Transitions

MEMORIES: I had only a few days in London on this trip, on the way back from Italy. Since I had a bad back and could not risk straining it before the rigours of carrying luggage on and off trains during the Italian tour, I had minimized movement on the way out and avoided London.

This was not really a problem, since as a city Oxford is much more endearing. However, one's student day friends are invariably the most important, so seeing them is a vital part of trips to England, and unfortunately most of them still live in the capital.

Paucity of time was solved however by one of them kindly hosting a party for me at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, an institution which I have never joined, but which has been a source of great hospitality over the last three decades. I gave a modest guest list, but he doubled it, and included a couple of people I had not seen for more than half my life that has now passed since I returned home at the end of 1979.

Time has certainly passed. Pints of beer bought propped against the bar have changed to champagne served in a private function room. Briefless barristers now own country houses. Two of the friends I shared a flat with are now members of parliament, alas as Conservatives.

Another is Lord Mayor of Kensington and Chelsea, though his conservatism seems to have got even more radical over the years, and banquets have been superseded by seminars. The three mothers who were there were no longer married, one of them never had been. Two men were almost completely bald. One of the girls looked younger than she'd done as an undergraduate.

Going home on the underground, after dinner upstairs for just a few, old fogies plus a much younger half English cousin now in the British Foreign Office, I wondered - as I have so often done - whether it was foolish to have come back home.

My father, thirty years ago, had informed me that my horoscope indicated I would do much better abroad. I have no doubt now that he was right. But in sending his last, or rather first, child abroad, to Oxford as well, he ensured my own return. My mother felt lonely and wrote what were for her very anxious letters, and I decided to come back and see how the land lay.

My excuse was that it was cheaper to type a thesis up in Sri Lanka, and that was what I had done, while finalizing it, over three months in 1978. They were great fun, and so, when the thesis was finally accepted (after retyping: why, my examiners had inquired, did my typist insist on placing a comma after Mrs), I came back to a job at Peradeniya and tea that appeared like magic when one needed it, and warmth.

But, whereas 1978 had been a time of hope, 1980 was the opposite. The economy had been opened up in 1977, and I had thought that we would start moving. We still had a head start - both Bangkok, and even Singapore, both of which I travelled through in 1978, seemed provincial even then in comparison with Colombo, though Singapore had clearly moved on fast from the backwater I had first seen in 1970.

By 1980, though, Singapore was far ahead. Symptomatic of the problem was I think the incident in which I was first warned of JR's self-destructive vindictiveness. He had sacked Shirley Amerasinghe, undoubtedly the best diplomat we had produced in decades, from the post of our Representative at the United Nations, which meant he had also to cease to be Chairman of the Committee on the Law of the Sea.

He had been an excellent Chairman, and several third world countries, including Singapore in those days, had asked for him to be kept on, but JR was adamant. It was claimed that Singapore had even offered to make Shirley a member of their own delegation, so he could continue as Chairman, but this did not prove practicable. With that, Sri Lanka, which had just been Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement too, ceased to be of any importance whatsoever in the world at large.

I was told all this by Lakshman Wickremesinghe, the Bishop who became such a prominent critic of JR over the next few years, as Chairman of the Civil Rights Movement. He said that his brother Esmond, who had fallen out with Shirley at the same time JR did, but was much more warm hearted, had actually pleaded with JR to keep Shirley on, but to no avail. JR never forgave, said Lakshman, in 1978 - and so it proved, by 1980.

The enforcement of the Prevention of Terrorism Act in Jaffna in 1979 led to much greater support for the terrorists. July 1980 saw a general strike and the widespread sacking of many government servants. And then, in October, Mrs Bandaranaike's Civic Rights were taken away, and the stage set for the wholesale destruction of democracy over the next couple of years, and the strong arm tactics that included attacks on Tamils in 1981 as well as 1983.

Lakshman, who would have been 79 a couple of weeks back had he not died after the horrors of 1983, was pleased when I resigned over the Civic Rights issue, though no one else was.

That too was something to wonder about later, though in the end, like returning, not I think to be regretted. The two things somehow seem to go together, the latter affirming the very different nature of life in Sri Lanka from the world of the Oxford and Cambridge.

But I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that Lakshman too had studied at Oxford and been tempted to stay on, before deciding - on the advice, he would say, of his brother - to return to a society in transit.