Between Languages and Walls
Between Languages and Walls
A childhood journey through Teldeniya and Matale, where words, walls, and small gestures bridged worlds
Childhood is often measured in distances — of roads travelled, of words understood, of silences navigated. I was eleven when I first discovered that understanding another life requires no classroom, only attention and presence. These weeks in central Sri Lanka — in Teldeniya and Matale — taught me the quiet discipline of observation, the patience of language, and the delicate bridges that can form between people and cultures.
Itamuses me now to think that my first hesitant words of Tamil were learned not in a classroom, nor from a book, but in a borrowed house in Teldeniya — in the uneasy companionship of children left to manage what adults had arranged.
Each morning, my father left early with his friend, the Chief Clerk, stepping into their official world of files and seals, of measured authority. And we — my mother, my sister, my brother, and I — were left behind in a house where language itself seemed to stand at a distance. There was no common tongue to fall back upon. We had to invent one.
From the boy — whose proper name has slipped from memory — I learned the urgent words first: “hungry,” “rice,” “food is ready.” They arrived in fragments, accompanied by gestures, pointing fingers, shy laughter, a fragile bridge of understanding. His mother, braver than the rest, would attempt a few English words, releasing them carefully, as though they might break in her mouth. Between us, meaning grew slowly, like a plant in uncertain soil.
I remember her first not by her face, but by the sound of her movement — the faint swish of cotton against the red cement floor, the soft rhythm of someone accustomed to labouring without spectacle. She wore her sari in the Tamil manner, the pleats drawn narrow and disciplined, falling straight to her ankles. It was not flamboyant; there were no loud blossoms, no shimmering borders. It was cotton, carefully starched, its colour subdued — perhaps a faded maroon or a soft turmeric, softened by countless washings. A thin, precise border ran along its edge.
The pallu rested firmly over her shoulder, and when she moved briskly about the kitchen, she would gather it slightly at her waist. At moments of modesty, she adjusted it across her chest with a small, unstudied gesture. Her blouse was short-sleeved and practical, fitted without ornament. A few glass bangles circled her wrists, clinking gently as she worked. Her hair, parted in the middle, was drawn back into a low bun, and a small red pottu marked her forehead — quiet, exact, almost austere.
In that house, where language failed us, her sari spoke first. It conveyed restraint, order, and a dignity that required no translation. She did not dominate the room; she steadied it.
From the edge of their garden, if one looked long enough toward the pale horizon, one could make out Teldeniya town in the distance. We were told that a great dam was being built, and that the old town — its shops, its temples, its small histories — would soon lie beneath water. Even at eleven, the idea unsettled me: a whole town erased not by war or fire, but by design. It seemed a quiet kind of drowning.
I played daily with the boy whose proper name I cannot now retrieve. Memory is selective; it keeps what it pleases. What remains is the name his mother called out from the doorway when summoning him — Kanna. The word carried affection, a softness that needed no translation. “Kanna!” she would call, and he would turn, and I would follow. In that simple call, something bridged the distance between our families, our languages, our unspoken histories. For that brief season, Kanna was the thread that stitched us together.
A week later, we moved again — this time to Matale, to the house of another of my father’s associates, a council clerk named Welikala, some thirty kilometres from Kandy. We travelled by bus. Kilometres felt like a small expedition in those days: the vehicle stopped often, dust rose in clouds, and the countryside unfolded slowly outside the window, each bend revealing paddy fields, groves of tea plants, and the quiet hum of small towns.
The journey remains vivid for a small but painful reason. A careless passenger, a smoker at that, holding a cigarette too loosely, burned a neat round hole in the end of my mother’s sari — the trailing pallu she adjusted so often with quiet dignity. I remember her looking down at the damage and protesting only strongly to the smoker. My mother was careful, perhaps even fastidious, about her clothes. It was a small wound, but it felt symbolic: the vulnerability of being perpetually in transit.
Welikala’s house stood in stern contrast to the white-grilled modern dwelling in Teldeniya. It was said to be two centuries old. The walls were thick — nearly a foot across — built for endurance rather than display. His ancestors, we were told, had been Radala: men of the Kandyan aristocracy, landholders and officials bound to the old order of the hill country. The house seemed to hold that history in its cool interior, in the depth of its verandahs, in the measured silence of its rooms.
We were given a large chamber to share. I remember running my palm along the breadth of those walls, astonished by their solidity. Outside, there were jackfruit trees heavy with promise, their fruit hanging like pendulous lanterns, and other trees casting dense, protective shade. In that old compound, beneath those trees, we rediscovered the small freedoms of childhood. For a time, the restlessness of movement receded, replaced by the reassuring thickness of walls that seemed built to outlast us all.
Even now, I realise that those weeks — in Teldeniya, in Matale — were less about the places themselves than about the negotiations of childhood in a world larger than oneself. Language had to be coaxed from strangers; familiarity was borrowed; friendships were delicate bridges across silences. Kanna’s small voice, the measured steps of his mother, the careful folds of her sari — all of it taught me, without lesson or lecture, the patient work of understanding another life.
The houses, the walls, the thick verandahs, the fruit-laden trees — they were more than shelter. They were markers of endurance, memory made tangible. And I, a boy moving quietly between them, learned that belonging could be provisional, that beauty often resides in the understated, and that connection does not always demand fluency. Even as a child, I felt the subtle truths of displacement and encounter.
We were passing through, yet everything lingered: the swish of cotton, the soft clink of bangles, the distant rise of a town about to disappear, the solidity of ancient walls. They stayed with me, stitched into memory like the folds of a sari, reminding me that childhood is a curriculum of subtle impressions, and that some lessons are learned not from books, but from the quiet insistence of everyday life.
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