The Rent Collector’s Tale
The Rent Collector’s Tale
Father kept his rent receipt book with the same quiet reverence he reserved for his Parker fountain pen and the old ledger that had weathered countless southwest monsoons since Independence. Between its humble covers lived the ghost of Pond’s face cream — that gentle, powdery white cream that marked his unhurried mornings when the breeze still carried the morning freshness through our open windows.
There was nothing grand about the little book. Its brown cover had softened with age and Colombo’s humid embrace, corners turned down. When you opened it, the pages whispered secrets — a sound much like the coconut palms that swayed in our lane each time the evening winds swept in from the church nearby. It lay flat and wide, those cream-coloured sheets stretching long and narrow, as if designed for a world that moved to the gentle rhythm of the bicycles and street vendors, where entries were made with the deliberate care of a clerk who had served the government with great devotion.
Each receipt was a small masterpiece of bureaucratic precision. The headings marched across the top in stern formation: No., Date, Received From, Rupees — words that carried the weight of adult responsibility, printed in fonts that have since disappeared. At the bottom, in letters that brooked no argument, was printed the commandment that governed our small world: RENT MUST BE PAID IN ADVANCE.
Father was stationed in the south of Ceylon then, in places with names that rolled off the tongue like distant thunder — Tissamaharama, Teldeniya. From those distant stations, his letters would arrive punctually every week, written in his careful schoolmaster’s hand, instructing me to collect the sixty rupees from Mr. Gnanadasa, our tenant on Kandy Road. I was not even fifteen and felt enormously important carrying that receipt book. It was my first taste of the adult world, where money changed hands and responsibilities were honoured. Father would prepare each receipt with the care of a calligrapher, filling in everything except the date — that was left for me to complete, a small but significant act of trust.
The house at 68, Kandy Road, Dalugama, had been built by my grandparents when the British still ruled and the roads were red dust in summer and rivers of mud during the monsoons. It stood modest and whitewashed, with a small garden where banana trees drooped their generous leaves.
My monthly visits to collect rent became small adventures. I would catch the bus after school, the same bus that carried market women with their baskets of vegetables and clerks returning from their offices in Colombo. The conductor knew me by now and would call out, “Rent collector boy!” as I climbed aboard.
But it was inside the house that the real theater began. Mrs. Gnanadasa would usher me into their front room, where the air was thick with the smoke of medicinal herbs and the complaints that had accumulated since my last visit. She was a woman of substantial grievances — about my uncle’s children who trespassed through their joint garden chasing guavas, about the roof that leaked during the monsoons, about the water well that ran dry in the dry season. “Tell your father,” she would say, waving her hands dramatically, “that boy from next door broke our vegetable garden again yesterday.”
Her two sisters, who lived with them like a permanent Greek chorus, would emerge from the kitchen to study me as if I were an exotic specimen. They would whisper among themselves in rapid Sinhala while I sat politely, receipt book balanced on my knees, waiting for the performance to end.
The most fascinating member of the household was Mrs. Gnanadasa’s son — a serious young boy, born to a father who had once worn the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk but had renounced his vows for love and marriage. He had transformed the back courtyard into an ayurvedic dispensary, where large clay pots bubbled mysteriously over wood fires, filling the air with the pungent aroma of herbs and roots. Patients would arrive at all hours, clutching their ailments like precious burdens, seeking remedies in bottles of dark, bitter-smelling medicine.
Mr. Gnanadasa himself was a complex soul, bald as a river stone polished smooth by countless monsoons, who had retained something of the monk’s eternal serenity despite his return to the world of wives and rental agreements. When he finally appeared with the sixty rupees counted out precisely, he would speak in the circular, puzzling manner of one who had spent years contemplating the mysteries of existence. His Sinhala came in waves of repetition, like temple chants that doubled back on themselves. “Money is water, water flows, flows to the sea, sea returns to the clouds,” he might say, pressing the crisp notes into my palm, before adding with perfect seriousness, “Responsibility teaches, teaches the young, the young become the teachers.” I would nod gravely, understanding perhaps half his words but sensing the weight of ancient wisdom in his voice, even as his wife’s complaints continued to drift from the kitchen and his son ground roots in the medicinal smoke-filled courtyard behind us.
The transaction complete, I would tear the receipt along its perforated edge with a satisfying rip, hand over the small slip of paper, and tuck the money safely into my shirt pocket. The bus ride home always felt shorter, weighted as I was with the pleasant burden of duty fulfilled. At home, Mother would receive the money with a smile that spoke of pride rather than mere approval. “Rent collected,” she would write to Father that very evening, though we all knew that those two simple words carried within them the story of my small journey into the grown-up world of landlords and tenants, of responsibility carried across dusty roads and afternoon buses, of the quiet satisfaction that comes from doing what needs to be done.
Sometimes I wonder if Father knew that in sending me to collect that modest rent, he was really teaching me something far more valuable — that life’s most important lessons often come disguised as the simplest errands, and that growing up happens not in grand gestures but in the accumulation of small, faithful acts performed with care and carried out with love.
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