As some of you would recall, I wrote a somewhat desultory note on the gathering of the afore-mentioned geriatrics last year – our freshman year among them. I hereby report that requests have been received that I do the same kind of thing (but better) this time round as well.

We all know that tiny tots are savvy, the tinier the savvier. It would surprise nobody that time was when the grandchildren knew for sure that I knew all there is to know about everything. Time, alas, is a fidgety creature, cannot stay still: it has lost its Latin, would be confounded by lente, lente currite and other such murmurs of wisdom and despair. As time goes her uncertain way, looking, looking, not seeing, I see the little ones falling prey to their parents’ myopic view of the world, and before long they’d begin to believe that I am in my second childhood. If that is so I yet know that 1+1 makes 2, the sum of the requests received, from impartial observers, for this note.

Besides those two kind requests, (plus one that Scott Direckze gave me at the entrance to the Eighty Club last Sunday, "I hope you write something", he looked for the word, "sensible this time"), all I have received over the past few months are complaints about what I wrote last time. Initially the fusillades were delivered over the phone:

"I-say!" or, "Do you know who this is?"

The voices, last heard from the teacher’s chair behind the huge desk mounted (?) on a 2-foot high platform, were un-mistakable. Their school-given names I shove aside with decision and say,

"Yessir!"

"Did Royal teach you to slander people? Is that what you learnt there?"

‘Masters’ then were masters, not ‘teachers’ as seems to happen when women enter that profession. The Principal was boringly stuck with his title, the Vice Principals of our time, Jowl (who used our head and hair as a duster to wipe the blackboard when we got a problem wrong), and Baappa (who walked the corridors with a cane cut to size for him), retained their immortal names beyond the grave. Apart from the masters-in-charge of this and that we had the Headmaster, Bob Edwards.

When such calls came I half-expected to be told, "Seneviratne! report to Mr. Edwards. At once!"

Actually I had been referred to him just the once for a misdemeanor that was as unclear to me then as it is now. Old Bob Edwards thwacked my palms with a rattan, a stout one, probably from Ritigala (for a decade to date being looted by ‘researchers’, exclusively foreign), not the malnourished kind we get at Vevaeldeniya now; he did it with a smile. I suppose some of us wondered at his lack of curiosity: a few searching questions would have sufficed to establish our innocence. Followed perhaps by a crisp word or two to whoever had sent us to him. ’School-discipline’ was mild, but in its essence the system displayed a fascist frame. I should mention here an incident, one of many such that many would have experienced, not by way of further illustration of such attributes of discipline but in tribute to Elmo de Bruin. It had to do with the discovery of some detritus of items that were associated with alcohol, bottle stoppers and such, in a railway compartment in which our sportsmen had returned after trouncing Trinity. Punishment was delivered summarily; as far as I knew at the time, not even a summary trial was conducted. As co-editor with Nihal Jayawickrema of the college magazine I did not editorialise on the matter but inserted at the bottom of the page, at intervals of 5-6 pages, pithy sayings by big thinkers on matters that had to do with justice. The morning after the magazine came out I was walking down to the tuck-shop for a cup of tea and there at the Principal’s door was Bruno, master-in-charge of the magazine. He looked down at me through his glasses (which most of us had invested with magical properties when we were a bit younger and occasionally guilty) and said, "I’ll give the Principal a copy of your magazine." I heard nothing more about it from either the Principal or Bruno. Over ten years ago I sent him a copy of my Ludowyk memorial lecture (in which I had mentioned him, Douglas Amarasekera, Pieter Keuneman, and Upali Amerasinghe among others). He responded at length, about old times and the state of the world, about his life in the Caribbean, our correspondence continued for some time.

Complaints made in person tend to be more embarrassing. I do not get about much. It’s ‘open house’ here but, as sometimes happens with age, only our/my regular phalanx of crows, (who continue to report despite my wife’s aversion to our fish-monger, Arlis Aiyya, who would peek into our verandah from a safe distance before coming on his face lighting up if I was in sight), a few stray cats (who, she believes, are rat-hunters but feeds on salaya and buth), and the odd beggar seem to know that.

So, such encounters have taken place in public places: a buth-kade, pattara-kade, a supermarket. Calls of protest prefaced by ‘adey! ado! D G P! Gamma! hey!’ have struck my eardrums more than passing blows. My physician, concern in her voice, whispered to me that she is baffled by my loss of hearing. Not wanting her to think I am a moron as well, I said, ‘So am I’. She wrote out a personal note in long-hand to a psychiatrist, the son of one I knew, told me his consultations hours.

The most frequent of such encounters in public places, and the most unnerving, occur at the kanatta, which has been frequently visited of late. "He’s there!" I hear them say, ‘They’ are all my seniors, quick on their feet, not as pot-bellied as I am or teetering on corns, and I hobble towards them before they hunt me down.

"You have been selective!" (trans: ‘I was there too!’), they say, gripping both my hands in one of theirs, their other hand caressing my shoulder a few millimeters from my neck. All very jovial and ‘how-are-things?’ and all.

I make some remark about the deceased. It is ignored. Besides the often macabre do’s at the Art Gallery and Independence square, where the mostly ‘official’ mourners go for foto-ops, the kanatta has become the place for shop-talk and socializing of that kind. The professional mourners in Negombo at least deliver the set-piece tearing of their upper garments, tears by the quart, chants of a grief altogether irremediable. Now we have ‘chat’ at the kanatta, at a ‘parlour’ and at ‘the funeral house’. Such have become the markers of a passing.

It was different at this gathering. When L S Dissanayake, the principal organizer, still 82 by his account, called for the tribute of a brief silence in memory of those who have passed away, everybody rose. Some may have been thinking of a particular friend, some reflecting more generally on the business of mortality. Fleetingly my mind registered certain absences: Wonkie (Narendra de Silva) who passed away last year, Tyrell Muttiah, neighbour and friend, (scrum-half to hooker Frecko Kreltszhiem, a late developer at rugby), the first to go. Dozens more in-between: Alavi Mohamed, a schoolboy pioneer at the Rowing Club, T K N Thilakan, who was wheeled out at our ‘golden anniversary’ ten years ago by Henry Rajaratnam, (who, as necessary, habitually attends to the duties of a House Officer if one isn’t there), Channa Wickremasinghe, one of the brightest of our lot, among them. Our sixtieth anniversary gathering will be later this month; Manicks, our principal in such matters at this time, will be out of the country and the honours will be done by Gamini Jayakuru.

A couple of others who came to mind, Eustace Fonseka and Denis Hapugalle, were contemporaries of Tony Anghie (who was present and, as I learnt that day, had ‘topped the batch’ and would have distinguished himself as our Army Commander). They were together in the rugger team, led by Ashy Cader, as charismatic in my memory as Imran Khan, that first won the Bradby shield in 1948.

Denis saw me at the Ministry of Plantation Industries around 1971 when I chaired an inter-ministry committee set up to formulate a ‘cashew development plan’. Much labour went into that exercise, especially on ‘the prospects’ for cashew and its by-products in the world market, but the process of development had to begin with producing the nut. The question was ‘where?’ This country offering nothing like the extent of land suitable for cashew as East Africa or India, it had to be grown in the coastal latosols - the old beaches. There were Mankerni near Trinco, Hambantota, Puttalam, but the best bet was Kondachchi, off Silavaturai, (on the coast below Mannar), where the State Plantations Corporation already had some 1,600 acres under cashew. We planned to expand that to 25,000 acres. The twin problems, apart from elephant and bear and boar from Wilpattu next door, across the Moderagam Aru, were water and labour. The village that lay alongside was populated by Muslims who were not inclined to cultivate dry land in a crop they weren’t accustomed to; the sea was close by. ‘Labour’ had to be got from outside. Denis proposed that we settle youngish persons, (around 40), just retired from the armed services, who had been trained in TAFII work - acronym for a task force set up to prevent illicit immigration from India.

The soil scientists had assured us that there was sufficient groundwater in roughly each square mile for intensive cultivation of food crops on 60 acres of land. Colvin, badgered by Doric de Souza, Philip’s ‘police spy’, contrived to shoot Denis’s proposal down. Not many years later, the LTTE established its key naval base there; illicit immigrants, not altogether looking for peace and plenty came in. From Silavaturai to Arippu and all around hundreds of civilians were killed; the cashew plantation, by then of over 5,000 acres, survived as possible.

Of them all, Eustace and Tony Muller, an Old Joe (is that what they are called?) were our dearest friends, especially the children’s. Marooned in a flat on Flower road Eustace survived on a Captain’s pension through much of the 1970s, all the incidental allowances gone; he had instead to support his batman’s family, - wife and three little girls. We had moved to a hole-in-the-wall on Pedris road to get the boys to school, so it was a little walk for us to visit each other. It was a good time for us all despite all the constraints: we had the bedroom with four beds aligned against the wall on one side, one for the eldest against the other (unused). Eustace would sit against the window on the furthest bed and a couple more, the guitar in his hands, and talk. And he had tales to tell, many of his own concoction, one of which, about the so-called ‘nine-run match’, was published in the R-T souvenir.

He sang to his guitar, or maybe it happened the other way round. The wife and children were his devotees. I cannot really say what their favourites were, there were gaps of age between them, but in later years they all recalled his ‘The Streets of London’ and maybe ‘Foggy, foggy dew’ (or ‘Where have all the flowers gone?!’) said to have figured in reports and rumours on ‘Operation Ganja’. On an evening when I was seated outside playing chess with a doctor-friend, Cecil Fernando (Kaputs), I heard Eustace play a Minuet in G. Kaputs, ex-Trinity, intent on figuring out the patterns of force as they shifted across the board, gave 100% to his game; wondering where that melody had came from I may have made some remark. Though he was fond of such music and had a radiogram, turntable and a collection of gramophone records of mostly western classical music, Cecil swore that I had muttered ‘Segovia’ and it had thrown him off his game.

At this gathering that I am sort of on, I was struck by confusion about age: introduced to Vijaya Vidyasagara who was doing a bit of elbow-bending with me, Scott, having established that they were near contemporaries, asked him by sign language (which some of us may have to fall back on some time), ‘how come you’re with this stripling?’ Vijaya said that I had been in the Ministry of Finance. He was a long-time servitor in the Department of Inland Revenue at senior levels, (he may have assumed that a big-time capitalist like Scott would have known that). We first met with Ranjith de Livera and George Dias in 1964 to talk about how a ‘rural credit program’ could be structured but our association had little to do with finance.

I told Scott, in my dumb way, that Vijaya was a Samasamajist, had been a lay preacher, had edited the Christian Workers Bulletin. (I used to write for the CWB while I was on a 10-12/6 work-week; the printer’s dead-line, advanced by two or three weeks, was his. His reminders often came, and they came often, at 0600 and the children, harried themselves ‘to get ready for school’, would call out, "Appachci! Phone! Uncle Science-Ocean!"

His judgment on the devastation of Nauru by Freeport McMoran, the biggest polluter in the USA as well, guilty of crimes against humanity, was used by Justice A R B Amerasinghe, supported by Nihal W and Justice Gunasekera, in his judgment on Eppawala; Justice Amerasinghe’s judgment also brought the notion of ‘public interest’ within the reach of our law. I am not familiar with the work of others here in the judiciary but as far as I know Weeramantry and Amerasinghe stand together not only as expositers of first principles but in taking the trouble to put their thoughts in writing for the continued use of mankind in general and of practitioners of the law - as such practitioners see it or are hobbled by their ingrained perceptions of what passes for ‘law’ mean in the matter of delivering ‘justice’.

Over the relatively recent past, there have been people who brought honour to this country and her people, their names are known, but the massive contribution that Weeramantry’s made towards the welfare of mankind via the rule of law is yet to be made a matter of celebration, never mind reverence, here.

It was somewhere near that point in our discussion that Tony Anghie joined our conversation. He and I may have addressed each other familiarly, and Justice Weeramantry, impercipient at our mundane level, as Scott had been a bit earlier, gestured a query: were together?’ The response that leapt to my mind was "For god’s sake!", but I said, ‘No. He was Head Prefect when I was in Form I.’ Unlike his brothers, Trevor, our fullback and place-kicker, and little Maurice who whizzed past or through everybody, all I remember of Tony in school, apart from his unthreatening presence as Head Cop, is mud on his face, stockings limp on his shanks by the end of a game.

To conclude this loaf, Chula Wickremasinghe directed me to tell everybody that he is not dead. He was there, on a brief visit from his pads in Chicago and Rio. In Form I (A) he was around the back-row, one or two behind me with his ‘westerns’ – Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tom Mix, Tonto and the Lone Ranger. There was much disputation about which of them was fastest-on- the-trigger, which the toughest-in-a-brawl. Such deep matters were not on the syllabus and Chula stayed back. He says he made it to the third Form before he was kept back and the record belongs to Daham Wimalasena.

I also learnt that Punyadasa Edussuriya, ‘Punya’ in school, ‘Das’ at home, Judge of the Supreme Court, yet serving as a Bribery Commissioner, had left Royal early - hauled away to Ananda by his father. He was one of those addressed by J E V (Bada) Peiris as a ‘little gentleman’; Lalith Mendis and I were the others. The old man was not infallible.

There were fewer wives than last time; word might have got around that they’d all have to sit together while the men traded yarns such as these. I hope they don’t take umbrage at my objective thoughts, occasionally painful, about grandchildren.