Sakkili

Voices from the marsh

4 min read4 days ago

A Memoir, Ceylon, 1965

There was a time, not so long ago, when my afternoons in Wattala felt like entire seasons folded into an hour. In 1965, I was a schoolboy, knickered and brown-kneed, with a satchel that smelt of worn-out books and Bulto toffees. Our school stood near the edge of a marsh — the kind of place where the land wasn’t sure whether it wanted to be earth or water.

After the bell rang, I would sometimes slip away. Not home — not yet—but to that narrow path beyond the rusted fence of the sports ground, where the footbridge lay half-rotten, a few planks missing as if time itself had walked across and forgotten its way back.

Beyond that was a place few dared to wander, and even fewer spoke about.

There, in a soft pocket of trees and tangled grass, stood a scattering of huts — patched together from tin sheets, driftwood, and castaway things. The city’s refuse had found its last breath there, reborn as shelter. This was where the sakkili folk lived — the ones the city needed but never saw. They cleaned the latrines, swept the back alleys, and disappeared into dusk like shadows afraid of light.

No one said their name aloud. My grandmother, when pressed, would simply mutter “those others” with a half-lifted hand, as though that wave might keep their presence from crossing the threshold of our drawing room.

But I saw them.

I saw the women hunched over their cooking fires, sweat shining on their brows, stirring pots as if conducting rituals. I saw the men returning barefoot with no vests in the afternoons, shoulders stooped but eyes still alert. I saw the children — dark-eyed and agile—chasing each other with wild laughter, their marbles chipped, their dreams unspoken.

And I heard the naga salam.

It would come when the day’s noise had thinned — when even the crows fell silent and the water in the canal turned from brown to burnished gold. At first, it was just a murmur, barely rising above the hum of the flies. But then, like a prayer gathering courage, it grew — wavering, unpolished, strange. A sound that seemed to rise not from the throat, but from the belly of the earth.

It wasn’t a song. It wasn’t quite a chant either. It was… a sending.

A sound cast upward toward something unseen. It had the weight of longing, but none of its impatience. It had the shape of grief, but not its despair. It moved like smoke, unsure of its destination, but certain it had to rise.

I used to sit on the old stone boundary wall, legs dangling, chin in palm, and let the sound drift into me. It made no sense, not to a boy of ten. But it moved something — the way a monsoon wind moved through cane fields, bending the air around it.

I remember asking Rohan, my classmate, what it was.

He shrugged and said, “That’s the naga salam. They know how to send it.”

Not sing it. Do not perform it. Send it.

And that word stayed with me — send. Because that’s what it was. Not entertainment. Not art. A vibration of the soul. A message without language.

No one taught the naga salam. You couldn’t teach it. It wasn’t something you learned from a book or a teacher. It came from inside — from knowing how small you were in the world, and how large your faith could be.

Long after I left Wattala — after the swamp was drained, and the huts replaced with boxy houses, and the people moved further into the margins — I would still hear it, sometimes in my dreams, sometimes in the breathless pauses of the real world.

That cry — part prayer, part protest, part plea.

A ripple sent into the silence, never expecting an answer.

And sometimes, just sometimes, that was enough.

A footnote by the author, some 60 years later, in 2025

The Sakkili community — sometimes called Chakkiliyar in the Tamil tradition — belonged to a caste once tasked with the “unclean” labours of Ceylonese society. Though the island now calls itself Sri Lanka and the laws speak of equality, the weight of centuries does not lift so easily.

They lived on the margins — not just of land, but of imagination. Feared, avoided, misunderstood. Yet in those weather-beaten huts and amidst the marshes of Wattala, I often found a quiet grace — a rhythm of survival, and sometimes even joy.

Many from that community have, over the years, sought other paths — through education, faith, or fierce determination. Some have risen above the mud their ancestors were told to stay in. But for many, the struggle still echoes, like the naga salam — not angry, not defeated, but insistent. A sound that asks, simply, to be heard.

Dalits