Wattala’s Soothsayer

Father David’s binding

Denzil Jayasinghe

3 min read

Bythe end of the fourth week, Father David Soyza had stopped keeping count.

They came in numbers too strange to explain — men who hadn’t stepped into a church in years, mothers with bags of incense and dried lime, spinsters convinced their dreams were being tampered with, and boys who said the devil was hiding in their water wells. Some brought offerings. Some just brought stories. All of them had a need.

Father Soyza had competition from the local soothsayers who also practised witchcraft. Men in white sarongs and red scarves, women with pottu marks on their foreheads, keepers of mantras and mutterers of spells. But while they tied charms to trees and blew smoke over burning rags, Father Soyza—as he was now called—had become the Catholic soothsayer—the only one who wore a collar and wielded a crucifix like a sword.

Did he come to Wattala to become a healer? Or did he come to disappear?

The bishop had assigned him there with a wink and a warning. “A quiet place,” the bishop had said. “Simple people. You’ll have time to read the Bible. Maybe write something.” But from the moment he arrived, the quiet had seemed too loud. Dogs barked at shadows. Children refused to sleep in their rooms. And a woman, three doors down from the church, swore her late husband was still borrowing her slippers at night.

It was Wattala, of all places — unremarkable, sunburnt Wattala — that seemed to be falling apart at the seams of the spiritual world.

At first, David did what he’d always done. He listened. He prayed. He offered comfort with the gentle detachment of a man used to grief. But something shifted. His prayers began to take hold. People said their homes felt lighter. The air didn’t press down so much. The cold spots in their living rooms — gone.

He didn’t change what he did. But they changed how they heard him.

By the second week, there were queues under the jam tree. By the third, children drew pictures of him fighting devils with a rosary like a whip. By the fourth, a woman from Hendala said her cousin had dreamed of him glowing.

Father David didn’t feel glowing. He felt tired.

At night, he lit a candle in the chapel and sat silently. It was not a peaceful silence. It was a silent watch. The kind that made you question the shape of your soul. He whipped himself in the dark, the lashes neat and precise, each a private litany. Then he lay down on the hard wooden bed that had come with the presbytery, his bones learning its shape.

He told himself it wasn’t him. That people were desperate. Anyone who paused long enough to listen in a city too fast to care and a country too haunted to heal could be mistaken for a prophet.

But sometimes, he wondered when the air changed, when rooms held their breath, when a man, eyes rolled back, began to speak in his dead mother’s voice, not angrily but gently, as if asking for forgiveness.

Those moments unsettled him. Not because they were frightening. But because they made him feel seen.

And still, he continued. House after house. Spirit after spirit. Some crumbled with a prayer. Some needed Latin. Some needed hymns sung loudly. Some needed silence. And the truly stubborn ones- the ones that laughed or growled or flicked lights off mid-verse- those he faced with the bishop’s cross and the rosary, each bead worn smooth by thumb and time.

People said he tied houses better than any soothsayer. That no spirit dared return once Father David had bound the place. He didn’t know if it was true. But when a man believes you can chase away his pain, you don’t correct him. You hold the pain. You carry it, even if it’s not yours.

He would never be sure whether faith or fear made them come. But they came. In the heat. In the rain. In silence and sobbing.

And somehow, that became enough.