Roots and Kerosene
Roots and Kerosene
Ithink I had an unusual upbringing, though at the time it seemed entirely ordinary. Childhood, after all, accepts its world without question. Only later do you realise that other people grew up differently, under brighter lights perhaps, or with less silence around them.
We lived deep in a village in Sri Lanka, beyond what anyone would comfortably call semi-rural. The house belonged to my maternal grandfather. It stood on a large piece of land, one of the biggest properties on the road, though “road” dignified it somewhat — it was really a gravel track disappearing into coconut trees and scrubland. Our house sat a good hundred metres away from it, withdrawn from the world, as if modesty itself had designed the place.
There was no electricity then. Not in our house, nor on the street. Evenings arrived quickly. Kerosene lamps were lit. Feet were washed before bed. Water came from the well, cold and metallic against the skin at dawn. We slept early because darkness left little else to do. Years later, when electricity finally came to the village, a lamp post had to be planted on our own land so the wires could reach the house. It felt almost comical — civilisation arriving cautiously, needing permission to cross our yard.
My grandmother, my father’s mother, lived with us. Nearby were my mother’s grand uncles and aunties, people who seemed impossibly old to me then, sitting on verandas in white clothes, speaking softly into the heat of the afternoon. We had roots in many directions. Ours was not a family that existed neatly within one branch of inheritance. People drifted in and out of our lives naturally, as though kinship itself were a kind of weather.
My parents were an unusual pair. My father was educated, self-disciplined, and carried a quiet admiration for English culture. His elder brother was entirely different — a man of the national suit who worked in a wood shop and seemed more comfortably rooted in village life. My mother had become, in effect, a homemaker at the age of eight after her own mother was taken to a mental hospital. This fact was never presented tragically. No one gathered us around to explain suffering. It was simply there, embedded in the structure of life, accepted with the same resignation as drought or monsoon rain.
I was expected to study, though in truth I rarely did. I listened carefully in class and understood enough to get by. That was usually sufficient. I often came first in examinations. Looking back, what strikes me is not the achievement but the lack of celebration around it. My parents expected it quietly. There were no speeches, no rewards, no performance of pride, no telling aunties and uncles how bright their son was. Success was treated almost as good manners — something one simply maintained.
They were not nostalgic people either. They did not tell stories about the past or rehearse family mythology at the dinner table. What I learned about their childhoods came in fragments, overheard remarks, unfinished sentences. It was only when I was nearly fifty that I fully grasped something that should have been obvious all along: my father had lost his father when he was a student. He had carried that absence through life without ever displaying it openly.
Religion shaped the rhythm of our days. At seven-thirty each evening a mat was spread on the floor and we gathered for the rosary and litany before dinner. On Sundays we attended mass together. Faith was less an emotional declaration than a discipline, woven into routine like bathing or eating.
My father was political in the quiet way some men are political. Listening to him speak with friends, one sensed his socialism, his instinctive concern for fairness and dignity. My mother rarely spoke about politics at all, though I suspect she leaned more conservatively, towards order and caution. Yet these differences never produced argument. Ours was a household held together by restraint, faith, and an unspoken sense of duty.
More importantly, perhaps, I was allowed to become myself. My parents listened when I spoke, even when what I said amounted to little more than childish stubbornness. That freedom now seems remarkable to me.
I remember, in Grade Five, wanting to leave my junior school because I felt the teacher was too harsh on the other children. My father did not laugh at me or dismiss the complaint as childish nonsense. Instead, he took me to visit other schools one by one, as though my opinion deserved consultation. In the end, the decision was left to me. It was an extraordinary kindness disguised as something ordinary.
I am not sure my younger siblings experienced quite the same freedom. My sister was born four years later, my brother four years after her. We seemed, in retrospect, carefully spaced children in an era before such things were openly discussed. Perhaps self-restraint was the method then, and a great deal of it too.
We were Catholics, though quiet ones. We belonged to no loud community and announced ourselves to nobody. What held our family together were smaller things: evening prayers, clean feet before bed, the smell of kerosene smoke, and the long gravel road that separated our house from the rest of the world.
We had poor relations, though I like to think we ourselves were somewhere in the middle class. Yet my parents moved easily between worlds. We visited homes had polished ceilings and tiled floors, and others who lived beneath thatched roofs with mud walls and open kitchens darkened by smoke. There was no embarrassment in either direction, no sense that one kind of person deserved more courtesy than another. We sat where we were asked to sit. We drank the tea that was offered. We listened.
Looking back now, I think that may have been one of the greatest educations of my childhood. It taught me, quietly and without instruction, that dignity was not something distributed according to wealth. A man beneath a leaking roof could possess as much grace as one beneath a chandelier. That understanding stayed with me long after the kerosene lamps disappeared and the village slowly entered the modern world.
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