by Gamini Seneviratne
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour

With the great black piano appassionato...

A man of many gifts, perhaps Anton Tissera’s principal vocation was the exploration of what the human body could do for itself and of the functions of the human mind in that endeavour. A more or less untrained tenor, his favourites were Tauber, Gigli, Lanza and the Irish ballads as rendered by John McCormack. Despite suffering from left ventricular failure three years ago he was anxious to get back to his mouth organ; a Himalayan flute in B was due from Kathmandu when he passed away.

As a boxer brought up in the tradition of the ‘quickies’ Danton Obeysekera, Albert Perera, K. D. Francis, Derek Raymond, Mahasen Welivitigoda and Leslie Handunge in the lightweight divisions, his particular distinction lay in his scientific approach to the sport. There was no dancing around for him; he occupied the centre of the ring, was swift on his feet and, from that twin stance, dealt as appropriate with whatever his opponent chose to try to do. Anton’s eyesight was weakening by then but I believe he was well on par with the best among his peers, Lakdasa Moonemalle.

He was a natural ‘teacher’ and more than passed on his skills to the most promising schoolboy ‘pugilists’ in the 1960s: he ensured that they grasped what the sport was about. He employed the ‘dictum’ needed, no dictates: he turned the pages for each ‘pupil’ one by one at the speed each could take.

So with archery and fly-fishing. He approached them in the spirit of zen, as of matters that mattered in the degree that they did not matter [in terms of the scores made]. On his last visit here a few months ago he sought out the family of V. J. H. (Harry) Gunasekera in an effort to see that the records of the Archery Club were preserved. He returned to a study of ‘Hunting the Hard Way’, mostly drawn from Amerindian practice, by Howard Hill. He also took time, much to my wife’s disgust, to teach our son Arjuna the fine art of fly-fishing and rejoiced when his pupil hooked a mahseer, [now virtually extinct here and imported from streams in India and Nepal by our zoo for some decades] in the waters by Kitulgala.

As would be evident from the foregoing, Anton was not inclined towards team sports — though one of his teachers at St. Thomas’s, Prof. Vinnie Vitharana, placed him recently by his commitment to the study of hela — and his place in the Second XI cricket team of that school. In the sports that he took to Anton was courteous to his peers, was ready to guide and be guided by them. The sports he favoured, boxing, chess, archery and fly-fishing, called for total concentration by the participant, no third parties providing aid or messing things up. His pursuit of mastery in such activities was ‘disinterested’ — not directed towards the acquisition of trophies or other mark of excellence.

Anton had a remarkable memory for the complete ‘handle’ of our contemporaries, ge names and all as they appeared in the degree certificates; he knew those of all the more colourful characters in Peradeniya, seven batches in all. Anton is not around to ask, and David, his much younger brother, who has in-depth knowledge of certain things and is cheerfully ignorant of much else, says that they are Uva people and have no ge name. Ge names, he asserts, are for hoi polloi from Sabaragamuva and the Low Country. Their father, Samuel Frederick Tissera , whose mother, Miss Ritchie, was the first woman to hold the office of ‘Post-Master’ in this country, and their mother, Cecilia Peter, who remains, at ninety, more lucid than the remaining half of her progeny, were both from Badulla. Her father, an entrepreneur from Kerala, [miscalled ‘Malabar Tamil’ presumably because the language of the ‘Jaffnese’, as the Brits called them, remains a derivative of Malayalam], had the wit to acquire the Taldena Walauva a hoo distance from Badulla town. Anthony Frederick Subindra Tissera carried in his handle the very different strains in his upbringing. And they were integrated in him. He straddled several worlds, was not lost in any of them, and even the Victorian elements continued to show.

Anton spoke Sinhala and the Tamil we have here, with as much fluency as he spoke English, Singlish and Austraylian. He had a natural gift for ‘language’ and he paid close attention to the mechanics that governed English and Sinhala in their various usages, as of the nuances they could generate. Though he read English for his degree, his primary interest was hela which Pinto-Jayawardena, Vinnie Vitharana and Arisen Ahubudu had taught that cohort of students at St. Thomas’s, Mt. Lavinia. He had been at Munidasa Kumaranatunga’s books for some time; his last request to us was for copies of the works of Pinto Jayawardena.

His poems reveal a rare sensibility to structure as of fidelity as to the emotion that begat them. Some of them are ‘slight’, a few would take their place among the best in the English language, as you would see when they come to be published.

Down in Oz, he muscled his way into the system so effectively that in the last few years he had become for his fellow workers their chosen representative: he was not to be bought off, he spoke for them with unabashed candour. He may have pushed the letter of the law to its outermost limits, but that is precisely what bosses everywhere try to smuggle into the small print.

It is to be supposed that, in hindsight even for some who had been close to him, he had made preparations for his exit. Despite the hundred and one ailments he suffered from, some of them life-threatening each in its own right, he hauled himself here for his mother’s 90th birthday. He also committed his fast-fading time and resources to visit old friends in the UK. And he cleared the deck of his trophies, giving them back to St. Thomas’s and others who had been instrumental in his winning them. Such was his perception of the transience of human life.

He knew his days were drawing to a close. He saw his mother, gathered old friends together, chewed betel, walked on the sea shore, tried the waters at Panadura, Hanwella, Bentota, Parakaduwa and Kitulgala with rod and reel, rode a motor bike risking our traffic to see old friends, very old now and crippled. He checked on the progress of his poems towards the press. When he did not have the company of a friend he could travel alone.

He had given up expectations of more leisurely conversations when the pipe-lines burst. In his last phone call to us he bragged about his wife, Erin’s management of their garden — though he had to call on her to name the flowers for me. Sober or drunk, as he sometimes used to be in earlier years, he was a constant presence in our heads for forty years and will continue to reside there as, no doubt, it would be so for others who knew him.