This country belongs to Pinchi Appuhamy
The terraced paddy fields of the tract that runs through Walgama are
in various stages of preparation. They appear as a patchwork quilt made
of differently textured cloth in a various shades of brown and green.
The earth has been turned, ploughed, evened out, plotted, sown and
planted.
There’s a kingfisher perched on a small rock, watching the water from
one liyadda to the next. Beyond the paddy fields and through the dark
green thickness of the typical Kandyan homegarden, homes and people come
sliced. At the far end, two farmers diligently raise mammoty, bring them
down, drag and repeat. The common bathing well is deserted. It was
around 11 in the morning last Sunday.
Great care and pride in work
Paddy cultivation. File photo |
A ten-year-old girl, unfettered and ‘unfetterable’, had turned this
lilting landscape from home to universe, just by the snap of
mind-finger. She distinctly remembers soaring over paddyfield and
canopy, reducing home and village accordingly as she surveyed the
kingdom she never claimed ownership to or ever needed to. The older
villagers still remember her speeding along the made-for-slipping
niyaras topped with fresh mud, trying to evade her 65 year old
grandfather, who ran after her, cane in hand, enthusiasm cleverly
camouflaged with stern countenance and admonishment.
‘He is still talked of as a hondagoviya,’ Ven. Walgama Munindrawansa
Hamuduruwo said. This was while the Thera was delivering the anusasana
at the alms giving held on confer merit on Pinchi Appuhamy last Sunday.
He died in 1994.
‘Farming was an art for him. He took great care and pride in his
work. When he prepared the paddy fields and repaired the niyaras marking
the boundaries of each liyadda, it was beautiful to behold. That was how
he did it and that was how he thought it should be done. He had little
respect for those who were lazy or not as meticulous. He considered it
an art form. It was sacred to him.’
Honest labour
Munindrawansa Hamuduruwo’s reading is shared by many. Pinchi Appuhamy
was a giant because he never neglected the tiniest detail, because he
was rooted in the soil and he strived to live the doctrine he subscribed
to.
He took the blows that came his way with courage, fought back but not
with anger, did what he had to do and even more than was expected of
him.
The alms giving was not held in a house he built. His had been a
small, two-roomed mansion (in the eyes of his 10 year old
granddaughter). He built it with his own hands. Literally. When his
son-in-law wanted to build a house, Pinchi Appuhamy had single-handedly
created a level plot by bringing down the side of a hill.
Single-handedly. No backhoes. No labourers. Once, having fallen from a
motorcycle, he had hobbled home with a knee-cap hanging tenuously to his
limb. He had demanded a knife to cut off whatever it was that still made
it body-part.
According to his granddaughter, the old man had lost consciousness at
that point. Fortunately.
‘Every grain of rice on your plate contains a hundred beads of my
sweat,’ he would often tell his grandchildren. He was made of rice. He
was made of honest labour and the will to treat with equanimity the ata
lo dahama: profit and loss, joy and sorrow, fame and notoriety, praise
and blame. He did not ravage the earth he walked of and which gave him
life. He did not spit on it. He trod softly, even as he chased an errant
10-year-old girl across paddy field and over hillock. I had seen Pinchi
Appuhamy once, a few months before he died. He had already been
unburdened of memory and tormented at times with that impossible-to-cure
ailment of remembering things that had never happened. I saw him again,
last Sunday.
It was around three in the afternoon. The almsgiving was over. The
pirikara had been offered and accepted.
Those who came and went were duly remembered and offered merit. I
strolled down to the wela. The two farmers were still working. There
were a few people at the well. There was some ‘art’ visible but it was
still an unfinished piece of work. Forgivable. The kingfisher was not to
be seen.
Favourite granddaughter
A ten-year-old girl was sprinting across the landscape, unerringly
finding the right spots in that made-for-slipping terrain. She had left
her cousins far behind, for they were wary of ‘slip and fall’. From some
faraway place and from another century and lifetime, an old man was
watching, I am certain. He must have been smiling.
The little girl has not claimed she could fly or that she in fact
had, but she spends a lot of time on trees. Just like her mother.
Unfettered and ‘unfetterable’.
Her great grandfather would have called her ‘Punchi Sama’,
recognizing in her the genetic signature of a clan, a way of life and a
way of growing up and of course as the daughter of his favourite
granddaughter, Samadanie, who he had chased and embraced, chided and
taught, and whose name he murmured long after his mind had left home,
village, relative and all things named behind.
Civilizations don’t die easily, and that’s because of people like
Pinchi Appuhamy, a ‘honda govimahaththaya’ from a small village called
Walgama, a few miles from Rambukkana. Unfettered and ‘unfetterable’, I
am sure Munindrawansa Hamuduruwo would agree.
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