The Housesitting Weekend
The Housesitting Weekend
A quiet weekend in a borrowed Dalugama house becomes an enduring memory of youth, freedom, and a woman who chose to live entirely on her own terms before time scattered us all.
Lucky’s house sat on Old Kandy Road, set back from the road behind a low fence and a metal gate that squeaked when you pushed it. It was larger than most houses in Dalugama. Three bedrooms, a proper sitting room, louver windows, a kitchen with actual counter space. Lucky’s father had done well for himself, though nobody talked about how exactly he rented it.
Lucky’s family had gone to the hill country for the week. Kandy, probably. Maybe Nuwara Eliya. He needed someone to watch the house and he asked Shirley, which was the sensible thing to do. Nobody in the village was going to break into a house that Shirley Fonseka was guarding.
Shirley asked me to join him. I said yes without asking too many questions. I was nineteen. An empty bungalow for a week with no parents and no village eyes watching you was not an offer you declined.
What I did not expect was Chandrika.
I had met her once, at the annual church carnival a few weeks earlier. The feast of the local parish was the biggest event in our village calendar. The whole suburb came alive — Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds, food stalls, music blaring from speakers mounted on poles. Young men spent weeks planning what to wear. I had saved up and had a blue jacket tailored, blue bell-bottoms, suede shoes. I was volunteering at the music bar, which meant I controlled the sound system, which meant I had more status that evening than I deserved.
Shirley arrived late in the evening with a girl I had not seen before. He introduced her as Chandrika. She did not wait for the introduction to be completed before she extended her hand and told me her name herself. Short hair, colourful frock, a few years older than us. Dark and stunning in the way that made you slightly nervous and slightly foolish at the same time.
We talked for a while at the music bar. Shirley hovered nearby, keeping one eye on the carnival perimeter, always alert for the Kiribathgoda gang who were rumoured to be coming to settle old scores. Chandrika seemed unbothered by all of that. She asked me about the music, about where I lived, about what I did. She paid attention when you spoke, which was disarming.
Before she left I played Ring Ring by Abba on the sound system, loud enough for the whole carnival ground to hear. A small gesture of impression. She caught it, smiled, and asked my name one more time as if confirming something.
That was all I knew about Chandrika.
She arrived at Lucky’s house on the first evening carrying a cloth bag and wearing the same composed expression she had at the carnival. As if this had already been arranged. Perhaps it had. Shirley said nothing and neither did I. He opened the gate and she walked in and that was that.
The three of us settled into the house with an ease that surprised me. Chandrika located the kitchen within minutes and began organising it. She was older — not by many years, perhaps three or four, but it showed in the way she moved through a space. Unhurried. Certain.
I am not sure what Chandrika saw in both of us. Shirley, the superfit athlete with his skin pigmentation, tall and commanding, and me, the skinny and embarrassingly thin, fair boy with long hair. We were opposites in every physical sense, two entirely different drafts of youth, yet there we were.
Shirley and I sat in the sitting room while she cooked. He was quieter than usual. Shirley was never quiet. On the train to Trincomalee he had talked for ten hours straight, filling the compartment with stories of street fights and narrow escapes, each one better than the last. Here, in Lucky’s sitting room, he sat with his hands on his knees and waited for dinner.
We were both, in our different ways, trying to appear relaxed.
Chandrika cooked well. Rice, two curries, something with coconut milk that I have never been able to replicate since. She served us at the table as if she had always lived there. We ate and talked and she asked us questions about ourselves, about the village, about our plans. She listened to the answers seriously. It was the first time a woman had listened to me that seriously outside of my own family.
After dinner we sat on the veranda. The street was quiet. A few dogs, a distant radio, the occasional street noise. We both smoked Bristol cigarettes. Chandrika sat between us in a cane chair with her legs folded under her.
I did not fully understand what this weekend was until it was already happening.
Chandrika slept with both of us. Not at the same time. Always Shirley first and then me. Separately, quietly, without drama or negotiation or declaration. She moved between us with the same composure she brought to everything else, as if she had decided something privately and was simply following through on her decision.
Nobody talked about it in the morning.
This is the part that stays with me. Not the fact of it, but the silence after. The three of us ate breakfast — Chandrika had made string hoppers from somewhere, I never found out where she got the ingredients — and we talked about ordinary things. The heat. Whether there was a cricket match on the radio. What time Lucky’s family was returning.
Shirley and I looked at each other once across the table. A brief look. Not guilt exactly. Something more like acknowledgement. We were nineteen and twenty, raised in a village where certain things were spoken about only in whispers, and here was a woman who had simply decided, quietly, on her own terms, how the weekend would go.
Neither of us had the vocabulary for it then. I am not sure I fully have it now.
We spent three days in that house. Chandrika cooked every meal. In the afternoons we walked along Old Kandy Road or sat inside out of the heat. Shirley told his stories. Chandrika told a few of her own — she was from Kiribathgoda, which Shirley found funny given the history, and she had worked in a factory in Colombo for two years before returning home. She was matter of fact about it. No self-pity. She had gone, she had worked, she had come back. That was the story.
On the last evening Shirley produced a bottle of arrack from somewhere and we drank on the veranda until late. The three of us talked easily by then, the way you talk with people once the awkwardness has burned off and you are simply together in a place. Chandrika laughed more that evening than in all the previous days combined. It was a good laugh, unguarded.
I went home on Monday morning. Shirley walked me to the gate. The metal hinge squeaked as he opened it. We shook hands, which was something we did not normally do — we were not a handshaking generation of friends — but it felt right that morning.
We said very little. There was nothing awkward between us, which was the strange part. Shirley and I had shared things before. A train compartment to Trincomalee. A street fight watched from a shop doorway. A friendship that had started because he was brave enough to chase a gang with blood pouring down his face. This was just another thing we had shared. A weekend in a borrowed house with a woman who had made her own decisions.
I never saw Chandrika again after that morning.
I have thought about her since. Not often, but at particular moments. I wonder what she made of the two of us — young, full of ourselves, performing a confidence we had not yet earned. She must have seen through it completely. She was older and she was sharper and she knew exactly what she was doing in a way that we did not.
There is something in that which I did not understand at nineteen. A woman who moves through the world on her own terms, quietly, without asking for anyone’s approval or explanation. In a village in Sri Lanka in the mid-seventies that was not a small thing. It was a considerable thing. It carried risk that I, as a young man, did not have to carry.
I did not think about that then. I think about it now.
Thirty years passed.
In 2005 I was back in Sri Lanka on holiday with my family from Australia, working through the rounds of visits to extended relatives, the meals, the catching up. A friend sent a message. Shirley had died. A road accident.
I drove to Nagahawatte Road immediately.
The house was full of people the way Sri Lankan houses fill up when someone dies. Shirley’s wife, whom I had never met. His children. His brothers, older now, faces I half-recognised from decades earlier. His eldest son stood near the door. He was a teenager, lean and athletic, and he was so completely his father that I had to look away for a moment.
Shirley had died crossing the main road. The junction near the church. The same junction where I had watched him as a teenager, blood soaking into his long hair, chasing a rival gang down the road with a cloth tied to his head, sword in hand, refusing to stop.
He had survived all of that. The gangs, the street fights, the overland journey through half of Asia to find a ship in Europe. A postcard from Barcelona. A reunion in Dubai in 1977, the two of us shopping in the bazaars, a long way from Dalugama. All of it survived.
A road crossing got him in the end.
I thought about the housesitting weekend that day, standing in his house with people I barely knew, drinking tea someone had pressed into my hand.
Lucky, whose house we had borrowed, was stabbed to death a few years after I left Sri Lanka. A dispute over money. Merril, who had come with us to Trincomalee, was killed on a motorcycle in the village, also not long after I left. Rienzie, the boxer who fought the Kiribathgoda champion to a draw on the carnival ground, lived to old age but died a drunkard.
Short-lived lives, most of them.
And somewhere — I have no idea where — there is Chandrika. From Kiribathgoda. Who cooked string hoppers in a borrowed kitchen and slept with two young men and said nothing about it in the morning and laughed freely on a veranda on the last night and then walked out through a squeaking gate and went back to her own life.
I hope it was a good one.
Some weekends you carry without knowing why. The weight is not guilt and it is not regret exactly. It is something closer to the knowledge that you were young once, in a particular place, with particular people, and that most of them are gone now, and that the weekend happened anyway, exactly as it did, and nobody can take that from any of you.
That was one of those weekends.
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