The ties that bind
The ties that bind
A story about growing up in a Sri Lankan village where love, duty, and gender quietly decide who you are allowed to become. In it, I look back at my childhood with my sister and younger brother, and at how the same family — same house, same parents, same dinner table — could produce such different lives simply because one of us was the “good girl” and one the “wayward boy.” This piece is my attempt to untangle those early scripts: the protection wrapped around daughters, the careless freedom handed to sons, and the silent bargains parents made with culture, religion, and reputation.
Growing up in our small Sri Lankan village, my sister and I always felt as if we’d been written into two very different stories that just happened to share the same cover. The title said “family,” but inside, the chapters rarely matched. We shared a house, parents, and the same heavy air scented with curry leaves and woodsmoke, yet our plots ran on separate tracks. She was the only girl, the cherished daughter. I was the elder son — restless, allergic to rules, forever leaning against the borders of our little world.
She arrived four years and eight months after me, but it might as well have been another generation. In any quarrel, my mother’s sympathies floated to her with the ease of breathing. My sister stayed close to Amma, learning that silent choreography of virtue: how to fold a blouse so it formed a perfect rectangle, how to sit with knees together and eyes lowered, how to soften her voice when men stepped into the room. I operated on another frequency. I talked back. I slipped out. I wore every scolding like a badge — evidence that I had pushed against something, however small.
The real ease in our childhood lived not between the two of us, but in the triangle we made with our youngest brother, eight years and eight months my junior. He was the bridge, the negotiator, the one who could turn a brewing storm into a joke. With him around, we were a trio — conspirators, giggling over stolen sweets and shared secrets. When he disappeared into homework or sleep, my sister and I reverted to formality. We became polite, careful, like cousins who know they are related but are not entirely sure how.
Adolescence only widened the gap. I was packed off to private Christian schools where English was the currency, and Colombo shimmered at the edge of my imagination like a promise. I discovered cinemas, bookshops, pavements slick with rain, and the strange power that comes from speaking a language that seems to open doors just by existing on your tongue. My sister stayed in a semi‑government convent school, learning mostly in Sinhala, shaped by the slower rhythms and firmer expectations of the village. Our vocabularies drifted apart. So did our music, our jokes, even our sense of what the future might hold. We still met every evening over rice and curry, but it felt as if we were commuters arriving from different planets.
She had my mother’s height and solidity. There was a particular way she could fill a doorway — calm, composed — that I only learned to admire much later. Villagers often assumed she was the elder one. I, thin and all elbows, seemed permanently half‑packed, as if I might pick up my schoolbag at any moment and walk out of the frame.
The real break came when I left home to enter a Christian Brothers’ formative school. On paper, it sounded noble: vocation, service, a life for God. In my own head, I knew I was running. When I was ten, my mother’s mother came to live with us — not gentle Kadayamma, but the other Achchie, whose mind had slipped its moorings. Her moods crashed through our small house without warning. Plates flew. Doors slammed. Words sharpened into weapons. My father, working outstation, was mostly a voice in letters. The weight fell on my mother, and whatever she could not carry spilled over onto us. By twelve, I felt trapped inside a storm I couldn’t name. Leaving felt less like answering a call and more like clawing my way to the surface for air.
From there, our trajectories hardened. My English‑medium life expanded outward; hers stayed rooted in the red soil of the village. My mother’s protectiveness coiled ever tighter around her only daughter. In the backwater Sri Lanka of the 1970s, girls were guarded like family heirlooms — precious, breakable, and somehow responsible for the shine of the family name. My sister rarely went anywhere alone. Amma walked with her to sewing classes and cooking lessons, ticking off the invisible syllabus of a “good girl” destined for marriage. Reputation wore a frock in those days, and it tied its hair back with a ribbon.
I, meanwhile, enjoyed a kind of freedom that now looks suspiciously like neglect. Perhaps Amma simply didn’t know what to do with a son who had tasted the city. I grew my hair to my neck, squeezed into bell‑bottoms and tight jeans, and spent my school holidays at in friends homes far away, dances, beat shows, and any gathering that promised loud music and dim lights. I mistook noise for adulthood. Mostly, it was escape dressed in polyester.
Even money told the story. My father quietly deposited fifty rupees into my sister’s savings account and only ten into mine. No speech, no explanation; it was just how things were done. But even as a boy, I understood that her little fortune was not really hers. It was a slow, careful contribution to an invisible chest labelled “dowry,” a future offering to a man whose name we did not yet know.
Looking back now, I see that my sister and I were never true opposites. We were mirror images, bent in different directions by the same social weather. She carried the weight of protection; I carried the illusion of liberty. We did not drift apart because we disliked each other. We drifted because the world handed us different scripts — his and hers — and, obedient children that we were, we stepped onto the stage and tried our best to play our parts.
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