Endgame : Meditations on a House, a Country, a Career –9 Cultural Initiatives

The renewal of my involvement with Trinity happened at a very busy time. I was purportedly removed from the Board in September 2013, which was perhaps the last straw as far as those Trinitians concerned with honesty were concerned. We decided then to go to Court, and that month saw a spate of consultations. We worked through Sriyantha Senaratne, an old Trinitian who had a wonderfully laid back law firm housed in Galle Face Courts, a beautifully old fashioned office, like himself. When you went to see him, opera resounded in the background.

We saw several lawyers, but the one who handled my case, and the other more important ones, was Harsha Amerasekera, who in addition to clear analysis reveled in a mischievous sense of humour. The others with us were old Trinitians and had to put up gracefully with references to the primitive nature of their upbringing.

In addition to the legal tangles, I was at this time launching all over the country my collection of English and Sinhala and Tamil poetry, albeit all in English translation, which the National Book Trust of India had published. They had earlier produced a collection of short stories, entitled Bridging Connections, which did a lot for Sri Lankan writing since it was also translated into all India’s national languages. This was necessarily a slow process, but by 2013 the Oriya and Marathi versions had come out, and it was heartening to see the different scripts on the elegantly designed cover.

For the poetry book, which was of course more complicated given the difficulties of identifying quality in translation, I had been helped by Lakshmi de Silva and Prof Chelva Kanaganayakam. Though he was in Toronto, he had kept up with Sri Lankan writing and was a mine of information. Both he and Lakshmi introduced me to other scholars too. I met the wonderfully lively and broadminded Prof Amarakeerthi Liyanage for the first time, and renewed acquaintance with Prof Sandagomi Coperahewa, who had been a little boy when I had been Sub-Warden at S. Thomas’. His father had been my art teacher, a delightful man along with his two fast friends, Arisen Ahubudhu and Mr Jinadasa, the one always in immaculate national dress, Coperahewa though as ardent a nationalist in a pressed suit, and Jinadasa in a bush shirt. The last died young, though Ahubudhu survived until recently and Mr Coperahewa was still going strong when his son helped me with the poetry volume.

For Tamil poetry Chelva introduced me to a delightfully erudite man called Padmanabha Iyer, who lived in London and kept close track of all Tamil writing. With seminal assistance from all these willing experts, I produced what I thought was a pretty comprehensive volume. There were long delays then on the part of the NBT but, to my astonishment, when I was in Delhi in April, my contact there, the imaginative Benny Kurian, gave me a copy of the book. I then presented this to the Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid in Delhi, when he gave me an audience after I had met him in Chandigarh, at a Conference arranged by the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development.

I met Khurshid to talk about the rapidly deteriorating relationship between India and Sri Lanka but, given the tendency of our Foreign Minister to panic if he thought his turf was being stepped on, I thought the book a good pretext on which to hang the visit. This had unexpected consequences, for the extremists in the Tamil diaspora decided the book was part of an Indian plot to destroy Tamil autonomy. Our High Commissioner in Canada arranged a launch there, but the extremists urged that this be boycotted, and used the picture of my presenting Kureishi with the book as evidence that it was an instrument of evil. Fortunately Chelva had no qualms about speaking, and delivered a thoughtful address on translations. I was delighted that the widow of my father’s old friend, the Chavakachcheri MP V Navaratnam, also attended.