Lakmi

  A  Sri Lankan folk story The Treasure           One father had three children. These three were lazy people who did not like to work hard since childhood. The father also grew old. The father, realizing the nature of the children, called his three children to shape their future and advised them to bury all the money he had saved so far in the home garden and to share it equally after his death.           Shortly afterwards, his father died. The three children, who were greedily searching for it, began to plow the garden. The whole estate was so greedy that not a single object was found. They had so far eagerly plowed the whole garden and thought of cultivating crops with the intention of taking advantage of it. They sold their produce and shared it equally. After earning a large sum of money, they realized that  they had found the treasure they had before Dad died.         ...

  Martin Wickramasinghe         Martin Wickramasinghe was born in 1890 in the village of Koggala bounded on one side by the beautiful expanse of the Koggala Lake and on the other by a coral fringed sea teeming with marine life. The Small white house near the eastern boundary of the parkland surrounding this museum is the place of his birth.           As a village boy he first learnt Sinhala letters from an ola leaf alphabet, tracing the letters on a sandboard. The flora and fauna of the village hinterland, the lake dotted with little mangrove islands, and the beautiful underwater world of the coral reefs, kindled his curiosity and stimulated his imagination about the nature and origin living things and the world. These insights into nature and the changing patterns of life in the rural village background acquired during these early years was the spring-board for Martin Wickramasinghe's unceasing intellectual ...