When home is just a memory
Last month I had the opportunity of visiting my former childhood home.
It was a visit that made me feel both happy and sad. I felt happy at seeing how well the old house has been refurbished and to what good use it is being put these days – yet at the same time there was a touch of sadness at seeing the changes in what once upon a time was the familiar home in which I spent the first quarter century of my life.
The stately old home in which we grew up has now been converted into the Lakmahal Community Library – a place that houses over 3000 books, a place where young people (and not so young people!) can spend time relaxing and reading and borrowing books. It is a place where regular literary events – talks by authors, discussions about poetry and literature, movie screenings and book club meetings – are held. In short, it is a welcoming place where reading and storytelling can take place and where creativity and communication can be nurtured.
Childhood home: Lakmahal
My childhood home Lakmahal was always a place where over the years people used to meet because my parents had such a large variety of friends. There were six of us in our family – my grandmother plus my parents with their three children – who lived in the old home. Seldom, however were there just the six of us in the house of an evening. We would usually have one or more friends or relatives visiting us and often enough staying for a meal. The social circles in which my parents moved meant that we as children were exposed to a wide spectrum of people professing views and information which helped us to broaden our horizons.
Many were the folk we met as guests in our home who went on to play significant roles in the public life of this country. I well remember one of my father’s friends, someone who had been his classmate since primary school and subsequently went on to spend many years working in New York for the one of the United Nations agencies. Whenever he returned to Sri Lanka for a few days he would stay with us. He was a raconteur par excellence, a word spinner in a class that today has nearly become extinct. He would not only exaggerate and regale us with tales of his own experiences – he would blithely appropriate and embellish other people’s stories with which to entertain us. He would often preface these stories with “Now, putha, this is a true story” which would make us youngsters eagerly await what we knew was going to be a tall tale told true!
Lakmahal was a place where my schoolfriends were always made to feel welcome – and fed. The lawn in front of our house – sadly now built upon, an ugly two storey building obliterating the lawn that used to function as a cricket pitch and soccer field – witnessed many a game played by the neighbourhood boys. Two of these lads, one playing for the Singhalese Sports Club and the other for the Tamil Union, even went on to play for the national cricket team. The rest of us fondly believed that the training they received playing with us was what contributed to their later success at the international level.
Those were happy days – when the world was peaceful and life was carefree, before we all went out into the world to study and work and raise families of our own. Some of our childhood friends are now overseas and of an age at which it is not easy to undertake long haul flights back to Sri Lanka. A few of these childhood friends have passed on, leaving us with only the memories of the happy times we shared with them.
I have learned that there is no past that we can bring back by longing for it. Times change, buildings and neighbourhoods change, and we ourselves change.
But I am grateful for the childhood that I had and the friends who shared that childhood with me. The house in which the child that I was still lives on but in a new reincarnation. Yes, the house remains – but the home is gone. For me today, home is just a memory.
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