Memories not mine but mom's

[part 2]

by Padma Edirisinghe

Some of those born in our country, in the first two decades of the past century like to boast that they were born between two world wars. Even my mother used to boast so till I graduated in European history in a major University of the island (excuse the boast, inevitable in the context) pointed out to her the absurdity of the claim. That disappointed her somewhat.

Anyway, she was fully involved with the second world war. Not that she went to battle with guns and pistols. But yet she was much involved.

Five of her seven children were born as Adolf Hitler, the war monger frightened the whole world in the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. Only two were born after.

Bursting

When her spouse got transfer orders to head a school in the upcountry she dutifully followed him or kept him company in a hired car bursting with luggage while crowds by the wayside sniggered. Till her dying day she remembered the taunts. “Yuddeta baye panala yana Patha rata bayagullo” that meant “Low country cowards fleeing the war”. So we were fugitives. My mother sat almost imprisoned in the car loaded with household stuff and a daughter (myself) and a baby in her arms, who predeceased me like my younger sister, Yasoma now lying in a grave in Warakapola, as a sacrifice to the mosquito menace. Mother had felt quite jealous of her hubby who sat in the front seat immune to all the chaos in the back seat and tutoring the driver on the Second world war and its main figure head, Adolf Hitler. It was the first time the man was hearing this strange name and almost made him ponder whether he was a Machang (cousin) of this gentleman who had hired him for a very long trip that was to end out of all places at Mathurata. Some folk, he no doubt had concluded, can act totally mad.

Said he was a headmaster but couldn’t he find a school in the low country rather than in this godforsaken hilly country wrapped in cold mists?

Births

Meanwhile, air planes flew above but never came down.

For five births mother had to come down to her own village by the Kandy-Colombo road but could get only second hand info on the trucks driving up loaded with, what the villagers called “Maratis”. The trucks were driving to the Kandy headquarters of the Asian battalion headed by Lord Mountbatten. The above human species (legend says hailed from Africa) had gained notoriety as man eaters and so, the villagers said, their mouths were padlocked. Mother had to argue with the maids over this matter.

“Did you actually see their mouths padlocked?”
“Yes.Nona. I swear to that, with my own yes I saw them.”
“If so, how can they talk or eat?”
“That I do not know. Anyway ask Manike too”.

Manike was myself and my mother had never asked me for verification for I was too small. But she had been intrigued by the information. Father never discussed war matters with her and when she tried to chat with the villagers on the topic, they too were clueless.

But her memories were more full of another war, a local war. And that had happened when she herself was quite small.

It was a war between two races (pardon the racism but the story is bound with it) that ended with the imposing of Martial Law too and even resulted with a governor called back home for misrule.

But mother was hardly aware of such a figure or such a law that belonged to the higher circle of information. But the basic facts she had mastered.

The war itself had ignited in a town close by, inhabited by a particular community. It was an offshoot of a communal friction that triggered off in distant Gampola in the 1915 decade. So my mother could have been between 5 and 8 years of age. But her memories retained snatches of how the villagers along with her family evacuated the chena of the pots to safer areas to ward off attacks by a furious race or a race ballooned to fury by a cascade of events.

“We, I mean the elders had put all the more precious household items inside bags and pillow cases as we ran away for dear life”.

Hilarious is her account of the alarm clock that was one of the hidden items. It rang at intervals but the fleeing villagers mistook it to be a war siren and whenever it rang the whole group fled more and more into the interior.

After they returned weeks later, some lands too had been occupied by the “Foe”. Recalls mother, “It was then that a great lord from Horagolla came to our rescue."

Hidden

This great lord was none other than Maha Mudaliyar Solomon Bandaranaike.

He had been an outstanding personage in the area, the lord of the mansion that lorded over Horagolla, the grove of Hora trees that had become the patrimony of a family come down from Silversmith Street in Colombo.

He usually rode on horse back and his whole bearing was so majestic and masochistic that my mother says, pulling facts from her memory box, that mothers never let their daughters be seen on the highway.

The Maha Mudaliyar was a Christian and one permeated by Western ways of eating and drinking. Young calves of soft flesh he preferred says mother with a shrug. But he was the man to present to this backward area the ultimate in grandiose living perhaps as the Romans flaunted grand living standards before the backward races of the North of Europe.

A miniature zoo too was put up in the Horagolla premises.

Anyway, whatever grouses the villagers of the chena of pots had against him for his foreign (paradeshakkara mannerisms) ways and apostasy were dispelled by the way he invested much effort in getting back to the local inhabitants, almost 100 % Sinhala Buddhists, their lands and possessions.