The Certificate By Ruwanthie de Chickera I have a few questions that no one can answer. So, I have stopped asking them. I don’t have a problem understanding things. I understand lots of things. I understand … things better than most kids my age. My mom says I understand most things better than her. But she says that probably because … she can’t read, you know... And, of course, because she’s my mom… and all… But hey… It’s important to try and understand things for yourself. That is what I think. Like… I think kids and adults live in different worlds. And it’s not that one world has toys and balloons and colours and is full of shorter, lisping people and stuff … no, it’s like a world of different rules. One set of rules for kids and the adults have different rules for the very same thing. It’s like kids are taught about a world that adults don’t really, really believe in, you know… Like we learn in school that policemen are good and the governments look after people, and that it’s bad to lie and that everyone has equal rights and that every child is special and la di da… Well, nothing about my life has been like this. It was confusing for a very long time. Then I just decided that adults lie. They lie all the time. Once you figure that out – all this makes sense. ----------------------------------------------------------My mom always takes me with her when she has to go to meet people to ‘sort out our lives.’ This generally means a lot of time spent in queues. And a lot, a lot a lottt of time filling out forms and writing letters and then telling our story…. Over and over and over again… My mother never seems to get tired of telling our story. I am frankly just sick of it. But my mom, she knows how to tell our story – she knows the voice, the expression all of it. It’s like switching a button. ‘So… tell us your story…’ Click. Oh man…. she’s repeated that same old story so many times to so many people … I watch her. Her mouth speaks the words but I can see her heart leaving her body. It just leaves. And she becomes very, very small and very, very … empty. She’s been getting the same answers to the questions she has been asking for all of my life. That is more than 14 years. But she still asks these questions. She asks all of them. Every single one. Just in case one of them will be answered differently. My mom’s a clever lady. She can’t read letters but she can read faces. My mother knows what someone is going to say before they say it (maybe even before they know it). This is probably why she talks without stopping. Because she tries to get in as many words as possible before they say what she knew they were going to say all along. Me? I have just stopped asking the questions which I know no one will answer. ----------------------------------------------------------Whenever we go out to ‘sort out our lives’, we take our ‘documents file’ with us. And before and after every meeting mama gets me to count the papers in the file and put them all in order. There are 63. Without the photocopies. The documents file is the most important thing in our house. Most important. Mama always says, if there is a bomb or a flood or anything, take the documents file and run. ----------------------------------------------------------My mom is dead proud of me. I keep winning all kinds of certificates in school. I have a whole pile of them, for almost every subject. Studying comes easy to me. I remember one of my certificates was for a speech I gave on my country. I spoke of this country like I belonged here… My teacher said it was brilliant. But she sounded more sad than proud and she couldn’t look me in the eye. When I was smaller, I used to make my own certificates. ‘this is to certify that (XX) completed (YY) on this day.” And I would sign it. My mother got certificates for all sorts of things she did for us. My father got certificates for smiling and making jokes. This was to encourage him to do these things. My father is a horrible man. I wish she would leave him. But she says that our problems will be bigger if we were on our own. I don’t quite see how. But my mother says that until the laws treat women the same way they treat men, women will always have to keep a man with them. These are the kind of ‘grown up things’ that I know about. ----------------------------------------------------------44