I have missed this countryside—the freedom and openness which I always had, before I went to Doha—the wide fields which are being harvested in some areas, the silvery channels of water, the wewas with the nelum flowers blooming. The men are sitting on the pila. Their work is done; they have sown the fields and are waiting for the paddy to grow. The paddy bissas with their thatched roof covers must be full of grain and the pomegranates must be ripening on the trees in the village gardens. Pumpkins lie piled up by the roadside, enormous golden yellow pumpkins. I never ate vegetables in Doha. It was always mutton and rice. Bossa madam would cook the food herself. She would cut up the meat and boil it with rice and spices—coriander, cinnamon and lots of cardamom. I have not tasted chillies on my tongue for six months. I longed for the taste of fish from the Mahawewa—tilapi and loola cooked with red hot chillies and coconut milk.

Coconuts are plentiful in loku mahathmaya’s estate and everyday I would scrape coconut lavishly—as much as I wanted for curries and sambols. Big bunches of plantains hang in the kades, kolikuttu and ambul. Divul and pomegranates fill the vatties woven out of dried pan kola. I think of the guavas and mangoes in the garden. During the season the trees are laden with honey-sweet fruit pillaged by parrots. At Doha there were plenty of apples and grapes but the people I lived with were loba, stingy. The rest of the family would buy crates of fruit and send up a share for Bossa Sir and madam and the children but they never gave me any. They would eat and drink before me but they never shared with me. I was, after all, a lesser being to them, a slave. I was there to do the work. There were five children in the family and Bossa madam was a teacher. The children were good except for the eldest girl, Menoor. It was because of Menoor that I could not stay. She made life unbearable for me.

Soon, soon I will be in Mahawa. I can see from this distance the towering pinnacle of the rock temple of Yapahuwa. The eagles and sparrow hawks wheel about the summit. Below the rock, covered with trees, are caves with figures carved in stone. Life never changes here at this temple. The chairs with their embroidered covers are ranged against the walls of the wide verandah, brass spittoons beside them. A teapoy stands in the middle with a vase of flowers. The monks who dwell in the avasa go about their business calmly as if the outside world hardly exists for them.