Father rebels!

Life is strange most of the time. Nissanka Aiya who had set up a new home at Batuwatte invited all of us to join him. In any case the lease that father had taken on the land at Halkandawila had almost expired and we thought father and mother would be happy to accept Nissanka Aiya's invitation and move into the new home. They did. We all did. Akka was ecstatic about the new home. Now at last she had a place she could 'come home to' with a measure of dignity.

Father however, was not too happy about the new arrangement. Although he and mother had a home to live and rest their tired limbs in, Father felt he was not the 'Head' of the family. All these long years, through thick and thin he had been the head of the family - meaning the most important and powerful member of the family.

Not that Nissanka Aiya made anybody feel that he and nobody else ran the show. He was still the quiet, soft-spoken and 'concerned' man of the family. But we had miscalculated father.

We had thought that after so many years of struggle, hard work, brief spells of joy and longer spells of disorder and uncertainty, that he would be only too ready to take a back seat, let his brood manage affairs, and enjoy his old age in comfort, like most old people would like to do.

But father, fortunately or unfortunately for him, and for us too, was not in the category of 'most old people'. He was still a rebel. He wanted activity. He wanted to be the 'head' of things. He vehemently refused the revered status of Grand Old Man in retirement relegated mostly to Hansi Putuwa (arm chair) and being attended upon.

Lonely childhood

Father was a 'lonely' man in spite of two marriages and six children. Long, long years ago his mother had died giving him birth. His father had married a second time and my father had had a lonely childhood. I believe that 'child' had never left him. He had learnt to live with his loneliness. He had worked hard. Life had always been a battle for him.

He had not known much love in his life. And even when it was there, he failed to recognise it. So even at this juncture when all of us were ready and glad to 'make him comfortable' he refused that cocooned comfort. He would rather strike out on his own once again and taste sweet cherries of success or even the bitter berries of failure.

My feeling is that he was right in his decision. He was still a strong man and quite healthy. (He lived up to 101 years). The 'Hansi Putuwa' was certainly not for him. Incidentally, we never had a Hansi Putuwa in any of our homes.

So my father broke rein and ran away - so to say. With him of course, mother too. No, it was not an unwilling mother that followed father in his many paths. She had absolute faith in him and I am sure she loved him deeply, although my poor father may not have been aware of it.

Father had made a few trips out, without our consent of course, found a job and one day he just moved out together with mother. At that time we were flabbergasted, we were dumbfounded, we were even hurt. Nissanka Aiya and Akka must have been even more hurt than the others, but they did not show it. They bore this 'unholy' (according to us!) departure of father with stoic rectitude.

I was 'hurt' too and I must be the one who blamed father most, in my youthful foolishness. It took me years to understand the will and the indomitable courage of this man - my father.

The Batuwatte 'home' did not last long either. When father and mother went away they had taken the home part of it away - although they may not have realised it at that time. What we were left with was only a 'shell' of a home without the warmth and the scent of a real home. In any case we had to part once again. Akka had been transferred out.

Nissanka Aiya had experienced the 'futility' of the whole experience and he moved out closer to Colombo too. He may have even been thinking of marriage. I had just scraped through the Senior School Certificate exam and was on the lookout for jobs. I went back to Loku Aiya at Bendiyamulla to our 'Takaran Gedara'.

Gazette

I started applying for jobs right and left. In those days, there was only one way of knowing where the jobs were and what they were and that is by perusing the Govt. Gazette, which was readily available at Post Office counters. I can't remember seeing any newspaper notices. Even if there were, very few of us would have spent money on a newspaper.

Soon enough I found a job to my great relief, because I was still living on Loku Aiya. One day I received a registered letter from the Registrar General's office, Colombo. It said that I had been selected as a temporary clerk in the establishment and that I was to call at the office on a particular day [in February or March, 1949] to take up duty. A few weeks earlier about ten of us young men had been interviewed.

Loku Aiya was away at work and I broke the news to his young wife, Bentara Akka. "I must be the only one selected, I am sure.." I told her for 'effect' more than anything else. After all this was my very first job and here I am 'selected' after a proper interview! "I am sure you are the only one, Chandrasoma Malli" Bentara Akka assured me, smiling.

And so on the given date I presented myself at the R.G.O. - Registrar General's Office in Chatham Street, Fort. If you are an 'oldster' I am sure you will remember the RGO, that cream coloured oblong two-storeyed building, under the spreading Mara tree almost opposite the Cargills building.

It is a pity it was pulled down and replaced by a host of business premises, including the present Hemas. The RGO was old enough, not to be pulled down. Anyway that is the way of progress.

When I reported for duty, I found that most of the other chaps too had been called. In a way I was relieved. We had company.! I told so to Loku Aiya and Bentara Akka that evening when I got back home on the very first evening of my very first job.

"Ah, but surely, you must have come first in the interview" insisted Bentara Akka. 'That's why you got a registered letter!" She insisted further. Loku Aiya nodded his head in approval and I let the issue rest.

The RGO was a jolly old place. It had some fine characters, that I could almost write a book on. For the purpose of this column I will deal with just a few of them - mainly two of them in fact.

The one was the celebrated singer and vocalist C.T. Fernando. He was already there when we joined in. We were all 'researchers' in a kind of way. Okay, let's say 'searchers', to be exact. At that period of time, all the registers of births, deaths and marriages were preserved in the RGO. All the old records from all the provinces were sent here for preservation.

They were bound in very hard cover registers - rather like the Law Books - and stored away in special racks in a special room, a sort of attic below floor level. All of us 'searchers' worked in an adjoining room which had long benches and equally long desks, rather like the pews in a church.

The applications for copies of birth, death and marriage certificates were sorted out elsewhere in the office and sent down to us for the actual searching. We, the group of searchers were allotted certain divisions. If the events were long past, the 'search' was difficult. Often the old registers were dusty, torn and parched. But that was where the fun was.

I will be coming back to the fun and C.T. Fernando especially, next week. Till then, do bear with me.

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