Piyal's Well
When Piyal first arrived in Meegasdeniya in 1986, he spent almost a week in the newly built school in the middle of the vast forest. The backhoes had cleared up parts of the jungle for roads and government offices that spotted the jungle. As promised by Aloka Karunatilake, the Cabinet Minister of Social Services, everyone got two and a half acres of land to cultivate rice and another half an acre to grow vegetables. Piyal received 3500 rupees to build a house that could fit the 550 clay roof tiles he was given. So, like most of his neighbors, he built a wattle-walled clay-roofed house with a room and a kitchen. Additionally, he received 1500 rupees to construct a toilet.
The settlers and their relatives who had arrived in Meegasdeniya cleared up the jungle. A speeding jeep, a small rattling tractor, an axe cutting into a tree, a tree crashing down, and a hammer’s ceaseless knock on a distant roof disturbed the silence of the forest, the chatter of the birds, and the hum of the wind that swept across the forest. The muddy, forestry, flowery taste that the wind carried gradually got mixed with the heavy taste of ash and charcoal.
Piyal and his neighbors collected drinking water from the deep pits that backhoes had dug wherever a trace of water was available in the jungle. There was water in the newly constructed waterways after a few months but that was not drinkable. The land was fertile, and anything he planted flourished. World aid arrived in trucks, and food rations were distributed. The days were hot, and the nights were punctuated by mosquito bites, but they never felt hungry during those first good years. But the thirst was unquenchable.
“We dug small wells on everyone’s land. But during August and September, when the wells dried up, the villagers dug pits on the parched banks of the lakes. Everyone drank from them. In the night, wild animals would also drink from them. We all trusted that water. Now we have tap water, “filtered tap water,” they say, but no one trusts tap water. No one trusts well water, lake water, or any water we can get.” Then Piyal looked at my water bottle and asked, “Do you trust that bottled water?”
