A Ceylonese Reunion

Wimala Ekanayake was nanny to my household for the most of fifteen years, extending over the most important years of my growing up. She fed me, bathed me and most importantly loved me just as a mother would. She would rise at dusk before anyone would and be the last to fold back into sleep. It took the better of ten years for me to discover that her taking up the motherly role of nanny was by no means a coincidence. Entering a new phase of life somewhere over the Indian Ocean was certainly not a snap decision and that decision was a story she sometimes retold as a bedtime story.

Wimala Ekanayake was born on the 30th of October, 1956 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. As part of the social fabric of the rural area she was born in, she had little to no access to the many luxuries we take for granted. In her 20's, she tied the knot to a man who she later found turned out to be a problem gambler. It would end like how it started and it happened almost like a slow car crash. In order to leave that part of her life behind, she left her two children in the care of her former sister-in-law and dedicated the next one and a half decade caring for two strangers in a foreign country. What made that decision even more absolute was the promise of a better life, for her parents, her relatives and her children. It was to be a pie-in-the-sky situation but unfortunately her time in Singapore outran the childhood years of her children. Ironically, her son did not feel the same way about her when she returned home to see her little ones - he got married and left his hometown, and in offering her motherly affections to two girls in Singapore, the invisible cord that once held mother and son together grew even more taut.

Wimala Ekanayake was more than just the woman who was brought over to care for and cater to the many whims and fancy of her little mistresses. To me, she was the one who sat watching primetime dramas with me, constructed elaborate bento sets that were the object of envy at school, taught my sister and me how to ride the bicycle and the one who rubbed ointment for me after I was on the receiving end of the cane. After 15 years in Singapore, she was very much as Singaporean as anyone born on this little red dot, she shared the same languages as us including Mandarin and Cantonese and her English was fine-tuned by what was broadcasting on the television waves.

After 15 years at the same home, she made the painful decision to leave and found work at Saudi Arabia. She was just as hard a worker and made sure she sent money back to her family every month. We later found out that the money went into rebuilding an entire house with the help of her father. Unfortunately, while working in Saudi Arabia, she learnt of her father’s passing and months after, her mother’s. The utter devastation of losing both parent broke but her employer needed her to be around to tend to the estate and children and she grieved in another foreign country, swearing to work doubly hard so that she can throw grand rituals for her parents each year to commemorate their deaths. Wimala Ekanyake. This woman, the one who cared for me for 15 years was someone who deserves much more than this dedication and my respect for her goes way beyond.

Two years ago, my sister and I, accompanied by our partners, took a week-long trip to pay my aunt a visit in the teardrop-shaped island of Sri Lanka. We haven't seen her in a decade and the reunion was as imagined, an emotional affair. Even though Sri Lanka wouldn’t naturally wind up as a destination we yearned to tackle, we felt compelled to visit my aunt and discover the country she called home, paralleling her experience years back visiting ours for the first time. Through this trip, we learnt even much more about my aunt and her beautiful country and at the end of the trip, we were made up over the beauty of this country. It was with a tear in our eyes that we bid farewell to my aunt but we made a promise to return much sooner and it is a promise we are going to keep.

If you ask us, this trip definitely unsettled us as we arrived in Colombo not knowing what to expect. We had our mouths agape for most of the week, astounded and surprised by the compassion and generosity by almost every Sri Lankan we met. Darren even went into his first foray of video production while he was there. At that point of time, we had no plans on starting a travel blog yet, much less have this video put up on our blog. He wanted to chronicle the trip and the time we spent with our aunt. I am glad he did. We just hope you don't mind the slipshod quality on this work.

Shot By: Darren

Shot With: iPhone6s

Edited With: iMovie

Music: I Forget Where We Were - Ben Howard

#SriLanka