Jamis begins life anew

Yamu, he says without hesitation and immediately shuffles to the vehicle and climbs in to take us to the Maha Gedera, just a few hundred metres from the place he calls home now. The Maha Gedera is sans even a single piece of furniture and the large garden is overgrown. Over the front door are black-and-white wedding photographs of people from a different era.

For octogenarian Perumbada Pejalage Jamis (he can't remember his age), not only from that era but also from a different world, there is only one yearning in the twilight years of his life……..to take up what he left off, many decades ago. Kumburu karanna oney, he says with an innocent smile, explaining that he wants to farm the land. That's what he did before his life took an unexpected turn which led him from the Gokarella Police Station to the Kurunegala Court, from there to Bogambara and finally to the Angoda Mental Hospital, where he has been for the major part of his life, 50 years.

Even at the Angoda Mental Hospital he and his "party" engaged in cultivations which helped supplement the meals of the patients. Jamis's life story unravels in all its pathetic circumstances……..he was close to 30 when, he says, he told a Maama (Uncle) that he saw a patch of blood on the road. The Maama promptly called him pissu and took him to the Gokarella Police Station.

His saga, beginning from his youth, meandering into middle age and then stumbling into old age, began then. While his relatives speak of an incident where Jamis allegedly got involved in a fracas with his own father and pihiyen ketuwa (cut him with a knife), the man himself has only hazy memories.

Jamis, a man of few words, says the Gokarella Police produced him in court. On being remanded he was taken to Bogambara. "It was after about a month later that I was taken to Angoda," says mild Jamis. Life took on a routine there. Yes, he took medicine for a while. For 10 years he engaged in rattan work, weaving chairs and then got into what he knew best. He and his party farmed five acres of paddy where they could not use tractors but went in chest-deep to get the best yield from the land. "Eka kannekata wee busal 800-1,000 hambawuna," he says proudly, explaining that from one season they used to harvest 800-1,000 bushels.

Turning left at the Ibbagamuwa junction onto Kumbukgette Road, it is easy to understand why ploughing, sowing and reaping are very much a part of Jamis's life. The road cuts through a tranquil pastoral scene, paddy fields as green as a freshly-woven carpet as far as the eye can see ending only at the line where a huge stone outcrop lies like a sleeping giant.

Lush and green, this was the area, Hipawwa village, from which Jamis went to school. "He had studied only up to about Grade 6," says P.P. Jayawardana, his first cousin's son (Loku Thaththage puthage putha). Jayawardana and wife Mallika have taken Jamis under their care and are hoping to renovate the Maha Gedera and move in there with him. One of the photos over the door here is that of Jayawardana's parents.

With a pirith noola tied round his wrist and two long tattoos on his inner arm, Jamis is totally relaxed when The Sunday Times meets him, and seems to take in his stride all the media attention that has been showered on him. One tattoo on his arm depicts a snake coiled around a kris knife and the other a mermaid which Jamis had got done while still a youth by giving a friend a glass of arrack as payment. He, however, does not even chew betel unlike others in his village of his vintage only a few of whom are alive.

His story came to light when he was sent to the National Hospital from Angoda because of a saharumak (kalanthayak or dizziness). From the National Hospital he had been sent to Welikada and then on to Kegalle Prison and to the Kurunegala Prison lock-up, where a prison niyamaka who was going through the papers to be submitted to court the next day had a chat with him.

Coincidentally, they came from the same family. In court, after disclosing that Jamis's father had actually died in the 1980s, long after Jamis had been committed to Angoda, he had been released on bail. The case is to be taken up in February. On Wednesday, when The Sunday Times met Jamis, he was preparing to go to a bank in Kurunegala to place the Rs. 500,000 gifted by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in a fixed deposit. Every three months, he will get Rs. 20,000 as interest which he will give to his relatives for his upkeep.