A face that is youthful. Handsome. Wearing a dark cassock, he hangs in this portrait gallery on a wall of this gloom-filled house. His eyes gaze out on a celestial world. Waiting for the Messiah. All things moulder in the grave, but those fresh young eyes see beyond this worldly garden. His grandfather had struck it rich when he bought the coffee garden of the last king of Kandy in the mountains of Hanguranketa. The king was captured by the new colonial masters, the British. He was exiled. The new colonialism rode in and the Royal coffee gardens were planted with new seed, new crops that brought the entrepreneurs from the South untold wealth. According to the ancients of this island, the wealthiest man is one who is rich in offspring, friends, cattle, pearls, money, houses, land. And the new entrepreneurs set out assiduously to acquire, to cultivate, the tenets of the ancients. They succeeded. But for how long? How many generations … and then the weakened blood petered out and flowed thinly through the arteries of etiolated branches. But the names entered the annals of a history that was being re-written—Susew, Jeronis, Jusay. The Lords of Creation. ‘The natives’, as their colonial masters named them.

‘That’s the uncle, the priest. My mother’s brother. Oh, he was lovely. Whenever he met me he would say, “Hello miss”, as if I were special, grown up, a young lady.’

‘And did he marry?’ Lydia asks, peering into an unshadowed face. ‘He could have. He belonged to the Anglican Church.’

‘No, he never married.’

The vows of celibacy were voluntary. Ended up a bishop in the Anglican hierarchy. Left nothing for posterity except for a hundred, perhaps hundreds of sermons preserved carefully within this locked oriental chest with its fine carving. A carving that has become nebulous, indecipherable, in its landlocked territory.

‘Oh, all the sermons written from the nineteen thirties.’

Dead Sea Scrolls. Urn burial.

The natives were proselytized. They prayed. They preached like their masters in the same carefully-worded language, devoid of extremes. A pure fountain of crystal words. Clarity without complexity. Innocent naïve theology, for those were the guidelines for the congregation. No steaming, champing controversy.