"The village where we lived in was about a mile towards the north from the town of Killinochchi. Education there was nothing but a dream. The only school in the village had been destroyed during the war. People there were poor, unprivileged and innocent. All villagers were forced to support the terrorists. The ones who refused to support the terrorists would be found dead in a farm, or a drain, or a canal before long. Life there was as horrible as that. But, people managed to survive.
The name given to me by my parents was Induwarsha. My parents had no idea of what it meant. All they knew was that it had something to do with rain. I had two brothers: Vishwa who was two years older than me and Nithya who was two years younger than me. Nithya was mentally disabled.
Appa had ordered us not to let Nithya come out of the house. He didn't want the other villagers to know that he had a son who was abnormal. He thought of it as something to be ashamed of. So we would tie Nithya to the mortar during daytime. Nithya had to live the life of a plant, not a child. Vishwa and I couldn't help these things no matter how much we loved Nithya.
When sunrays began kissing me through the tattered palm leaves of the roof, I knew it was time for me to wake up. Most of the days, the first thing I heard early in the morning was Appa roaring at the door; he would be drunk as usual.
No matter how sick and weak she was Amma would somehow prepare the morning tea for us. After tea I would brush my teeth, wash my face and getting into my white frock, the frock I always wore to church. Then I would walk out of our house to the church. The church was the only proper building in the village. The path to the church was lined by huge old Palmyra trees. The distance between the church and our house was not more than a hundred metres. But, it took a few minutes for me who was only a five year old at that time, .
At first I went there to learn English from the nuns. But, later the nuns taught me how to pray. So every morning I went to the church and prayed. All I asked god was to cure the illness Amma had. But my prayers took a long time to reach god and when god answered them, it was already too late.
Every week Amma and I would go to Kankesanthurai; to the harbour, from where we would be taken to Colombo by a ship that belonged to the Red Cross. It took us about three days to get to Colombo by ship. There was nothing else we could do to get to Colombo. We couldn't afford to go to Colombo by road every week. If we went by road it would only take about eight hours to get to Colombo. But, it cost a lot of money and how could we afford it? Our father had no proper job. He would pluck coconuts from trees and sell them. The money he earned from that was not enough even for our daily meals.
When we arrived at the Colombo Fort Amma and I would get into a bus that would take us to Maharagama, to the cancer hospital. People in the bus and the people on the road would look at us in suspicion. Amma and I always wondered why that was. It's now that I realize that people would have suspected us, from the way we were dressed and the language that we spoke that we were sent to Colombo by the terrorists because, from those days the terrorists have been sending women from our villages as suicide bombers and spies.
We would usually arrive at the hospital on the evening before the day Amma was supposed to have receive treatment. We would spend the night on the pavement in front of the hospital. There would be some other people from far away villages who had come to receive treatment who slept on the pavement with us.
In the morning Amma would go to the hospital to get her treatments done. And she would get to spend the rest of the day in the hospital and I would get to sit on a chair in the hospital and wait. The ward Amma stayed was always full. Poor Amma never got to sleep on a bed. She had to sleep on the floor.
The doctors who came to examine the patients in the ward had to walk over a patient to see the other patient because, the ward which was not bigger than four squared metres had more than twenty patients lying on its floor. So it was impossible to make space for a doctor to walk along. But the good thing was: all these treatments were done free of charge.
Amma would look paler and weaker after treatment. She began to lose the lovely hair she had.
The nuns in the village church had told me that life itself is a heaven and that we should try and understand it. But what was hard for me to understand was that how could I call Amma's life a heaven? She had been sick and suffering from whenever I could remember.
Amma couldn't continue getting treatment for more than three months. The war was at its peak and people were afraid to even step out of there houses. It was hard to watch her die everyday. So Appa begged the Red Cross to take Amma to Colombo for treatment. But it was impossible for them to do that because they couldn't take the risk of travelling by road at that time and travelling by sea was impossible because there was serious fighting going on in the sea between the local forces and the terrorists.
Amma died in a morning. We all kept our finger tips between her upper lip and her nose and felt no air touching our fingers. She had stopped breathing. Inside a home of clay and wattles her heaven ended forever.