Ramaiyi was born in 1957 and is a retired plucker on Kirkwall Estate. She is the eldest of eleven children, eight girls and three boys. Her father’s sonta &r is Vandavasi, a town in Tiruvanamalai district near the northwest coast of Tamil Nadu in India. He came to Ceylon when he was just four or five and at fourteen began working on Galloway estate, which is about eight kilometers from Kirkwall. He worked on the plantation as a mason and married her mother, who was a plucker from Lochanora estate46 and had come
to Ceylon from V%lur, a small town in Namakkal district in north-central Tamil Nadu, with her mother and father when she was two months old. She died from old age on Kirkwall estate in 1997.
Both of Ramaiyi’s parents did not have citizenship under the Citizenship Act of 1948 given their fathers’ birthplaces, and neither her siblings nor she obtained citizenship in the form of National Identity Cards until they got married. When I first asked Ramaiyi how old she was and she told me that she did not know and that I would have to ask Sakuntala because she only got her National Identity Card and citizenship once she got married for the second time in the mid-1980s. Neither of her parents had held citizenship, and her father, who is living with her younger brother on Kirkwall, still does not hold a National Identity Card, but a paper registration card from the local Gr"ma S%vaka confirming his registration of residence on Kirkwall.
As the eldest child, Ramaiyi did not go to school past Grade Five, which was the highest level of education offered on the estates at that time. When she was eleven began !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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staying at home to help her mother take care of the other children, and at fifteen she began plucking in the fields for kai k#cu (“hand money,” thus, off the books) to help her family. When she was twenty years old, she got married to a twenty-three year old man from Duncan Estate (approximately eight kilometers away from Kirkwall by road) and had two children, Seelan and Sadha. In 1983, her husband traveled to Colombo and got caught in the July anti-Tamil riots, disappeared, and was presumed dead. With Sadha only two years old when he disappeared, she remarried her mother’s brother’s makan (maternal uncle’s son) from Kirkwall a few years later. He was already legally married and had a wife in Samimalai (about two kilometers away by road), but her relationship with his first wife was cordial, and she had regularly met his children who were living there regularly.
In 1998, Ramaiyi was severely injured while plucking when she fell from a considerable height in the fields with the weight of a fifteen-kilogram basket full of tealeaves on her head. The k&(ai (“basket”) band from her basket knocked out many of her front teeth. The dental wounds got severely infected and she was admitted to the nearby hospital for one month and had twenty-eight stitches in her mouth. Only forty-one years old at the time, she did not want to return to ko)u*tu v'lai (“plucking work”), but decided instead to become a domestic worker in Colombo. This period was also seven years after most government-owned estates were privatized, resulting in a number of gradual but negative changes in working and life conditions on the plantations (Manikam 1995, Shanmugaratnam 1997), and the plantation in which Kirkwall is located suffered a labor shortage and laborers could not find estate work. Working in the home of a Sinhala
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exporter of fruits and vegetables, she worked as a domestic for three years, earning enough money for Seelan’s wedding in 2001. When his wife became pregnant with her first daughter, Ramaiyi returned to Kirkwall to care for the family’s first grandchild. With two more granddaughters born between 2003 and 2007, she remained on the estate and took up her full-time responsibility as caretaker for her grandchildren and house while her daughter-in-law and son worked full-time on the estate. In 2007, she received her retirement funds from her Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) and Employees’ Trust Fund (ETF) and used them to build an extra back room to their line house (show image) and support their seven-member household. The funds presented a surge of income for their family but were quickly extinguished given the reality of the estate daily wage and costs of living that had elevated considerably in the international economic crisis and Sri Lanka’s return to civil war.
Ramaiyi claims that she has suffered troubles throughout her life and that her losses of the past have determined her beliefs and practices in the present. As one of my closest friends and often motherly-like protector of me during my times spent on Kirkwall, she would often tell me how much she looked forward to our conversations about the past, and her genuine enjoyment of giving accounts of herself and sharing her thoughts about the community in which she lived would come out in the more animated ways in which she would speak to me about these accounts. In Daniel’s sense of bardic
heritage, she was also incorporating storytelling as a form of communicating the
suffering that she had experienced in her life as a widow. Her perceptions and those of other widows on Kirkwall complicate former anthropological conceptions of marriage
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and widowhood among this community and demonstrate how explications of suffering and grief can have cathartic effects on those who describe such emotional processes of transition.