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Blooming shame: flower-sellers’ arrests bring despair
View(s):B. Shiromi will be selling flowers outside the Kalutara temple again tomorrow as nine of her friends prepare to face court for the same “offence”. Shiromi, 28, a mother three, has no choice: without the Rs.500 she brings in most days her family will starve. Shiromi, her husband, 52-year-old Nihal Shantha, and their two children, aged 13 and 11, were made homeless by the 2004 tsunami but received housing in the Kalutara area. They now have a third child, seven-year-old Dilini Hansika.
“Come, buy my flowers”: Shiromi has no option but to be back at the Kalutara temple premises (below) tomorrow. Pix by Ratnasiri Premala
Mr. Shantha has a badly injured leg and cannot do normal work; while his wife sells water-lilies and other blooms, he also sits near the temple, selling little clay lamps. Last Thursday on Bak Poya the police swooped on the flower-sellers clustered on the pavement and approaches to the temple, arresting seven women and two men. Shiromi fled inside the temple and hid.
The police said there were designated stalls for selling flowers and the pavement sellers were an inconvenience to devotees.
Shiromi says Poya days are her best hope of earning money. “It is difficult to find money on other days – the most I can earn is about Rs.500,” she said yesterday. “We get these flowers from a flower shop and we are supposed to pay back half of the earnings to the shopkeeper.
“When the police come to arrest us, we run away and return after they have gone away.” She is trying to scrape up money to buy the schoolbooks her children need, and her dream is that someone would help them to buy a cart from which she could sell gram or other food.
Her husband sells clay oil lamps at the premises
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