The World Outside
 MOVED:
When Hope was in Colombo, his hours at the Tourist Board were fairly
regular. This was in the mid-sixties, after my father had moved to
Parliament and become Clerk to the House, the post later designated as
Secretary General of Parliament.
It was the period when Parliament was at its best, for you had evenly
balanced teams with brilliant debaters on either side.
My father had moved there in 1963, as assistant to Ralph Deraniyagala,
who had been Clerk practically since independence.
Many of his friends wondered why my father took up the job, and
though he took over as Clerk in 1964 even he sometimes wistfully
regretted the fact that he had given up a chance to get on the bench, as
a Supreme Court judge (though such regrets ceased in the eighties when
it became clear that the bench was no longer what it had been, as JR
tried to remould the Supreme Court in his own image).
In the early sixties the post of Clerk had been a sort of sinecure,
which suited the aristocratic Deraniyagala admirably. With the onset of
party political intrigues however, beginning with the accession of the
Trotskyists to Mrs Bandaranaike’s government, and the subsequent
crossover to the opposition of some SLFP members which brought down the
government, parliamentary procedures became of crucial significance, and
so did the role of the Clerk, who was supposed to advise the Speaker on
statutory requirements.
In those days, unlike in the early eighties when ridiculous rulings
were made (such as that allowing the unseated member for Kalawana to
continue in Parliament), Speakers were more scrupulous and, whatever
outcome they wanted, they would try to ensure that their rulings were
legally sound.
My father was in a difficult position, since the Speaker at the time,
Hugh Fernando, was one of those inclining to the opposition, while it
was generally known that the architect of the project to buy over at
least some members of the government was my mother’s brother Esmond.
Of course some members of the government who crossed over, the senior
minister C P de Silva for instance, were moved by principles which they
felt were being traduced by the party’s lurch to the left.
However, there were others as to whom Esmond made no bones about
mentioning the prices that had been paid, and indeed on one occasion
pointing out the house built with the proceeds.
Meanwhile, Lake House, which he ran at the time, was conducting a
concerted campaign against the government, not only because of its own
UNP leanings, but because these had led to the government trying to take
over the press.
It is a tribute to my father’s personality, as well as his legal
acumen, that the rulings given by the Speaker have stood the test of
time, and that later, when Mrs Bandaranaike returned to power, she and
the Trotskyists continued to have great faith in him even though some
members of her party, irritated by the rulings of the new Speaker,
Stanley Tillekeratne, tried to blame my father.
By then of course Lake House had been nationalised, my uncle having
given up control some years previously, which had been followed by a
financial scandal that contributed to the loss of credibility of its
management (there had been almost no allegations regarding Esmond
himself, it should be noted, in the record of financial irregularities).
Those were heady days then, and the Parliament elected in 1965, after
Mrs Bandaranaike’s first government had been defeated but Dudley
Senanayake only just managed to cobble together a coalition government,
was the liveliest we had ever had.
The opposition front bench had a collection of brilliant speakers,
the Trotskyist N M Perera, the Communist Pieter Keuneman, Felix Dias
Bandaranaike from the SLFP, and the maverick R G Senanayake, Dudley’s
cousin, who had left the UNP to join Mr Bandaranaike’s government in
1956 and now sat as an independent in the very corner, under the
Speaker’s gallery.
The government had Philip Gunewardena and Wijayananda Dahanayake,
both of whom had served in the 1956 government, as well as Dudley
Senanayake himself, and the sharpest of them all, J R Jayewardene. He
was widely considered the best speaker in the House, though it seemed to
me that the youthful Felix was by far more brilliant.
I followed the proceedings assiduously in 1965, trying out all the
seats and finally settling on the front row of the gallery directly
facing the opposition front bench, so I could better observe the
sparkling of its stars.
The long day was interspersed by a good lunch, and an excellent tea,
to which I would return, if the debate were dull, at around six o’clock,
to polish off the remains and observe the sunset from the balcony
outside my father’s rooms.
All these long evenings meant that my father was often late, and
could not pick up my mother from the Girl Guide Association, where she
spent most of her days. Besides, he was not especially patient, whereas
Hope was.
He seemed to have no problem about hanging on while my mother’s
request for a couple of minutes stretched on to half an hour and more.
The reason for such heroic patience became clear when we discovered
that Hope was paying court to the Secretary of the Association, Kalyani
Rajasooriya.
My mother, who did not drive, and seemed to have no sense of
direction, had a habit of asking people to drop her on their way to
somewhere that was in a totally different direction altogether.
She did this on behalf of others too, and Hope used often to drop
Kaly home of an evening, and in time they decided that they wanted to
get married.
This was awkward, because Kaly’s parents were strong Sinhala
Buddhists and thought Hope entirely unsuitable.
Having been brought up ourselves in a context in which racial and
religious differences counted for nothing - my cousins on both sides
were Buddhists, my father’s family as well as Esmond’s wife’s family
being staunchly so - I found it difficult to believe that the objections
to Hope could be serious.
Kaly’s parents had after all been utterly charming on the few
occasions on which we had met them. But her uncle, it seemed, a
Professor in the Medical Faculty in Colombo, was a forceful Buddhist
nationalist.
I had met him, at W J Fernando’s in Kandy, and found him quite
brittle, and it was then that I began to have inklings of a very
different mindset from that of the cosmopolitanism I took for granted.
In such a context it was impossible for Kaly’s parents to agree, and
in the end she had to leave home and have a quiet wedding.
This could not happen at Lakmahal, given my mother’s long
acquaintance with the family. Fortunately the other single person who
was often at Lakmahal, Diana Captain, had a large house and a very
broadminded mother who adored Hope.
The wedding was held there, in December 1968, I believe shortly
before Diana’s sister Perin married a very bright young man called
Lalith Athulathmudali. Son of Mr Bandaranaike’s closest friend in the
State Council, educated at Oxford and Harvard, he was keen on politics
and obviously had a great future.
However, having taught also at Singapore University, he was bursting
with new ideas, which meant he would find it difficult to join the SLFP,
which was increasingly influenced by Marxist ideology.
And perhaps more worryingly, for someone who had just married a Parsi,
the SLFP and its Marxist allies, had campaigned, as had the extremists
in the UNP led by its former General Secretary Cyril Mathew, against the
very limited devolution Dudley Senanayake had attempted to grant through
a bill to set up District Councils.
The slogans they used, in what should have been a political issue,
were unashamedly racist, and suggested that the bitterness engendered by
similar reactions to Bandaranaike’s own attempt at devolution a decade
earlier was still simmering. |
