Travels with Ena: Home Stays – Part 3

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Accelerated Mahaweli Scheme, Aluwihare, Armoured Corps, Days of Despair, Ena de Silva, Girandurukotte, Indo-Lankan Accord, JVP, Matale, Military Academy, Pallebadda, Wasgamuwa Park, Yala

Where Piyadasa and Suja stayed on for decades, Ena’ drivers changed over the years, as did her mode of transport. When I first went up to Alu, she had a Toyota double cab, driven by Sena, a portly old man with a shock of white hair that made him look immensely distinguished. In those days Ena drove around often, going into town to buy her groceries and whatever else took her fancy, and setting off every afternoon on an excursion into the hills and valleys surrounding Matale.

It was nothing in those days for us to set off after lunch to Wireless Kanda, as we called the highest point in the hills to the East, before the road dropped down to Pallebadda and then to the area around Girandurukotte where lands had been opened up for settlers under the Accelerated Mahaweli Scheme. That was the area too in which later the Wasgamuwa Park was set up, so the drive became familiar for quite another reason in the nineties. In the eighties however it was purely to loaf, getting up to the highest point before the mists rose, and then driving back as the sun set.

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Travels with Ena: Home Stays – Part 2

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Aluwihare, Desiccated Watalappam, Ena de Silva, Humbug, K2, Walawe Reservoir, Watalappam

Suja unlike Piyadasa had a family from the start, though her husband had vanished long before she settled into the household. Ena claimed that, when she first settled down in Alu after returning from the Virgin Islands, Suja was simply a household help who did not know even to boil water. There had been another cook in residence then, but she had obviously been unable to cope with Ena’s style of cooking and entertaining, and before long Suja had taken over. Our first trip down to the Sinharaja, when she improvised lunch on the banks of the Walawe Reservoir, was I believe her first great performance, and from then she never looked back.

She fell in energetically with Ena’s style of mixing things up at will, and though she never quite added passion fruit juice to coffee, as Ena claimed she might well have done in her enthusiasm to try new things, she certainly performed marvels when asked to turn patties into curry or cook ham with marmalade. Ena’s, or rather Suja’s, chutneys and jams were pure joy, made of tart berries and strange spices, and she deep fried to perfection, with an array of exotic leaves and thinly sliced vegetables appearing at intervals in the course of a meal.

Travels with Ena: Home Stays – Part 1

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Aluwihare, Bogowantalawa, D. S. Senanayake, Derrick Nugawela, Ena de Silva, J R Jayewardene, Jaffna, Kurunegala, Old Place, Reeves Gardens, W J Fernando

For there were also days of immense joy and tranquility at Alu. I have never found Colombo congenial, and from childhood on I would spend weeks during vacations with friends and relations who lived outside the capital. My favourite refuge was the Old Place in Kurunegala, but I also spent many happy holidays with W J Fernando when he was Government Agent in Kandy. There had also been one or two stays with Hope Todd, also in Kandy, before he moved to Colombo, and afterwards, when he went back there on work and stayed in the little house in Reeves Gardens which he continued to maintain. Memorable too were a couple of long stays with Derrick Nugawela on his estate in Bogowantalawa.

By the time I came back from Oxford however all that had changed, with Derrick in Australia and Hope and WJ firmly settled in Colombo. My aunt Lakshmi still continued at Old Place for a few years more, and I stayed there frequently, but the place was clearly on its last legs. That in itself did not really matter much, for I was quite content to do nothing all day except write, just as I had done nothing all day as a schoolboy except read. But what did matter was that Lakshmi and I did not have very much to say to each other. In the old days we had discussed books, and she had provided me with lots of exciting modern stuff to read, but by the eighties she was not reading very much, and we had less to say to each other about books and writers.

Travels with Ena: Yala and other travels – Part 9

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Anjalendran, Cinnamon Estate, Delhi Cultural Mart, Ena de Silva, Geoffrey Bawa, George Fernandes, Herbert Malinga Guneratne, Hong Kong, India, Jai Jatley, Mandu, Miles Young, Sabaragamuwa, Ujjain

On two occasions I travelled with Ena in other countries. The first time was in India, when she was running a workshop for Jai Jatley’s Arts Organization. Jai Jatley was a power in the arts in Delhi, even during periods of Congress Party rule though she was closely associated with George Fernandes, one of Indira Gandhi’s strongest opponents and Minister of Defence in the last BJP government.

Jai had asked Ena and her cooperative to be the visiting artists at the Delhi Cultural Mart one Christmas, and the two dynamic old ladies had got on incredibly well. Notwithstanding that Ena was well over 80 by then, Jai invited her to bring some of her girls and boys over to do a batik workshop for Muslim textile workers in Ujjain, and accordingly Ena and half a dozen of her brood went there in the March of 2006.

Travels with Ena: Yala and other travels – Part 8

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Academic Affairs Board, Acts of Faith, Ayagama, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Deniyaya, Ena de Silva, Getamanna, Hayes-Lauderdale Road, Kalawana, Karu Jayasuriya, Karunasena Kodituwakku, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Minister of Education, Ministry of Education, National Institute of Education, Panadura-Ratnapura Road, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sabaragamuwa University, Sooriyakanda, Teldeniya, Tissamaharama, UNP

In 2005 I had a sabbatical, but spent most of it in Sri Lanka, partly because, for the last six months of that year I continued to be a Consultant in English at the Ministry of Education. My main task was to revitalize the English medium programme we had started in 2001, which had flagged in the period in which Ranil Wickremesinghe was Prime Minister and seemed determined to kill it. Fortunately his Minister of Education, Karunasena Kodituwakku, was supportive, which helped it to survive until Tara de Mel came back as Secretary in 2004 and got me back in service.

She also got a lot more out of me, since I chaired the Academic Affairs Board of the National Institute of Education, and we started a radical programme of syllabus revision. Unfortunately we began too late, and it was only in 2005 that she overcame the objections of the educational establishment, so we had a lot of hectic work that year, very little of which unfortunately survived her departure when a new Minister who disliked her intensely took over. Though he told me he wanted me to stay on, I realized the old guard were back with a vengeance, so at the end of the year I took myself away. This allowed me to have a few months abroad early in 2006, for the launch of the Italian translation of Acts of Faith, which ended in the Ena figure marrying the President.

Travels with Ena: Yala and other travels – Part 7

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Aluwihare, British Council, Chanaka Amaratunga, Chitty Ratwatte, Dayanthi Tennekoon, Dhara Wijesinha, Ena de Silva, Ladies College, Maduru Oya, Nirmali Hettiarachchi, Sabaragamuwa University, Shirley Perera, Talaimannar, Wasgamuwa Park, Wild Life Department

Another memorable loaf, as Ena called these meanders, was in 1992, with Nirmali Hettiarachchi, who did a lot of work with me at the British Council, and who had also become a fast friend of Ena’s over the years. This trip also had a wild life component, for it included the Wasgamuwa Park which had not yet properly opened, and also Maduru Oya, which was off limits to the public.

Our key to enter was Shirley Perera, who had joined Ena the previous year when she set up her Carpentry Training Workshop. He had initially come for a few days, to help also with the Exhibition that was held at the British Council to reintroduce her work to Colombo, and then he stayed on for over a decade. He still goes back to help when she has any major assignment to which he can contribute, and continues a regular on her trips to the jungle.

Travels with Ena: Yala and other travels – Part 6

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Arankale, Bogowantalawa, Circuit Bungalow, Ena de Silva, Habarana-Trincomalee, Herbert Tennekoo, Iris Rambukwelle, Jaffna, Kalpitiya Fort, Kalutara, Kantale Resthouse, Kegalle, Kurunagala, Mullaitivu, Panduwasnuwara, Priyani Tennekoon, Puttalam, Rambukkana, Ritigala, Semita Wijewardene, Vakarai Resthouse

In addition to expeditions to the Wild Life Parks, we also during the eighties had various communal holidays in various parts of the country. On several occasions we stayed at Priyani Tennekoon’s family home at Rambukkana, which included wandering over her paddy fields – she had no idea how much the family actually owned – and expeditions to Arankale and I think Panduwasnuwara. One expedition was however halted when Romesh had an altercation with a CTB bus, entirely its driver’s fault, though when we finally heard from the police, it was to be told that they had decided not to prosecute Romesh out of kindness. We had to spend a long day at police stations, to no purpose it seemed, though I suppose the entry was required to make sure the repair to our vehicle was on insurance.

In that delightful fashion which I suppose was what Sri Lankan high society was all about a century ago, Ena and Priyani were connected, in that her father’s brother George had married Ena’s cousin Iris Rambukwelle. Another brother was Herbert Tennekoon, former Governor of the Central Bank, who had married my mother’s cousin (in the inclusive Sri Lankan sense, as she was the daughter of my mother’s father’s cousin) Norma. Priyani’s mother was Semita Wijewardene, cousin of my uncle Esmond’s wife Nalini.