Page 13 - Memoirs of Sarasworthy Somasundaram

Vaddukoddai

1942
I was 19, studying for my London Inter-Arts at Jaffna College. One evening I had gone for a
stroll, with my friends, down the road that cuts across the paddy fields around the college;
we stopped at a culvert spanning a small stream. As I leaned over and watched the small
fish darting in the water, suddenly a very vivid picture flashed through my mind. The picture
of a little child, holding on to the mother’s hand and throwing breadcrumbs to the little fish.
It was all so sudden and so vivid that it shook me when I realised that it was my own
memory flashing back a picture from my own childhood days!! As I stood there, I
remembered that my early childhood had been at Vaddukoddai.
At that time my father had been on the staff of Jaffna College. (He had moved soon after in
my second or third year?)

It is strange that this experience and this alone had remained locked up (filed in current
terminology) in my memory all those years; for I experienced no other flashbacks in all my
later associations with Jaffna College.

Strange and yet so beautiful. A touching tribute to a child-mother relationship. The
memory has brought me much joy in my adult days.

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