Kantalai. Parched arid land and brown houses with orange dust levels. Bony cattle and the beginning of palmyra. And skies so deep azure blue that you could lose your soul to them.
It is twelve years since I saw the East, a dozen years of incredible change, I last came here as a young bride, an innocent girl whose dreams had first come true as in fairy tales and then started ominously to disintegrate…
Then too there were stones that cracked , the twisted skeletons of wrecked lorries and a magnificent reservoir of glittering water that was thousands of years old. There was a wonderful building belonging to my husband's family, cool stone , old rooms full of timber and bats and bathrooms without water. We had to drag water from a nearby well and it had a few pollywogs in it, and there were monkeys and mangoes all over the place.
Somehow …somehow this destiny was interlinked before.
Decades ago my maternal grandfather was the engineer in charge of rework in the Kantalai area including on the reservoir dam. My mother has some beautiful stories of wild safaris in Anuradhapura,childhood treks in the jungle with her cousins. Life I could only dream of.
In 1986 the tragic Kantalai bund breach killed 125, destroyed many lives and livelihoods among them the family business of the man who would be my husband. For years after I married our houses were full of muddy collections of expensive broken watches and elastic and thread and old-fashioned plastic toys which had been salvaged from that disaster, and my mother-in-law, a lovely gentle old lady with delicate hands, would sit and tell me stories of the flood, while she combed and curled my hair sitting in the verandah..
They lost almost everything at this time but mostly with his perseverance, they recovered, and built up their legacy again, against all odds.
So by the time I met him, he was already well re-established in business, in charge of rice mills, a petrol shed, and a fleet of vehicles ; I was twenty and sweetly naïve. I thought that pretty girls who did the housework cheerfully and were kind to animals would (in true fairytale style) definitely be rewarded by the arrival of a Prince Charming who swept them away. My parents arranged to meet this man and his family and were pleasantly surprised to find that their families had known each other long ago in the South. My paternal grandmother had been his mother's distant cousin and best friend. We were taken up by the coincidence and the happiness of the moment..He was 32 and he had rejected all the women he met so far, looking for the perfect one, his family were getting rather anxious about him delaying marrying – there were younger brothers who were waiting too…
He was tall-dark-handsome and very charming; nothing could go wrong; we took each other for granted. Life with my prince had the most fairytale quality at the start, he kept me in luxury and did everything for me, pampering my every request and keeping me in a veritable daze of contentment.
There were interesting stories he told me about Kantalai, including how tasty the venison was, how he beat up an unsuitable guy who came after one of his sisters and how he saved two children from the flood, hanging by a rope from a helicopter, which resulted in long and terrible scars to his arm; there were good things I saw in him; when the mood was right he would be very kind to orphaned animals and he loved children and wanted his own. Years later I remember how he would leave home for work, and then come creeping stealthily back to check if the nanny was treating the baby ok.
Within about six months I was with child and one morning I was too tired to wake up and make tea at six am; the arguments started and always they were about me not living up to his expectations,why I was not graceful, patient, cheerful like his sisters, ; years of the usual accusations, arguments, tears and misery were to follow; his business was failing, because of my malefic horoscope and he threatened to find other women because I was not treating me right; this was all argued night after night but at the same time he would not let me go either. It's easy as a woman to point out all the negative aspects and pretend that I was perfect but I wasn't either. Just as easy as it is to focus on the pain and suffering and harshness of life for people in that parched God-Forsaken land of baking heat and eternal roads…
Somewhere down the line, I don't know exactly how it happened but Cinderella got beaten up and the Prince was discovered in the company of just one of the women who treated him better. ..
I daresay I had been a serious disappointment to him. I was 12 years younger to him and as he accused often "from a ballroom dancing culture" ( ie decadent English-speaking people with fancy accents …although of course at that time I would never have so much as looked at another man, far less ballroom danced…so intent was I on trying to live up to what he wanted - ) I was pretty,sweet, self-centred, and I do believe I had no real appreciation of the good things he gave and did for me; over the years he too chose to change for the worse which is perhaps something I could have prevented. Perhaps not.
Beauty they say , is in the eye of the beholder, and Victor Franknyl an Auschwitz survivor says "Everything can be taken from man but his freedom to chose a reaction" My reaction twelve years ago was of hate and rejection; I was forced to accompany my husband on this business, lugging my two children along, missing the refuge of home, roughing it under uncomfortable conditions, miserably suspecting him of having connections with the dusty cheerful local women, - this trip was torture.
I hated Kantalai, hated everything to do with it, hated the land of my birth and hated myself. at 25 I remember I was that close to harming my own life.
And now? Now years later, the land is the same, the sparkling tank is just as beautiful , my eyes are the same; but my reaction has changed.
It is one of awe at the beauty, one of acceptance of this hardship, and one of appreciation of the things I have lost. Not regret, because I do not believe in regret, but a positive recognition of the good and beauty to be found in the unlikeliest of places, and the sudden realization that I am in love with the East and have always been..
No youthful infatuation, but proudly, on my own terms.
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https://www.sundaytimes.lk/110501/Plus/plus_05.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTm8wZb_UQ This interview was interesting to me because my ex told me he had tried to airlift a woman from a tree, but she had let go of the rope because her skirt was falling off - he was sure she had died. Maybe she had or maybe it was this woman and she survived. anyway -
https://nalakagunawardene.com/tag/kantale-dam-breach/
A comment I found - not sure about any of this
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