Amitha Shantha
A riveting story extending to two generations
My father’s elder brother was a father to many children. By the time I was six, there were six of them, one after the other. The fifth child was a boy, Amitha Shantha, four years younger than me.
My father and his elder brother were different individuals. My father was aspirational. He progressed in his career. He raised his three children with liberal social values. In contrast, his elder brother was happy with his meagre job. His children attended the local village school, while my siblings and I were sent to private schools focusing on English education.
I got along with my cousins, but we had no strong bond. Even as a child, my destiny was already set for me. My thinking had already diverged to a different place than theirs.
When my younger cousin, Amitha, was about fourteen years, he was the tallest boy out of his Jayasinghe siblings and the most handsome. I bumped into him riding his father’s bicycle in my neighbourhood, wearing short pants on his long legs.
One of my friends suspected that a shopkeeper, a dubious character, was abusing Amitha. He had seen Amitha entering the shopkeeper’s shop, a few meters from his home, when the shop was closed. I tasked my friend to monitor my cousin’s visits to the shopkeeper.
The balding shopkeeper could not just be a friend to the handsome young Amitha. A middle-aged shopkeeper having a clandestine friendship with a fourteen-year-old boy was suspicious.
I was furious that one of my cousins, a kid, was getting abused by a paedophile. I had a strong need to protect my younger fellow Jayasinghe. My cousins should never be touched. Fuck ya.
I boldly walked into the shopkeeper’s shop and warned him to leave my cousin alone. The shopkeeper was big, and I was this skinny kid. I did not care. I was angry. threatened him and walked away from his shop.
But the shopkeeper did not heed my warning. My friend who kept the surveillance that Amitha continued visiting the shop.
I was fucking raving mad. Kids did not talk about such sensitive subjects openly with adults. Informing Amitha’s parents was not an option. My relationship with Amitha’s father, my uncle, was also clouded. I found him to be aloof when I visited their home. He was constantly repairing radios and hardly spoke to me.
The only action available for me was to catch the paedophile in his act. I was now on guard to rescue Amitha from that monstrous beast. My friend kept up watch on the shop and Amitha on my behalf.
When Amitha visited the shopkeeper next, I was at my friend’s home on their verandah. Amitha parked his bicycle outside before entering the shop. The shopkeeper took Amitha in and closed the door behind him. I could not control my fury anymore. With my friend accompanying me, I sprang into action and raced towards the shop. I kicked open the shop door. The panel doors fell apart. The shopkeeper did not expect it from me, a lad barely eighteen.
I was so enraged that I yelled at and threatened to hit the shopkeeper, double my size. I asked frightened Amitha to get out of there and go home. Amitha put his pants up, got onto his bicycle and left. I yelled at the shopkeeper never to touch the boy again. I also threatened to tell the paedophile’s wife, who lived in a detached house.
I felt thrilled having rescued my little cousin.
I did not stop there; I visited my uncle’s home and met Amitha’s sister and brother, both older than me. I told them what had happened. It was easy for me to talk to them about this sensitive issue than with their father. I advised them to keep a watch on Amitha and to protect him.
That was it. I went away on my business as the carefree young person I was. I believed Amitha’s issues were over.
I did not stay in touch with Amitha after that. I had little in common with my first cousins besides the same family name. I had moved on to a different social circle. Then, in the mid-seventies, I left Sri Lanka for good.
While overseas, I heard that Amitha had become a street gangster, living his life on the road. He left home and married young. His family members cut their relationship with Amitha. They were ashamed of him and his violent ways.
About twenty years later, my father informed me that Amitha had committed suicide.
That was not the end of this story.
Many years later, after my children were a little older, I travelled to Sri Lanka every year to visit my mother, now a widow and to see to her welfare. On one of those trips, I visited my cousin, Amitha’s elder sister, Marie and enquired about Amitha’s surviving family.
Marie informed me that her siblings did not have much contact with Amitha’s family. Amitha had two young sons when he took his own life. Amitha’s second son had since become a novice Buddhist priest and lived in a temple.
I was curious to see Amitha’s son. I found the directions to the temple and found Amitha’s son, the priest. His Buddhist name was Samitha. He looked a lot like his father. Here I was, his father’s cousin, a Catholic, face to face with another Jayasinghe, but a priest in a different religious doctrine.
We clicked before long. Samitha was happy that a fellow Jayasinghe with the same bloodline had come looking for him. Then he told his heart-breaking life story on the road.
His father and mother, banished from the rest of the Jayasinghe clan, lived in a small shanty home with Amitha and his elder brother, Amal. His father and mother often fought. His father was a drunkard and substance abuser. Eventually, Amitha took his own life leaving his wife, a widow with two destitute sons. Amitha’s wife left for another man, leaving the two kids on their own. Virtually on the streets.
Nobody from the Jayasinghe clan came to rescue the two small boys. Both, under ten years old, roamed and lived off the streets. They were exposed to sexual predators, particularly the elder boy Amal. Both had behavioural problems due to violent and undesirable exposures at home and on the streets. They ate whatever they got on the road as child beggars. They walked from town to town. Their mother, who deserted them, did not come looking for them.
Their grandmother, Amitha’s mother, took them off the streets and put them in a home. It was a home for children living in poverty and neglected, unable to be cared for by family. The home offered the boys a safe place to live and education. However, the boys could not cope with the discipline imposed at the institute. They did not know how to abide by the rules. They escaped from the facility and took off on the streets again, the younger boy following his elder brother.
They lived off the street again for some time. They then walked into a Buddhist temple, looking for food. The priest took pity on the two unkempt street boys and brought them into the temple’s protection. Both were cared for at the temple by this benevolent priest. He taught them, and the two young kids got a semblance of a good life at the temple.
By now, they were exposed to Buddhism. The two boys were ordained a few years later. In Sri Lanka, they ordain boys as young as seven as junior monks.
The elder boy Amal struggled to live in a temple with rules and order. He was a teenager by now and left the robes and the temple. He started working as a teenage labourer. The younger boy, Samitha remained in the temple, pursued his studies of Buddhism and progressed in his monkhood.
Amal continued to work as a labourer and was married when I met Samitha at the temple. Amal was a father himself and already had a young child.
They were harrowing stories. I could not believe that fellow Jayasinghes had to endure such horrible experiences. Amal and Samitha are my grandparents’ great-grandkids and did not deserve to suffer like this. My blood was now boiling over.
I sprung into action at adversities. My rescue instincts take over. I asked Samitha what I could do to help him and his brother. I wanted to meet his brother first.
Samitha arranged for his brother to visit me a few days later. When Amal visited me, a thin young man he was, it was not hard for me to see resemblances of the young boy, Amitha, my cousin, who was waylaid by the system.
It was not easy for me to recall my memories of my late teenage years. How Amitha’s early life was not ideal. How he was abused as a very young boy. How it turned out to be the monster he became. That curse has now gone to another generation. Both these lads had endured a lot on their own. They did not deserve this.
That moment when I broke into that shopkeeper’s den and rescued a naked Amitha kept reverberating. It is not something you can easily forget and discard.
Amal, the elder boy, had not been schooled. There was no future for him in continuing to be a labourer. Being 21 and a father, it was too late to return to school. Instead, I wanted him to gain trade skills. I did not know how to get things done in Sri Lanka, so I enlisted the support of the rest of the Jayasinghe clan, Amitha’s living siblings. With their help, Amal was enrolled as an apprentice in a trade training school.
Amal could not hold onto a proper job and left the trade school a short time later.
Then I decided to help the priest, Samitha, instead. Samitha could work with his elder brother to help him to transform.
Samitha himself was more progressive. He wanted to continue his studies. He was a devout believer in his new religion, Buddhism. He wanted to go to University. So I helped him alleviate some of his education costs. I bought him a laptop.
One of the good moments of this story is that my second daughter, a part-time student, gave me $200 to give to Samitha for his study expenses upon hearing Samitha’s plight. That was a great sacrifice on the part of my daughter. That money was a big deal for her as a high school student. At that moment, I knew that I had raised good kids on my own who could live out the Jayasinghe values.
Samitha graduated and is now a renowned Buddhist priest in Sri Lanka in his early thirties. He preaches on a television channel. He has his temple. He continues to help his elder brother, who has had three kids.
I keep in touch with Samitha occasionally. He is a progressive Buddhist priest in Sri Lanka. He loves hearing about Australian values and societal norms.
I find it hard to communicate with Amal, who had the most challenging experience as a kid on the street. However, I don’t blame him for my lack of communication skills at his level.
I have not told Samitha and Amal how I rescued their father when he was a boy of fourteen. I did not want to submit them to any more agony than they had already been through as young boys.
That is the story of one of my first cousins and his descendants — a tale of a fellow Jayasinghe.
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