Eight Years and an Absence

Caught Between Love and Loyalty

3 min read

That night, the house was thick with murmurs that clung to the walls like damp in monsoon. They put me to bed early — a small mercy, though sleep was a stranger. The air hummed with unease, the way it had for days, ever since the house had become a gathering place for grim faces and lowered voices.

Once spacious enough for laughter to echo, our home had grown tight. The arrival of my baby brother — just a month old — had squeezed us further, like too many spices in an overfilled jar. At eight years old, I was still a child, yet already familiar with absence. My cot stood in the middle of the family hall, a temporary arrangement, though nothing was ever genuinely temporary in Ceylon.

Two years earlier, when I was six, Grandfather had left us — not by choice but by the cruel arithmetic of time. Then Catherine, my aunt, and my mother’s sister, a nurse from the local hospital, came. She was young and vivacious in her early twenties. Her hands were quick and comforting, her voice soft as candlelight. My mother, burdened by my baby sister, leaned on her. Catherine took me under her wing, and for the first time, I knew what it was to be cherished without condition.

We shared a room, and on Sundays, she took me to Mass, the convent, and the cramped homes of relatives who pinched my cheeks and fed me sweets. My mother was disciplined, with sharp lines and unspoken rules; Catherine was warm, putting her hand on my forehead when I slept. I clung to her like a pilgrim to faith.

But time, as it always does, shifted the ground beneath us. My brother was born, and the house grew restless. Arguments bloomed — sharp, sudden things. Catherine had taken up with a man, a sin my uncle could not abide by. He shouted; my mother fretted, and Catherine, my Catherine, wept into her untouched meals. I watched, small and helpless, caught between love and loyalty.

Then, one day, she was gone. No note, no goodbye — just silence where her footsteps should have been. The house erupted. My mother wailed as if mourning the dead. Uncles and cousins formed search parties, chasing rumours through the city’s labyrinth, but Catherine had vanished like smoke.

The worst was not the chaos but the hollowing in my chest. At night, I whispered prayers for her return, but my mother’s grief had hardened into anger. Sometimes, in the dark, I wondered if it was my fault — if I had loved her too much or not enough.

Then came that evening, the one I would turn over in my mind for years. I woke to voices, low and urgent. A circle of relatives hunched around a man I did not know, a Petromax lamp casting long shadows. My uncle and mother were there, too — her face taut with something like fear.

Fortune-teller. The word slithered through my thoughts. It was a sin for Christians, yet here we were, desperate enough to bargain with the unseen.

Before I could understand it, my mother hurried over, her hands firm on my shoulders. “Back to sleep,” she murmured, but her eyes were elsewhere — searching, always searching, for the sister who had slipped through her fingers.

I lay still, listening to the whispers coil around me. Somewhere beyond those walls, Catherine was living another life. And I — I was left with only the ghost of her love and the quiet understanding that some losses never fade.