Elmo
Elmo
There are some people who pass through our childhood without ever knowing how important they were to us. They may not have done anything extraordinary. They were simply there at the right time, when we needed them.
Elmo was one of those people.
There were days when the boarding school did not feel like a school.
It felt like a place I had been sent to, and from which I had to find a way out.
I missed home.
Not only my mother and father. I missed the ordinary things that had seemed so unimportant when I was living among them. The noise of the house. My sister and brother. The children in the neighbourhood. The familiar voices. The smell of food coming from the kitchen.
At home, life had no timetable.
Nobody blew a whistle to tell me when to wake up, when to eat, when to study or when to sleep.
You simply lived.
I wanted that life back.
Even if it was only for a weekend.
The problem was that I was in a Christian brothers boarding school, and boys like me were not simply allowed to leave because they missed home.
So I needed someone.
That someone was Elmo.
Elmo Amerasinghe was a fellow homeboy from college. He lived only a few houses from our home. I knew his family well. His brothers and sisters were all older than us, and his father ran the Catholic bookshop in Pettah, in Colombo.
Elmo was perhaps a year or two older than me.
But none of that mattered.
What mattered was that he lived near my home.
He was my connection to the outside world.
I wrote a short letter to my father and gave it to Elmo.
There was no story in it.
I simply told my father that I wanted to come home for the weekend.
I knew he would understand.
A few days later, Elmo returned with a letter from my father.
It was addressed to Michael, the man in charge of us at the boarding school.
My father had written that his son was needed at home for a “family event.”
That was enough.
Michael read the letter, looked at me, and let me go.
That Friday afternoon, I walked out of the dreaded boarding school.
I don’t remember ever feeling so happy to leave a place.
The journey home seemed shorter than usual.
Perhaps it was because I knew where I was going.
For the next three days, I was no longer a boarding-school boy.
I was simply my mother’s son.
I played with my sister and brother. I went outside with the neighbourhood children. I heard the familiar voices again.
There was no whistle.
No timetable.
No roll call.
No Michael looking at the clock.
And there was food.
My mother and my grandmother, Kadayamma, seemed determined to make up for every meal I had endured at boarding school. They cooked the things I liked, and I ate without wondering whether I would be late for the next period.
At home, even eating was different.
It was not just food.
It was comfort.
It was belonging.
Those three days were nothing when measured against a calendar.
But to a boy who had been taken away from home, they were enormous.
Then Monday came.
And I had to go back.
I returned to the boarding school reluctantly, carrying with me the memory of the weekend.
The games.
The laughter.
My mother’s cooking.
Kadayamma’s food.
The voices outside the house.
My own bed.
I did not know then how much those things would remain with me.
And somewhere in all of it was Elmo.
He had done nothing heroic.
He had simply carried a letter.
But sometimes, when you are young and far from home, a person who carries a letter can become very important.
Elmo had become my bridge home.
And I used that bridge again.
The year was 1970.
The first escape had worked. That gave me courage.
I had begun to understand that if I wanted to come home, I had to find a way around the rules.
So I wrote another note to my father.
Again, I gave it to Elmo.
Again, my father sent a letter back through him.
Again, there was a “family event.”
And again, Michael had little choice.
I came home.
I did it twice that year.
Two weekends.
Only two.
But I remember them because, for those brief periods, the boarding school disappeared.
I was home again.
I could sit with my family. I could listen to the familiar voices. I could eat my mother’s food. I could sleep in my own bed.
And then I would have to return.
At the time, I did not think of what I was doing as rebellion.
I was simply a boy who wanted to go home.
Looking back now, I realise how little it took to make a child happy.
A weekend.
A familiar house.
A mother’s cooking.
A bed that was his own.
And a friend who was willing to carry a letter.
Elmo probably never understood what those letters meant to me.
Perhaps he thought he was merely doing a small favour for a boy who missed home.
But he was doing more than that.
He was carrying something between two worlds.
One was the boarding school where I had to live.
The other was the home I longed for.
In 1970, Elmo helped me cross between them.
Twice.
And after all these years, I remember him not for anything grand he did, but for something very small.
He carried my letters home.
Sometimes, that is enough to make someone unforgettable.
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