A long lockdown in the ‘watte’
Entry barred: A barricade blocks the entrance to the narrow alley leading to Ruwanthi’s humble home. Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
“Free,” is how she feels, stepping out of her little home to walk to the kade close by to get the family’s basic necessities, although the hope of resuming work as a domestic help in a house some distance away is bleak.
Even though ‘60-Watte’, home to about 400 families, nestling amidst posh and palatial houses and apartments down Torrington Avenue in the heart of Cinnamon Gardens went into lockdown on December 7 and was “unlocked” on January 7, troubles hit George Ruwanthi Sharmila (37) and her closest kin on November 25.
“Eda indala api wanirodhanaya kala,” says Ruwanthi, explaining that they were in isolation since that day, following mass-scale RT-PCR testing of the inhabitants of the labyrinth of 60-Watte, at a grounds in Narahenpita.
Her father-in-law living in a shack adjacent to her own tiny home off a narrow alleywhich snakes around this under-served settlement, tested positive and was taken to a hospital in Chilaw. Thereafter, Ruwanthi’s own family, husband Suresh Kumar, two sons and daughter, Dilshan (17), Hiruni (15) and Dushan (12), was restricted from stepping out. A quarantine notice was pasted on their wall (“sticker gehewwa”) and as they neared the time they could step out, the lockdown of 60-Watte followed.
Ruwanthi says that every single day they were in quarantine, policemen in face-masks and visors visited them to find out whether monawahari amaruvak thiyena wada kiyala (they were ill).
A niggling concern is that the family has not got a certificate endorsing that they have undergone the specified 14-day quarantine. This is while later her father-in-law had been told that he did not have COVID-19 but had got a heart attack.
The period under lockdown, meanwhile, was bohoma amarui (extremely difficult), says Ruwanthi as their TV was broken and her children just lounged around idling, sometimes flipping through their school books.
Painting a vivid image of what their lives were during the month-long lockdown, Ruwanthi says that a majority of women in 60-Watte who are domestic-aides (and usually go early morning to work and return at night, attending to the needs of their children before and after their hard day’s work) spent long hours before their TVs or chatted with each other, standing on their doorsteps.
This was while the men who run trishaws, are labourers or work in offices gathered in small areas of the watte to play “binko” (the description of which seemed like a modified version of Bingo).
The badu-malu (bags of goods) arrived once a week without disruption and had in each of them 10kg of white rice, 1kg of sugar, a packet of tea leaves, a packet of milk powder, a 300-gm packet of coconut milk powder, a can of tinned fish, a packet of dhal, a packet of wheat flour, a packet of dried sprats, a few packets of soya and packets of condiments such as chillie powder, chillie pieces and thuna-paha (curry powder) and also a bar of sunlight soap.
What they lacked was vegetables and Suresh would venture out to a kade within the watte to get some.
Unlike in normal times, Ruwanthi did not wake up at the crack of dawn but enjoyed the simple luxury of getting off her mat tikkak parakkuwela (a little late) around 9.30 a.m. and then set about preparing a frugal meal.
Both breakfast and lunch together, which was rice, a hoddak (a gravy) and thel-daapu kemak (something that was fried). Dinner was rice again and one curry or sometimes (hitapugaman) rotti. All the food she prepared she shared with her father and also father-in-law when he came back from hospital.
Wenadata thunwelama uyanawa (earlier she used to prepare all three meals) but not during the lockdown. This humble family faced much hardship when online classes began for the children, for they do not own a Smartphone and were compelled to borrow one from a neighbour and pay for data.
A mother who usually labours daily at cleaning and washing toilets in others’ houses and also ironing stacks of clothes to eke out a living and achieve the simple goal of educating her three children, Ruwanthi says with a sigh that only her eldest son who is in the Advanced Level (AL) class could follow these online lessons but her daughter (in Grade 11) sometimes and youngest son (in Grade 
were never able to do so.
60-Watte may have been taken off lockdown, but Ruwanthi and her family like thousands of others across the country are dogged by uncertainty and impoverishment, in the wake of the rampaging new coronavirus.
Suresh who was forced to sell off his trishaw and took to paint-work and Ruwanthi who was a conscientious daily home-help cannot go back to earning their wages because ‘outsiders’ are not welcome anywhere due to suspicions of being corona carriers.
What lies ahead, Suresh and Ruwanthi do not know, except that the future is fraught with worry over how to put food on the table and sustain their young family.