Sometimes I wish time machines were not science fiction material! Often I wanted to go back in time to be with my parents in that rural village just to re-live a day in my childhood. Memories are so precious to me but with time they have faded, I wish I wrote them down earlier.
It was the year 1983 my parents started building our home in a rural town called Athurugiriya. It is a lush tropical town close to the capital city of Colombo. I can remember the three of us visited the building site quite often. The builders stayed in a makeshift wooden cabin and we used to carry food for them during weekends. There were other families building their homes nearby. My mother used to complain that we will have to live in a wilderness. But my father enjoyed that wilderness and nurtured it until his last breath.
In 1983 civil war was ravaging the north of the country and there were incidents to disturb life in the capital city. However, life was slow steady, and peaceful in my village. My home stood about three kilometers from the little town called Athurugiriya. Athurugiriya means the place between two mountains. Yes, it was between two granite rock mountains. The town was so small it had few shops amongst them were the cafe, newspaper dealer, two vegetable and fruit shops, furniture shop, general merchant and the barbershop. There was a central supermarket that housed the drug store, beautician, cloth merchants, and book shop. A quaint rustic little town that gets a bit crowded on open market days.
We lived on the road that runs towards one of the rock mountains called “Korathota Kanda”. You could find homes hiding behind trees on either side of the road until you get to the rural hospital. Once you pass the hospital the roadside is full of fountain grass and various tall trees, until you reach a junction with a giant Laurelwood tree (Domba Tree). Amidst stands the Ceylon Steel Corporation. We could often hear the shift break horn from the foundry, as children we were so fascinated by that loud unearthly sound. One the other side of the road is the playground with a pavilion and it is on the hillock and the boundary was lined with a rank of Na trees. Na tree is the national tree of Sri Lanka. Na tree is a cone-shaped evergreen but it is always covered with the pink budding leaves. Poets and songwriters often refer to these leaves as a young woman’s lips. Once you reached the Laurelwood tree you need to take the left road and walk another two kilometers until you reach my small community. An adventure began at the Laurelwood junction as the bus will drop you at that point. Everyone takes a two-kilometer trudge home, for us children it was pure wild fun. The tarmac road was narrow barely two vehicles could pass each other. There is no sidewalk but the dirt paths on either side to walk on. There was a non-working rubber plantation for about a kilometer on either side of the road lining the road protecting the travelers from the midday sun. It was a quiet road hardly a vehicle passed by. You could hear the lulling noise of the rubber canopy swaying in the breeze almost like the noise of the ocean in the night. Often the mature dry rubber fruits will pop loudly and the seeds will fall on the ground with a noise similar to falling pebbles. We had so much fun collecting those shiny brown little balls called rubber nuts. Apart from the rubber plantation, there were old cashew trees, rukaththana bushes with their yellow flowers, coconut trees, jackfruit trees, eraminiya, bowitiya, blueberry, gandapana , bombu, kenda, wara, aralu, gini sapu and mara which made a perfect jungle scene. It was told people were living beyond the thicket but we never saw anyone. For us children that were a perfect mystery, unseen people from another world!
My home was initially a two-bedroom house with a combined living and dining area and the kitchen with open verandas. My father later added a larger living room and two more rooms with attached bathrooms and modern facilities. We had a housemaid and her name is Pemawathie. She now lives with her children and often comes to see us. We had around an acre of land which was longer than its width. My mother was a school teacher and did a lot of gardening in her free time. We had colorful croton bushes and hibiscus of various colors as the hedge. In the backyard, we had our drinking water well and next to it we grew the colorful canna lilies and banana trees among much other edible vegetation. In the front, we had a Neem tree, Jasmine creeper, Butterfly pea creepers, Yellow Bell tree, temple tree, daisy, roses, anthuriums, marigolds, and Chrysanthemum which I helped her plant. We had a second well which was for bathing. It was a square pond with a platform to stand. Its water was so clear and you can see the bottom which was about five feet. Moss and ferns were growing on the sides and we used to have fish and some water lilies growing in it. Water in that little pond was so cold as two olive trees were surrounding it providing shade.
My father's favorite pass time was agriculture and he used the evening to cultivate our land. We had the jack fruit trees, avocado, medicinal trees and plants, and a coconut grove. We had lemon , olive, godapara, and berry trees. The huge goraka (garcinia cambogia) tree was avoided as it was widely reported a vicious devil inhabited the tree.
There was a small stream that ran at the edge of our land. I never know where it came from but it went on to a much bigger stream in the next village. As a child, I loved to play in that water every evening while my parents attended to their hobby. My brother was a little baby at that time so I solely owned the fun land. I played on my own and climbed the fruit trees and hang on tree trunks upside down. I felt like an Olympic gymnast at that time. My father cultivated a small paddy and he filled the paddy with water to prepare the soil. My cousins swam in the murky water and told me it was better than their school swimming pool. Those days I thought swimming was a better sport than Gymnastics.
My entire childhood was enriched and molded around such a rich fresh environment. I still love and crave to live in a wilderness than a city. I left the comforts of my home at the age of twenty to join the rest of the world. Since then I have lived life to the fullest and enjoyed the comforts of a modern trendy lifestyle that everyone embraces or strives to embrace. But lately, I have realized that I have left something so valuable a lifestyle that in no way can match the sophisticated illusion I have lived. I have embraced toxicity in the name of modern luxury. Its time to go back in time to re-start where I left behind. This time not alone but with my loved ones and all of you. This blog is an attempt to reverse the ill influence of a modern life lived to the fullest. I read far and wide and the world is going right back to that miraculous far far away place called home, my home.
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