Forward, Always Forward
Forward, Always Forward
The Gaze from Every Gate
That morning, I turned right from our gate. The sun was still kind then, not yet cruel. It lay soft and drowsy across the road — the road that sloped the way it always had, easing down into the world like a slow thought. It was the kind of descent worn not just by years of footsteps and monsoon water, but by the memory of those who had walked it — names spoken and forgotten, dramas once urgent now folded into silence.
I hadn’t gone ten yards before I heard her.
“Sudu Putha”
Mrs. Siriwardane stood by her gate, leaning slightly against the bamboo bars like someone bracing against a wind only she could feel. That gate , old, sun-burnt and peeling, had seen things. It had opened for Perly, once barefoot and wild-haired; it had shut against Girlie’s and Jayanthi’s shouting; it had swung madly the day Lal and I raced each other to the gauva tree, our knees bloody with childhood.
She was their mother. The matriarch of that weathered clan, the keeper of that particular chaos — the type that always smelled faintly of dhal and Dettol. She looked at me now not like someone who’d known me all my life, but like a civil servant at a desk.
“Did you pass the exam?”
No context. No title. Just the exam. As if there was ever another.
The General Certificate. GCE. The great divider. The wordless altar upon which we were all offered up. Parents, aunties, even the ones who’d never gone past Grade 8 — they all knew it. Clutched it in conversation like a passport. You passed, you were allowed into the future. You failed, and the world shut you out quietly.
Her question sat in my slipper like a stone. Not quite pain — just the wrongness of something that had no place.
I didn’t want to answer. Didn’t want to stand there and be held up like meat in the butcher’s window. But politeness, that old inheritance, spoke for me.
“Yes. I passed.”
That was all. No numbers, no categories, no pleasing smiles. Just yes. I didn’t slow my step, though her eyes followed like laundry pegged in the breeze — persistent and slightly accusatory.
And as I walked, something turned sour inside me. A slow rustle of resentment. Not at her, not exactly, but at the thing behind her eyes — the tallying, the quiet arithmetic of comparison. I could feel it rise around me like the first heat of April. Dry. Invisible. Stinging.
She was weighing me against her own — her son, her daughters — like we were grains on a scale, like motherhood itself was a spreadsheet.
I hated it. That quiet appraisal. That unspoken rivalry stitched into every neighbourly smile. As if we were all running some strange race I never agreed to enter.
Further along — still within the shadow of her gaze — I saw her.
Maria Gurunanse aka Maria Achchie.
She stood by her metal gate like an old tree stands through the weather. Rooted. Still. Her gown hung on her like history — shapeless, faded, smelling faintly of camphor and the locked drawers of old cupboards. Her hair, like cobwebbed silver, framed a face that had once taught subtraction and scripture with the same finality.
She looked at me, and the boy in me twitched.
There had always been something clinical about her gaze. Even as a child, I’d felt it — that dissection. That mental sorting. She didn’t smile. Had never smiled, not even when I had scraped my knee and offered up tears like currency. That expressionless face, so eerily familiar — I’d seen it in my grandmother, in my mother, in every woman of that generation who had learned to watch without blinking.
She had never married. That was her story. Or maybe her verdict. Stayed on as a teacher long after the others had folded into marriage, into quietness. They called her Gurunanse, but the word was a weight.
“Where are you going, son?” she asked, her voice chalk-dry.
I flinched.
Lately, everyone seemed to be asking. As if walking had become an act of rebellion. As if movement itself required permission.
“I’m going forward,” I said, and the words surprised even me.
It was true. It was also defiance. Forward into the dust of the morning, into the untidy stretch of what came next. Away from these eyes that watched but never saw.
She didn’t reply. Just narrowed her gaze the way she did when someone gave the wrong answer in class. Those eyes had catalogued us all. Our relationships, our failures. The girls we smiled at. The ones we didn’t.
She lived with her brother, John Seeya, and Rosa Nanda — kind people, warm. I had swung from their garden tree, stained my clothes with cashew juice, and eaten billing fruits from their kitchen. Her world had touched mine. And yet, she had remained outside it — that rigid figure at the gate, holding a ledger of morality no one had asked her to keep.
Still, I walked on. But I carried her with me. That gaze. That burden. That eternal question of whether I was enough, or too much, or simply misplaced.
And then — a smile. A wide one. Rajapakse Aunty.
She met me head-on, wrapped in her usual osari, her teeth catching the light like polished betel nut.
“Going to the market, child?”
She peered into my bag, already assessing. I told her I was fetching groceries for Amma. That should have been enough. But it never is.
“Selling eggs, ah?” she said, poking at my cane bag.
Then the question again.
“Passed the exam, no?”
And — as if that weren’t enough — “How old are you now? This year birthday how many?”
Always measuring. Always weighing. Age, exam results, errands — they never asked what I dreamed, what I feared, what I longed for.
The village felt smaller that morning. Crowded not with people, but with their watching. Their questions. Their old truths, passed down like heavy pots no one wanted but no one dared to throw away.
And I — just a boy with half a map, pockets full of doubt, and a quiet hunger for elsewhere.
I walked on.
Forward. Always forward.
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