Seeking the place my father once called home

by Dakshana Bascaramurty

My father never read to me when I was a kid, but could sometimes be persuaded to tell a bedtime story from memory, drawn from a stock of Sri Lanka-ified versions of Aesop's Fables.

In the original parable of the crow and the fox, the fox flatters the crow, who is holding a piece of cheese in his beak, into singing for him. This prompts the crow to drop the cheese, and the fox catches it. My dad's version was pretty close to Aesop's original, except that the hunk of cheese was actually a vadai.

A crow eating vadai. To a five-year-old growing up in suburban north Toronto, this was an absurd image, and one I added to a patchwork of others in an attempt to understand Sri Lanka, where my parents were from but rarely spoke to me about. I understood a rough outline of why they and many other Tamils had left their troubled country and made Canada their home. I know their history in a meta sense, but few of the details.

Dad's silence

My dad's life, especially, was a mystery. Although my parents spoke Tamil in the house, enrolled me in bharatanatyam classes as a child, and made regular pilgrimages to a Hindu temple near Pittsburgh, the only tangible evidence of my dad's life in Sri Lanka were a few wallet-sized black-and-white portraits that had been preserved in yellowed envelopes or stuck into the crook of a disintegrating photo album.

The younger version of him looked nothing like the man I knew. Who was this stern-faced stranger whose jaw was narrower, lips were plumper and hair was more lush than that of my father, 46 and half-bald when I was born? Was he good at sports, or a klutz like me? What did his bedroom look like? His neighbourhood? How did he get to school every day, and did it look more like mine or the one on Little House on the Prairie?

How far removed from my world was his, on that mango-shaped island surrounded by the Indian Ocean nearly 14,000 kilometres away?

My dad never responded to my probing questions in a satisfying way. Like so many of those who even now are heading to Canada in the hope of a better life, he looked forward rather than behind.

When I was in grade school, there was wistful talk of a possible family trip there one day, but it never materialised. The enormous expense was one obstacle, safety a much bigger one. Government forces, representing the Sinhalese majority, had been at war with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) since before I was born.

By the time the war ended, in 2009, my brother and I were working adults, living thousands of kilometres away from our parents. Sri Lanka faded off my list of travel destinations. Maybe I'd never see it, and maybe that was okay.

In my parent's homeland

Then, this fall, I found myself in my parents' homeland for the first time - without them.

My husband, Anis, is half Sri Lankan and has family in the country's south. His cousin Tamarih was getting married this past October, and so we booked a two-week trip to the country. My long-buried interest in my so-called homeland was suddenly awakened - not least because the last leg of our trip would be a three-day sojourn to the North, organised by Anis's mother. My dad's house became the prime destination of the journey: In finding it, I hoped to understand him better.

My parents left Jaffna many years before the civil war began in 1983. In the late eighties, as the hostilities intensified, my grandparents, aunts and uncles began arriving in Canada, some sponsored by family, others claiming refugee status.

At one point, before I was born, there were seven members of the clan squeezed into my parents' two-bedroom apartment in Toronto's High Park neighbourhood.

Today, according to Statistics Canada, 131,000 Tamils live in Canada; academic experts put the figure even higher, at close to 200,000. So many settled in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough - opening up an extensive network of shops that sell 22-carat-yellow-gold wedding jewellery or imported spices - that some affectionately call it Little Jaffna.

Before the war, before the outflow, my dad recently confessed, he had fantasised about returning to his farming village of Atchuvely. Soon after he married, he suggested this plan to my mom, and she agreed to it.

"When Sri Lanka was in good shape, it was pointless wasting your time in another country," he recently told me, though, as usual, he held back on any details about why his homeland was so great. Although years ago he made one short trip back to Sri Lanka, his plans to settle in Atchuvely never materialized.

My mother's history

My mother was only slightly more forthcoming than my dad when it came to her history. One of the few bones she ever threw me was the story of how her father was almost killed by the Sri Lankan Army a few years after my parents came to Canada.

Having heard that soldiers were on the way to Urelu, their village, my grandfather had hid the family down the road. When he sneaked back later in the day to feed the guard dog, three troopers stormed into the house. It didn't take long before they found him - hiding, rather comically, under a pile of burlap sacks.

Two of them pointed guns in his face while another brandished a knife. He pleaded for mercy, and they let him go - but set the house ablaze. With the help of neighbours, my grandfather drew water from the well to put out the flames. Soon after that episode, he and my grandmother moved to Toronto, living with my parents until they found an apartment of their own. While downtown Colombo is a 21st-century city, history seems to have pressed pause on Jaffna. In the 10 days before arriving there, we'd travelled from the hubbub of Colombo to the tidy Portuguese-built streets of Galle, from Kandy's steep hills to the tea plantations of Nuwara Eliya. But the area in and around Jaffna was by far the most primitive part of the country.

The Sri Lankan Government has spent serious capital on reconstruction here since 2009, but signs that this was the site of a protracted conflict were tattooed on the land. We passed the

half-empty shells of bombed houses, some covered with vines that had twisted around their crumbling facades. It was clear that making Jaffna whole again will take far more time and money.

Subhas in Urelu

It was only after much prodding that I had finally got my parents to help co-ordinate a list of places to seek out during my time in the North. They were pleased with the idea of my going to Sri Lanka, but didn't exhibit the glee I'd hoped for when I mentioned the journey to Jaffna.

It was my Australian uncle, Yogan Mama - my mother's brother - who did the heavy lifting, spending hours poking around on Google Satellite and compiling points of interest in Urelu. Was the village co-op store still there, he wondered? It was where members bearing ration books could pick up weekly allotments of sugar, flour, rice, semolina and Maldive fish.

When the family had dinner guests, my uncle recalled, one of the four brothers would be sent off into town to Subhas, Jaffna's first ice-cream parlour. Whoever was dispatched would fill a flask with vanilla, the only flavour available, and cycle home from the relative hubbub of Jaffna's town centre to the sleepy village where the family grew bananas, coconuts, guava and eggplants. The owners of Subhas also ran a famous hotel of the same name that was shuttered for many years because of the war.

The hotel has reopened, but the ice-cream parlour, we discovered as we poked around, is long gone. So were the snack corners where they'd order rotis and mutton korma for lunch, and the grinding mill where they'd take coffee, rice and lentils for processing.

In my dad's village, meanwhile, his primary school was still standing, but the fate of many others, including both of the secondary schools he attended, was a mystery.

As I set out with Anis and a few members of his family, I had little optimism we would find what we were looking for here.

Once the second-largest city in Sri Lanka, Jaffna had been hollowed out by the war, and now has a population smaller than it did half a century ago. As we drove through this city, with its broken infrastructure and overhauled population, it seemed like a long shot that I'd find the place where my dad had grown up, or any traces of my parents' former lives, for that matter.

The directions my family had offered to my father's childhood home in the village of Atchuvely were simple: We were to look for a temple built to honour Pillayar (the elephant god, also known as Ganesh) and, after finding it, to ask around for the house known as Theivam Pathy.

During the war, a few temples were destroyed; others were occupied by the army so Hindus couldn't pray at them. Since the end of the conflict, some houses of worship had been rebuilt, occasionally funded by former residents who had created lives elsewhere. If we couldn't find the first landmark, there was little hope. But the Pillayar Temple was there!

An L-shaped structure painted mustard, it reminded me more of a repurposed farmhouse than the majestic white buildings adorned with hand-carved deities we'd seen in other parts of the country.

Finally found it

Save for a few smartly uniformed children playing behind the gate at my dad's old school, there was no sign of a living soul. We'd made the mistake of showing up during Atchuvely's unofficial nap time.

Just as we were about to throw in the towel, my husband spotted a man in the distance driving toward the temple on a scooter, and we waved him over.

"I'm looking for a house called Theivam Pathy. Know it?" I asked in my rusty Tamil.

"Theivam Pathy," the man said slowly, letting the words marinate on his tongue for a few seconds.

My dad was born in 1939, the same year The Wizard of Oz was released in theatres, an odd fact I always held onto because he was so rarely forthcoming with biographical details.

And so it somehow seemed fitting that, in this journey to learn more about his life, I had crossed paths with people who brought to mind the benevolent residents of Munchkinland.

A shirtless, white-haired man in a veshti (a white cotton sarong) held up with a belt, his cellphone tucked between the layered fabric and his belly, walked to the gate of a nearby house, eyeing us with what seemed to be curiosity and suspicion, as if we were Martians. His wife, a wiry woman with sharp cheekbones, marched up with him, sporting a faded green cotton dress and a dot of red kungumam on her forehead.

"I'm a visitor from Canada," I began, with a broken Tamil. "My father used to live here and I'm looking for his house. Do you know Theivam Pathy?" I asked.

The woman's eyes lit up immediately. "Theivam Pathy? Oh yeah, I know Theivam Pathy!"

The group at this house now wandered over to the one next door, where another shirtless man confirmed that Theivam Pathy was just down the road.

"Just around the corner" means as little in Sri Lanka as it does in Canada. We rounded many corners, trailing the man in the baseball cap for what felt like 15 minutes, until he gestured at a house.

Here it was: a modest bungalow surrounded by a stucco wall painted the colour of calamine lotion. Two women stood in front of the gate, chatting.

"Is this Theivam Pathy?" I asked, bracing for rejection.

But one replied: "Yes, yes, this is Theivam Pathy." She turned out to be the owner.

"This is where Cathiravelu Bascaramurty used to live," I said. "Do you know of him?"

"Oh, yes, I know that name," she said, nodding.

I turned to my husband, my eyes bulging. This was it.

My dad's home

She offered to let me in for a tour, and I stood there for a few pregnant seconds, grinning so hard that my cheeks began to ache. This was all I needed: The house, she told me, had been dramatically renovated; I'd never seen pictures of its interior or heard my dad tell stories about the place, so I had no nostalgia, even as a proxy, for it.

My parents had uprooted their lives completely to start anew in Canada more than three decades ago, and much of the world they'd left behind had been vigorously shaken up and slowly reassembled in a new form. But despite all that, there was still a small flicker of my dad's existence in this tiny, sleepy town.

Behind the house, faded plaid sarongs and batik dresses hung on a line, shaded by a tree weighed down with dozens of mangoes. I thought I was scoring when I bought a crate of imported ones for $10 near the Toronto airport, but here outside my dad's old home they were so abundant that some would probably rot on the tree before being consumed.

My dad's family never had enough money for bicycles, let alone a car, so they seldom went to downtown Jaffna.

Their diet was a mix of vegetables and fish with rice - meat was too expensive, and would probably spoil on the long walk home from town, anyway. But my dad had grown up with a mango tree in his yard.

A mango tree. This was a good life. And it seemed as if everyone here were living just as simply and contentedly as he had all those years ago.

(Dakshana Bascarmurty is a reporter for Globe and Mail, which initially featured this article)