On the 23rd and 24th of October, the English Literary Societies of St. Thomas’ College, Mt. Lavinia, and Ladies’ Colleges, Colombo, showcased the writings of talented young individuals, through their event, ‘Vellichor 2021’.

The event’s second day was a competition, with a panel of esteemed writers including:

Mr. Romesh Gunasekera, who was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1994 and has created internationally celebrated novels like ‘Reef’ and ‘Noontide Toll’. His latest novel, ‘Suncatcher’ is a must read, poignant coming of age novel set in post- independent Sri Lanka. Mrs. Madhubashini Ratnayake who won the Gratiaen Prize in 2011 for her bestselling novel, ‘There is Something I Have to Tell You’. Mr. Vihanga Perera, the author of ‘The Fear of Gambling’ and the 2014 winner of the Gratiaen Prize, and finally Ms. Grace Wickremasinghe, an outstanding spoken word poet who was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in 2015.

Below are the pieces deemed the best three by the panel:

In first place, we have ‘Dinner’, a poem by Sadisha Saparamadu, in second ‘Amma’, a poem by Indeevari de Silva and in third, ‘A Displaced Haunting’, a short story by Sehanya Bulathge.

We thank all those who submitted for participating and we wish them the best of luck in their future writings.

First Place – Dinner
Dinner was a special meal in our house.
Every Friday, without fail, was dry string hoppers
and coconut sambol and milk curry and boiled eggs
with yolks so overcooked and grey
that I usually passed them.

But every other day our maid cooked
Chapattis on a flat stove with red chicken curry
Or thosais that soaked up sambol and sambar
And appam, which at least I made sure had a runny yolk
Because I liked how you had to scoop it with the crust and eat.

If we were lucky, we got idlis and doughnut-shaped vaddes,
And sometimes she would bring murruku that we ate in bowls,
And once in a January morning,
She made sweet Pongal rice
And mixed melted jaggery, basmati and raisins
As I wondered how she got that gold stud in her stubby nose.

From dinner, I learned about her,
Before I knew she was one of the 6% who couldn’t read And
could only write her name in scratchy Tamil with big letters.
Before I knew she had gone abroad once to earn money when
plucking tea wasn’t enough.

Before I realized Link Language was more
than another list of words to memorize and quickly forget.
More than synonyms and antonyms and sentence structures
I struggled so hard to learn I couldn’t find its meaning.

Before I knew what the Sinhala Only Act was,
Or the Ceylon Citizenship act, or the Sirima-Shastri pact,
Or the many other laws that peddled people back and forth,
I learned, first of all,

At dinner.

– Sadisha Saparamadu

Second Place – Amma
She and I were never close,
But I remember every feeling of her presence;
Nostalgic memories of soft sweet songs
And warm embrace that cloud every past misgiving.
I don’t know if those memories are mine,
Or a glimpse of an old yellowing photograph,
But they linger in me like it happened yesterday,
Sometimes more often than it should.
The family photograph hung on the peeling wall has faded,
And the faces are hardly visible,
But maybe it’s the way she held my hand there,
I can’t stop thinking about it.
The house I grew up in, was lonely.
He; had been an alcoholic and a part-time worker,
And I knew too much of him.
He, and his wayward ways of expressing loneliness.
Maybe it was because of him; I used to frequent relative’s houses,
Full of stranger’s happy memories.
To me, it was a symbol of pity and sympathy.
It never felt like home.
And in those strange houses; They used to justify her absence
With the money we survived on.
Yet, no one told me why her presence in my life,
Was equivalent to that transaction.
Still, I remember every phone call we had:
Bad reception and broken words through countless tears
She; in her small room smiling at my thousand words
And me; clutching the tiny button phone like it was her.
She and I were never close.
The kilometres between us had only seemed like they were growing.
A thousand words were left unsaid.

A thousand feelings left unfelt.
Perhaps it was the day we realised she stopped sending us money
Or the day we tried to find her;
I wondered if I’d ever recognise her:
Wrinkles on the young face in the faded photograph.

– Indeevari de Silva

Third Place – A Displaced Haunting

The fire had stripped the house to its barest bones. But the skeletal structure still stood tall; the
crumbling remains eerie in the still night of the forest that surrounded it. But most haunting of
all was the realization that no one had come. Even after the embers of the fire stopped glowing,
and the ashes drifted away with the wind.
That had been weeks ago.
Now he walked among the ruins of his home. A pale, spectral figure. As lonely in death as he had
been in life. The first few days, his mind had been reeling in the aftermath. The single, almost
inconsequential spark that had flared to life at midnight and the death that had followed in its
wake. Not just his own, but the death of the dreams he had fought to conjure into a reality. The
hard-won yielding of a life that had once seemed an inescapable spiral of disappointment. Well,
he had escaped, the altar of his sacrifices morphing into the pillar of his dreams. In those early
days, if he had one regret, it was that he had never thought to test its strength. And fate had
answered a previously unasked question in the swiftest and cruelest of ways.
Later, his shock transformed into something sharper—the double-edged sword of denial. And
so, his vigil had begun. Hours crept into days, and days slinked into weeks. They would come
any day now. His disappearance from the world was not a secret to be kept among the woodland
creatures. Surely, the end of his life warranted something other than indifference within the
great world that lay beyond. Hadn’t he transcended the slums of anonymity he had fought so
hard to elude? Hadn’t he carved a place for himself in a world that despised pleas and indulged
success? Hadn’t he done everything right? No one heard his questions. Or his screams.
Soon, he learned to quell his questions and evade his disappointment. Traversing through his
memories achieved both. There was the good; the giddy, addictive ecstasy of his first
achievement and the quiet, assured satisfaction of his last. And then there was the tangible proof
that had once lain in the vast, tastefully furnished halls of his house, the rare, coveted
commodities that he had once treasured. There was also the bad; flashes of his humble
beginnings, and the bitter, perpetual feeling of defeat that lingered in the earlier days. The
contrast between his memories soothed him, and the clear distinction between the before and
after was better than words of comfort that never came.
In the end, the empty, darkened chasm of his life was only apparent when he realized that the

transition into death had been far too easy. He was as much a ghost now as he had been then.

– Sehanya Bulathge