The Seventh Sun

Chapter 2 -The four friends

Chapter 2 - The four friends

‘Something is terribly wrong! I can feel it!’ twelve years Medhi Weerasingha told her mother, pressing her hands on her temple.

It was the morning. Medhi and her mother were finishing their breakfast. Former was dressed in a white uniform and wore the green school tie, with her shiny black hair braided to two and tied with green ribbons, prepared to go to school. Latter was dressed in a saree, to go to work at her office in Mathugama town.

Mallika stared her daughter curiously. ‘Why, duwa? What’s wrong?’   

‘I- I am not sure,’ Medhi admitted. ‘But I have this feeling that something has gone very… very wrong somewhere to somebody very close to me… I have this hunch!’ she attempted to explain the feeling which haunted her from the moment she woke up in the morning.

She knew something was terribly wrong from deep inside of her heart, though she had no evidence to prove it… everything around her home and home town was absolutely normal.

Mallika eyed her daughter, her brow contracting with worry.

‘I have a bad feeling about today too, Duwa. Not that anything is going wrong with us, but…’Mallika trailed off, her thoughts drifting to a reverie far, far away.

Meanwhile her daughter was busy analyzing her own feeling, ‘Something bad has happened… I don’t know what… like a bomb has blasted somewhere and killed somebody very close to me… but there is no war in Sri Lanka now! Plus, you, Arundi, Jagath Uncle, Kalpani Aunty, Bodhi and Seevali are all doing well. So what can this possibly mean?’

Her mother’s countenance suggested that she had a better guess to that question than her daughter. But she remained silent.

‘Amma, you said you feel something too,’ Medhi glanced at her mother.

‘Yes, but I don’t think we have anything to worry about, Duwa,’ assured Mallika. Yet she sounded as if she was trying to convince herself more than the daughter.

Forcing a smile into the face, she added. ‘Cheer up! You’ll feel better when you join your friends!’

‘I suppose,’ Medhi sighed heavily.

Mother and the daughter got up and went to the kitchen to wash their plates.

Their house was very small. Two of them lived there alone from the time Medhi could remember. Her father had been an army commander and had gone missing in the war which had taken place between the government and the terrorists some time ago. He was probably dead, Medhi assumed. She did not press on the subject since the remembarance of her father always made her mother very upset.

When she was alone, Medhi sometimes thought of her father, tried to remember what he was like.  She wondered why they did not even have his photograph in the house, but could not muster the courage to question her mother about it.

However, Medhi was usually more than contented with the simple life she led with her hardworking mother. They were best friends.

Medhi’s mother had beautiful, shiny and thick black hair, which fell on to her knee, curled and rippled on the edges. Medhi had the same hair, though it was not as long as her mother’s. But her features were different. Medhi came to the conclusion that she must have inherited them from the father she never saw or knew. There was something exceptionally snowy about her mother’s skin and her eyes always gave Medhi a soothing cool feeling. Her own eyes shone energetically like sparks of fire.

Two of them heard their neighbors’ front door closing, three family members next door climbing to their car and the vehicle being reversed to the road. Medhi and her mother had locked their house and were at the gate when the car stopped in front of their house in a few minutes. Their lifelong friends, Jagath Jayalath, his wife Kalpani and their daughter were all smiling brightly to greet them, as they got on board. Jagath and Kalpani had a super market at the town and they usually dropped the girls to the school and Mallika to her office before they went to the shop.