What if?
What if?
TThe years stack up, and you start looking back at the scaffolding.
You begin to see how precariously a life is built. How much of it depends on decisions made in rooms you were never in, by people who were simply trying to get through their own days.
One small decision leads to another, and another, until you are standing somewhere you never imagined you would be.
And you begin to wonder.
What if?
What if Lewis, my grandfather, had never stepped up to carry the weight of his brothers and sisters? What if he had simply been allowed to live as an ordinary man, instead of becoming the pillar everyone leaned on?
What if the thyroid deficiency had not stolen my grandmother Euphracia’s mind when my mother was only eight years old?
A little girl losing her mother to a quiet, hospital-walled darkness, forced to grow up before she had ever had the chance to be young.
And sometimes I wonder about something else.
What if Lewis had decided to leave his wife after her illness changed the life of the family?
Would my mother and her sister have grown up differently?
Would the two women who later became such powerful influences on my own life have carried different memories, different wounds, perhaps different ideas about love, duty and responsibility?
I will never know.
But I wonder.
What if my father, Thomas, had not lost his own father so early? If he had not been forced to raise himself, would he have learned to become the steady and patient father he eventually became to me?
What if Lewis had said no when my father asked for his eldest daughter’s hand — the daughter who was, by then, practically running his household?
What if my mother, Susan, had taken that teaching job after they married?
What if she had chosen the classroom, postponed having children, and followed a completely different path?
What if my father had refused when she made the sudden and, to some, reckless decision to leave his ancestral home and move to a village without electricity?
What if my aunt had not been so gentle with me?
How much of her kindness did I absorb without knowing it?
What if she had not left our house when I was eight?
Would she have gone off to become a nun, rather than building a life in which she raised three children and opened her doors to five more?
What if they had not brought my sick grandmother home from the asylum to live under our roof?
If the house had not been filled with that particular kind of grief, would I have packed my small bag at eleven and left for the Christian Brothers boarding school?
What if Brother Ignatius, my loving carer in that school, had not been transferred away by a sudden order from his province?
What if, at fourteen, I had not been sexually abused by a Christian Brother?
Would I have discovered the fighter inside me — the boy who learned to stand his ground, refuse to be broken, and never be afraid to change direction or change his mind?
What if Sri Lanka had not descended into the dark and senseless chaos that consumed so many of its young people while I was growing up?
What if the air had not become thick with fear and blood?
Would a generation of us have grown up differently, without having to look over our shoulders and wonder whether we had a future?
Then there were the choices that seemed, at the time, entirely mine.
What if my father had objected when I dropped out of high school to pursue an accountancy course at a private institute?
What if he had refused — or simply been unable — to pay those exorbitant fees?
What if he had not encouraged me to complete the formalities to enrol in the training school for overseas telegraphy, the early forerunner of modern telecommunications?
What if I had not been targeted and systematically discriminated against by the seniors in that training school?
Would I have ever found the resolve to pack my bags, turn my back on it all, and leave for Dubai?
And then there is another what if I sometimes remember.
What if I had been selected for the American scholarship and student exchange programme that would have taken me to Cincinnati?
America was impossibly far away to a young boy growing up in Sri Lanka.
Cincinnati was only a name, really. But behind that name was another world.
I remember the possibility of it.
A journey to America. A different education. Different people. A different way of seeing the world.
What if I had gone?
Would I have returned to Sri Lanka?
Would I have stayed in America?
Would I have studied there, found a career there, built a family there?
Would I ever have gone to Dubai?
Would I have met the people who later became important in my life?
Would my children have been the same children, born into the same family, had I taken that flight?
One selection on a piece of paper could have altered everything.
I wasn’t selected.
At the time, it was simply a disappointment.
Looking back, it seems like another one of those invisible forks in the road.
And what if my father had not stepped in yet again, offering to pay the heavy bonds, penalties and apprentice loans I owed in Sri Lanka so that I could walk away clean?
Then came my sister.
She eloped, and in doing so brought my parents to the edge of despair.
It was perhaps the greatest trouble they had ever faced.
They had lost their daughter in a way they had not expected, and they were left trying to make sense of what had happened and how they were going to live with it.
A year later, another trouble came to our door.
My father was persecuted by the government of Sri Lanka.
He and my mother were still trying to adjust to life after the loss of my sister when they found themselves having to fight the government as well.
I stepped in.
I told my father that I would pay for all the legal and administrative costs.
I asked him to fight.
“Fight them,” I told him. “I will take care of the costs.”
And he did.
For the next year or so, we fought our way through the machinery of government. There were papers, lawyers, expenses and long periods of waiting.
I paid what had to be paid, and my father refused to give up.
Eventually, he won.
It was his victory.
But I remember it as mine too.
I had stood beside my father when he needed someone to stand there.
Looking back now, I see that these things were not separate events.
At the time, they were simply what was happening.
One trouble followed another.
One decision had to be made before there was time to think about the next.
You pull on one thread, and the whole tapestry threatens to unravel.
What if my grandmother had not become ill?
What if Lewis had made a different decision?
What if my aunt had stayed?
What if Brother Ignatius had not been transferred?
What if I had not gone to boarding school?
What if the abuse had never happened?
What if Sri Lanka had remained peaceful?
What if I had stayed in the training school?
What if I had been selected for Cincinnati?
What if I had never gone to Dubai?
What if my sister had not eloped?
What if my father had not been persecuted?
And what if, at each of those moments, somebody had made a different decision?
Perhaps my life would have been easier.
Perhaps it would have been harder.
Perhaps I would have become somebody I would not recognise today.
We like to think that we make our own lives.
We speak of choices, plans and ambitions as though we are the architects of everything that happens to us.
But looking back, I am not so sure.
Much of life seems to happen around us before we have the age or the wisdom to understand what it is doing to us.
A child is sent to a boarding school.
A grandmother becomes ill.
An aunt leaves home.
A young man packs a suitcase and leaves for another country.
A scholarship is offered — and not won.
A sister leaves home.
A father loses his battle with a government — and then wins it.
At the time, none of these things seemed to belong to the same story.
Now I know they did.
Somewhere along the way, without deciding to become one, I became a rescuer of people.
Perhaps it began with my family.
Perhaps it began much earlier.
Or perhaps it was simply the way the pieces of my life fell.
I will never know.
And that is the strange thing about looking back.
You can see the road you travelled.
You can see the crossroads.
You can see the roads you did not take.
But you can never know where they would have led.
Perhaps that is why we keep asking.
What if?
Not because we want to change the past.
We cannot.
Perhaps we ask because, in looking at the lives we might have lived, we begin to understand the life we actually did.
And perhaps, after all these years, that is enough.
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