The civil war in Sri Lanka
It seemed like an old apartment, it had a lot of rectangular windows. There were three floors. The bricks lost their original colour and were almost dark grey. Even the door was not really welcoming. It was a simple wooden blue door. She had told me that her room was on the second floor. She also had added that it was the room next to the stairs. I entered and headed towards her room. Climbing the stairs was hard, it took me some time to catch my breath. After a few seconds, I knocked on the door.
An old lady opened the door. She welcomed me inside and told me to sit on a chair. She sat on her bed and looked at me through her down-turned eyes. Her bushy eyebrows were reinforcing her apparent tiredness. I could hear her breathing through her long straight nose. She asked me what was the purpose of my visit. I told her that I wanted to know why she left that house. She looked at the floor. She was deeply thinking.
She started to narrate her story: "I grew up in Sri Lanka. I was happy with my family there. We were a middle class family. I studied really well. I wanted to become an engineer. A lot of people criticized me and told me that it was not a job for a woman. However, I loved to study the functioning of machines. I was always thinking about new inventions which would help people in their daily life. One of my aims, was to find a way to make the solar energy affordable to the poor family in Sri Lanka. Indeed, a lot of people lacked common amenities like light. Indeed, solar energy was not so developed at the time. Anyway, my relations tried to convince me to become a doctor. Contrary to most of the people, my parents encouraged me to pursue my dream and allowed me to be enrolled in an Engineering course. However, really quickly, the civil war started. I was nineteen at the time. One night, my father called me and told me to sit next to him. He told that a family came the previous day while I was at the University. He explained that they were family friends. They wanted me to become their son's wife. I tried to tell him that I was too young. He carried on and insisted that we were not safe. He repeated that living in insecurity in this country was not my future. He told that Gauthaman, the person to whom I was supposed to get married, was a nice man. He enumerated his achievements. Gauthaman studied in Sri Lanka and then finished his studies in Scotland where he got a job as a manager in a multinational company. His family came here to find him a wife. My father concluded that he always chooses the best to me. Maybe, if I had refused to marry Gauthaman at that time, I would not be in that condition now.
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