Journey to Motherland

JOURNEY TO MOTHERLAND

By Dr. Tilak S. Fernando

picture credit - Google.

Anne bid good-bye to her father, at the end of a six-week's holiday in Colombo with somewhat mixed feelings this time. She could feel her father's drawn, emaciated frame trembling. Her eyes filled with tears, but then, leaving her family and returning to London, after a glorious holiday in Sri Lanka, has always been painful.

Every year, Anne made it a point to make Sri Lanka as her holiday venue. Although she had fulfilled everything in England, from a higher education, a happy marriage and social status, money, expensive motor cars, detached houses, a loving family and all the imaginable material comforts in London, she always felt that inexplicable vacuum within herself whenever she thought of her childhood spent in Sri Lanka. True, it was a basic, simple and an unsophisticated life, yet the nostalgia was too solid and it always hit her back like a boomerang.

This time Anne’s holiday was different. She was not worried about the restrictions on travel subsequent to terrorist suicide bomb attacks in Colombo. In the six-week period she had been together with her parents, her father's mental and physical status had deteriorated before her very own eyes, and she felt her leave taking was to be her last!

A fortnight after Ann returned to her London base, her bed-side telephone screamed one early morning to warn her that her father had been rushed to a private hospital in a serious heart condition - for a by-pass heart operation. She was once again flying Sri Lankan airlines, home bound, desperately hoping to reach her father's bed side before he passed away. It was, however, not to be.

Ann felt a sense of hopelessness overcoming her.  ‘Those of us who have lost our parents invariably say that we regret for not having said all the things that needed to be said. If only we could have those last few days or weeks all over again - or a few hours’, she thought.

Ann's brothers and sisters were all living abroad. The term," Abroad", still had a social prestige, she thought, after so many years of independence on the Island.

We need years all over again to reconcile ourselves to the lives we lead and the people we have become -  thought Ann

During the '1960s ' going abroad to study was the goal of every ambitious student, or more to the point, the driving force behind every anxious parent. Her father was more keen than most. Inevitably she left Sri Lanka in pursuit of higher education at a London University to read a degree in English literature. According to her family astrologer, Ronald, she could not have been kept in Sri Lanka "even she was bound to metal chains!" Her path, therefore, had to lead to England - the "Mother Country" and the source of education!

Ann was soon able to quote Keats and Milton effortlessly, but how little of Gurulugome or Maurapada! The English history, the Tudors, the Wars of the Roses, The Spanish Armada, any such detail was crystal clear in Ann's photographic mind, but those of Gira Sandesaya, Guttila Kawaya, Hansa Sandesaya or Ummagga Jathakaya, and the Sri Lankan history, were very hazy.

Anne's brothers and sisters had left home, in turn, to various parts of the world, and her parents remained in a large empty house with their ambition fulfilled and their pride in their off-springs demonstrated by the family photographs that filled heaps of photo-albums, some of which were now becoming discoloured & defaced.

The ageing parents could feel a sort of family togetherness on the days when air-mail envelopes dropped into the red letter-box on the front gate.

In time, the family photographs were augmented by those of grandchildren and, Anne's parents continued to glory in their extended family, which included sons and daughters-in-law of various nationalities - a mini United Nations! The reality of all these did not strike Anne until those last few weeks with her parents. Her father had been in good health since he retired.

Both her parents had visited their children several times, who were living abroad. They loved every trip that took them to different parts of the world - London, Los Angles, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

Two years after her father's retirement, he showed an ambition to immigrate to the UK. Naturally Anne's parents loved to be with their favourite daughter and in the company of grandchildren.

Anne, however, discouraged such thoughts of her father because she always was afraid for both of them. Her father, a man of immense dignity, respected, revered by those who knew him at home as a ' cultured, educated and an imaginative man' would be another "Coloured immigrant” ridiculed by England's hooligans and, perhaps, hated and resented in some quarters, thought Anne.

She would, therefore, never permit her father to endure that; her father would never have understood how much emotions could be generated in the “mother country," thought Anne. Her father accepted her advice and continued to become frail while her mother began to sink under anxiety.

During the last six weeks together with her father, Anne noticed how her father's mind wandered from time to time. But there was a certain amount of truth, in those wanderings, that was mainly too painful to bear.

She noticed how blurred details of her father's life emerged when his mind wandered - the generations over-lapped so that Anne's mother and her father's mother merged occasionally. During such wanderings in his mind, one theme became crystal clear. He saw himself always as the head of the family.

In his fantasy, he spoke of his family settled in a large single compound with acres of land, a stone's throw away from Maharagama junction, with sons and daughters, with dozens of grandchildren close at hand.

It was vividly real to him as he "saw" his grandchildren grow up, their future shaping according to their interests and characteristics. In his imaginary family compound he offered Anne and her brothers and sisters money to help them buy adjoining land and even doing the supervision of construction of new houses by himself .

During Anne's holiday she had been talking to her father gently for many hours in those weeks. She let him become part of her father's waking dream, his family together, and close at hand. One day when his mind was clear and he was in the painful world of the present, Anne asked her father if he would encourage his children to leave home in search of education, if he had his time over again. His answer unhesitatingly was "YES"!

Anne's parents were lonely and had spent many sad hours remembering family gatherings, but they thought it was worth their while to see their children settled “abroad", where Anne and her other brothers and sisters had so many opportunities.

Anne was once again returning back to London, after her father's funeral, engulfed in a wave of deep sadness.

During the long flight from Colombo to London her mind turned into a mini cinema screen. For, she could visualise detailed pictures of the realities and past circumstances - especially the last six weeks she spent with her dear father, devoting her full attention and spending her entire holiday by his bed side.

Providence sometimes delivers sledgehammer blows on us. In this instance Anne was not destined to be with her most respected and loved man on earth at the very crucial moment when she would have liked to sit beside him, hold his hands and whisper to him:  “Father, thank you very much for everything you have done for all of us".

Anne was lost in a wave of deep thought for many months after her father's demise. Whenever her last trip to Colombo comes to her mind, Anne still becomes a confused woman, and she is yet to find an answer to a vital question that entered her mind, at the loss of her beloved father....!

Is the regret Anne now feels self-indulgent? Is the ‘multi-culturism’ she proudly accepted in England adequate to compensate for the memory of that “lovely old man" seeking comfort in the wandering of a senile mind.........?

Daily News 2013