Shamini and Sathiyaruben Ramasamy saved love letters - some torn up by her angry mother - and Valentines kept them even as they fled to Thailand and settled in New York.
Journey of love: Refugees who fled Sri Lanka amid civil war reflect on their new life together in Queens
Sri Lankan couple Shamini and Sathiyaruban Ramasamy are celebrating their fifth year of being together, this time in New York. But their story spans from their home country to Thailand, and finally, to Richmond Hills.
Journey of love: Refugees who fled Sri Lanka amid civil war reflect on their new life together in Queens
Sri Lankan couple Shamini and Sathiyaruban Ramasamy are celebrating their fifth year of being together, this time in New York. But their story spans from their home country to Thailand, and finally, to Richmond Hills.
Sri Lankan couple Shamini and Sathiyaruban Ramasamy have a cozy life in Richmond Hills, Queens — sharing home-cooked meals of crab curry and watching Tamil-language comedies.
But as they celebrate five years of being together in New York each Valentines Day, exchanging cards and gifts, Shamini likes to look back on their extraordinary journey.
“Our love is a different love,” said Shamini, 29, who, following tradition, now uses her husband’s first name as her last name. “We feel like it’s just you and me, nobody else.”
She and Ramasamy secretly dated and eloped because they were from different castes, escaped from civil war in Sri Lanka after his brother was killed, sought refuge in Thailand, and were resettled by the International Rescue Committee in the U.S. as refugees.
“I knew that if I married her, she would support me, and be a good wife to me ... She is courageous,” said Ramasamy, 31, in Tamil as his wife translated.
They arrived at JFK Airport in January 2009 wearing t-shirts and are still adjusting to the weather. She's now a medication assistant studying electrical engineering at Stony Brook University; he’s a house painter.
“He cooks, he does all this stuff, he wants me to study,” she said. “He’s so protective. Even if my mother had found somebody, I don’t think that person would be this much protective, helpful and lovable.”
They were teenagers when they met. Shamini first noticed her future husband — in a black shirt that showed off his muscles — when she returned from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city, to her parents’ town to attend high school.
“When I would go to classes, or go to school I saw a guy standing in front of my house and staring at me. But I never thought that he would love me,” she said.
“I thought, ‘I’m not pretty,’ I had that kind of feeling. And he’s kind of handsome.”
Ramasamy decided to make his move — telling Shamini’s family maid and confidant to pass along the message that he was in love with Shamini.
He was from a higher caste, so not an acceptable choice in her parents’ eyes because it could cause the family to be shunned — and had not finished studies beyond eighth grade. Her parents had plans for her to marry someone who would be chosen by a matchmaker.
She was intrigued anyway, and they planned a secret meeting at a temple outside of town. She snuck out of their neighborhood and put a red bindi on her forehead to pose as his wife, riding behind him on his bike past the paddy fields and up to the temple.
“When we went to the temple, I had already decided that I had to marry her,” said Ramasamy, making tears spring into his wife’s eyes. He is much more reserved in conversation than his bubbly wife.
“That’s the first time I’ve heard him say that,” she said.
During that first meeting, they just made awkward small talk — about how many siblings they had and other mundane things — but after that, they were a couple, sending letters to each other and meeting in the temple two or three times a month. She would sneak into the bathroom with her phone in order to call him.
“We were afraid of our parents. Anything could go wrong,” she said. “Me, I wanted to see him every day.”
In 2006, police arrested Ramasamy, suspecting that because his brother was a member of the Tamil Tiger rebel group, he was also involved, Shamini said. She was working as a teacher at the time and managed to find him legal help and visited him in a Colombo jail nearly every weekend, telling her parents a fake cover story that she was attending a teaching conference.
After several months, he was released and her parents set her up with a marriage broker. Before she got a visit from her first suitor, she ran away to marry Ramasamy — getting her younger sister to throw a bag full of clothes over a side gate so that she could walk out the front door as if she were headed to work.
After they eloped and moved in with Ramasamy’s family, who had come to appreciate his new wife, Shamini’s school fired her. Within weeks, a friend of Ramasamy was killed because of suspected ties to the Tamil Tigers, she said. Fearing for his life, Ramasamy fled into a rebel-controlled part of Sri Lanka. His rebel brother was killed weeks later.
Shamini was unable to join Ramasamy or contact him for months.
“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I didn’t know if he was alive or not.”
A road blockade kept her from reaching him by land, so she traveled by ship to another part of the island. From there, they fled to Thailand and registered with the United Nations’ refugee agency. They waited to hear whether they would be resettled in Australia, Switzerland, Finland, Norway or the United States — and were relieved when the International Rescue Committee placed them here.
“I still remember when we came out. We looked at each other, and said, ‘Ok. We are okay! There’s nothing that’s going to harm us anymore,’” Shamini said. “We’re kind of starting our life now. For so long, our life was a question mark.”
By Erica Pearson / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
epearson@nydailynews.com
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