One sharp shock of fate - and the finest can find a darker destiny

Carl Muller

Review:
A life in the round - Desamanya Kamalika: The Girl from Giruwa Pattuwa.
By Hilary Abeyratne
WHT Publications (Private) Ltd, Colombo, 2006.
pp. 180

BOOK REVIEW: It was April 1994, when Dr. Kamalika Priyaderi Abeysinghe Weera Wickramasuriya, wife of Dr. Michael Abeyratne, returned to Sri Lanka from Saudi Arabia... and it was when on one of her journeys to Tangalle - the fourth such to attend on one of her cases; and carry boxes of drugs and medicines, that the vehicle she was in hit a concrete signboard. Michael was with her too, and their son, Dayan, was at the wheel.

A passing trishaw pulled up. The driver was carrying passengers to Galle, but he turned them out. Kamalika felt a searing pain in her chest and severe difficulty in breathing. She cried out to onlookers to cut away her seat belt that was choking her. The trishaw driver found Michael all but buried under a pile of drug and medicine packs and had to drag him out through the hatch.

This is the setting that readers will find so painfully dramatic, even unpalatable, and it gives to this book its electric fire... for it is this book I am telling you about; and no truer story has yet been told. It is a fiercely loving tribute to one of the greatest modern names in the medical and social history of this island.

This book has been compiled ‘in awe’ by Hilary Abeyratne, who is Kamalika’s brother-in-law. He writes with a sad sort of passion; and the Foreword by Sunethra Bandaranaike calls Kamalika “a truly inspirational woman”, and warmly recognises Hilary’s - shall I say ‘opus’ - as “fascinating and eminently readable... the love with which it has been crafted... palpable on every page.”

As Sunethra reminds:

(Kamalika) was always a leader in the fight for fairness; and she was always a leader in bringing compassion to those who need(ed) it most. She fought to improve nutrition for children, she battled against malaria in the Anuradhapura District, she established free clinics across the Mahaweli scheme... Her love for people was equalled by her love for animals... her house was always full with lovable stray dogs that she did not have the heart to turn away...

Hilary puts the tragedy in controlled tones in his prologue. Kamalika, Michael and Dayan, carrying a car-load of medicinal drugs to ‘Nawajeewana’ - an organisation that provided free medical care and also rehabilitated disabled children. It was dawn when, at Ambalangoda, a child suddenly ran across the road.

Dayan braked hard and swerved; and the car hit a concrete signboard. They were rushed to hospital, but Kamalika was so badly injured that she was transferred by air to the Karapitiya Teaching Hospital. One of the blood transfusions she received was contaminated. She contracted the dreaded HIV virus.

It was then that the vileness began. The medical profession closed ranks, made her out to be a villain, sought to protect its collective reputation. One sharp shock of fate... one dawn crash far from home... and her life remained to be torn to pieces by those who even disrupted her attempts to help her fellow-sufferers. As Hilary writes:

(I am presenting Kamalika) as she was for the whole of her seventy years, instead of concentrating only on the last nine...

But it was the dark end-years that spawned this story and the build-up to it is told with the true skill of a historian-cum-biographer. To tell of Kamalika’s childhood, her growing years, her aristocratic origins, will be to invade the author’s territory. His chapters tell it all, and, if only to whet my readers’ appetites, allow me to point-form some details:

* Her father, George, who traced his ancestry to Batiyatissa, who was Maha Bethme Nilame of the Kataragama Devale, was a distinguished obstetrician an gynaecologist; the first to hold the Chair in these two disciplines at the University of Ceylon. Kamalika also earned renown for her exceptional achievements in medicine.

* In her book, “Nobodies to Somebodies”, Kumari Jayawardena tells of the various Dias families. Kamalika’s mother, Hilda Dias, belonged to one of the Panadura Dias’s.

* George and Hilda, with their children, lived in ‘Carlsholm’ - a palatial Ward Place mansion, then in another luxurious house in the same street.

* Kamalika was a ‘silver-spoon’ child - the best of food, clothes and the best of education. She was much pampered; and also suffered from asthma. As Hilary says, she was once passed under the belly of an elephant; even made to eat a thalagoya’s tongue, in the hope that these traditional practices would help get rid of the asthma.

* She had her primary schooling at Ladies’ College in 1949. She made a life-long friend in Premini Amerasinghe who told of Kamalika’s happy-go-lucky behaviour and strength of character. Kamalika and Premini were the only two from Ladies’ to enter the pre-Med year at the University.

Kamalika did not have it easy, but finally, she set to with a will, pushed by Michael - and it was the beginning of an illustrious medical career.

After their marriage, Michael and Kamalika went on post-graduate study to the UK. Michael’s assessment of his wife is worth recording:

‘Until we left for England, Kami was a spoiled and pampered young lady who never had to fend for herself. I do not think that she expected there would be long periods when she would have to be by herself, and sometimes in very uncomfortable circumstances.

‘So this was the period when she not only acquired the paper qualifications as a patrician but also matured as a woman and developed strengths that would serve her well in the years to come. Admittedly she did have relatives and family friends around her but it was she who was able to strike our and become her own woman.’

Hilary records the early consultant years and the way in which Kamalika’s own clinical success and “her natural charm and charisma” made some of the medical profession to dislike her. Perhaps they saw in her a threat to their own positions. One top-ranking paediatrician at the Lady Ridgeway would hurl painful and sarcastic comments at Kamalika.

Even the SLFPs political opponents, with their obstructionist tactics, made life difficult for Michael and Kamalika. They moved to Gampaha, Anuradhapura, battled the malaria epidemic there and discovered that there was a post-malarial defect in the red blood cells of the locals that was a G6pd deficiency.

Kamalika was awarded a National Science Council grant to conduct an island-wide study of this. It was a medical problem uncovered for the first time in the island.

Naturally, this book takes in every aspect of Kamalika’s medical career - in Sri Lanka, London, Dublin, Bremen, Oslo, Stockholm... then back to Sri Lanka to face a JVP insurrection in 1971 and the turmoil in Anuradhapura; then back to the Lady Ridgeway where she was accepted as physician and Michael as paediatric surgeon.

They spent 18 dedicated years and in this period attended many conferences abroad: Manila, New Delhi, Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Calcutta. Kamalika presented her last conference paper at the Fourth National Symposium on Neonatal Thyroidism in Saudi Arabia, for that was the time she and Michael had to seek refuge out of the island on account of death threats by the JVP - and all because she continued to work at the Lady Ridgeway even when the insurgents wanted the hospital closed!

Back in the North Central Province, she opted to lead the Mahaweli Clinics set up along the course of the river. She was made a member of the Council of the Red Cross. Michael was also a representative for the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society and he and Kamalika often treated and raised abandoned animals until the creatures could be released into the wild.

Hilary also tells how Kamalika had treated and cured Koko, a young Orang-utan in the Dehiwela Zoo, who had chronic diarrhoea; and of how Lyn de Alwis had written a long article about this for a Sunday newspaper.

While in Fifth Lane, Colombo, the couple experienced the departure of their children, one by one. Kamalika, who liked to write poems, penned these lines.

The house

The house once full
Of children, joy and laughter
Is now empty and quiet
As they have gone away.

The leader of this fun and frolic
Sadly left this life and us
In sorrow and in mourning
Never again to pass this way.

The others have left this house
To continue their various ways thro’ life;
Some to their own homes
And others to foreign lands.

The house has lost its lustre,
The woodwork dimmed,
Its arms outstretched in vain
To welcome back again.

And time will pass,
Friends and neighbours leave,
We too will pass away
Leaving you in other hands.

Be happy dear house.
You have served us well. When her eldest daughter, Aruni died of ovarian cancer, yet another poem of Kamalika deserves mention:

Sorrow (for Aruni)

The loss of a much-loved child is deep sorrow.
The grief-sodden hours are grey with loss
Knowing that she will never return
Remembering the happy hours
The promise unfulfilled and lost.

The struggle to live goes barely on
But each day brings forth trials and stress
Until the will to live fades out
Although it’s hard to die
The need to let go overpowers.

Then death came swiftly
To take that last quivering breath
And life was gone to a fresh becoming
All that’s left is a casket of ashes
Of a child that was but could not continue to be.

Although parents would gladly give their lives
To save their child
Their Kamma is no substitute for hers
The first-born child, a doctor to be
Left this life as her Kamma and life force expired.

Just so will our lives end
When our Kamma is done.
But neither grief nor lamentation can bar the way
If we cannot ourselves save ourselves
How could we do the same for her
Who was destined not to be.

The second child was Nilu,the third Shalini, and then came Dayan, his mother’s favourite and a brilliant student who yet remained a pain in the neck to his teachers. As Hilary says, when Dayan obtained seven distinctions and one credit at the O/Level examination, he was the only candidate ever to have a teacher who demanded that there be a re-scrutiny of Dayan’s scripts to have them marked down!

The story proceeds in leaps and bounds - JVP threat, Saudi Arabia, Goa, Melbourne...Hilary has not been sparing and has written in a most polished style but with that throbbing sense of both admiration and sorrow.

This book also abounds with people only too well known and known of in Sri Lankan society and the professions. Certainly, readers will not simply make note but also tell of what they have read and what Hilary has revealed. It is concerning this that, I wonder whether Hilary has treaded warily enough.

The book may seek to give us a true and well-scripted account of the real Kamalika-her agonies and ecstasies; the real person she was, never really understood because of the way she simply waded through life, all service before self. This book shows the shining spirit that possessed her, absorbing all the buffets of life with a near-saintly patience.

In succeeding only too well with this portrayal, Hilary has also involved a tremendous cast of characters, too well known in the tight circles of society. He may have glossed it at times to say: “Some members of (Kamalika’s) professional and others, too, who battened on her HIV status to drag her and her husband in mire, “but these ‘some members’ given the time and place mentioned, could easily be identified; and there will be many others of like bent who will doubtless smart under the charges levelled at them.

But then, this is also so typically Sri Lankan, isn’t it? The pecking orders will be set up - in medical institutions, in Universities, in research organisations, in every public or government venture that offers plums of office, grants, chairs of learning and the like.

In such a milieu there will always be those who peck away snidely, the lickers of backsides, who, aware of their defects in their own slots, will do their best to peck away if only to peck their way into the shoes of a better.

This is the carnival side-show of the mean-minded and the sycophants, the seekers after wealth, position and prestige.

Hilary has made this very clear...that there are always the assassins of character, the life-destroying, the malicious and the jealous, ever at work. This could also mean that this book that seeks a justification and a telling need to allow Kamalika to “rest in peace” can sow more outbursts of lies, as those, shown up in their true colours, seek to defend themselves and add to their besmirching of a woman who can now no longer defend herself.

This, to me, is a worrying side of this book, and I can only hope that there will be no more falsehoods, no more denials, no more attacks on career and character and reputation. We are all aware that the “grapevine” in this country also holds many blackened fruit.

On the other hand, of course, any such “dirty tricks” will only bring back strongly to our memories, the human wonder that was Kamalika! Hilary has done his utmost to nail every canard. He has stuck his neck out and given us this scintillating biography with strong abiding love. And he says in the end.

There cannot be too many people anywhere in the world who have achieved what she did and who have fought without respite for the causes that she embraced.

This was finally recognised when President Chandrika Kumaratunga awarded her, posthumously, at an elaborate ceremony at the BMICH on her seventy-first birth anniversary, the highest honour that women have achieved in Sri Lanka. Hence the title of this tribute: DESAMANYA KAMALIKA’

The photo-gallery and the collection of Kamalika’s poems add vastly to this book. Let it be read; let it be held up proudly. It is a throbbing tribute to a truly inspirational life - and let it lie over her. Her story...her long struggle and her triumph...her exceptional will to soldier on, undaunted, and to die with a smile on her face.