Dharmaraja’s Fourth Standard classroom, under maternal Coswatte Madam, never felt a proper classroom as it did not occupy the main Billimoria building, but was a remnant of an older building that stuck out like a bay-window and was ‘walled’ with diamond shaped trellis. These were not sound proof, and provided us great fun hearing Mr. Wickremaratne, in his stentorian voice, literally knocking basic English skills into the skulls of boys from village schools before releasing them into the normal all-English stream.

My preferred seat was in the back-row where a few kindred souls swapped scatological jokes or experimented with "military tanks" built of notched reels of thread, rubber loops and ekels. Their unique ability was, when wound up, to crawl up the slope of our desk to the shallow hollow to hold pens and the hole for the ceramic ink-well ,duly topped up every morning by Banda. The flip side of this seating arrangement was that I could barely decipher the writing on the backboard and had to rely, for interpretation, on my neighbours. Our teacher who did not tolerate the constant whispering in the back-row soon extracted me from my hide-out and planted me in the front row, right before the blackboard.

THE MEDICAL INSPECTION

The Annual School Inspection, feared by teachers, and the Medical Inspection of schoolchildren were two sturdy pillars of the Colonial Education Department in the pre-WW II years. In the fateful year of 1939 I stood in line with my schoolmates to be duly probed, weighed and examined by the visiting Schools Medical Officer and his acolytes. I was stood some distance away from a poster which I was asked to read. All I could see was a hazy capital ‘E’ at the top, followed by indecipherable squiggles. The Nurse duly noted this in her records and moved me nearer in stages till, to my great relief, I could read the strangely altered alphabet before me. I was duly diagnosed as short-sighted and advised to wear spectacles.

BESPECTACLED

Some days later I was packed off to the Eye Clinic in Kandy Hospital – near Bogambara if memory serves me right. Eye Surgeon Dr. Jansen ran me through a whole menu of tests and presented me with my very first prescription for optical lenses. Armed with this document Father took me along to Kandy’s best [and only?] optician U. N. Wijetunga in Colombo Street. This was an interesting street which faced the Court House at one end. It began with poky little offices of lawyers and ended with the pungent ‘karavala kadays’ occupying an ancient decrepit wooden house. Scattered in between was our optician’s place, hardware stores, Godamunne’s bookshop, Fancy House of colourful goods and Abdul Rahims of crockery fame. My memory of old Kandy’s many shops and grid of streets extends no further.

The gentleman in charge [Mr. Wijetunga?] reminded me of the toy-maker Gepetto in Walt Disney’s film ‘Pinocchio’. He had a little moustache and a gentle smile which allayed my fears when he seated me on an elaborate chair which seemed a cross between Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe’s throne and an executioner’s electric chair. He now ran me through the elaborate alphabetic test I was now pretty familiar with. But this time round he perched a heavy spectacle frame on my nose and kept fitting various lenses till we ‘hit the jackpot’ and the whole ‘alphabet’ sprang into perfect focus. There was not much variety in spectacle styles in that period. As an active boy of ten, what was needed were specs that would not fall off and Father chose a model that curled firmly behind my ears. Several days later I stepped out, rather shamefacedly, on to the street wearing my very first [of a very long line] of spectacles. It was a wonderful new world I saw. The fuzzy scenes I had seen all my, short, life now became bright and crystal clear. What I will never forget is my wonderment when I saw the signboard of the hardware shop right opposite the opticians. Earlier, all I could read was "Majeed and Faleel" in large letters Now, to my amazement, I could read the rows of smaller letters listing the variety of goods they carried "Barbed wire, Mammoties, Wire mesh, Alavangoes, Pickaxes, Pruning knives…." etc. It was one of the most magical moments in my life, and one that I will always treasure.

It took me some time to get adjusted to these new appendages on my face. My first attempt to wash my face, wearing specs, became a staple of family legend. My first embarrassed entry into my classroom in my new ‘avatar’ was, as inevitable, greeted with hoots of laughter and the bestowal of the rude title "kannadi polonga". All these minor mishaps paled before the new found joy of reading signboards, seeing blades of grass, scurrying ants and cracks in the pavement without squatting down. The night sky, which had been just a vaguely luminous cloud, now twinkled with little points of starlight.

O’RYAN.

Rev. Small, Father’s school principal in Galle’s Richmond College , had been a keen amateur astronomer and populariser of studying stars. Some of this interest yet lingered with Father – though nowhere near the expertise of his older brother who taught at Kandy’s Trinity College – and went on to establish an observatory there. Father seemed keen to share his scraps of ‘starry’ knowledge with his eldest son hoping, perhaps, I would develop an interest in astronomy – now that I could see stars, at last. Kandy’s pre-war skies were free of light pollution as its street lights were dim and all shops closed down soon after dusk. I recall Father standing on the pavement, before our house on Horseshoe [a.k.a Cross] Street and pointing out to me various stars and such mysterious constellations as the Milky Way, the Plough, the Great Bear, the Southern Cross, Mars and Venus. Fortunately, he never cross-examined me to point out their location and, today, I remain as ignorant of them as I was, ages ago, in 1939 pretending to know.