Lovers flee as shortcut through Mount Lavinia cemetery is disturbed by 'ghosts'

It was Tuesday in the third week of August 1966, and the joy of my success at the First Examination in Engineering at the University was somewhat marred by the passing of my aunt, Elsie Amerasekera. She succumbed after a long spell at the Maharagama Cancer Hospital.

- BY NIHAL KODITUWAKKU

Elsie was my father’s older sister by 12 years and was yet just in her 50s. She produced 11 healthy children, sufficient for a mixed gender cricket team. Mervyn, the fourth in line, and my favourite cousin from my father’s side of the family could not make it to the funeral as he had migrated to England relatively recently.

It was before the time of funeral parlours, so the practice was to keep the coffin at home to allow visitors from far and near to pay their respects to the deceased, at any time of the day or night. This is a humorous episode of a two lovers’ shortcut through the Mt. Lavinia Cemetery with eyes only for each other ended.

It is not natural for a child to die before a parent. My grandmother, widowed at the age of 30, was 82 years’ old when my aunt died. Achchi She was in remarkably good health attributed, it was remarked, to her unwillingness to take the bus for short distance travel! She gave a new meaning to ‘a short distance’ in 1960s when hardly anyone indulged in walking for health reasons unlike nowadays.

The distance from our home in Ratmalana to my aunt's place in Dehiwela, was five kilometres. Happily, granny’s strong ‘walking genes’ were also inherited by my father, and me in turn; a clear ‘gain of inheritance’ you may say, over more material things like property.

My grandmother, a good-looking woman, did not look her age at all. I can still remember my eyes welling up seeing her sobbing at Elsie’s coffin. “My daughter, why did you have to go before me?”, she asked. For the parent, the sight of an adult offspring in distress is to cast the child back to its early years.