Vidanage P Karunaratne

The Tale of the Nubile Teenage Enchantress Vidanage P Karunaratne

Being a resident in Canada during the past two years, Professor Vivek receives an e-mail from his 22 year old beautiful female student Samantha in Sri Lanka with whom he had a clandestine love affair for about 6 months before he migrated to Canada, desperately requesting him to return to Sri Lanka as she and her brother Mervin are terminally ill with a fatal disease and presently hospitalized. She says that she has no other benefactor to turn for help since she and her brother are banished from their family which fact Vivek already knows. As Vivek does not have the heart to refuse Samantha's appeal from her death-bed, he immediately returns to Sri Lanka and meets the doctors in the hospital where both Samantha and Mervin are warded and discovers from the doctors that their terminal illness is AIDS. He is at a lost to understand how this brother and sister contracted AIDS almost simultaneously and questions the doctors at the hospital of a possible cause for their disease. Nevertheless, they too seem to be unaware of how this brother and sister contracted AIDS and inform him that both of them remain tight-lipped about the issue. Meanwhile, Mervin succumbs to AIDS and dies in the hospital and soon afterwards his body is cremated. Thereafter, with the doctors' advice, Vivek takes Samantha to her home in Colombo-05 and commences caring for her until her last days. Close upon her passing away, Samantha narrates a long pathetic story to her lover Professor Vivek and begs for his pardon for the sins she and her brother had unwittingly committed. However, he does not abandon her in disgust but bestows unimaginable boundless love on her until her last day where she passes away while being in his loving embrace on their bed. Read on this aesthetically and poignantly written romantic tragedy and experience the undying love between two personalities quite different to one another in many aspects.