171 Homestead – By Charmaine Candappa
I’ve been thinking a lot about my childhood home these days.
171 was a safe and familiar haven, a place that brimmed with memories that once filled us with a sense of security and peace.
My family home that my father built and called Homestead comes to my mind ever so often . My childhood was lively, having a neighbor of my own age. I need to mention Rai as she was so much part of my childhood memories. Today our family home is dwarfed by tall shabbily constructed two and three storied buildings around it, a sad and pathetic sight seen almost all around the city of Colombo. As the years have so swiftly gone by, I think of those memories of my parents, my siblings, and all those domestics who helped my mother, and who came in and out of our household, a far distant memory indeed, which is now hard to restore of what was once there, and to feel it was once our home. As the youngest of six , it makes me sad and nostalgic when I think of the loss of my two older brothers and my only sister.
They are now past the moon and the stars in a Home that is more profound than our earthly home. My two remaining brothers and I are separated from each other as we live in different continents. My memories are all that I have, that live inside the walls of my heart that holds safely the people I loved. My family home is now a place of memories of love and loss. It’s a place of shadows and light. Homestead still stands despite its faded and peeling walls, rusted brass window rods.
The vibrancy of color of the Croton leaves is all gone, and the beauty of the hibiscus flowers, my mother’s pride and joy. I could never make that utterance ” there is no place like home”, anymore when I think of Homestead, 171 St James st, Colombo.
Charmaine Candappa.
