There are many more changes now in Mahawa. The old houses are now abandoned—the huts with the mud walls and thatched roofs with their windows barred with jungle sticks. The new houses have plastered wails of pink and green with tiled roofs. There are no longer fences of jungle wood but parapet walls with gates. The houses are full of cassettes and transistors. It was very different in the past. Nona, loku mahathmaya’s sister, remembers many things—the big, flat round kurakkan rotis that the people of the Wanni Hathpattuwa ate and the jungles full of bear, deer, leopard. The thalagoyas, the giant lizards, used to crawl into the garden at night and the jungle cocks would crow in the garden, she would tell me. The wild fox, the nariyas, used to scare her at night. The jungle was close to the property but it has now been cleared and the animals have had to go far into what’s left of the jungle. The last time Nona came, she knew that things had to change in her brother’s life. Brother and sister had stood watching the coconuts being plucked, talking about how loku mahathmaya too could not live here much longer. The loneliness was too much for him. He was growing old. There were many changes taking place and the estate was too much for him to manage. Not like Arthur mahathmaya who still has his coconut plantation in Chilaw. He will never give it up. He prefers to be alone there rather than live with his wife in a foreign country, however rich he could get there. Loku mahathmaya has already given away most of his possessions to his children and soon the house and property will be in the hands of strangers. I will then have to find a new place to go to, but it will never be like this. Here I was treated as a person, an individual, a human being. And even when I go, he will see that I do not go empty handed.

The taxi stops at the gate. I open it for the car to go up. Loku mahathmaya is lying back on the long chaise lounge, reading a book. ‘Ah, Nanda, you have returned,’ he says, smiling.

I enter the house and sit on a chair. A luxurious feeling assails me. I have never felt such a flood of happiness in my whole being. It is an indescribable sense of peace, santhosaya.

For six months I had no chair to sit on, only the floor, and when I was tired and weary I had only the wall to lean back against. When I sit on this chair I feel I will never want to return to that country again.

This, alone, is enough for me.

The Innocents of the World

The Arrival