The Tea Set
THE TEA SET For my sixteenth birthday, I received a beautiful tea set. I never owned anything so beautiful before. I don’t know how my parents could afford to buy it for me. Just one year later I had nothing else but the sugar bowl and the milk jug. I’m sure the set never was used. We lived in a house on the east bank of Sri Lanka’s longest river, the Mahaweli Ganga, at 1060 Peradeniya Road, Kandy. Each evening I called from the balcony facing the river, “Come and look at the sky! Come and look at the sky!” Whoever was at home rushed out to see what was going on. The ever-changing colors of the sunset expressed a beauty that no artist can capture. The wind blowing through bamboo groves by the river sang me to sleep each night. The numerous birds' chatter and whistling woke me each morning. There were numerous changes in my life throughout that year. What happened to the cups was just a culmination of everything else. Seven weeks after my birthday, just a