Just to the Ghosts

Anna Jayawardane’s last days @ Eldeniya

Denzil Jayasinghe

7 min read

·

1 day ago

The evening light filtered through the front windows of Catherine’s home, casting long shadows across the worn cement floor where Anna sat, her brown clothes pooled around her like spilled ink. At eighty-two, her hands were gnarled as old tree roots, but they still moved restlessly in her lap, weaving invisible patterns in the air — a habit that had never left her through all the years of endless talking, endless pleading, endless hoping.

She could hear Catherine’s children playing in the courtyard, their laughter piercing through the thick walls like birdsong at dawn. It reminded her of other children, other courtyards, other homes where she had been both welcome and a burden. The young man — what was his name? — the one who had stood up to Christie with such fierce determination. She had thought the lad cruel then, moving her beloved nephew’s things, disrupting the careful balance she had tried to maintain. But now, in the soft amber light of her final year, she understood what she had been too proud to see: he had simply claimed his right to exist in his own space.

How strange, she thought, that it took a boy to teach us all about dignity.

Her mind drifted like smoke, settling on memories that seemed more real than the present moment. Leo’s face appeared before her — not the Leo of the end times with his wild eyes and saint-filled visions, but the Leo of in his twenties and the middle years, when his hands were strong from farm work and his laughter came easily. She remembered watching him plant those chena in Puttlam and pineapples in Eldeniya, row after careful row, his chest soaked with honest sweat. He had been happy then, truly happy, in a way she realised now she had never been.

“We were fools,” she whispered to the empty room, her voice barely audible above the children’s play. “Holy fools, perhaps, but fools nonetheless.”

The telegram. The first telegram. Even now, her face burned with the memory of it. It had been Leo’s idea, of course — Leo with his desperate need to know if anyone still cared, if the bridges they had burned could somehow be rebuilt with a lie dramatic enough to matter. She had watched him dictate the words to the telegraph operator at the post office, his hands shaking not with illness but with a terrible hope.

“Leo passed away suddenly. Please come.”

Such simple words to carry such complex longing. They had waited by the window for three days, watching the road for any sign of visitors, of forgiveness, of love rushing toward them on urgent feet. When the boy’s father finally arrived, dusty and worried and real, Leo had hidden in the back room like a child playing a game that had gone too far.

“It was a test,” Leo had said afterwards, trying to justify what they both knew was unforgivable. “We needed to know.”

But Anna understood now what she couldn’t admit then: it wasn’t a test at all. It was a prayer made flesh, a desperate reaching across the chasm they had dug with their own troubled hands. The cruel irony was that love had come running — love had dropped everything and travelled those terrible roads and arrived ready to grieve with them, to comfort them, to be present in their darkest hour. And they had turned that love into a farce.

The second telegram had been different. No hope that time, just the familiar weight of their reputation for deception. When Leo died — really died, finally died — she had sent the same words, knowing they would be dismissed, knowing she would bury him alone. The gravedigger and the priest, both paid with the last of her pension money, both uncomfortable in the presence of a woman who had cried wolf once too often.

She remembered the walk from Anamaduwa to Susan’s home in Dalugama — Susan, Catherine’s elder sister — after Leo’s funeral, her feet bleeding in her old shoes, the black saree clinging to her skin in the humidity. Every step had been a surrender, an admission that she had nowhere left to go, no pride left to lose. When she had finally arrived at the house and seen their faces — shocked, guilty, uncertain — she had understood that even in death, Leo’s timing had been impeccable in its cruelty.

“Anna,” Catherine’s voice drifted from the kitchen. “Are you talking to yourself again?”

Anna smiled, a rare expression that transformed her weathered features. “Just to the ghosts, my dear. Just to the ghosts.”

Christie appeared in the doorway then, his hair now more silver than black, his scalp showing through in patches, and his once-handsome face etched with the particular tiredness that comes from a lifetime of quietly disappointing others. He nodded at her, a gesture that had replaced words between them years ago.

“Juan Christie,” she said, using the title that had once made him seem so important, so worthy of her devotion. Now it sounded like what it had always been: a way of making herself smaller so that others could feel larger.

He paused, perhaps hearing something different in her voice.

“Do you remember the marriage brokers?” she asked suddenly. “How I used to stand by your door, telling you about all those beautiful girls? How I thought I was helping?”

Christie’s face softened slightly. “You meant well.”

“Did I?” Anna asked, genuinely curious. “Or was I just lonely? Was I just trying to keep you close by finding you someone to marry, someone who might make you stay?”

He didn’t answer, but she hadn’t expected him to. The truth was a luxury they had never been able to afford in their family.

Anna closed her eyes and let herself remember Leo as he truly was: not the saint she had tried to make him, not the farmer he had tried to become, but the man who had loved her in his broken way and whom she had loved in return. She remembered their first years together, when love felt possible and the future stretched before them like an unplanted field, full of potential, despite their gap of two decades.

They had been happy once. Brief moments snatched between disasters, but real happiness nonetheless. She remembered Leo teaching that young boy to make kites from banana leaves, his patient hands guiding small fingers. She remembered the taste of fresh coconut water drunk straight from the tree. She remembered the feel of fertile soil under her bare feet and the sound of Leo singing while he worked.

These were the memories she would take with her, she decided. Not the telegrams or the shame or the years of being a burden and a guest in other people’s homes. Just the simple, true moments when love had existed without question or condition.

She thought of the love she had surrendered in her twenties, the man she had let go to keep her family’s peace. The years that followed were quiet, orderly, filled with duty — but empty of companionship. She remained a spinster until the age of forty-eight. Then came Leo, twenty years her junior. She married him knowing she was past childbearing age, yet with a strange, reckless hope that something new might still bloom in her life.

The light was fading now, and Catherine would soon call her for dinner. There would be rice and curry, served on mismatched plates at a table where she would sit as she had sat at so many tables: grateful, apologetic, trying to take up as little space as possible. But tonight, for the first time in years, she would also sit as herself — not as Leo’s widow or Christie’s devoted aunt or the old woman who had nowhere else to go, but as Anna, who had loved and been loved, who had made mistakes and paid for them, who had survived.

Tomorrow, perhaps, she would tell Catherine about the pineapple farm, about the way the fruit grew heavy and sweet under Leo’s careful attention. About the mornings when they would walk the rows together, checking for pests and disease, planning the harvest. About the dreams they had shared of making something lasting, something worth leaving behind.

She would tell her about the real Leo, before the visions and the delusions took hold. The Leo who could read the sky like a book and knew exactly when the rains would come. The Leo who saved every seed and cutting, who believed in the possibility of growth even in the hardest ground.

And maybe, if Catherine listened with the kind patience she had inherited, Anna would also tell her about the love that had survived everything — the exile, the failures, the madness, even death itself. The love that lived now only in memory but burned there as bright and warm as a hearth fire on a cold night.

The children’s laughter had faded, replaced by the evening sounds of cooking and calling, of families settling in for another night. Anna pulled her clothes closer around her waist and prepared to join them, carrying her ghosts with her like old friends who had finally agreed to walk quietly beside her instead of ahead.

She had been a fool, yes. But she had also been a woman who loved fiercely and without reservation, who had tried to build a life from nothing but hope and determination. That, she thought as she rose slowly from her chair, was not such a terrible epitaph after all.