An interview with Sharon Ingram: Part II

In the second part of this three-part interview, we learn what happens to Sharon Ingram after her mother was arrested for the murder of her father. If you missed the first part, please read it here.

At twelve, Sharon had already accepted that the changes in her life would be swift and unrelenting.

It was like standing on a beach. Her feet would sink slowly into the sand where she could find her bearings for a moment, only for a rogue wave to knock her down and disrupt the quiet stability yet again.

It had been years since her mother and the local priest were arrested for the murder of her father in a case that gripped the tiny island nation. Sharon and her siblings were shuffled off, quite unceremoniously, to an orphanage far from home. 

Sharon stood out, with coppery red hair that belied her Scottish roots and an infamous name that shone an unwanted spotlight on her. She fielded countless questions (do your mother and the priest sleep together?) and damning assertions (my parents said your mom is a murderer) from peers and gossipy teachers alike, cementing a feeling of “otherness” that never left her.

So, it was at twelve years old that Sharon welcomed a move to the bustling seaside city of Colombo — away from the orphanage — and reunited with her mother and her mother’s family. The investigation continued, but at least for the moment, Sharon had a home and a family and that was enough.

Until January 1983. 

I remember we were all going to school. [My mother] was going to the trial that was to begin, and we all left at the same time. She said “I’ll see you in the evening,”

So we went to school. We came back to my aunt’s house after school, and it was three o’clock, four o’clock — my mom didn't return.

Sharon doesn’t remember who turned on the radio. At six o’clock in the evening, the news pierced the hushed whispers in the family home. 

The trial had begun, and Sharon’s mother and the priest would not be granted bail. Instead, they would be housed in the maximum-security Welikada prison, which would later host vicious riots within its walls later that year and again in 2012.

As if someone had snapped their fingers, the air shifted in the room. Hot tears welled in Sharon's eyes as her aunt — the person charged with taking care of her — rushed to the armoire where Sharon's mother had kept her things: wedding ring, jewelry, clothes. She immediately pocketed any items of value, taking all she could. 

This wave knocked Sharon down and almost drowned her. 

In this, and multiple abusive home environments to come, Sharon learned to walk on eggshells. Her and her siblings were relegated to sleeping on the floor then rising in the mornings to an exhausting list of chores: burning the trash, shelling the rice, grating coconuts, drawing water from the well to tend to the plants. Hunger gnawed at them throughout the day as they were given meager portions of food, sometimes even rotten food not even fit for the dog.

And the beatings. She was beaten for the slightest (even perceived) infractions with a rattan cane, slapped with a metal bucket, dragged by her hair, and subjected to constant belittlement. “You're good for nothing, nobody would want you for anything.”

“In this, and multiple abusive home environments to come, Sharon learned to walk on eggshells. ”

Neighbors noticed and would sometimes pull Sharon aside for a cup of tea or a bit of food, but no one ever stopped the abuse. Not one person stood up for these children in any way that truly mattered.

As Sharon described it to me, “Just being the daughter of somebody could be punishment enough… You don't get through that. You take it — you don't even take it one day at a time, you take it one hour at a time. Even minutes at a time."

The summer of 1983 brought with it a violence in the country that mirrored the mood at home. In what is now known as “Black July”, tensions between two ethnic groups in the country — the Sinhalese majority and the Tamils — escalated to an untenable degree. Members of the LTTE or Tamil Tigers ambushed an army convoy and killed thirteen Sinhalese soldiers. In response, bloodshed flowed across the country where Tamil men, women, and children were targeted and brutally killed. With a decades-long civil war to follow, Sharon’s entrance into her teenage years was set against a backdrop of abuse, instability, and mandated curfews. 

Welikada prison, photo by Peter Trachtenberg

In the months leading up to the case’s judgment, Sharon and her siblings would make the journey to the prison to visit their mother. She remembers with a smile her mother saving pieces of juggary (palm sugar) from her tea for her children, and the female guards who displayed more sympathy towards them than her teachers or her mother’s family ever did.

But even a rare treat from their mother couldn’t offset the discomfort in visiting another Welikada prisoner — Father Mathew. For years, he provided financial assistance to Sharon’s aunt while she was (and I use this word loosely, gentle readers) “caring” for the children. He was the devil they could never be rid of. The smell of him, the awful twinkle in his eyes as he reached for a hug from Sharon, it was all the more unbearable for her because “the man who murdered my father held our lives in his hands”. 

The torturous limbo in which Sharon and her siblings found themselves came to a head on February 15, 1984, when the High Court sentenced Delrine Ingram and Father Mathew Peiris to death by hanging.