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by Geoff Wijesinghe

The peace that currently prevails in the country has helped a Sinhalese mother find her long lost son whose father was a Tamil, a teacher in Jaffna after 32 years of pain and sorrow for both.

I was a witness to their tearful reunion last week in Colombo. The story of Ranji, the mother and Rajan, her son, is one of misery, grief, poverty and finally of joy and happiness with a fairy tale ending.

Ranji was adopted by a kindly old lady when she was just three years old. She was an orphan.

Her foster mother who was from a very respectable family in Colombo, had been wed for a short while to an engineer, but their marriage had ended up on the rocks due to incompatibility.

She decided to devote the rest of her life to the noble endeavour of caring for orphans. At the time Ranji joined Aunt Mabel's family, being legally adopted, there were two other orphans living with their benefactor in a small tenement at Kirullapone.

Aunt Mabel was very independent-minded and refused offers by her brothers and sisters to come and live with them. She wanted to run her home although she was living in penury.

She lived on the not too large handouts given by members of her family, the large majority of whom were against her adopting children. But, they were her first and last love.

At time went on Aunt Mabel became somewhat of a recluse. She also developed a very painful skin disease. Her youngest brother used to visit her weekly and clean her wounds. Meanwhile, the two other orphans she was bringing up, Leena and Mercy, had grown up and left having secured employment as housemaids. They were now not heard of.

They had forgotten her foster mother. Poor Aunt Mabel used to hobble along to her relatives holding the little Ranji by her hand for a meal and a pittance.

When she mercifully passed on she was taken to a home of a relative of her foster mother. Ranji was treated virtually as a servant in that home and relegated as a kitchen helper, clad in soot-covered clothes.

Some time later, one of Aunt Mabel's sisters-in-law, a kind lady with fair means, being thoroughly disgusted at the treatment being meted out to Ranji, brought her to her home at Kollupitiya, and the girl was once more treated as a member of the family. At 18, she struck up a love affair with a lodger in a front house, a Tamil teacher. The couple, preferring to keep the affair clandestine, Ranji eloped with her lover.

They lived in a room in a rather turbulent area of Wellawatte, There, Rajan was born. But, a couple of years later, the marriage broke up, and the husband returned to Jaffna. The boy remained with the mother, who fell hook, line and sinker for a philanderer, gambler and drug addict.

Next, they rented out a room at Mount Lavinia, where Rajan was beaten up viciously by the big brute of a stepfather, who forced him to go begging from house to house for money to bet on horse races and buy his quota of marijuana.

Unable to see her eldest son being so mercilessly beaten up with a belt, his body covered with red welts, Ranji finally contacted her husband's relatives and had him sent to Jaffna to his father, who had cared for him well until his death some years ago. Since then, Rajan who is married with three children, lives in a little room in Nelliady, eking out a living cultivating a small plot of land.

Rajan's stepfather too, died after being knocked down by a car. Meanwhile, Ranji secured employment as a housekeeper to an American family in Colombo and later accompanied them to the United States.

One month ago, for the first time in 10 years, Ranji returned home and managed to contact a relative of her husband in Colombo and appealed to him to do his best to trace her son in Jaffna, now that the situation has returned to near normalcy.

She returned to the US without any news of Rajan. But, three days later, she received a telephone call from Colombo that her long-lost son had been traced.

The next day, she took a flight back to Colombo and within a week, there and behold, was her beloved Rajan before her.

As a result of the opening to public transport of the A-9 Colombo-Jaffna highway, Rajan was able to travel by bus to Vavuniya and from there to Colombo by train to meet his mother after three long decades, where they embraced each other and shed uninhibited tears of gladness and of great joy.

Ranji accompanied her son to Jaffna and spent a very memorable and joyful week with her grandchildren and daughter-in-law, showering them with love and gifts. Said Ranji, "I thank God for this peace which has just given me back my son."

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Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
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