Jaffna was probably where the Kachcheri and its adjuncts in district administration functioned most smoothly. The GA enjoyed two advantages: ‘the ordinary people’ looked to the government to solve their problems, and, he was required to serve a public that included a large number of public servants, many of them pensioners. That meant that not only were ‘the public’ accustomed to the discipline and procedures of the public service, they were, at least in the major towns, aware of the services the Kachcheri, (as well as other, stand-alone, departments), were expected to provide.

The large number of pensioners and their willingness to engage in social work bolstered such institutions as the multi-purpose cooperative societies, the fisheries cooperatives and weaving centres, mostly handloom, (which produced good cloth though they lagged behind the old centres in Batticaloa, in the Kattankudi area). They all made a substantial contribution to the welfare of the people. They were well run, there was scrupulous attention to the cash-flow, and the what & why of the actions of the management were both open to scrutiny and were scrutinised.

A negative input by the government came, not much later, in the form of the Markfed, a State ‘cooperative’ federation. District unions, including the Jaffna Cooperative Federation, one of the strongest in the country, were, predictably, weakened by that intrusion – as Philip’s Multi Purpose Cooperative Societies had undermined primary societies that had developed since the 1930s.

The culture of the Jaffna pensioner was informed by an urge to help – even in the matter of providing unadulterated arrack on a no-profit basis to fellow pensioners. Whether Jaffna, or some segments of it, is /was a matrilineal society or not and whether that culture came from Kerala or not, the purse was in the hands of the wife. A friend who pioneered the ‘fair-bar’ afore-mentioned, gave the following mournful account of a misplaced control of the purse. He had asked for 10 rupees, he said, to put in a gallon of petrol and a shot or two of the OS, but his wife had flown into a rage. The provocation for that being that his sister had left a substantial sum with him to cover her funeral expenses, when, as must happen some time, the need arose.

His wife had directed him to the almirah: the smallest note in that bundle had been a hundred rupees. On his way back home from the petrol shed and bar, a concrete post had detached itself from its moorings on the pavement and collapsed on the bonnet of his car; it was mid-afternoon he said, fully three hours before lighting up time for the CEB and he hadn’t seen it coming. The figures showed that the release of 10/- rupees in time would have saved 5,000/- on repairs to his Morris Minor.

‘That, boss,’ he concluded, ‘is being penny-wise and pound foolish.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘she must have known you might take a drop too much, and been too angry to care at the time. She couldn’t have known that a light-post would pre-empt her by punishing you before you got back home.’

My first visit to Jaffna was in the mid-1950s for an inter-school chess match with St. John’s. In ‘board order’ our team was Delvin Knower (who became an Evangelist), myself, Jim Silva (who took to engineering), C Vaseeharan (mathematics and political activism) and Valentine Perera (who moved from Greek & Latin to IT and, latterly, to writing novels). It being the school holidays we were lodged in the Hostel, with their Head Prefect, Samuels, as our host. On the morning after our arrival he told us that the UE/HSC results had come in and he had failed in Physics. Vassa looked at the question paper and sorted out the problems that had baffled Samuels, demonstrating the solutions on the sand with his toe.

As the chess-match progressed – we were ahead – a bevy of saree-clad giggling girls from Chundikuli invaded the battle-ground. Knower, who believed that girls, unlike boys, were the instruments of the Evil One, ignored them, and I was in some trouble deciding how best to finish my game. They may have made an impression on the others but we retained our lead into the next day. Somebody had decided that drastic measures were called for and we were sent to Keerimale for ‘a refreshing bath’ (with sweet toddy to follow; despite the cautions issued by Knower, some mouthfuls of toddy were consumed but it had little effect on the outcome of the match.

Peter Somasunderam was the master in charge and made us all welcome; he lived close to the school down a lane named after his family: the LTTE didn’t like him and made that known after their fashion. He was a formidable man to our eyes and my impression was that he was as much an iconic figure at St. John’s as Elmo de Bruin was at Royal. Many years later, his brother, A.J., whom I had met over the board on several occasions, sold his collection of books on chess at give-away prices; hard times, then, not financially.

I first met ‘the Jaffna Comrades’ on May Day, 1958, on Galle Face Green. The LSSP rally, the biggest that year, as it had been for many years before and would be for many years after, was over when I met them. They said, ‘The Jaffna rally will be in a week’s time. Come.’ I went, with M. Sri Shanmugarajah of Karainagar and Sparling de Costa of Mundel, sometime Trot leaders at University. The rally was in the market area, lit up with Petromax lamps and hurricane lanterns. Among the many speeches made, the most generous ovations were for those by A Visuvanathan, R.R. Dharmaratnam of the Transport Workers’ Union, P.Banudevan of Karainagar, (an alumni of Peradeniya) and Thurairajasingham of the Tobacco Workers’ Union. The LSSP Senator, P Nagalingam of Chunnakam, was respected as an elder but, evidently, was no orator.

The LSSP leaders in Jaffna were intellectuals and/or trade unionists; they were also, for the most part, among those classified as ‘low caste’. After the death of S.Tharmakulasingham, who had polled over 6,000 votes in Pt. Pedro in 1947, there had been no high-profile Vellala among them; their returns at parliamentary elections reflected that ‘ground reality’. Based as we were, on that occasion, at Visvanathan’s home, I had the privilege of participating in extensive discussions with them on that ‘issue’ and on the fundamental problem of marshalling the people against class oppression. In Jaffna at that time ‘class’ had most to do with ‘caste’ as it governed relations in ‘the agriculture sector’.

The ‘caste factor’ is present throughout the country, as was manifested at the election of an ‘Educated Ceylonese’, by presumably educated Ceylonese, in 1912 when a govigama/vellala Tamil was preferred to a karava Sinhalese, and as a scrutiny of the caste composition of our Cabinets would show. Over the past three decades it has been more than present in the public services as well. It is found in its most acute form, if such distinctions are tenable, in Jaffna.

It struck me with some force in campus, when the daughter of a Vellala who was a very senior member of the Civil Service had a mild dalliance with a close friend of mine who was of the ‘wrong’ caste. She was removed from university and ‘married off’, as the phrase went, to a ‘suitable partner’. Many years later he married a woman from Batticaloa, identified by the location of her village as ‘sub-vellala’. He named their son ‘Sankaran’ as epitomising the ‘mixing’, as it seemed to him, the infant represented. He was a very intelligent and well-read man and would have been familiar with a booklet on ‘Race’ by his sometime guru, K.N.Jayatilake. Nevertheless, given how ‘Jaffna’ mismanaged her people, I should not have been surprised by what was his self-perception. Human blood, as the term is commonly understood, is a good mixer, and that is what we all have.

My next encounter with that phenomenon occurred in the early 1970s when the sericulture or silk industry was being revived. As chairman of an inter-ministry committee entrusted with drafting a plan for the revival of that industry, I was scouting for mulberry cuttings around the country. My explorations took me to Atchuvely, where a rat-proof silkworm rearing facility from the 1940s existed (though, by then, put to other uses). An officer who had been associated with that industry accompanied me on the quest for mulberry cuttings. It took us to Kaithady South where, besides the mulberry that survived there, my friend, S Kanesan, Vice President of the GCSU, had his home. We found him at his morning (spiritual) ablutions some distance away, and when he was done and found us there, he pedalled his way back home at a brisk pace. He asked us in for coffee. Kanesan’s house with its thatched roof was not ‘Colombo’; neither was it of the ‘Jaffna’ of the Vellalas. Sensing my companion’s discomfiture I remarked that it was nice out in the garden under the margosa trees and Kanesan hospitably brought the coffee out there, sugared, with fresh milk on the side. I did not realise, though, how traumatic that experience had been for my companion until, on our way back, he launched into a long tale about his family connections in which a Judge of the Supreme Court (whose career was written about recently) figured as ‘My Brother-in-Law’. The message was clear, and he kept repeating it, in ways various enough for it to penetrate my head, till my old Ford Anglia got us back to Jaffna.

I had no active interest in ‘politics’ at school but my broadly ‘Left’ orientation led me to the Communist group in Campus. Most of my schoolmates were with the LSSP and when they took off for ‘study-classes’, they took some trouble to avoid me. It was not long after my return from Jaffna after that May Day that the riots of 1958 took place. I lodged myself at Sparling’s brother’s place in Wellawatte, sort of patrolling that lane, fetching news and provisions for the households there (all but one were Tamil).

When campus opened after that ‘long-vac’, I joined the LSSP, took the initiative in reviving its Youth League (which had been more or less defunct since the ‘Great Hartal’ of 1953), and was elected its Secretary. In that capacity I moved a resolution calling for the revocation of the Official Language Act and for ‘parity-of-status’ for Tamil. Among the most committed supporters of that resolution were L P M Wijedoru of Batapola (& Royal), and G K Haththotuwegama of Richmond. We moved on from there to the Union Society, the general body of students, where our resolution was passed by a majority of some 95 to 5%. Those who spoke against it, and produced ‘law-points’, were students from off the ‘elite schools’ (including my own). Many of them were from the department of law in the University; one of them (whose mode of locomotion was, a few decades ago, compared to that of a crab) has been sounding off recently about the injustice administered on the Tamil people.

More significantly, the adoption of that resolution caused dismay among the mostly ‘anglicised’ though not necessarily ‘Christianised’ Tamil students; they proved to be the most determinedly communalist.

The Official Language Act was actually brought into effect, not, as has been repeated ad nauseam, ‘in 24 hours in 1956’, but on the 1st of January, 1964. Preparatory steps towards that were taken in 1960. As it happened I was in the Treasury at the time and was directed to oversee its implementation. Besides my known position on the question, the fact that I had read English, became the subject of snide comments. The Minister of Finance under whose purview the subject came, T B Illangaratne, trade union leader and distinguished novelist in Sinhala, gave instructions to the effect that the widest accommodation be made in the matter to ‘old entrants’. New entrants were required ‘to acquire proficiency’ in Sinhala within a few years.

At our bi-annual get-togethers, Kumar, who had evidently not inherited the mindless venom of his father’s communalism, or become subject to the designs of the Catholic Church, designs as ‘grand’ as any creepy-crawley may be expected to design, would chat with me of what he wished to do. He was working on the history of the political deals that Chelvanayakam and his associates had been engaged in from time to time. It is a pity that he could not complete that tale of our Colombo based westernised ‘elite’, ‘Sinhalese’ and ‘Tamil’, (for many of whom their ‘mother-tongue’ was a foreign language), jockeying for influence in the sphere of political-economy, with themselves as the central figures and principal beneficiaries of the outcomes they sought. What our ‘political scientists’ (the quality of their role was visible in the late A J Wilson’s accounts in which, on such trysts, he had served as chauffeur for Chelvanayakam, his father-in-law), and ‘historians’ have yet to place on record is the overarching cynicism that governed the lives of the ‘negotiators’ and dictated to them the routes by which they could acquire a place in our history.

The ‘pacts’ so-called were torn up ceremonially but their contents were in fact applied, scrupulously by Bandaranaike-Dudley, while Chelvanayakam et al used them to engineer ‘the ground reality’ on which claims to a ‘traditional homeland’ have later come to be based. Such a re-ordering of history was also attempted by such outfits as ‘the Gandhian movement’ (in which my colleague, Devanesan Nesiah, was very active). In the late 1970s, that ‘movement’ was engaged in moving ‘Estate Tamils’ and illicit immigrants from South India into Vavuniya with a view to ‘colonising’ a fat belt of land in the dry zone, - the kind of land that ‘Jaffna Tamils’ had no wish to live in.

Nor, to my knowledge, have our academics ever referred to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Sinhalese from Jaffna in the mid-1970s. After the students in the Jaffna University, the bakers (of bread) were among the last to be hoofed out of the peninsula. Besides the ‘koviars’ et al who had been, in the caste-ordering employed by the vellala in Jaffna, reduced to ‘low-caste’ status over time, Sinhalese people had remained a small but stable community in Jaffna. That was before people like Ponnambalam and Chelvanayakam, following in the steps of Ramanathan and his sibling, Arunachalam, muscled in on the possibility that a communal constituency could be employed in the service not only of their aspirations to political power but towards the ‘deconstruction’ of the history of this country. The most intractable ‘problem’ they encountered was, to phrase it in short-hand, ‘Anuradhapura’. There is no need to expand on that in this note.

The common folk had no particular interest in pursuing such communalist jihads. When I drove down to a training centre off Matara in 1984, it was in an old car in which the driver’s door could not be opened. My companion, who was from Point Pedro and in the passenger seat, had, perforce, to fetch tea, snacks and cigarettes at `kade’s’ along the way. He chose to employ a heavily Tamil-accented Sinhala but nary a dark look was directed at him. When we reached our destination in a kind of ‘back-of-beyond’, under a moonlit sky, he stretched himself out on a chair (not designed for such gymnastics) and said, ‘How I bleed for my country!’ He was thinking of Jaffna.

My younger son ran for Parliament from Jaffna district for the Sihala Urumaya in 2000. Going around that electorate by whatever transport offered, - mostly buses, eventually a taxi, he had encountered no hostility. He did not receive more than a few hundred votes, but in fact the SU had gathered more votes than the Vasu-Bahu road show, and Rajiva Wijesinha’s Liberal Party.

Evidently, the people had no faith in such groups that pandered to the communalist dreams of well-heeled and open handed expatriates: they wanted relief from LTTE oppression so they could get on with their lives. The subsequent history of the ‘true Left’, so-calling each other, is known, that of Rajiva’s outfit, mostly himself, is not yet out in the public eye.

While it is true that Hindu festivals are celebrated in the ‘Government controlled’ areas as they are not in areas as yet controlled by the LTTE, the dislocation of the lives of people in and around the battlefields up in Jaffna and in many places much further south, has been and continues to be not one that you and I would wish to undergo.

During one of my several spells in ‘the Pool’ (it is some kind of record, though it has been disputed by a senior colleague, Dr. Ramanathan: close questioning revealed that he had only been underemployed for some seven years!), I was directed to have a look at (‘evaluate’) the outcome of World Food Program interventions in Jaffna. They had to do with repairing small tanks of which there were around 700, each irrigating roughly 25 acres of paddy. It was the wrong time of year for such an inspection, but the ones I looked at seemed to be in a fair state of repair.

Much of the irrigation in the Jaffna peninsula is derived from wells, (now classified as ‘agro-wells’ though their uses were/are various), deep and of a substantial circumference. The water was then generally raised by large galvanised iron buckets, not, as they used to be, by palmyrah ‘baskets’, hauled up by ‘pulleys’ aided by a kind of well-sweep. The water was trained along narrow channels to the beds of vegetables, onion and potato among them, fruit trees, tobacco (from which the celebrated ‘Jaffna-cigar’, moist and aromatic, is fashioned), and, occasionally, paddy. With the demand for water that modernisation / industrialisation and an increase in population bring, a general lowering of its quality has occurred. Among all the work that needs to be done towards the rehabilitation of the Jaffna peninsula priority must be given to the task of cleaning up the aquifers that support its life.

On that ‘inspection’ my visit to the dry, very dry, island of Delft merits special mention, but I would rather first relate some particulars of a later encounter with the ‘agro-well’ in Jaffna.

In the mid-seventies, on a trip with a dear friend, Mahen Vaithianathan, Mohan Perera helping with the navigation, my wife and I, and Arjuna Parakrama, visited Swami Gavribala at Sella Sannadi off Thondamanaru. After a stop for lunch at Tekkam, one of my favourite places en route to Kondachchi and Mannar in the early ‘seventies, and for Arjuna to look for rare birds and identify them for us yakkos, we broke journey at Mahen’s late father’s cottage in Tiruketheesvaram. It is located between Mannar & Madhu, where Mahen’s father had restored the celebrated temple in the face of the preposterous claims, of the same order as to Madhu, of the ‘Extension officers’ of the Roman Catholic Church. (The Catholic bishop for Mannar has, right now, exposed, perhaps unknowingly, the umbilical connection between the Catholic Church and the LTTE). After a long drive from there via Pooneryn and Chavakachcheri through to Point Pedro, we got to the ashram in the late afternoon. I made straight for the well, afore-mentioned, typical of the Jaffna peninsula, 40-60 feet deep, the water hoisted up by a large galvanised iron bucket. I used about five bucketsful to wash the dust and the sweat off, soaped myself and used another ten or so to complete my bath. Unbeknown to me, Swami Gavribala, whom I was yet to meet, had been watching me from his ashram. He came up as I was about to dry myself, said, "Sit! These are the days of Agni." He hauled up twenty-five more, pouring the water over my head without a word.

I was, to put it briefly, Director of Industries at the time, had helped, indeed, bullied, a few wealthy people from Jaffna, domiciled in Colombo, to establish manufacturing industries in Jaffna. Two of them had gone into the production of water-buckets. When I went to have a look at those industrial establishments Gavribala came along for the ride. At the first, the better one, the proprietor, a lawyer from Colombo, was present, and in attendance (unforgivably, on me!). Swami observed all that, picked up one bucket after another and hurled them down on the concrete floor, knocking the base out. The proprietor was petrified. I said to Gavribala, "For god’s sake, these buckets are meant to hit water!" "You speak of God, my friend. Listen to what He says." Bang! I asked the proprietor to get over the technical problem of welding the base on more securely, and inquired about his other products that had nothing to do with drawing water or wrath.

As we drove off, some half a mile away, I noticed a package in the car, all wrapped up in ‘Christmas paper’. It was a bottle of Scotch. I asked Mahen to turn around. He was midway through his U-turn when Gavribala grabbed the bottle: "This", he said, "is for me!"

We stayed at the regular ashram – Gavribala had his own kutiya – and around six in the evening he sent word for me. My wife was in no condition to go for a puja and asked me to pray for her. Swami had already told me what he had in mind for the evening and I thought it would be impious of me to explain matters to her. He conducted us (Mahen and me) to his ‘speakeasy’, a (palmyrah) raa-bomu `tippola’ a mile or two away. It was fashioned ‘tourist-native’ style with benches and a fixed table under palmyrah umbrellas, furnished too with arrack plus fowl who perched on Swami’s head. I was not permitted to open the bottle of Double Distilled I carried with me. We returned around ten, the moon up and the dogs barking and Gavribala barking right back at them.

The following morning he came to the ashram for breakfast; the poosari were quiet, he made an invocation, and we set to: as expected, the meal was the iddli, thosai and vadai with the usual accompaniments of sambhar and sambol, and cleaner and ‘fuller’ than, say, the Greenland’s offerings.

That evening he asked us to his kutiya. It was a one-room structure mounted on a platform about three or four feet high. He asked my wife whether she has tasted ‘grape-wine’, produced a bottle of ‘genuine brandy’. "This," he declared, "is Mother’s little helper!"

He may or may not have got to where his compatriots, Gn/Nyanithiloka and Gn/Nyanaponika (fellow ‘enemy aliens’ from Germany who had all been incarcerated at Dehra Dun), got to, but undoubtedly he was somewhere there. He was no more a fraud than Yogaswami and other siddhis in Jaffna. They ‘saw’; common speech was not their medium of communication or instruction.

And, now, to the island of Delft. It’s not the kind of island one could walk through in a day when on ‘inspection’. Transport was required, and, when I got there, was singularly absent. Transport consisted of a CTB bus, a big (four wheel) tractor, the Police jeep, the DRO’s pony-cart. The bus and the tractor had contrived to collide on the only, and more or less straight, road visible from end to end to the naked eye; the battery of the Police jeep had sort of died on itself and been sent to ‘the mainland’ for resuscitation. The DRO’s carriage was parked in the porch of his office but it lacked a pony; that fellow, no friend, had taken off to join his pals in the scrub land beyond the DRO’s ‘span of control’. I made do on a bicycle.

The people were all there, mostly by the roadway, anxious to talk with this official who had come all the way from beyond ‘the mainland’. For them it was, rather, a convivial break from their work than an occasion to air grievances or to criticise the WFP or the Kachcheri. Pausing at the gate to meet them meant receiving / being it on the head with an invitation to ‘come in’, and that involved partaking of a mug of toddy. By the time I concluded my ‘inspection’, my bicycle, obviously a truant vehicle, was wobbling and the commander of the launch, not to be outdone by the general populace of land-lubbers who had gathered there to say ‘ta-ta’, greeted me with a warm hand-clasp as he helped me in.

The Dagaba in Delft is, like the large Dutch constructions in Jaffna, built of coral. Delft is but one of the islands which has become, to put it in a term favoured by our ‘post-colonial’, ‘post-modernist’ nitwits, ‘an arena’, (like the Roman Coliseum perhaps) in which the people continue to be crushed by the Liberators of the EPDP and the LTTE. ‘Clearing operations’ by the army and the navy have added to their woes.

They had suffered a ‘taking down’ that reached well into the past, prior to the violence unleashed on them by freedom fighters. It had arisen from the ‘peninsular mentality’ of the mostly anglicised elite of Jaffna and its immediate environs. They saw those people as ‘islanders’ in contra-distinction to themselves as the ‘mainlanders’. That notion, needless to say, was self-serving: when it was suggested, alas by ‘an islander’, that the seat of administration of the Jaffna district should be moved to Kilinochchi, it was vetoed, as, say, by ‘the UN Security Council’s Permanent Members’. They had too much to lose by way of the value of real estate and other instruments of domination in the peninsula.

Apart from a weighty presence in the public services, their only, more or less productive, encounter with the mainland was in the irrigable land they acquired at Mutthiyankattu, (on the mainland) which they could visit occasionally to check what the farmers who worked them were doing.

* * * *

The ‘CFA’ brought many changes in the Northern Province. It saw or did not see sophisticated military equipment being smuggled in, mostly through Ranil’s ‘Green Channel’, and through ‘diplomatic’ channels. Almost all of it came in to the Districts of Mannar, Mulativu and Kilinochchi. What of Jaffna?

Jaffna’s experience of the CFA occurred above ground level and was more visible: it took the form of a steady streamlet of tourists from Colombo. On their return they could give ‘first-hand accounts’ of how nice the LTTE had been to them, of the (low) price of rice & curry, what bargains there were on red-onions, chillies, murunga, mango, potato, jewellery, and, of course, of bullet-ridden buildings, of roadways damaged and deserted, of the general picture of devastation of her physical infrastructure, and what a hassle-less trip it had been.

What the CFA did not bring were plane-loads of the refugees in western countries - returning, with or without goodies, to the ‘homeland’ simply to see and be seen by friends and whatever family they had left behind. The email senders, the placard-waving demonstrators, those who paid up their ‘taxes’ to the LTTE were chary of making that journey. The reasons for that need no speculation.

* * * *

What people, the mere flesh and blood human beings, have suffered wherever the LTTE has been active, from Point Pedro to Colombo to Gomarankadawela or Tanamanvila, is of the character that shares the visceral understanding of ‘the travails’ of people and places as say, in Asne Seierstad’s narratives of Afghanistan and Baghdad, of Anna Politkovskaya of Chechnya, of Virginia Tilley on Palestine.

The history of the people in the districts, towns and villages in which the LTTE has been active, and, to put it mildly, of their discomforts, often violently enforced, over the past twenty years and more is yet to be told. Only two persons of my acquaintance could have done it in this language. A J Canagaratna, who died last year, and Ambalavaner Sivananthan, long domiciled in London.

Few knew ‘A J’ by those initials. He was better known as Pepin. He lived off Joseph Lane, around the corner from the two restaurants that served liquor in Bambalapitiya fifty years ago; one was the ‘Foreign Liquor Restaurant’, the other the ‘Pepin Restaurant’ and I had assumed that A J’s nickname was derived from that – and not, as I learnt was the case, from some King of short stature in medieval Europe. He read English in Peradeniya alongside three mischievous girls who bullied him, with, Yasmine, if rumour is to be believed, leading the pack. What I recall is that he spent much of his time playing carom in the Common Room at Ramanathan Hall. After graduation he lived in Jaffna, teaching English in schools and at the University of Jaffna. On my first visit to him there I had to ask for directions to the house of Mr. Canagaratna, Lecturer in English. They knew of no such person I was told by some people who turned out to be his close neighbours. Faced by my persistence, one finally said, "Aah, you mean that teacher! That’s where he lives!" (two doors away).

When a few friends from Peradeniya, including Norman Weerasooria, called on him in May, 1958, he had indicated to them that they should leave: he had his ear to the ground. The violence of that month began in Vavuniya where the Federal Party was conducting its conference. It is indeed strange, or perhaps not, that a news-man like Tarzie Vittachchi, editor of the Ceylon Observer and privy to what was going on around the country, should have ‘missed’ that fact in his diatribe, ‘Emergency, 1958’.

Pepin wrote for the ‘Saturday Review’, published by Gamini Navaratne, (G N), first from Jaffna and later from a hole-in-the wall off Canal Row in Colombo. During the height of the Indian Peace-Keeping Mission, after several runs for safety from the IPKF, some on foot, some on the bar of a bicycle, he made his way to Colombo. GN told me that Pepin would not write, was comatose much of the time, sleeping the morning away on a desk. I managed to get him across the road to my office where he slept on a hansi-putuwa (on which the Settlement Officers of colonial times had taken their tiddly-winks), with a wash-basin, soap & towel to help bring them back to work all bright and shining.

It helped him get a bit of rest but he was not altogether comfortable. Memories of the IPKF kept troubling his sleep. The mounds of un-husked paddy in houses had drawn the wrath of the Jawans he said. They had told the housewives shivering in fear, have houses, gardens, fruit, vegetables, fences, electricity, radio, good clothes, gold necklaces, bangles, plenty of food. You have roads and schools, a railway. And you breed terrorists and get us down here to fight them for you?"

They had pulled out bottles of coconut oil, Pepin said, and drunk them down, squatted on the mounds of paddy, defecated on them.

When I was walking him down from an old waterhole on Upper Chatham Street to the Fort Station to see him onto the Jaffna train he grabbed me and sobbed. He did not want to go back.

Much later, too late perhaps, he wrote an introduction to the occasional writings of Regi Siriwardena, and as he lay in hospital, he had the satisfaction of being told by Thiru Kandiah (who, strangely, had never met him before) just why his response to an ex-native scholar was what that charlatan had deserved.

I have met Sivananthan, very briefly, just the once. When Memory Dies is a book incongruously coupled with a pamphlet: the second half of it reads like a propaganda tract made familiar across the world over the past three decades. The first part is way and away the finest, most mature piece of creative writing by a Lankan to date. It puts to shame the collective work of our historians, sociologists, novelists and poets as it relates to the mores and events of the early 20th century. Let us hope that, however else he may be occupied right now, he would write his own story of the elements of the life of the people of Jaffna and those around them ‘as far as ‘Colombo’ and, maybe ‘London’.