Tear Drops

Amala kept hearing the shrill sounds of her mother calling her name far across from the field. Although it was nearly time for lunch and she had to run back home all the way from the coconut tree garden back home to get the food to deliver to her father who will be busy working at the rubber plantation at this time, she was truly enchanted by the story which Parvati granny was telling her.

By now, Amala realized that her mum would have finished packing the food for her father and her twin elder brothers, Aryan and Chelvam and must be impatiently waiting for her third child,to come back home to get the food while she tries to get her youngest child, Manohara to get to sleep for a while. Amala was still lying down on the puffy grass patch, chewing on a piece of coconut which her father gave her when he went climbing up the tall trees in the wee hours of the morning to pluck the fruits which after selling in the market, placed the food on their table every other day. While enjoying the breezy wind, the detracted mind of Amala’s attention was again captivated by every word of Parvati granny’s of the tales of Ceylon, the olden term used for Sri Lanka.

Parvati granny continued while chewing on the betel leaves, getting her mouth all reddish while she spitted the overflowing leafy remains out of her mouth now and then. Amala felt herself going deep into the stories once again as she continued. The Sinhalese had always claimed to have been the earliest colonizers of Sri Lanka, first settling in the dry north-central regions as early as 500 B.C. and its guardianship of Buddhism. Being a Tamil, Amala had been a curious girl and will sit with anyone who tells her stories on the Sinhalese history and culture which in fact, cohabitate with the Tamils.

The institutions of Buddhist-Sinhalese civilization in Sri Lanka came under attack during the colonial eras of the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British as what Mrs Horns told her during their long walk at the tea plantation whenever Amala’s mother permitted her to go out in the early evening times now and then. The British under the Donoughmore Constitution of 1931 and then the Soulbury Constitution of 1946, the franchise was dramatically extended, preparing the island for independence two years later. Amala found herself smiling when she thought of the sweet word, independence, that is.

The beautiful portrait painted by Parvati granny’s words of Sri Lanka’s history which at times was pinched with tear stains of the various political influences which affected the mankind of Sri Lanka, was also splashed with the beautiful tales of the rich culture. It was always difficult for Amala to return back in the afternoons while she was brought back to a whole new world while listening to Parvati granny, and she wished, for just a second that her mother would stop calling her and yet she felt herself getting up, brushing away the spluttered dried grass away from her light floral skirt and the checkered button shirt which Mrs. Horns, the English teacher who came from Britain to teach the influential children of the big houses in Amala’s town presented her with, on her fifteenth birthday last year. Amala said a quick goodbye to Parvati granny and promised to meet her again the next day to hear the story on the ancient Indian epic of Ramayana and of the Sinhalase Buddhist stories which remains an ever top favourite on Amala’s lists.

Soon turning into sixteen this year, Amala was secretly waiting to join the English typing class which Mrs. Horns taught for the girls who could afford to work and spare some time learning how to type and soon progress their lifestyle as they dream saving up enough money and one day sail off by taking the weekly ship liner all the way to Britain and live a whole new life where promises and dreams could come true. Shaking herself to come out of the dream, Amala sprinted across the coconut plantation skipping and jumping across the dozens and dozens of coconuts strewn across the grounds.

She found herself gasping for breath when she almost reached her two roomed house standing shabbily along the outskirts of the rubber plantation. She grinned when she saw her younger brother Ayan and younger sister Vimala playing at the veranda both eight and ten years old respectively. Ayan shouted out loud, “Akka, where were you? Mother has been looking for you for a long time”. He stressed loudly on the “long” word. Amala shushed him and tapped his rear end and went inside quietly.

Her mother stood there gently shaking the man-made baby cot looking exhausted and wishing that her last one will go to sleep soon as she had to rush to the tealeaf plantation to start her shift soon till the day turns into dusk and she had to rush home to help Amala with the dinner preparations. Amala’s mother suddenly noticed her daughter preparing to leave the house with the food prepared for her father and her two sons and she frowned in irritation and called out to her. “What took you so long to come when I was screaming until the whole neighbourhood could hear me a while ago? Your father and the boys will be ravenous by the time you bring the food to them, why can’t you hang around in the house more often and help out a bit more Amala? I have to make Manohara go to sleep and go to…..” Amala ran out of the house carrying the food in both hands without hearing the rest of the words her mother was telling her. This world she was living in was something she was trying to escape from. It was the year 1948 now, the year where the Ceylon Citizenship Act was being carried out, which denied citizenship to 11% of the population.

The Tamils presence was resented by Sinhalese nationalists,recounted Amala as she walked along to the rubber plantation to serve her family men their lunch of sweet potato porridge and salted fish with small raw onions. Amala’s mind was in a mini turmoil as she walked along speeding up her steps as she got nearer as she thought of the Ceylon Citizenship Bill which was introduced shortly after independence on 4th February 1948.

Amala recounted to herself that the Bill stipulated that anyone wishing to obtain citizenship had to prove that their father was born in Ceylon, that they were at least third generation immigrans. She frowned in dissapproval as she decided that this was an impossible task for the Indian Tamils.

Amala’s father and her rest of the family were placed on hold as they were still waiting for their citizenship status with hope. Whereas, Amala was hoping that Mrs. Horns will bring her along to back to Britain as she will be returning to New Hampshire at the end of the year to retire and she did mention that Amala can live with her in her house while studying to become a teacher. Amala has been living with high hopes since that day.

As Amala found her father and her two twenty year old brothers sitting by the rubber trees, taking a rest, looking totally exhausted and making small talks about the political situation going on at that moment, she quietly placed the food down and started to place the 3 small copper plates down and serving the porridge. She was looking distracted and didn’t hear her father calling her name till her brother Aryan touched her shoulder.

Amala’s father looked concerned and wondered why his daughter looked so distracted for the past few days and frowned when he suddenly had this thought that she may have fallen in love with one of the many soldier boys or the rubber plantation workers as she has already attained marriage age. Amala shook herself mentally and regained her usual cheeriness and talked and joked with the three men and went back home to start preparing the dinner wondering whether her dreams will come true or will she be also drawn into the millions of the Ceylonese girls where dreams turn into buried memories till their last breath.


Two years later, Amala woke up with a jolt as the baby woke her up abruptly. She carried the baby tenderly and slowly began to feed her. Thripshika, the four month old, looked up at her mother with innocent eyes and Amala felt herself tearing. She looked at her husband who was lying down on the floor beside her looking weather beaten and lost to the world after a whole day spent at the rubber plantation.

Amala’s mind went to Mrs. Horns whom she sent off at the harbour a year ago, with her dreams washed off by the ship liner as the teacher slowly started to vanish further and further away from her eyes. Amala’s mother died of a snake bite at the tealeaf plantation six months prior to Mrs.Horn’s voyage back to her homeland and Amala’s life took a three hundred degree rotation after her mum’s demise. Her siblings had to be taken care of and her father went into depression, staying at home to drink and smoke pot instead of taking care of the other children.

Amala’s elder brothers took charge and over the two years, everything slowly began to change in Amala’s life. She was married off to a rubber plantation supervisor’s son who also worked in the same area as her brothers did. Slowly starting to adapt to the new family life, Amala, just as the other million girls in Sri Lanka, let go of her dreams and turned into one of them and slowly Amala put her baby back to sleep and found her eyes drooping into darkness.


There was already a cleavage along ethnic lines between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, and also a widening rift between Sri Lankan Tamils and Indian Tamils. Amala’s brothers and her husband were discussing about the discrimination which had been going on ever since the 1950’s started. The Tamils having started to feel discriminated demonstrated peacefully, asking for equal treatment. That included Amala’s husband, and her brothers who were all starting to feel the heat of the discrimination as they were showcased to, in their every day lives.


As this political commotion began, Amala’s siblings and daughter started growing up and Amala was holding two jobs to cope so that she can help to assist her husband whose current job at the rubber plantation was going downhill due to the discrimination efforts.

The central and most explosive issue of the 1956 election was a linguistic one. The People's United Front won the majority share of fifty-one seats. By then Amala’s daughter had turned eight years old and Amala herself was carrying her second child. Her father had by then also remarried and had started to take care of his own children leaving Amala to mind her own family of her husband Ram and Thripshika. As active demonstrators, Amala’s husband and brothers were often arrested by the Sinhalese police and were thrown into prison for many long weeks. Amala was the one who strived to keep her daughter from starving and managed to put some food on the table so that she, Thripshika and her unborn child remain alive. Thripshika was growing up to be exactly like her mother in every sense as Amala realized as the years went past. Although she was delighted, her heart also ached for her daughter that sooner or later, she will be also disappointed that the small heart which is containing big dreams will soon be broken into thousands of pieces.


The Federal Party continued to consolidate its strength and became an important player in national politics. In 1965 the party became a component of the UNP-led coalition government. Thripshika had just turned fifteen and she was trying to persuade her mother to let her attend seventh grade so that she will be able to sit for her SATS after that. Amala has been skiving and saving secretly so as to help assist Thripshika take her SATS too, although she has not given any high hopes for her daughter just incase of an emergency. Nobody had mentioned anymore about her second child, after all these years and today, Amala went to the temple with Ram, who now ran his own grocery shop in the town area, to do prayers for her child who died during childbirth seven years ago.

Aryan, Chelvan, Ayan and Vimala did try to visit their sister, Amala’s house whenever they pass by the district as all of them had married and had their own families and children. Amala continued to be the matriarch for her family as all of them knew how she took care of all of them during the hard times and now, as Amala gets older, everyone had developed a deep respect and love for this angel lady who carried all of their burden on her shoulder all these while.

In May 1958, due to a communal riots, hundreds of people, mostly Tamils, died. This disturbance was the first major episode of communal violence on the island since independence. The government declared a state of emergency and forcibly relocated more than 25,000 Tamil refugees from Sinhalese areas to Tamil areas in the north. Amala had to relocate her house three times just to escape the Sinhalese tortures which took her father’s life on one fateful night.

Shortly after the new government victory, it presented parliament with the Official Language Act, which declared Sinhala the one official language. The act was passed and immediately caused a reaction among Tamils, who perceived their language, culture, and economic position to be under attack. Thripshika suffered most due to this act in Amala’s house. She was prevented from studying in the corporation school where eighty percent of the students were Sinhalese. Nobody could console her and Amala was also deeply upset by the fate this motherland's mankind brought to her child.

As the years rolled on, the political upbeat kept everyone from progressing and all the Tamils had started to suffer due to the subsidized weekly rice ration by half. The Tamils also started to make Tamil an official language to which the Sinhalese activists express hostility.

Civil violence ensued, and the government was forced to proclaim a state of emergency that lasted for most of the year in 1962. As Amala and her daughter work in Ram’s grocery shop along with Ram, they suffered a lot of losses due to the heavy recession and depression period and Thripshika fall in love with a Sinhalese navy officer in which her whole family except for Amala, showed disapproval.

Amala got Thripshika married off to Veer Pritam, the Sinhalese navy officer on a bright Sunday morning in the outskirts town temple and watched them board the ship liner and again she waved her hands to a loved one till they vanished far away from her eyes. Everyone in her family including Ram was angry and made Amala feel devoid of any communications after that incident.

Bandaranaike's government was introduced in 1973. The policy made university admissions criteria lower for Sinhalese than for Tamils. Two years down the road, Amala was delighted to find that Thripshika had entered the local university in India and had started to study literature like she always wanted to and had mailed her a novel which she had just wrote dedicating it to her mother, Amala.

Meanwhile,a Tamil separatist underground started to form. These groups were known collectively as the Tamil Tigers. The strongest of these separatists were the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), founded in 1972 by Velupillai Prabhakaran.

In July 1983, the most savage communal riots in Sri Lanka's history erupted. At least 150,000 Tamil fled the island. These riots which shook Sri Lanka, also took Amala’s twin brothers and her husband's lives who got killed by soldiers.

Amala’s son-in-law came to Sri Lanka during one of those days with Thripshika and this time, and at the ripe old age of fifty-one, Amala crossed the border, and as she went up the ship liner, with her daughter, she felt herself turning into the sixteen year old girl once again, who kept waving her hand as the liner cruised away and her motherland slowly started to vanish further and further away as Amala disappeared into the wide ocean, this time with her dreams lefts at the shores of her Motherland, Sri Lanka and her teardrops piercing the land with unspoken words.