Lakmahal 12 – Different Perspectives: Closures

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Bishop of Kurunagala, Colombo, Lakmahal, Lakshman Wickremesinghe

In the early sixties, when I first came to consciousness as it were in Sri Lanka, I knew little and understood nothing of the tragedies my grandmother had faced earlier. We were aware only of my uncle Tissa’s dying and his death, nine months after we came back from Canada. The family had got chicken pox in London on the way back, my fault for I had contracted it just before we left Canada, so that we could not enjoy the tour of Europe that my parents had planned. Worse, we gave it to my grandmother and my uncle in hospital, and to Aelian Nugara, the Lake House agent in London who had been of invaluable assistance to the family, and generally it seems caused an epidemic.

A few months after we had got back my grandmother returned with Tissa, knowing that nothing could be done for him. He came back to the room at the front of the house which had been his as a boy. It was on the south side, above the drawing room, but also had windows eastward, looking over the front lawn and the pink cassia tree that he had planted there a few years earlier. He liked to look at the tree, initially, but then his eyes began to fail, and he was blind by the time he died, on January 30^th 1961.

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Bridging Connections – Poems of less sensuous male sexuality

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Bridging Connections, Buddhadasa Galappathy, Dayawathie, Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, Lust is without caste, Somasundramoillai Pathmanathan, T Ramalingam, To my friend Aldred

While I have enjoyed preparing this column from a purely literary perspective, it was also intended, as its title indicates, to indicate similarities between the different peoples of this country and therefore encourage a sense of shared perspectives.

I was not sure if I was having any impact in this regard, so I was delighted recently to receive a note from one of the Tamil writers whose work I am using for the book that will be published later this year by the National Book Trust of India. This is Somasundramoillai Pathmanathan, whose translations appear under the name SOPA. He wrote ‘After all, isn’t the end of all Knowledge, Spiritualism and Culture, Man acquires the recognition of things in common among different peoples of the world? Perhaps, decades later, when Sri Lankans sit back to ponder over what went wrong in our relationships, won’t they blame our generation for pushing the Country into an abyss? It is from this point of view that I consider what you are doing laudable.’

I was deeply touched, and I hope that others too have looked also at what these poems when juxtaposed tell us about our common concerns, and shared attitudes in dealing with these concerns.

Wijesinha leaves his signature in literary firmament – 6 May 2012

By L.N.D. Anuruddha KUMARA

Rajiva Wijesinha is recognized as one of the best post- colonial Sri Lankan writers in English, distinguished for his political analysis as well as creative and critical work.

He has been an academic by profession for much of his working career; he was a Senior Professor of Languages at the University of Sabaragamuwa of Sri Lanka when I started university there to read my undergraduate in English literature in 1997 and it is there that I met him for the first time. Since then he has stood out as one of the major influential writers today with an elegant style of writing, producing a unique selection of literary genres within a short period of time.

Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha in Syria

Given his success, I felt it worthwhile to research how his education has influenced him to achieve such literary milestones during his life. First, I will study his educational ladder and see how he ended up at University College Oxford, one of the most prestigious universities in England.

I will then discuss his work as well as his experiences as a writer and finally we will see how his content of education has contributed to distinguishing him as a talented writer both locally and internationally.

Lakmahal 11 – Different Perspectives: Staying Together

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Lakmahal

The Wickremesinghe children – Tissa, Lakshman, Mukta and Esmond

Expansive though the downstairs of Lakmahal was, and made me in describing it, the heart of the house lay upstairs, in a layout that had been designed especially for the family that moved into it in January 1937. My grandmother must have been looking forward to this enormously. For the last few years she had had to look after a dynamic collection of children who, charming though they all were, must have been intensely demanding.

Something of what she must have gone through was suggested to me only towards the end of her life, when she was in her nineties and I realized that my mother was worried not just about her physical condition. Only my mother was left to look after her by then, for all her brothers were dead, Tissa the second in 1961, the youngest Lakshman in 1983 at the age of 56, and the eldest Esmond two years later. After Lakshman died my mother once suddenly said that he was the only one who had understood – once, sometimes twice, a year, he would take my grandmother to Kurunagala, and grant my mother relief for a week at least of what I sensed she saw as a tremendous responsibility.

Apart from the natural tensions between two strong personalities, there was I later realized something more. My mother mentioned once, in passing, and could not quite remember the dates, though it seems to have been sometimes in the thirties, that – overwhelmed perhaps by her own responsibilities for four lively children, needing also to spend time with her husband in his various increasingly demanding stations of work outside Colombo- my grandmother had suffered a nervous breakdown. My aunt Ena provided further evidence of this, in that her mother, my grandmother’s cousin, had once mentioned the enormous amount Esme had to do, rushing about by rickshaw in Colombo to supply her brood and the vast quantities of friends all four attracted.