Our House

Dan and I walked down the curving driveway on an evening in early January to pay our rent and to inquire for some friends about other apartment options. I had only been down to the main house once before, on our previous rent-run. Originally the house was meant to be entered from this bottom floor through tall highly polished teak double doors with concentric half-moon patterns carved into them. The Madam ushered us inside and asked us to have a seat on the white leather sofa. The Mahattaya, the master of the house, was home from his job as a professor of Geology at the University of Peradeniya. He was a tall, lean, high caste Kandyan with excellent English. When he went to work he carried a briefcase, wore tailored trousers paired with an ironed dress shirt. This evening he was dressed in a T-shirt and faded tartan sarong while the Madam wore her casual Western clothes, a synthetic cream button-down shirt and long, pleated, brown synthetic skirt. When the Madam went out she wore solid-colored sarees with gold or silver zari borders draped in the Kandyan style with tailor-made blouse pieces. After Dan and I settled ourselves on the couch the Dissanayakes sat down in the matching white leather overstuffed chairs across from each other.

“Would you like some tea? And how was your trip to Colombo?” the Madam asked us. We nodded “yes” that we would like some tea and the Madam disappeared into the kitchen building attached to the main house by a small interior door.

Dan told Mahattaya that we had a nice time staying at the Galle Face, but security was very tight.

“Ah yes,” he replied, “The LTTE is going to do something awful in Colombo, I just feel it. Our daughter is in school there and I worry about her. Our other daughter, she is in Paris, so I don’t worry as much,” he finished visibly distressed.

“Were you here in the house when the LTTE truck bomb hit the Temple of the Tooth back in 1998?” I asked since we were already talking about terrorism.

“Yes,” he replied. “All the windows shook. That window shattered from the blast,” he told us, pointing to an interior window set into the French doors leading to the bedroom.

“Wow,” Dan and I replied in unison, looking at the window.

“That was a very sad day for me,” Mahattaya continued. “My teacher died that day.”

“Was he at the temple?” I asked.

“No, when he heard about the bomb his heart stopped. He died of a heart attack,” he finished sadly. We were all silent for a moment.

“So, how long have you owned the house?” I asked.

“Oh, since 1983,” the Madam replied, walking back into the room with a tray of tea paraphernalia. “We were living in some apartments over there, they aren’t there anymore,” she continued. “This house was built in the 50’s by a surveyor, so he could get all the timber and such,” she explained. “He built the house below also, it is a hotel now. He died and left his wife with seven children. Then the whole upper road washed out and the hill behind collapsed. The whole house was filled with mud this high,” she told us, holding her hand two feet off the floor. “The wife, she was done with it here I think. I was working as a lawyer at the time and I helped her with the paperwork for the city to fix everything, but she was done and wanted to go home,” she explained with a head-waggle.

“So we got a good deal then,” Mahattaya finished. I pictured the whole bottom floor filled with mud, submerging the rounded, fanned out lower treads of the grand staircase leading up to our annex.

“Did you always rent out the top floor?” Dan asked as he dumped milk and sugar into his tea.

“Yes,” Mahattaya replied. “All we have ever needed is the downstairs.”

“The British Council started up there for awhile,” the Madam mused as if trying to recall of their tenants over the past 24 years.

“Yes,” Mahattaya agreed, “And we had a writer, an Irish poet lived up there for a year.

“What about the apartment under the yard?” I asked, sipping my tea.

“Oh, that was us,” Mahattaya told us with pride. “When be bought the place we needed to do something with that part of the hill. I knew this man who told us that he could build that. My father had just died and we needed a place for my mother.”

“You would not believe that a nice apartment it is!” the Madam told us enthusiastically.

“She’s got windows down there that look out right?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mahattaya confirmed, “And it is very quiet down there. She does a lot of meditation down there.”

“But there is an intercom to us up here if she needs us,” the Madam explained, getting up to show us the intercom on the opposite wall. I often saw the grandmother out in her housecoat sitting on the bench under the mango tree. She walked with a cane and would sometimes wander the compound when the rest of the family wasn’t home. Whenever I was hanging laundry or saw her from the kitchen window I would wave to her. As soon as she saw me her expression always changed from foggy concern to radiant happiness.

Dan then began to explain that other scholars were coming from America who also needed a place to stay for a year. He and the Dissanayakes discussed several venues in our neighborhood that were often rented as I drained my tea. I tried to imagine the whole downstairs filled with mud, psychologically overwhelming the poor widow with seven children. I saw the mud flowing through the two sets of French doors to the bedrooms, around the dining room table, and out to the kitchen. Even though the story was tragic, the house had a magical, protective feel for me. The red solid concrete floor, white concrete walls, white iron window casings, and bottle glass windows had stood for 60 years surviving mudslides and truck bombs and everything else Sri Lanka had to dish out. I was struck by a feeling of loss again, knowing that our time here was limited. I wished that we could buy the place from the landlords and keep it for ourselves.