FICTION

The Doll’s Death

By Sunethra Rajakarunanayake translated by Madhubhashini Disanayaka Ratnayake     VOLUME 57 No. 4

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That our mother was descended from a Malayali family from Kerala had not been something that we had known, Malayali being a name that the Sinhala people connect to magic and spells. You might find this a kind of ignorance, a bit hard to believe. Inside the house, she wore a long skirt and a blouse that fell rather low upon her body. But if someone came over, she went to the hall only after covering her torso with a colorful shawl. We did not find that strange. Our village was close to Nuwara Eliya anyway, which has a cold climate. In any case, those she used were the Kashmir shawls that my father had given her before he died.

We didn’t wonder in the slightest at how my mother could speak Tamil so well or why her Sinhala also had a Tamil accent. It didn’t even strike us that Tamil and Malayali were two different languages. This was because we had seen strongly Buddhist mothers also visit the Kovil when they faced a big problem or had a big wish to make. So we never wondered why my mother went to Kovil every Friday. We liked to go to Kovil and eat the sweetened rice and peanuts and so on.

My mother did not wear skirts or trousers when she went out though, like my aunts did. When she emerged from her room wearing a saree in the Kandyan style with utmost neatness, my grandmother’s eyes said, “Great!” though she didn’t speak the word.

Amma sometimes got calls from India. Even that didn’t seem beyond the ordinary as my father also had relations scattered all over the world. Grandmother had had thousands of acres of tea, but they had been taken over by the government. However, my grandparents had managed to write off fifty acres to each of their children. They had also reassigned some to their own names, and to an epileptic brother who was living with them, and had managed to save 400 acres of it.

Because I was the youngest, I didn’t know that we lived on the income that we got from my grandmother’s tea estate and on the money from the shops that they rented out. There was nothing lacking on our table, or in the clothes we had, for me to think about that.

I had heard a story about my brother asking, when he was young, if my mother had been born of a lotus flower or a beli fruit since she didn’t seem to have a mother or a father.

“Let’s go and see your mother and father for New Year’s,” I suggested to Amma.

“My father died when I was small. The land where the tomb was went to the state,” said Amma, going toward the bathroom. Little as I was, I went in and peeped. Amma was washing her face. She looked in the mirror. Then she washed her face again.

If we ever spoke about our father, tears came to her. This must be for a similar reason, I thought. Therefore, I didn’t ask her about her mother either after that. She would also be in a tomb somewhere.

She cried when we went to hostels. She cried when we came home for the holidays as well.

My grandmother always said, “Sajitha is a fountain of tears.”

I had also heard my grandmother say to a relative once, “I trust Sajitha more than my own children. She has not said or done anything that might have caused me pain from the day she set foot in this house. See how fast she learnt Sinhala. I was also a bit strict at the beginning.”

Everyone said that my grandmother was a strict woman. My aunts have said that no matter how many servants they had retained, they still had to do the work assigned to them by my grandmother. It is said that she had even made my aunts grind chili, pound flour, and stir the dodol sweetmeat pot. The amazing thing was she never put such rules on us. But we did have to join in the making of sweetmeats for the new year.



Our aunt’s son was quite a thug—a chandiya. We called him Chandi ayya. He was two years older than me. But he was as large as a baby elephant. If he didn’t get what he wanted, he cried till he got it or toppled things over.

I had heard my grandmother say to our aunt, “Put aside your psychological stuff and give me that child. I will raise him properly and hand him back to you.”

I also dearly wanted to teach Chandi ayya a lesson myself. When he came for New Year’s, he wanted my talking doll. If I pressed the stomach of that doll, said something, and then pressed the stomach again, she repeated what had been said.

“I will take this. This is good to scare the boys. I can hide this and then press the stomach and frighten them by saying there is a ghost talking.” Chandi ayya took my doll and put it inside his family’s car.

I went behind him and hung on to the car door. Though I was as small as a worm, I kept clinging on without letting go.

“Daughter of the Malayali spellbinder, aren’t you? Though imprisoning spells, bandhana, have been cast on my uncle and grandmother, we are not scared of you.”

I didn’t even know what imprisoning spells were. But I had a feeling that it was something bad. Because I was small, I wanted to return the same kind of name-calling insult. Those days, a big word that I had learnt to write was the Sinhala word for prison: bandhanagaraya. From the day we had learnt it, we used it as a joke to threaten everyone.

“We are not scared of thugs like you either,” I said. “I will tell the police and imprison-spell you to the prison as well, make you have a bandhanaya to the bandhanagaraya.” I thought that the word bandhanaya was a part of the word bandhanagaraya, but it actually meant a particular spell to make someone attracted and bound to you.

“I will have the police catch the skinny daughter and her fat mother and get them sent to Pudukuduiruppu.” That was an area in the north of Sri Lanka, where the Tamils were.

Because the fight was progressing royally, neither of us turned back. But I never imagined that everyone who had been seated on the porch would come running up to us.

My aunt dashed into the midst of the fight and bundled Chandi ayya into the car. In a minute, my uncle got the car started. My aunt took the doll that had been in Chandi ayya’s hands and dropped it out of the window. I stayed, turned to stone, without running to pick up my helpless doll fallen on the earth.

The rest of the uncles and aunts went back to the porch and sat down again without saying a word. No one spoke.

“Let’s go in, child. Who cares what that Chandi baba says,” Grandmother said, taking me by the shoulder and leaning my body against hers as she led me in. When I went into our room, my mother, elder brother, and elder sister were all seated in one row on the big bed, unmoving.

I wanted to tell them that I had done no wrong, that it was he who had started the fight. But the words got caught in my throat.

Because it was the April New Year’s Day, Amma was in a Kandyan saree. I had read stories of magicians. The spell masters in those stories were in England, right? Then where would the Malayali magicians be? Our room was filled with such a silence that it was impossible to ask that question. Amma was blinking very hard to stop the tears from falling. My elder brother pressed a red towel into my mother’s hand.

I looked out of the window. The tire marks of Chandi and all’s car could be seen, as if a small road had been made on white sand. The doll looked as if it had been in an accident and died on the road. Not “as if.” Really dead, I thought. I went back to Amma and hid my face on her lap.

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SUNETHRA RAJAKARUNANAYAKE has published over sixty novels, short stories, translations, travel essays, and spiritual pieces. She contributed columns, articles, and interviews to many newspapers and magazines in Sri Lanka from the early eighties to 2022, as well as edited magazines and scripted and directed stage plays and radio programs. She has served as a jury member for drama, literary, and film competitions from the mid-nineties to 2008. She earned an Asia Foundation fellowship and Shanghai Literary Association fellowship.


MADHUBHASHINI DISANAYAKA RATNAYAKE is a writer of fiction, a translator, and an academic. She is the former head and a senior lecturer in the Department of English Language Teaching at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. She has a doctoral degree from Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, and a master’s degree from New York University (in English and American literature with a special focus on creative writing), which she attended on a Fulbright Scholarship. Her anthology of translations, The Routledge Companion to Sinhala Fiction from Post-War Sri Lanka came out in 2023. She won the Gratiaen Prize, established by Michael Ondaatje for the best creative work written in English in Sri Lanka for a particular year, in 2011, for her novel There Is Something I Have to Tell You, having been shortlisted for the prize twice for her short story collections. She won the State Literary Award for her short story collection Driftwood in 1991 and in 2020 for the Best Translation of a Novel from Sinhala to English for The Sowing Festival, a translation of Somaratne Balasuriya’s Vap Magula.


VOLUME 57 No. 4