Sunday short story

“The sun does not forget a village just because it is small”- African proverb.

Our story goes back to 1947 when I was 13. I call it “our story” for I relate it for my younger brother, Dinky Nallathamby Macintyre, as well. Dinky died many years ago in Arhaus ,Denmark and lies there. The two of us were boarded at Saint Patrick’s College in the city of Jaffna. My father had arranged that Dinky and I were allowed weekend breaks at the home of an uncle with the surname of Joseph, and we, small fellows, branded him with the place name, Kondavil Uncle.

His home was in the small village of Kondavil about six miles from Jaffna on the road going north to the sea coast town of Kankesanthurai. The train journey was short, so that Dinky and I, every Friday evening, were soon at the Kondavil station and walking east on Station Road, which cut across, west east, the northern rail road to the sea. Kondavil uncle’s home was only a short distance from the station. Those who lived there were uncle and aunty Joseph, their daughter Violet and youngest son Jeyanesasingam. The other three male offspring were grown up and working far from the Jaffna Peninsula.

There was as well, Somawathie, a young Sinhalese girl, orphaned as a child and abandoned in a southern village . She was adopted by the Josephs and was their domestic servant. Dinky and I knew spoken Sinhala but we could not talk it to Somawathie, for she spoke only Tamil.

Our weekend lives were not confined to the home of the Josephs. On the western side of Station Road , beyond the railway station there lived “Amamma”, in English ‘Mother’s Mother”. A silver haired gracious old lady in her eighties, the mother of our aunty Joseph. From long memory, she looked very much like the lady in the picture above, of the Ambaal temple close to Ammama’s home. Of course, minus the Hindu forehead ashes, for Amamma was a Christian.

Somawathie accompanied us cheerfully and frequently to Amamma’s home. It was a neatly kept home with a back garden full of pomegranate trees.

Ammama’s husband had died many years back, but she did not live alone. We found that out, when we strayed into her small bedroom on the first visit. In it we saw another bed adjoining hers. It was also neatly arranged with white sheet and white pillow case. As we looked Amamma came in and saw that we wondered. She explained, “That is the bed for Jesus. He sleeps there every night, guarding me. I have never lived alone.” She went on to say that the sheets and pillow case were changed as regularly as hers were.

Time passed, we grew up and Dinky and I spread out into the wide world very far from Kondavil. I never forgot the small village nor did Dinky , I know. I thought of it when I came to know that Shakespeare wrote in the prologue to Henry the Fifth,

” Oh for a muse of fire, to ascend the brightest heaven of invention”.

Later I rethought this. I was only partially on track.

There long ago was Amamma of the village of Kondavil, not driven by the poetic urge of invention, but resorting instead to deeply held belief in a historical fact, to experience it in her personal life. And yet, not without creative imagination, to accommodate Jesus in her bedroom.

The prologue to Henry the Fifth ends with a line that may well end this short story.

“Gently to hear, kindly to judge……..”.