He served here and the consolation is he will enjoy his life elsewhere with these named and unanmed greats.

May he attain Nibbana.

There is very little space between the two walls and the heavy fibre glass door. He holds the door open with one hand while clutching a pile of books with the other and says “Creep under my arm while I keep it open”. I do just that, barely brushing against him as I step into an office room at the Institute of cultural studies at four in the evening on a Monday, not so long ago. We are assured we would be left in peace for at least one hour. This is the closest I get to Tissa Abeysekara, physically…but spiritually? Well that’s a different story altogether.

As we face each other across a desk on which I place his latest book “Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences, Dr. Abeysekara gives me his trademark smile – bound to generate an equally wide grin from whoever happens to be its recipient ahm… depending on the situation. I dare not smile back. The situation is too serious. I must get him to talk about things he has not already revealed in “Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences”.

The past. Could he elaborate on the “split-social background” of his childhood. “I was born into an affluent family and taught to read and write in English” begins Dr. Abeysekara. English was spoken predominantly at home, and in his early childhood he grew up among the kind of people who dressed for dinner, and were filled with a lot of etiquette. His father had wanted to turn him into a pukka sahib , when, in an almost Charles Dickinson like twist of fate, his life changes from one of “cocooned comfort” to a “world of deprivation”. “The servants went, the cars went, the house became smaller” and as it got smaller his world grew bigger. But, he found himself an outsider in this “bigger” world where speaking in English was an embarrassment. This was a world where you drank tea by pouring it onto a saucer, where you walked around barefooted and where everyone spoke in 100 per cent Sinhala. He had to “disown the English language. Keep it under wraps , sometimes even mispronouncing English words in order to survive. He says “I became a schizophrenic by the age of ten”.

When he was eleven he was sent to the Windsor College, his first school, where he was made to sit with the girls because the teachers felt, as he was only eleven years old, the girls were safe around him. By the time he reached thirteen he could gain admittance to a proper school and having missed being in the primary classes, had found himself a stranger once more in another strange world. Wanting to prove to himself and the class bullies that he “could do it” he had passed his GSC exams with flying colours. Then, failed the University entrance exam “gloriously”. By this time he had lost total interest in text books and begun to make excursions into taboo land; begun to read Kafka and do everything a boy of his age was not supposed to do. He pauses and grins at me. It’s up to me and you to guess what he means by this last statement. He had sat for the exam a second time and this time too,“failed wilfully”. “I am a high-school drop out”! He says with a tinge of justifiable pride in his voice.

Having dropped everything and run away to Kandy, breaking his father’s heart and making his mother wait for him to come home, he believes it was Dr. Lester James Peiris who finally brought him back into focus. He says “Almost exactly on the day I met him my vagrant life came to a stop”.

He was twenty years old and still lived with his parents in a two bedroom house in Egodawatte. “Even though my parents gave me food and lodging I was not a burden on them. I earned the money for the things I needed”. He remembers how he read late into the night, in his little room at Egodawatte, and how he had made friends with other vagrants like G.W Surendra, Sugathapala de Silva, whom he calls “vagrants of a higher level”. Together they had got drunk, watched films, talked and argued till dawn, and shifted “gears to a higher level”. This had been a wonderful time to be alive – with “no war”, the issues of ethnicity unknown, you could roam the streets at any time of the night with no hindrance.

Today, looking back, Dr. Abeysekara says “the narrative of my life is clear to me now”. Having braced many a stormy sea, he has finally reached calm waters.

Our time together is up. He must leave now to conduct a lecture on Ingmar Bergman. His final words make me wish I had another hour with him, or two or three or till eternity. He says “Even when I write in English I write like a Sinhalese”. Could he elaborate please? But he is gone before I can phrase the question. Perhaps there should be a sequel to this interview, but then again, sequels are never equals.

So, here it is. He sliced out a piece of himself and slapped it down on the desk in front of me. I tried to put it on paper, tried to describe it in a way that you would see and feel and touch… I hope I have succeeded.

May you rest in peace.

Thank you for the stories. Thank you for the movies.

May you rest in peace.