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| Wednesday, 13 October 2004 |
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Our fortunes change 
I mentioned earlier that two of our houses in the village were rented out to city folk who came our ways in search of 'safe' houses. We had what we called our 'Ulu Gedara' where we lived and on the same grounds a little apart was our 'Takaran Gedara'. At first my father rented out our Ulu Gedara and shifted to the Takaran Gedara.
All I remember is that the Weerasuriya's had a pretty little daughter called Therese. I remember bumping into her long years later at Bambalapitiya where my father ran a grocery and oilman store, during the war. But that's another story. Then for a while we had a man called T.P. Saldin - an Interpreter Mudaliyar of the Gampaha Courts. I remember him for a good reason. Some afternoons he would take a 'Booru Anda' out into the garden and have a good snooze there. We little kids were summoned and asked to pull out grey hairs from his head for which we were paid at the rate of one cent per five hairs. Upto this day I can't imagine how he managed to go to sleep and snore away while two or three of us pulled at his hairs. The Saldin household had two or three rotund females whose main occupation during the leisure hours of the day was munching away at heaps of Atu Kos - jack fruit boiled and dried - seated in the verandah, precariously perched on some wooden stools. These females, plump, pink, with pretty round faces covered partly by purdah, moved slowly and majestically when they chose to move. Their gait somehow reminded me of the slow, majestic gait of the decorated baby elephants in a Perahera. Illustrious occupant The most illustrious occupant of our Ulu Gedara for sometime was B.P. Weerawardhana, who became one of the most celebrated photographers of our times. I am not sure if he was already a famous man at that time. I don't think his talented son, Chandragupta Weerawardhana, whom we came to know very closely in later years, was there at that time. All I remember is that the Weerawardhanas too had a pretty little daughter, whom we met and came to know much later in life at the Chitrasena Dance School at Kollupitiya. Even later, in 1978, Ranee Weerawardhana's (yes, she was called Ranee) daughter was one of the ballerinas in the dance sequences in the new production of John de Silva's Sirisangabo, which I directed on an invitation by Prime Minister Premadasa, for the opening of the rebuilt Tower Hall. Then we had the Wijesinghes whose two sons Mahanil and Bandula were students of Ananda College. A branch of Ananda College too had been brought down to Gampaha by then. Mahanil (Mervyn to some) later became an engineer - a very innovative one at that - and Bandula captained the Ananda cricket eleven in later years. The owner of Royal Studio, Gampaha, which is still in existence, Mr. Chandrasekera was also one of the occupants of our Ulu Gedara. Fair rent My father always charged a fair rent for his houses. He did not take advantage of the war situation to jack up rents and hence there was no dirth of grateful occupants for our houses. He even built a third house in a bare land we owned on the other side of the village. This was a rather unusual structure which father built with wattle and daub almost single handed. It looked pretty enough when completed and painted although there were slight differences in the floor levels from room to room, and only the uninitiated would twist an ankle or two tripping from one room to another. Finally we had to rent out our makeshift house too which we had come to call 'the house that father built'. We had to go somewhere and my father built yet another wonder which came to be known among the villagers as the 'Hulang Bangalawa', which would roughly translate as The Wind Mansion. This particular bungalow was built entirely with cadjan. Cadjan walls, cadjan partitions to demarcate the couple of rooms inside, cadjan windows and cadjan roof. No doors except a kind of makeshift 'pelella' at the two entrances to the house. Yes, there had been very trying times for my father and his six children. Our Kudamma helped as much as she could in all my father's endeavours, including a small scale dairy my father ran. She learnt how to milk the cows, to feed them and to look after the two or three milking cows as best as she could. She had been a city dweller most of her life and this was a totally different rough and tumble life for poor Kudamma. She had her little tantrums with father but was always concerned and kind to all of us. Like most of our villagers would have, she too had her reservations about the feasibility of the Hulang Bangalawa with no doors and little privacy. But then, as always, she stuck on with her 'murandu' man and moved into the new abode with all of us. We never complained. We were too scared and of course we had a lot of respect for this man who toiled from dawn to dusk to bring up the brood-six of them. Charming smile I have digressed and I hope I'll be forgiven. Times were still hard on us, although things were getting better with the house rents (which did not come in quite regularly) and the little income from the dairy. I had to distribute the few bottles of milk we got from the cows among a few of our clients in the town. One of our clients was the Chief Magistrate of the Gampaha Courts. Almost always it was the Magistrate's beautiful wife who came to the door to collect the milk, and she had a beautiful smile too. Although a little bit averse to this daily chore before going to school, I came to like it later because that charming smile more for less made my day. I often wonder where those lovely people are now. Those people who made a boy's life happy. Yes, time could fade them or even rob them, but not their kind smiles and little gestures which remain etched in my memory as fresh as ever. And then, suddenly our fortunes changed, almost dramatically. My father found a job. Yes, in Colombo. But that's another story. **** Back **** |
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Our Ulu Gedara, the bigger of the two was occupied, I am rather proud
to say, by a string of illustrious personae. One of the earliest occupants
of Ulu Gedara was one E.B. Weerasuriya, an Accountant by profession who
later rose upto be a Deputy Secretary to the Treasury, if I am not
mistaken. It is my Nissanka Aiya who fills me with the details.
