When Memory Dies

by A. Sivanandan

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The Buddha taught that to live is to experience suffering. Few family sagas, especially first ones, have captured this aspect of suffering and so many other truths in as lyric a fashion as "When Memory Dies". Through the viewpoints of three generations of a Sri Lankan family (taking the reader from 1920 through the 1980s), Sivanandan explores a culture destroyed first by colonization, then through the ethnic divisions that are released when the country achieves independence. The family, which lives at a level of poverty that makes survival a constant struggle, must also balance love for one another with a deep love of their homeland. Without bending to romanticism or proselytization, the author evokes a compelling and very human story of a lost country. It is a vision as beautifully told as it is unrelenting in its devotion to truth. In the process, the work also supplies a rich historic background to the often underreported news accounts of the massacres and upheavals in Sri Lanka.

Release date: October 18, 2007

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 300

Sample

MY
MEMORY BEGINS, as always, with the rain – crouched as a small boy against the great wall of the old colonial building that once housed the post office. It frightened me, the great monsoon downpour, and saddened me too, threw me back on my little boy self and its lonelinesses, the growing things in myself I could not tell others about, the first feel of the sadness of a world that kept Sanji from school because he had no shoes. And I welcomed the lightning then, not frightened any more, for it would strike me dead and Sanji would have my shoes, and I would be sad no more.

Or I was sad for the trees and the birds and the little kid goat battered and cowed by the rain. I was afraid for the plantain trees, heavy with fruit, now swaying dangerously from their trunks, and I was sorry that the crows, proud kings of the dung-heap, should make common cause with house-sparrows under the eaves of roofs. But suddenly the rain would lift and the trees come erect again, putting forth to the sun which had as suddenly appeared, and the crows would caw once more. And a mist would rise from the hot roads like dawn. It was the seasons’ return, in that moment that had gone and come again, it was awe and grief and wonderment crowding in on each other, a first involuntary affirmation of life that was somehow mixed up with Sanji’s shoes. It was the first memory of my growing world.

Other seasons I would come to know – spring and autumn and winter – and other countries where shoes abounded. But the things that crowded in on me that day in the rain, and in many rains after, and made me an exile for the better part of my life, were also the things that connected me to my country and made me want to tell its story.

But there is no story to tell, no one story anyway, not since that day in 1505 when the fidalgo Don Laurenço de Almeida, resplendent in gold braid and epaulettes and hat plumed with all the birds of paradise, landed on our shores and broke us from our history. No one story, with a beginning and an end, no story that picks up from where the past left off – only bits and shards of stories, and those of the people I knew, and that only in passing, my own parents and son, or heard tell of, for there was no staying in a place or in a time to gather a story whole, only an imagined time and place. And no story of the country – or, if of the country, not our story but theirs, the parangis’. Except that we all bore the imprint of that history, like a stigma, internalized it even, made it our own, against our will, calling to memory the while to lose it by losing memory itself.

 

My father worked in the post office, the new post office by the large tea estate, no more than a cry away from the disused building that had sheltered me from the rain that day. He was born in Sandilipay, a bone-dry village in the north of Ceylon, at the turn of the century. His father was an inept farmer on whose lacham of land nothing seemed to grow but children, thirteen of them in as many harvests, till the villagers enviously referred to him as ‘the man with the green penis’. Only nine of the children, five of them sons, survived childbirth and infancy. My father was the youngest. And on his education my grandfather, awakened to the possibilities of a safe career in the British Raj, concentrated the attention of his passionless years. So that by the time the boy was twelve years old, he was fluent both in English and Tamil, excelled in arithmetic, and was constantly nagged by his brothers for being immersed in a book when it was his turn to feed the goats or milk the cows or run the chickens in for the night.

One day the headmaster of my father’s school turned up at the old man’s ‘farm’.

‘Are you Sahadevan’s father?’ he inquired without ceremony, leaning his bicycle against the wall. My grandfather looked up from the aubergine plants he was tending, took in the man with the bike – tall, self-possessed, dressed in immaculate white verti and shawl and banian – and went back to his aubergines. A rogue, he thought, from town, a trader perhaps, some unpaid bill? He knew the seed merchant, the ironmonger, the pawnbroker, all the people he had business with in town. But this man? Perhaps he was the new pawnbroker. The old man was alarmed at the thought. The drought had already damaged his crops, and there was now this unexpected visitation from town. The seasons on the one hand, rapacious townsmen on the other. He needed time to think, prepare his defence, draw the man on to peasant ground and fight him there. He raised himself slowly, pulling his loin cloth together, and walked up to the well.

‘Are you Sahadevan’s father?’ the man demanded impatiently. And stung by the arrogance in his tone of voice my grandfather quite lost his temper.

‘Yes, I am,’ he retorted. ‘And what is that to you? Besides, I have got a name too, you know.’

‘Yes, yes I know that, Mr Pandyan,’ the intruder replied easily. ‘You see, I am the boy’s headmaster. I sent a number of messages for you to come and see me. Now I have had to come all this way.’

‘Oh sir, I am sorry,’ answered my grandfather abjectly, going into his peasant slouch of deference.

He invited the headmaster to come into the shade, saying that he must have had a tiring journey. And why hadn’t he told him he was coming? He would have met him at the house. He hesitated in his embarrassment. What would he like? A little toddy perhaps? He had some fresh toddy. Or would he like some water to cool his face? No?

He began drawing water from the well, washing himself, taking in the new situation. The headmaster, good heavens, the headmaster, come all the way to see him, he who had never been to school!

‘Well, sir, you are out of the sun at least. Is your bike all right over there?’

‘Mr Pandyan, please, I want to talk about the boy. I have no time to waste. Besides you have got your work to do.’

Sahadevan was in trouble. Expelled, perhaps? My grandfather became wary again.

‘You don’t have to worry about me, master. Time I have, that is all I have in fact.’ He stared at the headmaster hopefully. ‘Well, sir, what about the boy? He is a good boy you know, not a trouble-maker or anything like that; maybe he could study a little harder.’

But it was very difficult, he added, to get all the work done on the farm by himself, even with three boys. The eldest had married and moved away and Sahadevan had to help a little, milking the cows and that. ‘But I’ll see that he works harder, if that is all.’

‘Mr Pandyan, if you will stop a minute, I’ll tell you what I came to see you about.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s a good idea,’ the old man said, squatting now on his haunches before the headmaster, a supplicant awaiting truth. Sahadevan was a fine boy, the headmaster told him, and an excellent student, the best in the school. It was very creditable that he had been able to leave the village school so early and come to him. He hadn’t known a word of English at the time. Imagine that! And in three years he had beaten the rest of his class in English and arithmetic. In fact, he had been recommended for a double promotion.

‘Double promotion? What is that, sir?’ asked the old man, glowing with pride, the drought forgotten. Another seed had begun to sprout.

It meant that Sahadevan, instead of going from Form 2 to Form 3, would go straight to Form 4, the headmaster answered. My grandfather jumped up in delight, reaching for his pot of toddy. ‘And that means he will leave school earlier and help me on the farm?’

‘No, no, Mr Pandyan, he must not become a farmer,’ the headmaster replied anxiously. ‘He is an extraordinarily bright boy. He must go to a proper college, in Colombo. That is what I came to see you about.’

Sahadevan, he explained, was college material. St Benedict’s or St Joseph’s, they were the best, if they would take him. But the old man would have to find the money. In fact they might even try to get him a scholarship or at least a bursary. ‘The sooner he goes the better,’ he finished.

College material? the old man reflected. Well, well, well, the headmaster was right, education was a great thing, a great thing. Perhaps the boy would enter government service, who knows, a government agent one day even, eh? Yes, yes, the headmaster was right. Of course his other sons could help him manage the farm. It wasn’t much of a farm anyway. And truth to say, he wasn’t a very successful farmer either. Yes, by all means, let the boy have education. Perhaps he might even become a headmaster.

Rising, he took a swig from the pot and held it out to the headmaster, who turned it down. He sat on his haunches again.

‘But, sir,’ he complained despondently, ‘there’s no money. I can sell my wife’s jewels, but there is only the bangles left now. And my eldest daughter, she is getting on, you know.’ He shook his greying head. ‘Twenty-two and no man in sight. I haven’t a dowry to give her, except a bit of this land, and you know that’s not very much.’ He drank from the pot again. ‘Where will I go for money, sir, even if he gets that scholarship or something, how will I feed him and buy him shoes and things? Of course there’s my wife’s brother, the dry fish trader –’

‘I know, Mr Pandyan. I know Mr Segaram well.’

‘Sahadevan can stay with him. But we never got along, you know. He always wanted to adopt Sahadevan, because his dried-up wife couldn’t have any children herself. I told him he could have one of the girls, or even the second boy who is not very good on the farm. But no, he wanted Sahadevan.’

‘Mr Segaram is one of the old boys of our school, you know, and he has given the school a lot of help.’ The headmaster hesitated. ‘He was down to see me last week, in fact, and I told him about the boy.’

‘You did?’

‘Don’t misunderstand me. Sahadevan was only mentioned in the course of conversation: he is very good at science too, you know. I told Mr Segaram about trying to get him into St Benedict’s.’

‘That bloody fool. What does he know about education?’

‘Mr Pandyan,’ said the headmaster, with some warmth, ‘Mr Segaram is prepared to keep the boy, support him, provide him with school uniform, shoes, meet all his school expenses –’

‘He bloody well won’t, headmaster! He bloody well won’t! No boy of mine is going to be obliged to that bloody trader! Dry fish, is it? He has made his money on dry fish? And now he wants to make my son a dry fish merchant too? And marry him off, I suppose to his wife’s niece? Oh no, Sahadevan will go to that college – you arrange it, you arrange it – you arrange that scholarship thing, and I’ll find the money for school expenses! I will. Somehow.’

‘Be reasonable, Mr Pandyan,’ replied the headmaster angrily. ‘Your son’s future is at stake and all you can think of…. What has Mr Segaram done to you?’

‘Done to me? Done to me? He tried to play me out of my dowry, that’s what, and then he tried to buy my land.’

‘Yes, but that was a long time ago. He has changed. So must you. If he wants to help the boy, let him. Even if you find the money for the school uniform and books, where’s he going to stay? Besides, Mr Segaram lives so close to St Benedict’s. The boy walks seven miles to school every morning and evening now. St Benedict’s is only a mile from Mr Segaram’s house. Come on, Mr Pandyan, be reasonable.’

And watching my grandfather weaken, he added that there was nothing like education in this world. Surely he could see that for himself. It was a wonderful chance for the boy. Besides, he couldn’t go on working all his life. Sahadevan would look after him, he was sure of that, a very thoughtful boy.

‘Oh, all right then, headmaster. But mind, Segaram must come and ask me himself, none of this go-between business. It is not as though he is doing me a favour, you know.’

The headmaster nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said.

‘Does the boy know?’

‘No, not yet. I thought you should be the one to tell him, Mr Pandyan.’

 

And so my father went to college, St Benedict’s College, a school run by Catholic brothers in the north of Colombo. He did very well at his studies there too, winning the school Scripture and general knowledge prizes in his last year. But after passing his School Certificate examination, he had to leave, as neither his uncle nor his father could support him any longer. The old man’s land had all gone as dowry to his two eldest daughters; two more of his sons had married and gone away, the other had been crippled by a fall from a palmyrah tree (the story was that he drank the toddy even as he tapped the tree, a job which he should have left to the low-castes anyway). Two daughters, the twins, remained unmarried. Even the mud house in which my grandparents lived had fallen into decay. And Segaram had been slowly pushed out of his dry fish business by the Anglo-Fish Corporation.

For a time my father helped his uncle Segaram with his ailing business. But when a few months later the Anglo-Fish Corporation had finally swallowed Segaram up, my father was taken into the firm, from the generosity of their heart, the company made out, though Segaram knew it was to win his customers over to the firm. And for a while it looked as though my father would make his mark in business: he was good at figures, was straight and firm in his dealings with customers and worked as devotedly for the corporation as he had for his uncle. ‘That boy has a good head for business,’ Mr Thomson, the director of Anglo-Fish, was heard to say. ‘He will be running this firm one day.’

But Grandfather Pandyan wanted the boy beside him. He was getting old and the heart had gone out of his fight against land to which he no longer belonged, for it no longer belonged to him. He now managed what he once owned in return for a portion of rice and a handful of vegetables. His sons-in-law, both townsmen, cared nothing for the land but still claimed their share of the produce at harvest time. Not only did they refuse to put money into seed or fertilizer, but they accused my grandfather of neglect and downright theft whenever their portion of the produce fell. Kept from loving and caring for his land, and watching his family fall apart, the old man had taken to drink and to bed. My grandmother sent for Sahadevan. Mahadev would have done as well: as the eldest it was his duty to take up his father’s burden, but he had a family to support and a job to mind. As works overseer (albeit subordinate to his father-in-law), hiring out labour on contract to the government for road-works, he had to keep constant watch over his labourers to make sure the job was done in time. Pandyan’s second son was a cripple and spent his time in social activities around the temple and in prayer. The two other boys lived in their wives’ villages some twenty miles to the north, drinking their dowries away. So it fell to Sahadevan to mind the farm and care for his parents and unmarried sisters. Besides, everyone looked up to Sahadevan, his brothers-in-law too, for had not Sahadevan passed his School Certificate? And he was no slouch as a farmer either: if anyone was able to get any money out of the land, he could.

For close on two years Sahadevan worked night and day to make the farm pay. He managed to make some small profit in the first year and, even more remarkably, persuaded his brothers-in-law to put some of their profit back into the farm. But twice the rains had been late, and labour was hard to come by.

‘Those damn low-caste fellows can get better jobs in town now,’ observed Pandyan bitterly. The Roman Catholic priests, he complained, had promised the nalavans that they did not have to be submissive and obedient to be born to a higher caste in their next birth. All they had to do was to convert to the true faith of the Roman church and they would go to heaven.

For a while Sahadevan held out against the odds. But at the end of the second year, his brothers-in-law wanted the farm sold so that they could marry their sisters off: cash and not land had become the more attractive dowry. Besides, old Pandyan was getting anxious about his two unmarried daughters. Sahadevan would have to find a proper job, one more suited to his English education. A clerical job, hopefully, in the service of the central government in Colombo. There were openings there for bright young Tamils, the British seemed to favour them, and a government job carried the type of prestige that would restore the respect in which Pandyan’s family had once been held. And then there was all that security.

Respect and security. Old man Pandyan fingered them for a moment – they were not the things he had quite wanted from life. As a young man he had rejected them both. He had fought and accepted and revelled in the recurring drought and the untimely rain. He had wept when the crops failed him and rejoiced when they broke through the barren land against all the dictates of heaven. And he had celebrated his own strength at having brought them through against the will of the gods before whom only a moment before he had lain an abject supplicant. Up one moment, down the next, an endless love affair with the land and the sky, without a progression or an end, and yet moving in a spiral upwards through a re-volution of time.

Now the land had been taken from him. His rhythm was broken. Time had become one-dimensional, unilinear. He was at outs with the world.

But with his son he found another rhythm, a way of keeping step with the new order of things, another measure of time. It was not altogether to his liking, but as he saw this other seed sprout and grow and battle with its own world, he determined to keep faith with it.

Respect and security. He would accept them for the sake of his daughters, to wed them better; for himself even, though not for his son. But there, he knew, he need have no fear, for even into this new order of things, enclosed though it was, Sahadevan would bring his own measure of disorder and protest and rebellion. Sahadevan would break through, like corn.

In the certainty of that continuity, Pandyan rose from his bed and walked tall in the promise of Sahadevan’s days, wearing now a verti and shawl, as the father of a prospective government servant should, and sporting a rolled-gold wrist watch.

My father was nineteen when he returned to Colombo once more, this time to take up a post as a clerical servant in the telegraph department of the postal service. His uncle Segaram offered to put him up, but Sahadevan wanted to be adult and free and found himself room and board with a Sinhalese family a few miles from his office in Slave Island. At first he worked hard and studied long into the night for his departmental exams: he was still too fresh from the poverty of his village to spend money on the pleasures of the city. But he liked to fall from time to time, as he put it, indulging in a beer now and then with his friends from the office, visiting the bioscope on occasion and even betting on a horse one day. All the little things which as a schoolboy at St Benedict’s he had promised himself he would do when he was grown up and had money of his own. But he still managed to send some money home to his parents, and even a sari or two to his sisters.

Gradually his ‘extravagances’ got worse. He developed a taste for cards, beer gave way to arrack. The remittances home began to fall off. And though he applied himself to his work at the office, he paid no heed to his studies. But to his surprise, and that of his friends, he passed his departmental exam at the end of the first year and was confirmed as Junior Clerk, Grade IV, which meant of course that he would be entitled to one week’s leave in the year and a free railway ‘warrant’. On the strength of that, Sahadevan decided to visit his folk.

He bought apples and grapes for his sisters, who had never even seen them before, a verti for his father, a shirt for his brother and a Bangalore sari for his mother, and all manner of sweets and chocolates and biscuits as befitted a man returning from the capital – all on the money he had borrowed from his friends against his next month’s pay.

The journey to Jaffna took a whole day and his neat white suit and polished brown shoes were bedraggled and dirty by the time Sahadevan entered the last lap of his journey, in a bullock-cart, to his village, some ten miles from the railway station.

As they drew away, the carter looked covertly at the youngster seated beside him and thought he knew his face. The pug nose and the broad forehead topped by a shock of black hair seemed familiar to him. Surely it was … no he could not be certain, and these townsmen were not a communicative lot. But it must be … he had the same build as the old man, medium height and sturdy as a bull.

‘It is Mr Pandyan’s youngest son, isn’t it?’ the carter finally burst out, unable to contain his curiosity. But Sahadevan, immersed in the thoughts of his homecoming, did not respond, and the driver quickly lapsed into conversation less intimate, remarking that trains were not very reliable, and he must have had a tiring journey. Then, roused to the slowness of his own vehicle, he yelled at the bull, beating it mightily with his stick and twisting its tail at its arse with a deft flick of his toes. ‘Juk, juk,’ he shouted. ‘Juk, juk, you son of Satan, can’t you go any faster?’

‘Yes, it’s a long journey,’ said Sahadevan agreeably. With the comforts of trams and buses behind him, he was becoming used to the cart once more. ‘Two whole days on the train, and only five days of my leave left. It’s not worth it,’ he fretted, trying to remember the driver’s name.

‘Oh no, don’t say that, master,’ replied the carter, certain now that it was Pandyan’s son. There was no mistaking his voice. ‘You have been away a long time, a whole year, and your folk have missed you. Very proud of you too. Your father started on that new well with that money you sent him. I was helping him. The water in the old well was getting salty and –’

‘Velan, it’s Velan, isn’t it?’ yelled Sahadevan in sudden recognition, his veneer of city reserve falling completely away from him. ‘Yes of course it’s Velan. You had gone to live in your wife’s village when I came back from Colombo to run the farm. No wonder I couldn’t remember you. I haven’t seen you since I was a boy, and you recognized me?’

The driver grinned and passed two fingers through his shock of greying hair. ‘Well, young master, I carried you around as a boy, didn’t I? And you haven’t changed all that much, still got the old man’s features, and his temper, I dare say. Remember that time he took a stick to you because the cows hadn’t been milked all day, and you ran up the mango tree? Ha ha, I’ll never forget that!’

‘Yes and he didn’t know that I was stuck up there and couldn’t come down even if I wanted to, did he?’ Sahadevan too was grinning now, the memory vivid in his mind.

‘Go on! He knew all right, the old fox, but he wouldn’t let on, not he! Pretending he’d wait there all day just to punish you. Yes! If I hadn’t come along, you’d both be there still, such stubborn people, both of you.’

Velan continued to reminisce. There was that other time when the young master ran away from school, he recalled, and Sahadevan chuckled. Well, fancy him remembering that. He was observing the way the driver’s eyes narrowed as they peered into the past. In the village there were only memories and people, the man told him, weddings and funerals and feuds. It was different for city folk. They had so much to do and no time for anybody.

‘But I knew the city couldn’t have changed you. You are still one of us, thambi,’ he assured Sahadevan.

And so restored to his old relationship, Sahadevan began to bombard Velan with question after question. Why was he driving a cart? What had happened to the farm? His wife, how was she? And his son, it was the boy only, wasn’t it? When had he come back to Sandilipay?

A shadow passed over Velan’s features, lined now, and pinched in pain. Dead, he sobbed. Both his wife and son. Some long and terrible fever. Enteric, perhaps.

The sadness in his eyes deepened.

‘My wife, she was expecting another baby, perhaps a son to help with the farm – who knows?’

He wiped the tears away. She died in hospital, he said. The city hospital, mind. He shrugged with resignation. The doctors couldn’t do anything. Perhaps he should have listened to the native physician.

He struggled to keep his tears back and it was a little while before he could continue. ‘I couldn’t stay on in the farm after my wife died,’ he said more calmly. ‘So I sold it and bought this cart – set up in business, you might say.’ He gave Sahadevan a wry smile: the truth was hard to bear, even harder to tell. But he saw Sahadevan’s eyes mirror his grief and gave in. ‘Land without sons, thambi, what use is that to anyone?’

Sahadevan was silent. He couldn’t say anything. What was there to say? They continued their journey in a communion of sorrow.

 

‘He is here, he is here. Colombo uncle is here!’ His nieces ran into the house to tell their grandparents. Their baby brother had been left behind and, picking up the straggler, Sahadevan followed close behind the others. His mother came rushing out from the kitchen to meet him, wiping her hands on her sari, smiling and crying at once. His father had put aside the paper he was reading and came forward at a more leisurely pace, waiting his turn to embrace his son. His sisters and brothers-in-law were there too, as well as his cousins and aunts. Even his brother had broken with his temple routine to receive him. And Rover, his old mangy dog, shook the fleas off him to go and greet his master. They were all there, just to celebrate his homecoming!

His mother’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘Oh look at your nice suit, all splattered with mud! Why didn’t Velan bring you right up to the house?’

He tried to put her at ease. Enveloped in the folds of her sari, she was smaller than he remembered.

‘The lanes are all muddy, amma. The cart couldn’t get through. Anyway, it’s only a short walk from the main road.’

His mother offered him a towel and verti. ‘The well’s over there,’ she pointed, ‘behind the cadjan fence, the new well, your well. I’ll have some soda water to drink when you come back in.’

‘Soda water?’ bristled the old man. ‘Soda water? He is not in the city, you know. Fetch him some toddy, some fresh toddy. Kunju, go and get your uncle some of your father’s toddy, if he hasn’t finished it all,’ he mumbled.

Sahadevan shed his suit and shoes behind the curtain that separated the men’s room from the women’s and put on his verti. He picked up the towel and walked to the well, looking once again at the familiar trees around him. He could still smell his mother’s cooking. He came back from the well refreshed, and joined his father on the verandah over a pot of palmyrah toddy.

‘You have not completed this addition to the house, then?’ he inquired.

‘No, son,’ Pandyan wiped the toddy from his moustache. ‘There was the well to finish, and the roof of the old house to thatch, and your mother has been having those attacks again. Mahadev sends some money too, you know, but somehow it all goes.’

‘But you were anxious to get this part of the house finished for Saraswathi’s dowry. Why didn’t you tell me you needed more money?’

‘You are doing your best as it is. And look at you, so thin and gaunt. In fact, once the rainy season is over and this part of the house is done, you needn’t send us so much money. You must look after your health, son. That’s more important than getting Saraswathi and Lakshmi married off. Anyway there’s no hurry to discuss these matters now. Finish your toddy. Then we’ll go and eat.’

The menfolk were already seated cross-legged on the floor of the kitchen with their plantain leaves before them, waiting to be served, when Sahadevan came in behind his father.

‘Mind your head‚’ Pandyan warned his son, but too late: he had forgotten to crouch through the door. Rubbing his forehead ruefully, Sahadevan sat down, to find that his mother had taken his plantain leaf and replaced it with a plate resting on a stool.

‘What is all this, then?’ growled Pandyan. ‘Plates and stools, and what next? What is the matter, woman, do you think your son has forgotten to eat off a plantain leaf?’ And as his wife hurriedly took away the stool and plate and put a leaf before Sahadevan, he added, ‘He only works in the city you know. He doesn’t have to follow their ways.’

‘Yes, of course –’ Sahadevan began, when Rama, the religious brother, broke in.

‘Why didn’t you go to the shrine room after your bath and put holy ash on your forehead?’ he asked.

‘I forgot,’ replied Sahadevan lamely, more in apology to his mother, who was devout without being intolerant. No one paid much attention to Rama anyway.

As his mothers and his sisters served up the piping hot rice with dhal and brinjal and fried fish and prawns, Sahadevan realized what an occasion this was. Rice and one vegetable, if that, was all they usually had.

‘Eat up, son,’ his mother said plying him with more food. They were his favourite prawns.

‘No, amma, really. I have had my share.’

‘There is plenty left for us,’