Conversations with my Mother

By Shyam Selvadurai (page 2 of 5)

How I used to love going to the Lodge. First there was the journey in the open jeep. Our route took us through the lush foliage and rivers of the Wet Zone of Sri Lanka, then the road would emerge out onto the coastline and we would travel past miles and miles of white beach, turquoise water. We would always stop at Tangalle Bay for a picnic lunch, which we children would eat quietly, hoarse by now from screaming out jokes and mild obscenities at the village children we passed.

Within an hour from Tangalle, the landscape changed completely. We had entered the Dry Zone. The light was no longer the hazy, moisture-laden yellow of the Wet Zone. It was now a brilliant clear whiteness (the same quality of light as a dazzling February day, here). The trees on the sides of the road were stunted with few leaves, yet they were filled with brilliant red and orange flowers. Vast arid plains stretched into the distance, a smell of dried clay pervaded the air.

To get to the lodge our jeep would leave the main road and go along a narrow jungle path. So close were the trees that we would sit on the floor of the jeep as the thorny branches banged and rattled against the sides. Then we were in the clear and, rising quickly to my feet, there it was, the lodge- a long wooden building, an extensive deck with pillars at regular intervals supporting the low slung roof. Doors led off the deck into the bedrooms. The building was raised eight feet off the ground, for, if it was the rainy season, the Wirawilla lake would be lapping at the base of the Lodge, flamingos, painted stork, peacocks, buffalos, deer, an occasional elephant, along its distant banks. If it was the dry season, all this animal life would have receded to the centre around a water hole.

What adventures we children had at the lodge. If the tank was full there was fishing and bathing. The tank had man-eating crocodiles in it and so we always stayed in the shallows, one of us keeping an eye out for the deceptive looking logs. If it was the dry season we would play cricket or badminton on the parched floor of the tank, making treks to the water hole to see the wild-life. We would go into the jungle, my brother leading the way with his air rifle, our thrill and terror when we would come upon fresh elephant dung.

While the Lodge is, in my mind, associated with all that was best about my childhood and adolescence, it is also how I mark the beginning of the end.

Despite its idyllic setting, the Lodge was in the deep south of Sri Lanka. My father was from the minority Tamil community and for a Tamil the south has the same implications as the American south has to an African-American. Before he built the Lodge, friends advised against it. Yet my father loved the south, its barren landscape, the brilliant white light, the wildlife. This was his country and he would go wherever he wanted in it.

In 1977, for the first time in my lifetime, ethnic conflict broke out between the majority Sinhalese community and the Tamils. For people living in the capital, Colombo, this conflict seemed removed as it was confined mainly to the south and other regions of the country. It might have seemed the same to us, except for the Lodge; except that my brother was at the Lodge, on vacation. For a few days we did not know if he was alive or not. All I remember of those days was the way time, the world, seemed to slow down. My mother told us to keep busy, to pray. But I remember just lying on my bed, aware of how the hours dragged on. Finally the telephone call came that he was safe. The mob had come to the Lodge demanding my brother, but the staff had secreted him away into the jungle. If they had found him they would have butchered him with the sharp scythes they had brought with them, or worse, put a tire around his neck, poured kerosene over him and set him on fire. He was only fourteen years old.