How I Made Metta

Metta began, long before I knew it had a name, in my grandmother's kitchen.

Her home was the ancestral home, in Aluvihare, Matale, a place that holds my childhood and also holds something much larger. Aluvihare is where the Pali Canon was first written onto ola palm leaves, the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha pressed into leaf by hand. I did not understand this history as a child. I understood only that this was my grandmother's house, and that her house had a particular quiet to it.

She spent her days in devotion. Family, ritual, the running of her home, the cooking of every meal at her wood hearth. Some mornings she would drift out into the garden, so quietly that you barely noticed her leave, to walk in meditation or to pick pichcha, a fragrant jasmine that still flowers there. In the evenings I would sit with her alone, in a room lit by a single oil wick lamp set into a bo leaf shaped terracotta pot. The light caught a small Buddha statue and the coasters she had made by hand, and it caught her hands too. I remember studying them while she chanted, palms resting together, her jasmine flowers mingling with her perfume until the whole room seemed to hold its breath with her. I did not have a word for what I felt then. Later I learned it: metta, kindness.

There is another memory from that time, one that moved me before I could explain why. My grandmother giving alms to the forest monks who lived on the mountain above the walauwa. Something about the simplicity of that exchange has stayed lodged in me for forty years.

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This year I went back, after almost a decade away. The walauwa is run now as an Airbnb, by my cousin, who was my closest friend as a child. I slept in what had been my grandmother's shrine room. I walked the path she walked every day, past the room where she slept and gave birth to eleven children, into the kitchen where she was always to be found.

It was in that kitchen, at that hearth, that I began Metta in 2025. The hearth is lined with cow dung, built the way most hearths of her generation were. It is not a simple thing to light or keep burning. It asks for attention, patience, and return, every single day, the same devotion it would have taken to feed eleven children, a husband, and the handful of household help. Sitting there, I began pressing botanicals onto canvas for the first time in that kitchen, flowers plucked from the same garden she once walked through daily to gather offerings for the Buddha.

I carried the work back to my studio and completed it in 2026.

What emerged held everything I associate with her: the peace, the giving, the quiet joy, even the particular rhythm of her walking meditation on the sand of the driveway. Across the canvas I embroidered the word Metta, in a script that traces the same steps she once took, a script shaped, too, by the memory of that other writing done on that same ground centuries earlier, the words of the Buddha inscribed onto ola leaf.

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I gave the finished piece to a group exhibition at Off the Kerb Gallery in Collingwood, bringing together Sri Lankan diaspora artists living in Melbourne alongside artists from further afield in Australia and Sri Lanka. It was, I was told, the first show of its kind, and it was, by every account, a success. Metta sold to a collector who had supported the gallery for almost a decade. It sold for $700, and I donated the full amount to Ondru, an organisation supporting underprivileged communities in Sri Lanka.

That single donation opened something in me. For the past ten years, my husband and I have quietly supported a small group of academically gifted girls in Sri Lanka, girls identified by his cousin, a teacher who has spent her career finding children who are bright but without means, some missing a parent, all needing help to keep studying. Watching Metta turn into something for a child I would never meet made me realise my work could do this more deliberately, and that the community around my practice could be part of it too.

So in my grandmother's name, I am donating my early originals, trials, my experimental and smaller works from my studio, to a new solo exhibition called Studies. I am in discussion with World Vision to direct every dollar raised toward education. The details of that event could be found here.

This is a small pebble thrown into a large pond. I cannot see where the ripples end. But I know where they begin: a hearth in Aluvihare, a woman with jasmine in her hands, and a word I did not have until she taught it to me without ever saying it aloud.

Love,

Dharshi