Fractured Bliss

By Sree Padma

The plot is situated in twentieth-century Sri Lanka. Th e protagonist is a Sri Lankan woman of a mixed racial origin (Eurasian) who grew up as an orphan at a time when the island was transitioning from colonial rule to independence. Her background, her marriage, and later her change of religious identity represent a slice of the emerging ethnic complexity on the island. She not only witnesses close-up the tragedies that occur in independent Sri Lanka in the form of Janatha Vimukti Perumuna (JVP) uprisings in the early 1970s and 1980s, the Sri Lankan governments brutal suppression of them, the terrible ethnic riots of the Sinhalese against the Tamils, and the rise of the Liberation Tamil Tiger Eelam (LTTE) and their terror tactics, but she also experiences
other struggles coinciding with the political fate of the nation and its own self-infl icted calamities. Th is makes the aim of the book somewhat ambitious, as it intentionally sets out to be a personal witness to issues of colonization, the constitutional fl aws of an emerging nation, power-mongering politics, racial and ethnic tensions, emergent religious/political identities, and gender discrimination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514469682

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Copyright © 2016 by Sree Padma Holt.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016903089

ISBN: Hardcover    978-1-5144-6970-5

Softcover    978-1-5144-6969-9

eBook    978-1-5144-6968-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 03/01/2016

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Wedding Ceremony

Chapter 2 Origins

Chapter 3 Childhood

Chapter 4 Girls’ High School

Chapter 5 Polytechnic School

Chapter 6 Colombo Stint

Chapter 7 Queen’s Hotel

Chapter 8 Mrs. Jansze

Chapter 9 Childbirth

Chapter 10 Pastor’s House

Chapter 11 Watapuluwa

Chapter 12 Compromise

Chapter 13 Discord

Chapter 14 Katugastota

Chapter 15 Watching the Young Fly

Chapter 16 Nightmare

Chapter 17 Reckoning

Acknowledgments

Sources Consulted

To the victims of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.

CHAPTER 1

Wedding Ceremony

Did you see the bride? She is wearing a SARI! Mary’s eyes popped up with surprise as she put her palms on her cheeks to enhance it. My curious face excited Mary further as she whispered in my ears, "Emerald akka (older sister) is wearing a sari with a wide brocade border. And she looks very, very pretty."

Mary stressed the last three words as we walked toward the chapel with the other girls in the choir. Emerald was the bride in the Anglican wedding that was to be held shortly.

Really! I whispered back. Emerald akka is wearing a sari?

Yes, just like Auntie.

Auntie was Mrs. Nirmala Kulatunge, who was in her late fifties. She was a warden of our home, a girls’ orphanage in Kandy. As was told, we simply called her Auntie. She always wore saris in an Indian style with a blouse. The blouse was always tight around her upper arms and covered her midriff almost completely. The groom, Atul, was her son. Until the time of the wedding, he lived with Auntie in her quarters in the orphanage. All the girls in the home called him Atul ayya (older brother).

Like me, Emerald was of Burgher (Eurasian) origin but grew up in the orphanage. As such, she wore frocks. Whatever were our origins, in our home, we lived together as sisters and called one another familial terms: akka (older sister) and nangi (younger sister). By the time I was old enough to know, Emerald left the home to work as a nurse in Colombo. We only saw her visiting our home from time to time. We didn’t know anything about her relationship with Atul ayya until the wedding was announced.

The ceremony was going to take place in a chapel at St. Thomas College in Colombo. We were excited. But then we weren’t sure if we would get to see the wedding. The night before, the good news came that all of us older than seven would be attending the wedding. We stayed up late into the night chatting and gossiping. Sleep can wait for later, but weddings can’t.

The excitement of the wedding ceremony woke us up early that morning. Just a year before, I became part of the church choir that consisted of fifteen girls who were eleven and older. We sang in the weddings and funerals of those families connected to the Anglican Church in Kandy. The Anglican Church was closely connected to our home. If the home was our family, the church members were like our extended family members.

Auntie asked us to sing in Atul ayya’s wedding. That added to our excitement on that day. As soon as we finished our breakfast, we got into our uniforms, which we always wore for our outings. The girls—fifteen of them in our choir—wore long skirts and blouses. I, the lone Burgher, wore a white frock, white socks, and white shoes. Even without my distinctive dress, unlike some Burghers, I could have stood out as an oddball anyway with my very pale white skin and cropped hair among the rest of the girls with brown skin and braided hair. In any case, apart from my appearance and dress, I was as much a part of the rest of the group, sharing their joys and dreams.

Soon after our arrival on the St. Thomas campus, we walked toward the chapel. I attended many Sunday services in this chapel during those summer vacations when Auntie brought us to Colombo to stay in the St. Thomas hostel. Compared with our Anglican chapel in Kandy, this one was big and beautiful. I liked the walls and ceiling. Its ambience looked magical, with its dome painted in sky blue and dotted by stars.

As we walked in the aisle to the altar, I glanced at Auntie, who was sitting in the front row. Auntie was of normal height, and she was plump and fair by Sri Lankan standards; she had light brown skin, with her hair combed sideways and secured in the back in a tight knot (konde). Like most middle- and upper-middle-class Sinhala women, she wore simple jewelry on regular days: a gold chain around her neck, a simple pair of gold ear studs, and bangles. But on this day, she decked herself out for the wedding. She was wearing an embroidered silk sari, matching necklace, earrings, and bangles. She appeared so regal. I felt proud of Auntie. Next to Auntie sat her daughter, Savitri, who shared a lot of Auntie’s features and who dressed almost like Auntie except for her hair—it was loose and bobbed.

We piled up on one side of the altar in the chapel and waited. Then the bridegroom, Atul ayya, and his best man walked up to the altar. They were both dressed in suits and ties with their hair combed back. Soon the priest joined them. Now we all waited for the bride.

Impatiently shifting our weight from one leg to the other, we fixated our eyes on the entrance of the chapel. Even so, Mary akka poked at me with her elbow as though to direct my attention to the bride who was just entering the chapel.

Emerald akka emerged like a swan. She was wearing a white silk sari with heavy brocade and with a white veil over her head. Emerald was always a beautiful woman. But on that day, in her bridal sari, she looked stunning. Bertie Liyanage, a husband of one of the older girls from home, assumed her father’s role and led her toward the altar. Three bridesmaids followed behind her, holding her long veil.

We quickly noted the details of the decorations on the bride and the bridesmaids for our later gossip. For now, we proudly raised our voices to sing our first hymn as the bride was being led to the altar.

With the priest’s help, the groom and the bride exchanged vows. As soon as they finished their vows, we sang the second hymn. As we watched intently, the best man and one of the bridesmaids passed the wedding rings to the priest. The priest blessed the rings and gave them to the groom and to the bride to exchange. With shy smiling faces, the groom and the bride slipped the rings on each other’s fingers. Their shyness reflected in our faces as well. The priest then tied the sash around their right hands and blessed them. Promptly, we sang the third and last hymn.

After this, the priest took the couple to the vestry to sign the wedding registry. We knew the couple would kiss each other after the signing but didn’t have a way of witnessing it. So as we waited for them to return to the stage, we satisfied our curiosities by whispering to each other and imagining their kissing.

The couple emerged out of the vestry smiling happily. Then they walked down the aisle together and stood at the entrance to greet the attendees. All the elders blessed them as they left the chapel. We stayed in the chapel, watching the couple until they left to get photographed. Later, we retired to the hostel with the rest of the girls to get ready for the reception.

Only family members were invited to the reception. Since we were considered as Auntie’s family, we attended the reception as well. This was a rare opportunity for us. The reception was held at the home of Auntie’s brother in Mount Lavinia, in the same neighborhood as the chapel itself.

By the time we arrived at the reception party, Atul ayya and Emerald akka had returned from their photo session. The grown-ups were served wine, and others were given cool drinks. With drinks in our hands, we proceeded to our most favorite part: the piling up of snacks and cakes on to our plates. We savored every bit of the food we ate and our silly talk with one another.

What we were not aware of at that time was how we were also making memories—memories that would stay with us forever. We might be orphans coming from different families that probably had very different backgrounds from each other, but the nursery bonded us together as close sisters sharing and cherishing our experiences.

I loved my childhood. Although it was far from perfect, I loved my life with all its ups and downs until that time fate inflicted on me an irreversible and terrible malady that turned my life upside down. This dreadful misfortune was what made me reexamine myself: the background responsible for my life, the course of events that took place in my life and in the lives of those around me in my town and elsewhere in my island nation, and all their interconnectedness. It made me realize how those few in power could decide the destiny of the people.

As I look back at the way I led my life, I regret not having this perception—that I was not just leading my own life, but while living, I was also influencing and was being influenced by those living around me. Most importantly, I didn’t have the awareness that the fate of the nation—like mine and that of the rest of the people on the island—could be dictated by those few powermongers. Like any average person, I was busy with my life, and I minded my own business. I thought that in this way, I was being a good citizen. Now I am not so sure of this.

We know in theory that passively watching a neighbor’s house burning might mean that the fire would come and engulf our own house too. But I didn’t know that watching horrors perpetrated on fellow citizens because they belonged to a particular group would somehow affect us all. Although I don’t know what course of action I would have taken to prevent this, I do regret my indifference to so many ghastly acts perpetrated on innocents; I too would be a victim.

Now I understand how my life has been inextricably tied with the turns and tides of the island’s history. This fact stares into my face, and there is no denying it.

CHAPTER 2

Origins

I was born on a small island in the Indian Ocean. The island then was called Ceylon. It was a momentous time for the whole world. This was the time when most of the world found itself in chaos as it waded through the aftermath of World War II. Thanks to the British presence, even our small island was not ignored or left alone.

This was a couple of years before my birth; the Second World War, true to its name, stormed through the island’s doors. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan—backed by Italy and Germany—started its aggression into Southeast Asia with the intention of occupying British colonies. When the British were forced to leave their Southeast Asian possessions—such as Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, and Singapore—it was clear to them that Japan’s next target would be their last naval base in Ceylon, which served as a tactical location in South Asia.

As a preparation for this impending attack, Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton of the British Royal Navy evacuated all European women and children from the island. Needless to say, native women and their children were not their concern. Saving their own folks aside, as colonial masters, their real concern was to protect Trincomalee (Trinco), the gigantic, natural deepwater harbor located on the east coast. So Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme commander of the South East Asia Command, moved his headquarters from New Delhi to Peradeniya, just outside of Kandy, with Trinco as the base for advanced operations.

The Japanese, however, devised a surprise Easter gift not for Mountbatten but for those British officials who were relaxing in Colombo. The same Japanese squadron responsible for bombing Pearl Harbor around six months earlier delivered this gift by sneaking into Colombo’s skies in the early-morning hours on April 5, 1942, to drop bombs at several places of choice. Only after the bombs started killing civilians did the British get into action to shoot at some of the attacking aircrafts. The battle lasted only half an hour. The British considered it a victory. Never mind the loss of some lives, and never mind about some business owners losing their businesses after they ran away from Colombo’s business area like chickens at the sight of a hawk when they heard the bombing.

Little did these men know that by chickening out, they lost claim to their businesses because, at the bidding of his colonial masters, the civil defense commissioner later seized the occasion to invite his favorites to take over their businesses. If one were to enumerate these types of events specifically, they would be countless.

If we focus on the big picture, however, it appeared that British preparations for an imminent Japanese attack actually gave a boost to job opportunities. The numbers showed that the military bases employed as many as 83,500 civilians at that time. That was how my mother, Monica Daniels, who grew up in Colombo, took employment in Trinco. Just a few weeks before the bombing, she packed her belongings and left her parents’ home in Colombo to work at Trinco’s navy base. Though she was not in Colombo during the bombing, she didn’t miss the excitement altogether; the same Japanese squadron bombed Trinco’s navy base nine days later. Fortunately for my mother and others who escaped, the bombing was not extensive. The Japanese were satisfied with destroying one of the fuel tanks and then retreated for good. This was the end of war in Sri Lanka.

The war was fought at many other venues in the world for the next four years, keeping the British busy while the island enjoyed relative peace and prosperity. So in spite of the war—in fact, because of the war—things in the island started looking up.

Actually, it was preceding the war that the island passed through its most difficult times. First, there was the great famine; and then there was the spread of malaria. The war, on the other hand, brought an economic boost to the island; this was especially so since Ceylon became the chief source of rubber for the Allies, following the fall of Malaya. This prosperity eventually translated into social welfare measures such as free medical facilities. These amenities allowed the recipients to happily expand their families. As a result, the island tripled in population. My birth, therefore, was a trickle added to the flood of the island’s teeming population.

I should not get ahead of myself. A few things should be mentioned first. My mother stayed at the Trinco base until the beginning of 1944. She was a product of the colonial legacy of Ceylon that lasted for almost five hundred years. She came from a Burgher family. Burghers are Eurasians who trace one line of their roots either to the Portuguese, the Dutch, or the British; each of these three European groups stayed on for about a century and a half.

Credit goes to Alfonso de Albuquerque whose intention was to populate Asia with Portuguese blood. He pursued his objective with a crusader’s zeal. So by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Portuguese men were free to marry native women in their Asian colonies and not just keep them as concubines. In Ceylon, the Portuguese drew their wives both from the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority communities. In spite of their unfailing efforts, they proved to be not so effective in spreading their seed as fast as they wanted. So by the time the Portuguese power waned in Asia, Albuquerque’s dream of creating a nation of Portuguese descendants did not really materialize.

But there was one winning point. The emergent mixed group, with their darker complexion and with their fervent commitment to preserve their Portuguese heritage of Catholicism, nonetheless, was better equipped to deal with local conditions than their Portuguese fathers.

When the Dutch came to the island, usurping power from the Portuguese, they scoffed with disdain at the mixed breed that the Portuguese had sired. With pride of victory over the Portuguese, they decided not to commit the same mistake by mixing with the inferior natives. Like everything, as time passed, their pride waned too. When the Dutch dwindled in numbers, however, they had to eat their own words. Well, at least to some extent; they wanted to ensure that their superior genes and culture were passed on to their offspring so that they would be distinguished from the Portuguese mix.

First, Dutchmen were permitted to marry only those local women who converted to their Dutch Reformed Church. Second, the daughters begotten by these native women were allowed to marry only Dutch men so the Dutch blood would not become too diluted. In this way, they wanted to ensure that the Dutch progeny still could retain enough fine genes in their blood to pass as Dutch Burghers. Thus, the island, in a century and a half, witnessed another line of Burghers. Unlike the Creole-speaking Portuguese mix who followed Catholicism, the Dutch Burghers pompously traced their origins to the Dutch, spoke Dutch, and attended the Dutch Reformed Church called the Presbytery of Ceylon. Throughout the Dutch colonial period, the Dutch Burghers managed to claim their supremacy over the Portuguese mix.

The arrival of the British as new colonial masters at the end of the eighteenth century put the Dutch Burghers in their place. At least, this was the sentiment of the Portuguese mix, who were happy to treat the Dutch mix as their equals—no less and no more. Anyway, they, together with the Dutch Burghers, found themselves in the same predicament; neither the Creole Portuguese nor the pure Dutch language would be of any use if they wanted to dominate the urban scene, where they lived out all their lives.

So they quickly learned English, the official language of their British colonial rulers. With European blood running in their veins, they were already qualified to better assist the British than the natives. To prove their European heritage, whether or not their skin color was pale, they assiduously embraced British European customs and traditions. Their attempts were not futile because their thought process was on the same plane as that of the British, who generously allotted the Burghers a status just a step below their own and above the indigenous Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims. And this was what the Burghers wanted since it kept them over and above the native populations in qualifying for key positions that the natives had only a rare chance to get.

There was more to this. Inspired by the loyalty of Portuguese and Dutch Burghers and their reverence for their European ancestry, the British busied themselves by adding their own pool of genes into the native populations. Obviously, this strategy, which they reserved only for this island, did come in handy to strengthen their authority further.

Elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent, once their offspring grew in increasing numbers and with varying skin colors—from not so pale to brown and very dark—the British grew suspicious of their own progeny. They enacted laws to keep them separated from the original stock. It was like a crow chasing some of the baby birds out of her nest when she hears them sound like cuckoos.

In Ceylon, on the other hand, the precedence was already set with regard to how to make use of their mixed cousins in the government and in business and how to slate them into the social hierarchy. So the relaxed British contributed some more strands to the growing complexity of the Burgher community in order to surround themselves with enough loyal people. As a result, the Burgher population thrived. Their growth in numbers continued on to the period of independent Ceylon and reached its peak by the time I was nine years old. Everything has its time and space. So it was with the Burghers and their fortunes on the island.

Even at the height of their fortunes, some Burghers fell through the cracks. My mother’s family was as an example of this. Coming from a middle-class family with not a lot of money to go around, my mother was allowed to go and find a job on her own. In fact, Burgher women in general—whether they were rich or not—moved about much more freely in public than their Sinhalese, Tamil, or Muslim counterparts. Unlike other girls on the island, Burgher girls were actively encouraged by their families to meet boys of their own community, to form friendships, and to choose their future husbands.

But compared to European women, Burghers, true to the meaning of the word, remained conservative. Actually, some rich Burgher families vied with the Sinhala and Tamil aristocracy in preserving family honor. Indeed, it is a universal truth in South Asia that family honor lies squarely on the women’s shoulders. To put it more precisely, family honor is dependent on how women regulate their sexual lives in order to ensure a proper patriarchal line. So even those Burghers who considered themselves liberal and forward would frown upon women who entered into any kind of premarital relationships. While a very sensitive subject, this is the type of relationship my mother was in when she gave birth to me. Soon after my birth, she came to Kandy to leave me in the orphanage. Only after I grew older did I learn this from Auntie.

I was a big baby with very pale skin and with a full head of thick black hair. Auntie thought I was a beautiful baby, and she was smitten. It seems my mother also had a hard time in giving me up. Soon after she gave me to the orphanage, she returned to reclaim me. But she couldn’t seem to keep me either. Since she couldn’t make up her mind, she kept coming back. Each time, Auntie had to go through the process of unregistering me back to my mother, along with my birth certificate, only to repeat the process later. So at some point, Auntie put her foot down and asked my mother to provide a notarized letter that she would not return to claim me again. That was the end of my mother’s visits to the nursery.

My birth certificate spelled my full name as Rita Daniels, after my mother’s maiden name. It was not quite unnatural for some groups on the island to go by their mother’s lineage. Our history says that Kandyan society remained largely matriarchal as late as the seventeenth century. If not specifically following the lineage, some sections of Hindus and Muslims who live in Jaffna and on the east coast are also matrilocal even to this day. But there is no matrilocal or matrifocal or matrilineal history associated with the Burghers. Like Europeans, Burghers always followed the father’s lineage. So obviously, my case was an exception to the Burghers’ norm. Only when I grew old enough and I realized that my mother’s maiden name was my last name too did I understand my mother’s unmarried status. But growing up, I never thought about my origins seriously.

Blissfully naive, I happily spent my childhood within the home’s premises. Our home was in spacious gardens and included four buildings. I remember sleeping in my small bed upstairs in the infant section which was filled with cribs and toddler beds. My toddler bed is all I can remember as I slept in that until I was six years old. There were two other buildings where girls of different ages lived. Auntie, who was the warden of the home, lived in one part of the bungalow where the grown-up girls lived. As I look back at my childhood and later events, I can say confidently that Auntie was my mother in the real sense of the word.

Growing up in the infant section, I remembered Maya, the matron, taking care of me and other children in the dormitory. Maya brought me to Auntie’s quarters in the afternoons. When I was still a baby, Auntie played with me during leisurely hours. I can still hear Auntie’s words when I was brought to her door: Come, Rita dear! Have you had a good nap? And then she would turn to Maya. Has she been any trouble?

Maya would say, No, madam. She slept until now. I’ve changed her since.

Auntie would nod in satisfaction and say, That’s good, Maya. Isn’t Rita a nice girl? Aren’t you, Rita? Then she would turn to Maya. You can go and take care of the rest of your work. I can prepare some milk for Rita if she is hungry. You don’t need to come back to get her. I’ll bring her before bedtime.

I was four years old when a picture of me along with other girls of the home was taken, framed, and hung on the wall of the orphanage, where it stayed throughout my stay and afterward. I was very fair and chubby, with pink cheeks and a shock of dark hair falling on my wide, round face. My older sisters loved to cuddle me, and Auntie treated me with affection.

This was the time I started my preschool. All I remember from the preschool days was my clumsiness. I remember carrying a glass bottle of milk close to my chest one day that somehow slipped from my hands and hit the cement floor. I tried to reclaim it in haste, but it was nothing but pieces of glass with spilled milk flowing in streams. Instinctively, I cried out loud and produced another stream between my legs that joined the milk on the floor. Nothing seemed to be in my control. Even so, I remember that my wailing was not so much for losing the bottle but for having to face my matron after school. This happened too many times.

One afternoon when I returned with wet pants and no bottle in sight, as expected, Maya stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips and her eyes fixed on me. You broke the bottle again, didn’t you? People think you are cute, but what do they know? Mark my words. My name is not Maya if I give you one more bottle.

From then on, in the mornings, Maya would thrust a glass into my hands, saying, Here is the milk. Drink to your fill. Because this is it until you return home. I would nod and empty the glass promptly.

Auntie and Atul ayya lived in a two-room annex attached to her office. Auntie and Atul ayya ate with the rest of the staff in Auntie’s dining room. Attached to her two rooms were an official drawing room and a big dining room that was used when guests were entertained. Whenever Auntie received sweets, chocolates, or biscuits as gifts from individuals and institutions, they were distributed among the home girls. Sometimes she would keep the leftovers in her room for another round of distribution.

When I was little, the leftover snacks were another attraction for me to go to her room. While she was away, I used to take liberties and eat a stomachful of those leftovers and pretended innocence. I was stupid, of course; it was obvious that Auntie had noticed my pilfering, especially during the times when she reached for those snacks to give me some.

She would say, Why is the candy packet looking almost empty?

Nonchalantly, I would reply, I don’t know, Auntie.

Staring at me with a wry smile, she would say, Strange, we don’t have any rats around here except the big rat called Rita!

Then I would look up at her, caught by her stare, and lower my eyes while my face betrayed a shy smile. Taking this as agreement, Auntie would start a benign inquisition.

Look, Rita dear, you can tell me that you ate the candy. I know you love it. But you should not eat all of them at once. See, what will happen now? You won’t be able to eat dinner tonight with a belly full of candy. Skipping dinner is not good for your health.

I loved Auntie. But I didn’t want to believe everything she said, even when I was young. I always had my opinions, and they were strong. In my little head, I felt strongly that eating candy was good for me because chewing candy always made me feel happy. Furthermore, rice and curries were given to us three times a day. What if I didn’t eat big dinners once in a while when I had a chance to fill my stomach with tasty candy? I knew Auntie would not understand this because she never seemed to like candy the way I did.

This was 1948, when the British finally left the island for good. The island—which was called Ceylon until 1972—became a parliamentary democracy just like Britain. Why did Ceylon choose to imitate its colonial ruler? In Britain’s case, though it declared itself as a democracy in 1707, it did not mean to include democracy in any of its colonies beyond the British Isles. Neither did it mean to abolish the special privileges of its royalty. Even in the case of the United States, it took centuries for the nation to achieve universal suffrage without discrimination with regard to gender and race.

To its credit, Ceylon seemed to have learned from the lessons of these other countries as it tried to start on a note of equality. Even the fears and anxieties of the minorities seemed to have been allayed by the guarantees against any discrimination given in our first constitution. The public statements proclaimed by our first elected prime minister declared that he would champion a multiethnic polity. But in no time, he backtracked by announcing that five hundred thousand Tamils working on plantations would not be citizens of this new nation. Except for the newly formed Federal Party (FP) to protect minority Tamil rights, no other Tamil parties seriously questioned this decision. At that time, optimism ran so high that no one suspected that this was the first of many stabs the body of this new democracy would receive. Nobody thought that treating the plantation Tamils as the other would mark the beginning of a process that would undermine democratic ideals. If democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch, then the plantation Tamils certainly represented the lamb.

Anyway, if putting down roots qualifies a particular group so that they do not become the other, then I must say that the plantation Tamils did put down enough roots on the island. Some of their illegitimate children ended up in an orphanage in Nuwara Eliya, which served as a sister home to ours. The Tamil plantation workers and their forefathers—who were brought by the British a century and a half ago from South India—served as the labor backbone for the island’s important tea industry. They were also the most marginalized group under the British. As indentured laborers, they were subjected to work of drudgery and slavery.

These laborers were elated when universal suffrage was announced in independent Ceylon. Enthusiastically, both Tamil men and women voted for the communist party, the party that promised to improve their lot. Their hopes collapsed too quickly as they watched their own party sitting in powerless parliamentary opposition while the ruling party not only disenfranchised them politically but also relegated them to an illegal status in a country where they had lived and worked for generations. It didn’t matter at the end whether or not they were born in the island and lived all their lives doing the heavy lifting to make the tea plantations the pride of the nation. The English and Scottish tea planters, who made fortunes on their very cheap labor, were satisfied by the fact that at least they were not asked to leave the country right away. Anyway, as the saying goes, better cross-eyed than blind, India agreed to take some of the plantation Tamils in installments. So as though it were some kind of horse trade, the island packed off some of the workers as a first installment while the rest waited for their unknown future.

As for me, I was too young to understand what was going on in the outside world. I didn’t have any clue that my playmates Saroja and Jaya, who came from the Paynter Home to stay with us during school holidays, were the illegitimate offspring born out of the union between Indian plantation workers and their masters, the English and Scottish planters. In our home in Kandy, the minority children frequently came from Burgher background. Although Saroja and Jaya shared European blood, they weren’t identified as Burghers. This might have had something to do with their mothers’ heritage as Indian plantation workers. It is mind-boggling for foreigners to try to understand the gradation involved in segregating each group in the island.

Anyway, while the Burghers enjoyed certain privileges under the British, their future in the newly independent island of Ceylon faced a measure of uncertainty. Yet these fears and uncertainties did not surface in mainstream society—at least not until almost a decade later when discrimination was extended to the native Tamils who formed the largest minority on the island but constituted a majority in the northern and eastern provinces of the island. Then all hell broke loose.

At this point in time, in spite of the fate of the plantation workers, Burghers and Tamils, along with Muslims and Christians, still exercised cautious optimism for their future in the new nation. Because our home was associated with the Anglican Church, the church of the colonial rulers, we had joined in this cautious optimism. In fact, our local Anglican church learned to survive difficulties from its inception and was ready for any eventuality.

When the Anglican missionaries first arrived in Kandy, the British were worried about the reactions that their conversion activities would elicit from the conservative Sinhalese Buddhists. So the British shooed many of them away to other parts of the island, just the way they did with other Christian missionaries. Most of them concentrated their efforts on building schools to educate children from first to thirteenth grades in Jaffna. Without a flinch, the Anglicans competed with other missionaries; they set up their own schools in Jaffna and in the south, such as in Colombo, Matara, and Galle, in the name of the Christian Missionary Society (CMS). Only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, four decades after the colonial government took over the control of education, did they slowly make their way into the Kandy area.

Once the British felt secure about their hold in the region, they not only didn’t object to the presence of Christian missionaries but also, in fact, tacitly approved of their proselytizing activities. The Anglicans were not as successful in their conversions in Kandy as they had been in other areas. But they managed to establish their churches and educational institutes with funding from the State and with very little opposition, even from the Buddhist monks.

Historically, Kandy was unique in its tolerance for other religions. When the Dutch persecuted Catholics down in the low country of the island, even though they were fellow Christians, the Catholics found asylum in the Kandyan kingdom. Other religious and ethnic groups, such as the Muslims and Hindus, also sought asylum in the Kandyan kingdom when the Portuguese and Dutch harassed them. But this came to change as the Kandyans, like other Sinhalese in the island, found themselves in a defensive position.

Needless to say that the native education started losing its hold as various Western powers moved into different parts of the island. By the time the British government took control of the island, the indigenous educational system was in a state of atrophy. Thanks to the Protestant missionaries on the Jaffna Peninsula, as early as the early nineteenth century, many high-caste Tamils living in the north received education in English, qualifying themselves in colonial civil and military services.

In addition to education, the missionaries provided