Recently 1 met my old classmate Asoka at dinner at the home of a mutual friend.

Since it has been well over twenty years since last we met, Asoka and 1 had a lot to catch up on. So we were in deep conversation, reminiscing about old friends and long remembered incidents from years gone by, when one of the other guests came up to us to poke her sticky beak into our discussion.

"Ah" she said, "I see you have caught up with each other after a long time. SO what are you two talking so much about, like long lost bosom pals?"

Without batting an eyelid, Asoka turned to her and replied "About long lost bosoms".

As a master of the quick one line put-downer, Asoka has no equal. Age and the passage of time have certainly not dulled that scintillating wit of his schooldays.

As a schoolboy 1 remember him as an avid reader. To his parents- and teachers dismay, however, he utilised his sharp brain and his facility with the English language to read, mark and inwardly’ digest not the prescribed textbooks, but all that was good in English literature. Early in his upper school career he had decided that he would not study what he was not interested in. Consequently he became a regular visitor to the British Council and the American Centre, devouring library books when he was supposed to be cramming Botany and Physics and Chemistry. Needless to say, when his 0 Level results came, he had got distinctions in English, Sinhalese and English literature - and either failed or barely passed in everything else.

He used to read with great enjoyment the short stories of 0. Henry and Saki, the novels of A. J. Cronin and Paul Conrad - and (when the rest of us in class used to find even the comics or Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare’s stories heavy going) he would occasionally read an original Shakespeare play for pleasure. And although he came from a respected Catholic family he prudently avoided going to church — the only Catholic priests he kept in close contact with were characters like Giovanni Guareschi’s Don Camillo and G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown.

Of course it must be admitted that Asoka was not what one would call a bookish nerd, because he was a rugby player of no mean repute and played for our school first fifteen for a couple of years. The difference was that, at a time when most of us rugby players considered the Subhasithaya a series of verses to be memorised without understanding and recited only to get marks at examinations, and looked on Shakespeare as a boring writer who had no idea of contemporary English, his plays a necessary evil to be mugged up to pass 0 Level English, Asoka could quote with ease from both Shakespeare and the Subhasathiya. He could lift 150 pound barbells in our school gym and discuss weight training schedules with the class thugs one day, and the next day he would be carrying on an interesting conversation about Paul Scott’s or Rumer Godden’s novels with the bookworms in our class.

In school 1 used to constantly be impressed by Asoka’s memory, how he could store up in his brain lines that he had read and come up with them at the appropriate moment.

1 asked Asoka if still read as voraciously as he used to and whether he could still quote from memory as he did in days of yore, when words of learned length and thundering sound would amaze our gazing classmates gathered round.

"Definitely" he replied. "Let me quote some lines from Tennyson with which old fellows like us can empathise:

‘Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. ’