Sharing Spaces-A personal exploration of the idea of 'sharing' through lived places - Episode 1 - Earliest recollections

I have been living in a few different types of living spaces. Though I vaguely remember living at a doctor's quarters in Gampola and at an apartment in New South Wales, Australia (both due to memorable events; the first is my eldest brother falling into a limestone pit and the latter because of myself falling from a staircase, ending up in my head between the wall and a flower pot. 

    My solid memories of living space during my childhood were of a small single-storey house my parents rented in Kurunegala. It had an entrance porch, living, dining, kitchen, single washroom, two bedrooms and two courtyards, each opening into the living and dining; and it had a large garden where my two brothers and I used to hop around and stretch ourselves to our heart’s content.  Our house was 'the' cricket ground for our friends in the neighbourhood. The garden was a usual space for me since it allowed me to free myself from everything else; a place where I found solitude; I used to ride the bicycle under the hot sun or go on adventures of climbing and jumping trees, boundary walls, roofs, especially when my brothers were not in the mood to play (they had their own way of fun, can’t complain).  My twin brother was more interested in seeking out the plants and plucking them to create small flower decos inside a coconut shell. This was a habit which I think he developed during our stays at our grandparents’ house in Kandy where our grandmother maintained a lovely garden full of trees and flowers. This is probably the first hint of him being interested in becoming a floral artist (which he is now). On the other hand, my eldest brother preferred to sit and think while biting his lips, gazing at a fixated scene or an object. The only activity which mostly got the three of us together was cricket and sometimes riding bicycles. I being the youngest and the mischievous fellow, used to drag them into my adventures teaching them to do things ‘our parents do not want us to do’; like climbing the antenna pole to get onto the Calicut tiled roof and jumping from the lower end of the roof etc. The garden also had a 'takarang' garage shed (corrugated sheets fixed to a GI structure) and a separate toilet (the water tank was above that) with an outdoor shower and washing area; a playful shower on sunny Sunday noon was hardly missed by three of us. The garden had three coconut trees distantly placed, two Pihibiya trees (Fern Leaf tree) which we loved climbing up and hanging down like monkeys, naran (Local Mandarin) tree, Cyprus, and many Croton plants around the well as I remember. 

    We used to share one bed when we were small, on which we slept in the wrong direction (perpendicular to the bed head); me being in the centre. The bed was placed against the wall for safety. My parents slept in the other room. There was only one wardrobe and we managed to keep all our clothes in it (we have four now).  We never used the dining table or the room to have our meals; the table was the place where we kept the miscellaneous items with every Sri Lankan household had (bottles, containers, newspapers...anything and everything!). Once a year we used the dining table to put wrapping over school books before the new school term, for which all five of us got together. 

    Everyone in our family used to sit on the cane-woven chairs arranged along the walls in our rectangular Living room to have meals while watching TV on the dark drown wooden stands (which had a stereo setup and VHS player in it- precious items that we were not allowed to use unless our parents were around) and sometimes at the laminated kitchen table (with floral designs and it stood on four steel legs). Three of us mostly preferred to sit on the maroon colour granite floor on which we even slept sometimes (it was cool_not to mention the heat in Kurunegala). The two courtyards, which we used to call the 'pergolas' (which is funny because pergolas are the RCC beams laid on the top of the courtyards) were interesting places because they allowed us to play while being inside. The courtyard attached to the living room (which was our 'loku pergola'; Loku in Sinhalese means 'big') was also mostly used to store our toys while the 'podi pergola' (the courtyard attached to the dining: ('podi'  in Sinhalese means 'little') had a fish pond and miniature rock mountain.

    Later on, the owner of the house added an annexe between the dining room and the boundary wall hoping to rent it to someone else. This addition to the house was my first experience of a construction site. I was curious to observe new brick walls being laid on the ground and being raised up to compartmentalise the garden that I once knew. I was a bit upset because the annexe occupied the space of the star fruit tree for some reason I enjoyed watering every day.

[tbc]

Next episode - 'Seeyala Gedara'