The Wailing and the Silence
The Wailing and the Silence
A boy’s coming-of-age story amidst the dark reality of domestic violence in rural Sri Lanka in the 1970s.
Disclaimer: This story portrays specific individuals and events in Dalugama. The actions and behaviors described are not representative of all men in the community, which is diverse and includes many who differ from those depicted here.
The stranger’s greeting hung in the air like incense from the church I had just passed — sweet, persistent, and ultimately ignored. I heard his voice, of course. You always hear the voices that reach out to you in the darkness. But that night, walking home past the church grounds at night, my ears were already too full of other sounds, other voices that I wished I couldn’t hear.
“Good evening, young man,” he had said, his words floating across the empty space between the church gate and where I walked. A kind voice, probably. Maybe someone who knew my father, or grandmother, or simply believed in the courtesy of acknowledging a familiar face in the fading light. But I pretended deafness, pulled my shirt tighter around my shoulders, and quickened my pace along the familiar path home.
You may wonder why I chose rudeness over politeness. I was not raised that way. My mother would have been mortified to know I had ignored an elder’s greeting. But that night, courtesy felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford, a social nicety that required an emotional energy I had already spent.
The wailing had started again.
It drifted through the warm evening air like a toxic fog, seeping through the gaps in coconut palm fences and over the low walls that separated one family’s misery from another’s uneasy peace. Women’s voices, raw with pain and fear, cutting through the cricket songs and the distant rumble of the last buses heading towards Colombo.
I knew these sounds. We all knew these sounds. They came with the regularity of the evening news, the predictability of the monsoon. When certain men stumbled home from the taverns, their tongues thick with illicit liquor and their fists heavy with the day’s accumulated frustrations, the night songs began. Not the gentle lullabies mothers hummed to their babies, but these other melodies — soprano screams that made dogs bark and children burrow deeper under their sheets.
As I walked past the dimly lit houses, most of their windows already dark or glowing faintly with kerosene light, I could map the geography of domestic violence by sound alone. Gunasena’s house — that high-pitched pleading that always ended in sobbing. The metal-sheeted house near the well — a woman’s voice raised in defiance before it cracked into whimpers. The tile-roofed house where a large family lived — silence that felt more ominous than screaming, the kind of quiet that meant someone had learned not to cry out loud anymore.
What did their children think, I wondered, lying in their small beds, listening to their fathers transform into monsters when darkness fell and alcohol stripped away the daylight pretence of respectability? Did they cover their ears and count sheep, or did they lie awake calculating how many years until they could run away? Did they promise themselves they would never raise their hands in anger, or did they absorb the lesson that this was simply what some men did when words failed them?
My own father had never raised his hand to my mother, not once in all my years of observation. When they disagreed — and they did, about money, about discipline, about his long absences for work — they would retreat to their bedroom and conduct their arguments in harsh whispers that respected the thin walls and the sleeping children nearby. Sometimes my mother would emerge red-eyed, and sometimes my father would sleep on another bed, but there was never a loud voice, the sound of flesh against flesh, never the crack of a palm across a cheek.
But we were the exception, not the rule. In our neighbourhood, domestic violence was as common as rice for dinner among certain households, as unremarkable as the call to prayer from the bells of the nearby church. Some men who smiled at me during the day, who asked about my studies and complimented me, became different creatures after sunset. The illegal bootlegging shops that lined the back lanes might as well have been selling transformation potions, turning certain husbands into demons, certain fathers into strangers their own children learnt to fear.
Why? The question burned in my adolescent mind as I navigated the darkening lanes towards home. Were these men so incapable of forming words that they had to speak with their fists? So intellectually limited that they couldn’t resolve disagreements without violence? Or was it something deeper, some poisonous mixture of pride and powerlessness that fermented in their bellies alongside the cheap alcohol?
I thought of my teachers who preached about civilisation and progress, about Sri Lanka’s ancient Buddhist heritage of compassion and non-violence. What hollow words those seemed when measured against the nightly symphony of domestic terror that played in certain houses around me. What kind of civilisation allowed its daughters to be beaten for burning rice, its wives to be punched for asking where the day’s wages had gone?
The stranger who had tried to greet me was probably walking towards his own house now, perhaps to his own wife preparing his evening meal. Maybe he was one of the kind ones, the men who came home sober and spoke softly to their families, as many in Dalugama did. Or maybe he was counting the coins in his pocket, calculating whether he had enough for one more bottle before the shops closed.
I reached our front gate, the familiar squeak of its hinges announcing my arrival to anyone inside who might be listening. Our house was warm with lamplight, and I could hear my mother moving around the kitchen, probably preparing for the next morning. No wailing here, no sounds of conflict or violence. Just the ordinary domestic peace that I was beginning to understand was actually extraordinary, a gift that not every child received.
As I pushed open the door, leaving behind the darkness and its terrible soundtrack, I made a silent promise to myself. Whatever man I became, whatever frustrations life would pile upon my shoulders, whatever failures or disappointments awaited me in the years ahead, I would never add my voice to that nightly chorus of masculine brutality. I would never become the kind of man whose return home sent women and children scattering like frightened birds.
The stranger’s ignored greeting seemed trivial now, a minor social transgression in a neighbourhood where much worse sins were committed every evening when the sun went down and the bottles came out. But rudeness, I was learning, was sometimes just the beginning of a larger moral education, the first lesson in a curriculum that would teach me what kind of man I refused to become.
During the day that followed, we heard more wailing. Rumours persisted that a girl had jumped into the village well and died. Why would girls throw themselves into wells to kill themselves? Perhaps their brothers had brutalised them too? The same men who beat their wives, did they also terrorise their sisters until death seemed like the only escape from a world that offered women no sanctuary, no voice, no hope of justice?
I thought of that girl, whose name I never learnt, whose face I had probably seen on the street or in the market. What final cruelty had driven her to choose the cold embrace of well water over another day of breathing? Had she stood at the edge, looking down into that dark circle, and seen it as a doorway rather than a grave?
The questions multiplied like monsoon puddles, each one deeper and murkier than the last. In our small community where everyone knew everyone’s business, how had we all failed to hear her silent screams? How many other girls and women were standing at the edges of wells, literal or metaphorical, while we walked past pretending not to see, not to hear, just as I had ignored the stranger’s greeting that night? Yet not every man in Dalugama contributed to this despair, and many lived lives that offered kindness and safety, their homes free from the violence that plagued others.
Memories belong to the author from Dalugama in Sri Lanka in early seventi
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