Lakmahal 16 – Different Perspectives: Moving On

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1983, Bhutan, Cyril Mathew, Esmond Wickremesinghe, JR Jayewardene, Lakmahal, Lakshman Wickremesinghe

After the riots of July 1983, both my uncles were anxious to talk to me, at least according to my mother. I was not in Colombo when the troubles started, for I had a friend visiting from England and, after a hectic tour, to the ancient cities and Sinharaja and Lahugala and the east coast, we were relaxing at one of the cheaper Bentota hotels. When we heard the news, only at dinner time a full day after the troubles had started, I rang home, to be told that it was best to stay where we were, for the house was full of refugees. In any case there was a curfew in the WesternProvince, though we noticed on the next day that this did not prevent truckloads of obvious thugs crossing the bridge and heading towards Colombo to add to the mayhem.

We finally got home on Thursday the 28^th, and it was then that my mother said that Esmond had been to Lakmahal often over the last few days, to check obviously on his mother and the rest, but also it seemed keen to talk things over with me. However, Nicholas was clearly panicking, and looking after him while the house was packed seemed complicated, so the next morning we took a bus to Negombo, to wait there until he could get a flight back to England. On the way we realized that chaos was building up again, but it was only after calling home that evening that we realized the full extent of the horrors of Black Friday, when there was concerted killing.

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Lakmahal 15 – Different Perspectives: Coming Home

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Colombo, Esmond Wickremesinghe, Lakmahal, Lakshman Wickremesinghe

While I was growing up, I had little sense of Esmond, my mother’s eldest brother, being part of Lakmahal. The house emphatically belonged to the Wickremesinghes, with my grandmother presiding over it and her husband’s legacy with a commitment I took long to understand; whenever Esmond was present, he sat at the head of the table where his father had sat before him; but whereas Tissa, who died at Lakmahal in 1961, and Lakshman, who used it as his Colombo base, were emphatically part of the household, Esmond always seemed a visitor.

He had his own very comfortable home in 5^th Lane nearby, given to Nalini by her father when they married, and they were kind enough to keep my sister and me during the last days of Tissa’s illness when it was thought his agony would be too much for young children. 5^th Lane, as we called that household, always came to lunch on Sundays, though on an increasingly staggered basis as the years passed and its members developed different interests. Esmond himself was generally the first, and sometimes he had eaten and gone by the time the rest of his family, which was used to rising late, arrived. He himself often, if not always, also marked his presence in church on Sunday mornings, coming late and leaving early, after having checked that his mother had registered his arrival.

Lakmahal 15 – Different Perspectives: Family Traditions

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Colombo, D. S. Senanayake, Dudley Senanayake, J R Jayewardene, Lakmahal, Sir Baron Jayatilleke

Dudley Senanayake with his father Prime Minister D. S. Senanayake and Finance Minister J. R. Jayewardena. He was then Minister of Agriculture & Lands.

Esmond’s almost lifelong commitment to the UNP can be seen as part of a family tradition, for his father Cyril had been D S Senanayake’s right hand man when the latter was Minister of Agriculture, first as Government Agent at Anuradhapura to supervise the seminal Minneriya scheme, and later as Land Commissioner when he moved to Colombo and into Lakmahal. The two families were close, and they had also been friendly with the Wijewardenes, the owners of Lake House. For years the page at which the old Visitors’ Book at Yala had stood open was the one that recorded a visit of D S and his wife, Cyril and Esme, and D R Wijewardene and his wife.

It was probably therefore to the entire satisfaction of both sets of parents that in 1944 Esmond, having sown his wild oats, married Nalini, the eldest daughter of D R Wijewardene. He had qualified as a lawyer by then, having entered university at the tender age of 17, the year the family moved into Lakmahal. Having obtained a first class in history, he then turned to the law, in which he would doubtless have excelled had D R not summoned him in to look after Lake House.

Lakmahal 14 – Different Perspectives: New Politics

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Dudley Senanayake, Esmond Wickremesinghe, J R Jayewardene, John Kotelawala

Esmond Wickremasinghe

By the time I knew him, my mother’s eldest brother Esmond was emphatically a supporter of the UNP. Soon after I was born he had been sent to New York by Sir John Kotelawala, to negotiate the entry of Ceylon into the United Nations, and family legend had it that it was the charm displayed by him and his wife that finally ensured our admission. Until then the Soviet Union had opposed this, on the grounds that we were still a colony, with the British still having troops here. But, long before Mr Bandaranaike came into power and asked them to leave, Esmond had succeeded in averting a Soviet veto, in terms of a compromise that saw the admission also of other countries that had been disputed.

Esmond was by then seen as Sir John’s right hand man, or rather one of them, for that wily old bird made use of several capable people. But none of them was able to prevent his shattering defeat in 1956, when he led his party to an election called prematurely. Blaming him however would be wrong, for a clear reading of what happened that year suggests that he was forced into calling an election he did not want, and contesting it on a platform he abhorred. Or, rather, blaming him alone – he cannot escape all responsibility for allowing such a situation to arise, and letting himself be carried along by it, a practice that has been followed since by many other Sri Lankan leaders.

Lakmahal 13 – Different Perspectives: Blue and Green

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Cyril Wickremesinghe, Esmond Wickremesinghe, Lakmahal, Lakshman Wickremesinghe, Mukta Wijesinha

Cyril Wickremesinghe had obviously planned Lakmahal for his family, and it was on the basis of his four very lively children that he had built four large bedrooms upstairs, apart from the massive one he occupied with his wife which she used for nearly half a century after his death. The four bedrooms for the children shared two bathrooms, my mother’s and Tissa’s the green one, placed between their rooms, and accessible also from the central hallway, so that it could be used by visitors too.

The other bathroom however, the blue one, was awkward for sharing, for it led off Lakshman’s bedroom which was directly opposite the passage to the green bathroom. That bedroom also connected with Esmond’s bedroom, which was opposite Tissa’s. Cyril may have well thought that Lakshman, not yet ten when the family moved into Lakmahal, required to have his eldest brother, then sixteen, close at hand, but the design he finally chose meant that access for the bigger one to the bathroom lay only through the smaller one. This contributed to making Lakshman’s room very much the least attractive in the whole house. It was also dark and very dull, looking out only on a tiny semi-circular balcony, over the bay windows of the dining room below.

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.

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.

Lakmahal 10 – Opening Doors: The World Outside

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Bandaranaike, Colombo, Dudley Senanayake, Hope Todd, Kalyani Rajasooriya, Lake House, Lakmahal, Philip Gunewardena, Ralph Deraniyagala, Stanley Tillekeratne, Wijayananda Dahanayake

Old Parliament - Colombo

When Hope was in Colombo, his hours at the Tourist Board were fairly regular. This was in the mid-sixties, after my father had moved to Parliament and become Clerk to the House, the post later designated as Secretary General of Parliament. It was the period when Parliament was at its best, for you had evenly balanced teams with brilliant debaters on either side.

My father had moved there in 1963, as assistant to Ralph Deraniyagala, who had been Clerk practically since independence. Many of his friends wondered why my father took up the job, and though he took over as Clerk in 1964 even he sometimes wistfully regretted the fact that he had given up a chance to get on the bench, as a Supreme Court judge (though such regrets ceased in the eighties when it became clear that the bench was no longer what it had been, as JR tried to remould the Supreme Court in his own image).

Lakmahal 9 – Opening Doors: Books and Bachelors

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Émile Zola, British Council, C Mylvaganam, Charles Dickens, Ediriweera Sarachchandra, Enid Blyton, Esmond Wickremesinghe, Gamini Fonseka, George Eliot, Hope Todd, Jaffna, Lakmahal, Lalitha Sarachchandra, Leo Tolstoy, Matale, Narnia, Philip Gunewardene, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Richard de Zoysa, Shirley Corea, Thomas Hardy, Vanity Fair, W J Fernando, Wijayananda Dahanayake, William Shakespeare

Through his work with the Tourist Board, in those heady days of the mid-sixties, when I was moving into my teens and Sri Lanka seemed full of promise, Hope Todd provided lots of opportunity for travel. Those regular trips down south, that one long drive up to Jaffna, perhaps laid the foundations for the peripatetic existence I have since led, whether for the British Council, or to various Affiliated University Colleges and General English Language Training Centres all over the country.

But Hope was also a companion, if a sleeping one, for the vast reading programme on which I embarked in those years. I had always read voraciously, but one day, when I was nearly twelve, my father commented on the fact that I did not seem to read anything very memorable. That was not entirely true, for I still remember vividly the Enid Blytons and the Narnia books of childhood. But he had a point, in that I knew nothing of the great classics, except through comics. Understandably enough, few young people of those days were interested in the classics even in comic form. One source of what might be termed worthy comics was my cousin Ranil, Esmond’s second son, in a community of interests that I don’t suppose many young people shared. Ironically, I remember thinking then that he was much more civilized than most of the older boys I came across, and I would devour the Iliad and the Black Tulip and lives of American Presidents in a series bound in thick blue board covers which he occasionally allowed me to borrow.