appeared at the doorstep, shivering from head to foot and stammering at us to come in. She then closed every door and window, pulled down the curtains with a mad hurry, and locked us in the bedroom. Nobody else was at home except our housemaid, Susila. My father, a postmaster, was in town at work. He used a Dayton push bicycle, a real luxury then, to go to his office. And my daredevil grandfather, who was very rarely at home, was absent.

When I gathered sufficient presence of mind to talk, I asked Mother, What’s all the fuss about?

Cannibals, whispered my mother, still shivering.

My sister started crying.

Pipe down. Mother shut my sister’s mouth with her hands. If you do that, they will be here soon to shoot us all down.

I looked at the road through a crack in the window. A file of men with very dark skin, dressed in khaki, was marching along the main gravel road with guns in hand. I, like most others in the village at the time, had never seen an African before, and their black skin and large lips looked very strange to me. A deadly silence pervaded the entire village.

"They are called kaberi, explained Mother, and they come from Africa. If they meet anybody on the way, they might eat him or her alive." (Kaberi might be a derivative of Kaffir.)

The file of African soldiers went past our house, and I keenly listened to hear the sound of a gunshot, fearing that at any moment these cannibals might attack anyone very near and dear to me. But nothing was heard, and after about an hour, they returned by the same road and again went past our house back toward the town.

The doors and windows of our house were opened only after three or four hours. But we were not allowed to go out for the whole day. It took the village a couple days to recover from the shock.

The file of African soldiers never reappeared in Pathegama. And nobody in the village still knows the purpose of their unwanted visit or from where on earth they made their appearance.

2

Loku Maama Makes the Big Time

Pathegama was a small village. Its Arcadian charm pleased its denizens. Whereas city dwellers hardly knew even their neighbors, rural dwellers knew everything about theirs, as well as the entire village. The African apothegm that it takes a village to raise a child, made popular by First Lady Hillary Clinton during her book promotional tour in 1996, resonated well with the rural culture of Pathegama, where friendliness was contagious. Villagers intuitively understood that life was a cooperative. Village life demonstrated the dynamics of interaction, interdependence, and interconnection of all creatures and things, great and small. Unpaid volunteers were readily available at weddings, funerals, exorcisms, pirith chantings, and so forth.

Everyone took an interest in everyone else, with few exceptions. The villagers had their oddities, eccentricities, and differences, but these did not matter. Pathegama had its share of sworn enemies within its territorial limits. These enmities, however, were mostly based on trivial disputes, which they easily forgot in times when community action required high priority.

The peasants of Pathegama, just like their fellow folks in the rest of Ceylon, were still enmeshed in observing colonial and feudal social norms even at the midpoint of the twentieth century. The year 1948 marked the demarcation line between de jure colonialism and independence. But their de facto demarcation came much later. My grandfather and our family were among the beneficiaries of this time lag because we continued to receive feudal privileges until we left the Maha Gedera in the 1960s.

Such was the state of affairs in Pathegama when my Loku Maama (big uncle), the Ralahamy’s older son, made a big splash in the village as a participant in World War II.

Well before Clinton discovered African wisdom, the Pathegama villagers were raising their kids under the watchful eyes of the entire village. I was one of those village lads who grew up under such community scrutiny. Because of this affinity, I feel immensely proud to point out that my village also had a role to play, however miniscule it may seem to outsiders, in winning World War II, the most titanic conflict in history. Unfortunately, neither the world nor our own country has yet recognized the contribution of Pathegama, which sent two of its stalwarts overseas to join the imperial forces.

These two healthy stalwarts, young and handsome to boot, were well known for their ambidexterity. One had a remarkable tendency to dismantle structures and stop halfway through; the other had a natural gift for climbing coconut trees for a fee. At the time in question, occupationally speaking, one was a police officer, and the other was a tree climber. One had an educational background and acquaintance with the city; the other had neither.

In physical build, however, both were similar. The one was Loku Maama, the second offspring of my grandfather; the other was Naamba (stallion), the spouse of Maggie who earned a living by converting paddy into rice on the wangediya (rice pounder). Susila, our housekeeper and babysitter, was the daughter of this couple, although her paternity was in doubt.

Loku Maama, who subsequently came to be known in the village as Ratagiya Mahattaya (gentleman who traveled overseas), had not inherited the vociferousness of his father, but only his vigorous disposition. Naamba was a harmless fellow who, despite his physical stature, was renowned to be in mortal fear of any chance person who might accost him to challenge him to show his pugilistic skills

When these two worthies had left Ceylon on their peregrinations, I had been harmlessly lying in my mother’s womb. The details set forth above are those I culled later. My mother tells me that all in our family were very much moved when tidings came that Loku Maama had joined the army. It was to them a sudden shock. He had never told the family of any such intention. The first thing my mother did when she got the bad news was to put up a pahan-pela (lamp-lighting hut) in the front yard of the house and to invoke the blessings of God Vishnu to guard her wayward brother from probable mishap.

Grandfather had worked himself into a furious rage when he heard of the capricious act of his son, stomping his feet on the floor and shouting deprecations at the top of his voice. Because the old man was not on talking terms with his son and never showed open affection to him as well, no wonder that his son decided to see the world courtesy of His Majesty, the king of England.

The whole village was perturbed concerning Loku Maama. Perhaps his unorthodox association with many a villager had made him quite popular; perhaps the fact of his being the son of His Majesty, the Ralahamy, had caused them to think of him in special terms. Whatever the reason, the village folk kept repairing to our house in straggling knots and expressed their concern over Loku Maama. For everyone thought that he was as good as dead.

As for Naamba, the nincompoop that he was, the concern expressed by his fellow villagers was of a different type. They would miss an expert practitioner of the ancient art of tree climbing and a man to poke fun at to boot. He was also as good as dead.

I was born into this world, or should I say village, in late January 1940. By the time the war ended in 1944, I was ably gifted with the skills of speaking, sensing, and understanding.

I can vividly recall how my mother invoked the blessings of the Satara Varam Deviyo (gods of the four warrants: Vibhishana, Lakshamana, Tumburu, and Narada) and all other deities known and unknown to guard her brother every day, morning and evening. My sister and I, unable to mumble even a part of a gatha (a Pali spiritual stanza) would add a loud-sounding Sadhu (Buddhist equivalent of Amen) at the end of Mother’s invocation.

Airplanes flying past the sky over our village were a common sight during those war years. Once in a while, when a plane took off from the nearby Koggala airport, flying low in the sky, my mother would rush into the yard, calling me to do the same, and say, "Now that may be Loku Maama. I think he is waving his hand. And both of us would wave our hands with utmost agility, I shouting out for Loku Maama." Sometimes, Sister also joined in.

At least once a month, Loku Maama sent us a letter by airmail. I suppose those were the first airmail letters that the postman ever delivered to our