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Recollections of long past Easters and Sinhala and Tamil New Years

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Hot April is here upon us. With it comes the solemnity and end joy of Easter and the customs and rituals of the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. To me additionally, the name April inevitably brings to mind Chaucer’s first lines of his Canterbury Tales:

“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of March had perced to the roote,
And bathes every veyne in swich licour/ Of which vertu engendred is the flour
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne.”

Yes, the drought of March has given way to searing April with its blazing overhead sun. The crop is harvested; not so disastrous as the last two starved of necessities due to Prez Gota’s killer directive of banning chemical agricultural needs. The aluth sahal festivity was in Anuradhapura with Prez Ranil smilingly chatting to young ‘uns and back in Colombo planning to bring in a so-called “draconian” Bill to pass an Act against terrorism: ATA to replace PTA and allegedly more restrictive and dangerous. TUs, more so truculent Uni students have to be curtailed but not undemocratically. Ranil W is a Prez who is much in Parliament and that is commendable, as is the first faint sign of an economic turn-around.

Its festive season in the country but the ground reality is far from celebratory. To get away from eternal loud opposition and constant protest marches, and the thought of economic difficulties still suffered by most, I deliberately sent my mind back to the dim distant past. Times were truly spacious and peaceful then; people were content even though there was a distinct caste system in villages, and a division of young ones of the privileged private missionary school students and vernacular village school goers. I wanted to recapture innocent joy by recollecting how Easter was commemorated and the Sinhala and Tamil New Year celebrated.

My sibling and I were fortunate in having a mother who insisted on education in English for her children even though widowed very early in life and against a maternal uncle’s orders to “Go live in the village and send the girls to the local school. Then get them married as soon as possible. If you stay in town living alone with them, they will bring disgrace on us.”

In those ultra conservative days, a girl and boy even sending eye messages of love to each other was considered a crime and an elopement and births were shiveringly expected, hence cautionary, too strict vigilance in homes. As fate or karma is just in its dishing out, it was this uncle’s daughter who raised family eyebrows by eloping and divorcing! My sisters demurely consented to carefully arranged, very suitable marriages. By the time I came into my own as an adult, norms had changed for more freedom for women, though Mother remained Victorian.

So we went to a Methodist missionary school in Katukelle, Kandy. Mother consented to us learning Scripture and we were fortunate in reading and studying the Bible, knowing all about Jesus Christ. Later as a school boarder I went on Sundays to the Methodist Church down Brownrigg Street, Sunday school and Thursday guild meetings with boys from Kingswood.

I remember crying when we were told in Scripture classes and in Church of the betrayal of Jesus Christ by sneaky Judas Iscariot and denied by his VIP disciple Peter. This led to Christ having to carry his own wooden cross hearing the jeering catcalls and pitying cries en route and then being nailed to it and crucified between two thieves.

The joy of Christmas was so in contrast, so much so that with poignancy of Easter and being sent Easter eggs by the Janszes and peeping into their Christmas tree and decorated home, my much impressed third sister wanted to convert to Christianity. There was, however, not even a hint of conversion in our school. The mostly Irish Principals were totally service givers and their service included education, appreciation of English literature, and growing up to be modest, excellently behaved young women with values imbibed both at home and school. Principal Miss Allen particularly admired our Kandyan mores and modesty.

On the third day of Easter occurred the miraculous rising of the impaled Jesus Christ, who showed the stigmata in his palms, blessed those who had kept vigil near his stone tomb and been faithful to him; and ascended to Heaven. We so believed this story and were jubilant. Truth to tell we knew more about Christianity than Buddhism then.

Religion at home was going often to the temple on Halloluwa Road, Katukelle; pirit chanting and alms giving in-house; and visits to the Dalada Maligawa. Rituals in the Mahagedera were even more significant and practiced with a closer connection to the sponsored village temple with all night pirits at least twice a year. One sibling had to observe sil with Mother every month and invariably me with least clout got conscripted. I am thankful for that.

S&T New Year

I go by my memories of long ago Sinhala and Tamil New Years where customs were very strictly observed in my grandmother’s home and then in ours in Kandy. Mother was an out and out traditionalist.

The first custom was spring cleaning, which meant cleaning and clearing away accumulated stuff in the home. The uncemented areas of the mul gedera were the space for pounding paddy; the kitchen area; and the large room where a couple of feet above the ground were the wooden store rooms for that season’s rice harvest – divided according to the somewhat unfair custom of two thirds to owner of paddy fields and one third to the andé cultivator. These areas were cow dunged, so at the beginning of April, I well remember watching women squatting on their haunches and plastering the floor with cowdung mixed with water.

The used kitchen clayware – pitchers, pots, chatties, korahas, nebilis, maddaku were replaced with new ones. New clothes meant visits to Suppiah or Palayakat Stores in Kandy, and the sewing machine of the seamstress school teacher whirled day and night.

That covers the spring cleaning and new clothes of New Year. What about nonagathe period when one is supposed to be inactive? I remember well how this time period was very long when we were children. We had to subsist on biscuits, cheese, and stolen sweets such as kavun, aluwa and unduvel, stored in wicker kurini petti to be first offered to the priests in the local temple and then laden on the Avurudu table. We delighted in this absence of the usual rice and curry meals which were served thrice a day in the Mahagedera with women of the household even pitching into plates of rice at afternoon tea. Alternatives like string hoppers, roti and hoppers were rare even in our home in Kandy. Experimental Western dinners were served by older sisters who followed home science in school.

I suddenly remember the old kettle in my grandmother’s kitchen which was suspended over a cemented three brick hearth on the ground, eternally alight with smouldering dahaiya – dried husks of the paddy seed. That hearth too would surely have been cleaned out and re-ignited to glow day and night for the next twelve months.

The diversions or take-it-easy routines of Aluth Avuruddha? Plenty in the village, noisy too with rabanas beaten and loud merriment emanating from the kamatha where a giant wheel had been constructed by the youth of the village. Riding it was forbidden to us; we could only watch the rickety thing creaking up and down. Our consolation was the rope swing with a plank of wood as a seat strung on a firm branch of the mango tree in the midula.

A punya kalaya comes within the nonagathe period and also after the dawn of the New Year. We went to temple with small offerings of flowers and incense, dressed in our new year plumage.

An important ritual of the New Year is exchange of money. Mother would go to Kandy town to a Hettiya’s shop to do the needful and emerge gleeful since the betel leaf that the verti clad man gave her held a bigger amount than what she offered him. A couple of days later is the auspicious time to anoint one’s head with medicinal oil, have the first bath for the new dawned year and resume jobs, career, work, studies.

Very auspiciously this year a poya too comes within these two weeks and Eid al-fitr at the end of the Ramazan fast. The secular make-up of the country is demonstrated by this coincidental confluence of religious dates and a national occasion this year. May it augur well for the beloved country, after two years of intense suffering due to Covid and our leaders’ stupid mismanagement and also running down the country. Faint glimmers of silver appear in the clouds that bring April showers.

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