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Kade of many goodies
In a classic tale of rags-to-riches, Muniandy who arrived on the shores of then Ceylon from Tamilnadu as a little boy, now owns a bothal kade that boasts of stuff that even Abans doesn’t have

By Kumudini Hettiarachchi
The entrance is unpretentious. The small space at the front is dark and dingy. The second door leads to a much larger room but amidst the junk there is order. The cardboard is piled high in neat stacks. The bottles are arranged on the shelves. The wires are in rolls.

This is the kade that has no name but everyone knows where it is. Located a stone’s throw from the Nugegoda Railway Station, at 10, Kirullapone Road, “just call it bothal kade”, says owner Sinnakayambu Muniandy tucking up his sarong and questioning us as to why we want to write about his “business”. A bunch of keys hang from his waist. He agrees to talk to us but lays down one condition. “You can take all the photos you want of the shop, but none of me,” he stresses through dentures, wracked by spasms of coughing.

“I built this up from nothing,” he drawls in Sinhala, while shrewdly negotiating with a customer over a heavy roll of copper wire, weighing it and mentally calculating the cost in Tamil while his juniors are struggling with a calculator. “When I set off to start my bothal-paththare business I had in my pocket just 65 cents, while my wife gave me Rs. 3.50,” he says.

Like in most rags-to-riches tales, 68-year-old Muniandy’s beginnings were unimaginably humble. He and his father arrived in then Ceylon from a village in Tamilnadu, a couple of weeks before the country gained independence, brought here by a Muslim who wanted this boy to work in his parana yakada kade (scrap iron shop) in Kuliyapitiya. In India Muniandy had not attended school regularly and that too only up to Grade 2.

His father returned to their village and it was many long years after, that he learned that he and his step-mother had died of cholera back home, he says with a tinge of sadness and regret that he did not see him again.

However, for 11-year-old Muniandy, life changed in this new country when he spoke about the Mudalali’s massina (brother-in-law) eyeing a young Muslim girl who brought hoppers to the shop. He was out on the street, sacked by the brother-in-law. He got on a bus found himself in Fort, sleeping on the pavement near the Times of Ceylon building of yore, staving off starvation with crusts of bread and helping the naataamies (labourers) near the bo-tree in Pettah.

One naataami took pity on him and took Muniandy to a shop, where he worked for a while. Later he moved from shop to shop looking for better prospects and finally ended up in a bungalow in Bambalapitiya, where he became the Jack of all trades. That is where he fell in love – with the ayah amma next door, with whom he lived and still lives, having five children.

“She is much older, 10 years older than me. We lived together but when the children had to go to school, we found to our dismay that their birth certificates stated that they had no father. We married then,” he says practically, introducing us to Olaboduwage Pabisthina Hamine in their living quarters of tiny room and still tinier kitchenette at the rear of the shop.
By 1958, he was roaming the streets with the bothal wattiya (basket to carry bottles) on his head and shouting paththare bothal. When he heard that a property was up for sale in Nugegoda, he decided to make a bid for it and established a boutique. And from then on he has been buying and selling bottles, newspapers, books, cardboard, aluminium, brass, wire, coconut shells and more.

The earnings vary from moment to moment, he concedes. “Sometimes I don’t have five rupees at other times I may have 25,000 rupees.” Amidst the toil and hardship, he and Pabisthina Hamine have had their share of tragedies. “One of my sons who is mentally ill, hit his brother on the head and he died. The other children are okay. I have one more son and two daughters, all in this business too. I am a great-grandfather now,” he says.

Proud of the way he built up his business single-handedly, he says many people gave him a helping hand. He does the same now along with a lot of charity work. Among his contributions, he mentions a large bell he donated to the Pullayar Kovil in Amparai and a building to the Sambodhi Viharaya in Gothatuwa, while refusing to divulge how much he spent on them.
His humility overrides all else as he leads us to the second room to point out a ramshackle old bicycle taking pride of place. “I bought that Raleigh cycle for Rs. 350 from someone who had got it for Rs. 750 but used it for sometime. That was the bicycle I went on after I had made some money with the wattiya on my head.”

“The mementos of the past are a reminder of how I have come up in life,” he says, showing us also the hook scales. “Though we have this modern scale, this is what I used when I went from house to house,” says Muniandy who now has two employees under him, urging that one must never-ever forget one’s beginnings.

“To this day, I get up before dawn and fold papers neatly. It’s my own thing and if I don’t work, I can’t be successful,” he says, adding that many a customer says that he has stuff that even Abans doesn’t have.

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