The second Telegram
The second Telegram
In1972, the year I turned seventeen, a telegram arrived at our home in Dalugama. It came in the late afternoon, handed over by the postman on a bicycle, folded like a secret. My mother read it before anyone else.
“It’s Leo,” she said, her voice flat. “He’s dead.”
My father put down the paper he was reading. “What do you mean, dead?”
She handed him the telegram. He read it aloud without emotion.
“Leo passed away suddenly. Please come.”
He left the next morning, just after six. The roads to Anamaduwa were long and bad, broken in places by tree roots and unlit bends, and it was not a place we visited anymore. My mother stayed behind with the three of us. We had school, chores. Life continued.
He returned the next day, much earlier than expected. He drank the tea quickly slammed a door. We heard him talking to himself before he even stepped inside.
They lied,” he said.
“What do you mean?” my mother asked.
“It was a trick,” he said. “A hoax.”
“A hoax?” she repeated.
He looked at her as if she were complicit. “They made it up. Leo and Anna. To see if we still cared.”
My mother’s face did not change. She kept her hands folded in her lap.
“I travelled all the way for nothing,” he said, almost spitting. “Wasted two bloody days.”
There was no apology in the house, no one to direct blame toward, just a hollow silence that deepened.
Weeks passed. Then another telegram came.
“Again?” my mother whispered, reading it. This time, she didn’t even tell my father. She folded the paper and placed it inside her drawer.
“Is it Leo?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. Dead again.”
We didn’t go. None of us mentioned it after that. It became a kind of private joke, though no one laughed.
And then, one evening, Anna appeared.
She arrived on foot, her black saree clinging to her like wet skin. Her eyes were red, and her feet were covered in dust. When my mother opened the door, Anna didn’t speak. She stepped inside and sat down in the first chair she saw. Then, without warning, she began to sob – loudly, like someone had opened a door to the past and let all the grief come tumbling through.
“It’s true this time,” she said between gasps. “Leo’s gone. Nobody came.”
None of us spoke. My mother handed her a glass of water. My father stood in the back room, not coming forward.
“They buried him near the church,” she said. “There was no one. Only the gravedigger, the priest and me.”
“What happened?” my mother asked, her voice almost kind.
Anna shook her head. “They don’t know. He was sick, maybe. Or something took hold of him.”
I didn’t know what to feel. I remembered Leo’s voice, his laugh, the way he once taught me how to make a kite from banana leaves. That was before the visions, before the strange sermons he started giving under the trees. He had turned into someone else, someone I didn’t understand.
He was gone now. And yet he had been gone for years already.
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