Avurudu...

Then came that family time proper, the pre-dinner hour when we sat on benches in the outside area between the house and kitchen to SING! The repertoire varied from the old Tower Hall songs in Sinhala to songs such as ‘Galway Bay’ and “Coming through the Rye” and other oldies. Uncles and Aunts with good voices held sway and everyone sang. Cups of thick vegetable soup were passed around, with some village folk actually turning up at “soup time”. The sing song always ended with Uncle Tom’s rendition or rather ‘direct translation’ of the passage from Julius Caesar.

We never, ever, tired of it! He began in English, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen lend me your ears “……holding forth, with the direct translation including the words “thope kan mata nayata denu”. He had another favourite anecdote about “hearing the cow laughing in English” after one of my visits! Uncle Henry was the quiet one, the listener, whose stories had to be coaxed out and were all the more interesting, fact, and not fiction, about his days as a vet in India working for a Maharajah and looking after his animals.

Bertie mama was the teller of the tall tales of my childhood. “You should visit my house. I press a button and it opens out of the mountain, I pull a lever on the side and there is the well”. All the time “Makulussa” the real mountain looming over us- it sides a soft green lawn of velvet – a myth my father soon dispelled, telling us of the time he climbed Makulussa with his uncle, Aththa’s youngest brother – Albert ( Oh yes, all of them “Princely” names ). “Those velvety lawn like areas, are actually tall grasses, razor sharp that can even cut your face.”

So we listened and wondered and looked out at a clear moonlit sky- so bright over Makulussa you could read a book by its light, until sleep engulfed us as we lay ensconced in Aththa’s metal four poster bed.

Breakfasts at New Year were substantial. Aththa had been up in the wee hours ensuring perfection as always. “Hunusaal buth” (made out of the fragments of rice after pounding and de-husking) with Kiri hodhi (the white coconut curry) and pol sambol. My favourite was Aththa’s very own – string-hoppers soft and creamy, made out of home grown (and back breaking) pounded rice flour. The ambrosial kiri hodhi was always made by maiden aunt Padma – who passed on the secret of the wood fire – the clay pot – stirred just so- with the addition of a lime. I dreamt of Aththa af- ter her death when she told me her secret of the creamy string-hoppers,… ah ! but by then she had already passed it on to me !

After morning games of cricket and badminton, and large glasses of green orange juice, fresh off the tree - and spiked with salt - we set off for the wells. One year it was to “the Bibile Kumbura” the water spout in the village of Udasgiriya on a higher elevation above Andewatta. This water spout that never ran dry was a constant source –for bathers and one stood under it – shower style. At Andewatta there was a choice of two wells – our choice was always the well in the rubber tree section that overlooked a paddy field. No drawing out of water with rope and pail – just to reach in with a bucket, splash and pour!

At oil anointing time it was Aththa who anointed our heads with the oil she had brought from the temple. There were leaves hung overhead and leaves spread underfoot and I remember her chanting and blessing each of us as the oil was applied with a betel leaf.

When the time came to leave there was always much sadness. I remember her rushing to the fence to stand and wave for a last glimpse of us, the cars slowing down and all of us waving! This, she did unfailingly even during her latter enfeebled years.

Andewatta is no more, first the roof gave way and the house was later bulldozed to the ground. On recent visits as I walk over where it once stood I can still see the round and oval shaped bricks that made up the cornerstones of the entrance steps. A few of Padma nanda’s rose bushes are still in bloom and here and there sprout bits of the maidenhair fern that formed an arch over the little verandah. I dream of the cool cement floors that I sat on as a child reading all those back copies of the Reader’s Digest in what served as the shrine, cum office room and library. Letters I found and could barely discern, from my grandfather to my grandmother always beginning with “My darling Lou” ! Aththa was Louisa and he was writing from Oxford! What treasure I held in my hands - I never knew – if only I had grasped and held on – their story would have been a novel in itself.

All gone and vanished like the rest of that little house.

I hold on to the memories of a lost time and place – that I wish the children of today could experience. Village life, clear clean water pure organic food, (we didn’t know it- for what it was- at the time !) listening to the stories, watching the buffalo wending its way round and round the threshing floor, hearing the plaintive cries of the farmer coaxing the animal on, the hiss.. of the “Petromax” lamp, the tart taste of the cocoa fruit, and yes – even speaking to Raththi the cow in English.

The Matale heat is pretty much as in Colombo today. There are no more rivulets and streams running along the roadside, none of those little crabs in the paddy fields. Noteworthy is the absence of even the pesky leeches we had to guard against in the rubber patch! De-forestation and chemicals in agriculture have put paid to all that.

“Naw gala” (the upturned boat shaped rocky mountain) and Makulussa still look benignly over a landscape – that burns with the cloying smoke from the kilns of Matale “lime” used for plaster and building construction. Descending the winding mountain road to Dodangaslanda and its environs, we stop to make way for trucks and container transportation on a road not built to cater for such huge vehicles .

Back in those days a single car was an “event” !

Every bit of the route is so familiar and holds a particular memory of a time untrammelled, of heading back to hearth and home and all that Andewatta personified! Bringing back my very own - New Year nostalgia.