The Quiet Roots of Mudiyansegewatta
The Quiet Roots of Mudiyansegewatta
A Pilgrimage of the Heart
There are quiet, forgotten corners of the world where people do not merely live alongside nature, but share the simple, daily rhythm of their lives with the trees. Mudiyansegewatta was one such sanctuary.
Nestled gently in the heart of Dalugama, just behind the weathered, sun-bleached walls of the old church, it sat quietly sandwiched between a sprawling green paddy field and the peaceful Catholic cemetery, where many of our ancestors rested beneath the shade. The air there always carried a cool, moist stillness, smelling faintly of damp earth, rain, and fallen leaves. It was a generous piece of ground, ever hospitable to a drifting seed and welcoming to eager, seeking roots.
It was an old neighbourhood, dusted with the soft patina of years gone by. The land had originally belonged to an Amerasinghe — a distant branch of the family tied somewhere to the gentle tapestry of my grandmother’s line. Though time has moved on, the spirit of the place remains untouched in my mind. The people here shared a quiet, enduring friendship with the trees — a silent bond born of passing seasons, shared shade, and roots that ran far deeper than memory.
Mudiyansegewatta was low and flat. From the ponds in the paddy fields behind us, large water monitors — the kabara goya — would occasionally wander into our gardens with a slow, ancient dignity. They were peaceful, solitary creatures that meant no harm to anyone. Then there were the smaller land monitors, the thala goya, rustling about in the dry bushes. Though some of the village folk would hunt them for their meat, we never touched them; in our family, we preferred to let wild things be.
I grew up in this quiet village, living there from the time I was a four-year-old boy until the days of my youth drew to a close and I left for the wider world. My grandfather had built a small, unpretentious house here — a modest home, not a grand bungalow — for himself and his children. I was told years later that he built it as a refuge of sorts, a peaceful sanctuary to escape the dark shadows of my grandmother’s mental illness.
In those days, I needed no name of my own. Everyone knew me simply as my father’s son, or my mother’s boy, or the grandchild of the old gentleman who passed away just two short years after we made Mudiyansegewatta our home. And a few of the older folk still remembered my grandmother — that gentle soul who walked beside me to school every single morning, holding my hand until I turned eleven and thought myself old enough to face the world alone.
This quiet corner was also home to a generous patch of inherited earth — a piece of land belonging to my maternal grandmother that had been written directly to me before I even understood the value of real estate, long before I ever thought of the millions properties command today in places like Australia. It bypassed my parents completely, passing from my grandmother straight into my hands. Looking back, I am deeply grateful for that gesture. As a young fellow, I never viewed land as something to hoard or boast about; it was simply a modest appendage to be used for the betterment of the family, long before I ever gave a thought to building a life of my own. It reflected the deep trust my parents placed in me, though I must confess I was a bit of a wild boy back then, living entirely for the day.
That patch of ground was home to about fifty coconut trees, three towering jackfruit trees, forty banana trees, guava trees, two naminan trees, and a few straggling coffee bushes. This was not to mention the pineapple plantation we owned some five kilometres away in my grandfather’s ancestral village in Eldeniya, which also included a small paddy field harvested by a local family for generations.
Out on our front porch, rows of potted crotons stood in heavy cement pots, their leaves bursting in brilliant hues of yellow, red, orange, and deep green. But the real wonder lay hidden beneath them. Plump, solitary frogs — painted in vivid patterns of white, red, and green — made the damp undersides of those pots their quiet sanctuary. I would carefully lift a pot just to admire them; unlike the skinny, dark green frogs that skittered across the village, these plump creatures stayed perfectly still, undisturbed in their cool, secret shade.
Yet I grew up without dwelling on these ancestral possessions, as so many boys in Ceylon were prone to do. They were just there, part of the scenery, part of the quiet background of life. Perhaps it was because we were surrounded by simpler lives — poor relatives on both sides of the family, cousins who attended the local village schools, and my mother’s kin living in humble dwellings without electricity or running water. We were natural socialists at heart, long before any of us had a name for it; fairness and humility were woven into our very DNA.
Now, whenever I return, I travel quietly in a car — either in a hired cab or seated beside a friend’s driver — for this is, unashamedly, a pilgrimage of the heart.
My first stop is always the cemetery, to visit the graves of my paternal grandmother, my father, and my mother. They lie resting together in the very same plot of earth — and rightly so, for they are the quiet pillars of my lineage. I consider myself fortunate to have stood by and witnessed the final journeys of two of them: my grandmother first, back in 1974 when I was barely nineteen and full of youth; and my father, twenty-five years after I had set sail from Sri Lanka. My mother followed him a decade later, though I was far away and not beside her when she passed.
These days, I find myself wandering through Mudiyansegewatta like a stranger searching for a forgotten dream. The old landscape has slipped away, leaving behind only a few sturdy old homes that have stubbornly resisted change. Where there was once open ground, tall concrete walls have sprung up everywhere. Back in our day, no one bothered with walls. Only makeshift fences of sticks and overgrown hedges marked where one garden ended and another began — and even those were cheerful misdirection, completely ignored by young boys like us, who regarded the entire village as our personal playground.
My grandfather’s house is no more; time and progress have claimed it, and it has been demolished. In its place stand three new homes, some rising three storeys high. I intentionally avert my gaze from those grounds, lest they stir heavy thoughts I would rather leave undisturbed.
I do not even bring myself to look at the fourth home — the grand, modern house I had built in my mid-twenties, funded by the petrodollars I earned during those intense years in Dubai. Back then, Mudiyansegewatta had seen nothing like it. It was designed for free by Dixon De Silva, a prominent architect of the era whose sons were my dear friends, and its construction was meticulously supervised by Raymond, the premier builder in Dalugama — a man who was far from cheap, but whose absolute mantra was quality.
Everything in that house spoke a new, exotic design language born of Dubai and distant places. Its interior was infused with the elegant taste of an aunt from Delhi, Rani Ralli, while the kitchen fittings and bathroom fixtures were all air-freighted directly from Dubai — for sea freight was an unheard-of luxury in those early Gulf days. It was a proud monument of youth and ambition, but today, like much of the old land, I prefer to let it live quietly only in my memory.
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