Tales from my Island: Stories of Friendship – and a Sri Lankan Childhood

By Sanjiva Wijesinha

Tales from my Island is a collection of stories that presents a warm and light hearted look at human relationships and the many facets of friendship. Here are delightful tales crafted to make the reader "smile, chuckle, even laugh out loud" and remember those good old days - when we were not so good and not so old -.when we had so much to laugh about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9781483540412

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I. TALES FROM MY SCHOOLDAYS

1. Death to the Terrorist

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

- William Shakespeare. Henry V

The first time I met my friend Tiny Reid was on my first day at school.

We had just started day one of term one in the 2nd standard – and as schoolboys are wont to do, as soon as the bell rang for lunch someone started organising a game of cricket. One of the boys Vasantha had brought along a bat. Appointing himself captain of one team (which we felt he was entitled to do, by virtue of him being the owner of the bat) and his pal Ajit captain of the other, they were soon selecting their respective teams.

Since I had been assigned that morning to sit at the desk next to Vasantha’s in class, he selected me on to his team (little knowing what a woeful lack of cricketing skills I possessed) and we were about to start when I noticed that Tiny had not been selected for either of the teams. Aiy, I said you’ve left out Tiny!

Can’t help, we already have two teams said Vasantha bluntly. He’ll have to stay out.

Now this struck me as unfair, since Tiny had been sitting next to me in class (on the other side to Vasantha) and had come out with the rest of us to play.

No, I said, you’ll have to take him – otherwise it won’t be fair.

Oh, all right relented Vasantha he can be an extra player on our team.

Wise move, that – Tiny turned out to be one of the best cricketers in our class, much better than Vasantha and myself, and in years to come he ended up playing for the school first eleven as well as for Sara trophy teams. But that is another story.

Thus began my friendship with Tiny – a friendship that has spanned over fifty years. Knowing all he does about me, if he ever decides to blackmail me I would be well and truly sunk – except that I too know more about incidents in his life than anybody else! He is a person with whom, given the need, I would share my last spoon of rice – as I am confident he would with me if I were in the same situation.

One of the incidents I distinctly remember was the day the two of us got together to kill our maths teacher.

We were both in Standard 3 at that stage – and the maths master assigned to teach us could only be described, in the most complimentary terms, as a downright sadist. Those were the days when corporal punishment could be meted out even to seven year old boys – and the old man used to delight in slapping us or throwing the wooden blackboard-duster at us for the slightest misdemeanour. He even hit us if he asked us a question and we got the answer wrong – which was not difficult to do because we were so scared to open our mouths and say something wrong, that even if we knew the correct answer to the question he asked us, the wrong answer almost always came out.

After a whole month of putting up with this type of terrorism, Tiny and I decided that something had to be done about the old terrorist. Being an avid reader, I confidently told Tiny that I had read in a storybook that if you made a wish and threw a horseshoe over your shoulder, the wish would come true. If only we could get a horseshoe, I said, we could wish that the old man would die.

Dadda has a horseshoe on his office room wall, offered Tiny.

Our eyes gleamed. If only Tiny could (without his Dadda’s knowledge) borrow the horseshoe for a day, we could put our brilliant plan into action and save all our classmates from another ten months of terrorism

On the appointed day, Tiny came to school and grinned I’ve brought it. I couldn’t wait till the interval to work our magic – and as soon as the bell rang, we carried his school-bag with the all important horseshoe to a secluded part of the school grounds.

There, out of sight of anybody else, we carefully unwrapped the horseshoe. I went first – held the horseshoe in my right hand, stared straight ahead, screwed my eyes tightly shut, softly murmured I wish our maths teacher would die and then threw the horseshoe over my right shoulder.

Tiny picked it up, changed places with me, and repeated the procedure.

Quietly confident that the spell would work, we wrapped up the horseshoe, placed it carefully in the bottom of Tiny’s schoolbag - so he could return it safely to its place on his father’s office-room wall before his father missed it - and went back to class.

For the next few days we watched our teacher like hawks. When would the telltale signs of malignant disease invoked by our spell begin to show?

Unfortunately for us, the old man continued in the best of health. Neither jaundice nor breathlessness nor even a sudden chest pain came to take him away from us and relieve us of the horrible ordeal of having him come in to class three times a week for the duration of that year to terrorise us.

I was sure we must have done something wrong. Maybe the magic had gone out of Tiny’s father’s horseshoe. Maybe you were supposed to throw it over your LEFT shoulder. I don’t know the reason – all I know is that at the young age of seven ears I lost my faith in magic.

I had almost forgotten the incident until I got a phone call from Tiny some years ago.

Have you seen the papers? he asked our old maths teacher has died.

Are you sure? I queried.

Yes he said I just saw the obituary this morning. Too bad our horseshoe spell took three decades to work!

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2. Anton and the pencil

"A friend in need is a friend indeed’

Anon.

Whenever I turn to reminisce about my days in primary school I remember my old friend Anton Achilles.

Now Anton and I were not particularly close friends – we did not share the same interests or play the same sports for the school or even attend the same place of religious worship. But Anton was my never-to-be-forgotten friend because .... let me tell you the story.

When Anton and I were in the third standard at school – we must have been about 7 or 8 years old at the time – we had (as mentioned in the previous chapter) one of the most frightening Maths teachers one could imagine. The man had such a fierce demeanour that when in class he asked any of us a question (such as How much is eight times eight?) we were so scared that we might give the wrong answer, that invariably we would stammer out an incorrect answer. In those days teachers were allowed – nay they were EXPECTED – to administer corporal punishment to their pupils, even to boys as small as seven years old, so nary a day would pass without one of us getting a smack with the ruler from him. If we did not receive a physical blow, we were subject to the humiliation of having to stand on the form – being made to stand up on our seats until the class was over.

Our Maths class was usually held in the first period after lunch – and one day, after we had trooped back to class after spending the lunch interval playing and were getting ready for our work, I was mortified to discover that I did not have my pencil with me. Looking frantically in my pockets, to my horror I discovered a hole in my pocket – a small hole, but nevertheless one through which a schoolboy’s pencil could have slipped out. There was no time to go looking for the missing pencil because the master was coming in – so with a quick prayer that he would spend the period teaching rather than getting us to do some sums in our books, I sat as quietly as I could in my place.

Luck seemed to be with me, because after we all stood up and dutifully chanted Good afternoon Sir, he turned to the blackboard, took up a piece of calk and started explaining some new work to us. After a short while, I started breathing more easily, and even managed to correctly answer one of the questions that he suddenly barked at me.

Unfortunately, just as I was beginning to think that I was safe, he finished explaining and turning round to us said Now take out your exercise books and write down these sums – and complete them before the bell rings.

What could I do? While all my classmates began opening their bags and taking out their books, I gingerly put up my hand - and when the ogre’s gaze rested on me, I hesitantly said, Sir, I think I have lost my pencil.

You have WHAT, I say? he barked.

I’m sorry, sir, but I have lost my pencil. Turning my pocket inside out, I showed him the hole (which I had managed to enlarge with my finger for added effect). See, Sir, there is a hole in my pocket and it must have fallen out.

The master glared at me. You have five minutes to go and get yourself another pencil he snarled otherwise you be careful! and he made to shoo me out of the class.

It was at this point that Anton stood up. At a moment like this it required considerable courage to stand up, let alone to open one’s mouth. YES, Achilles thundered the master, staring daggers at Anton.

Sir said Anton, I have got two pencils. I can lend Wijesinha one.

The old man stared at Anton, then at me, then at Anton again. Wijesinha he barked you must thank this boy for his generosity. If not for him, you would have suffered a SEVERE thrashing from me for being careless!

I gratefully walked up to Anton and accepted his extra pencil, and was able to complete the sums that we had been set. I don’t know if the sadistic old man was disappointed that he could not use the ruler on me.

But from that day onwards Anton was my friend – a friend from the days of my childhood whom I have never forgotten, and will always remember with affection.

Isn’t that what is meant by having ‘A Friend in Need"?

3. Nimalsiri’s Archives

You can go through life and make new friends every year –every month practically –but there is never any substitute for those friendships of childhood.

-Mma Ramotswe (in Alexander McCall Smith: The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency)

A few months after we returned from Australia to live in Sri Lanka, I decided to pay a visit to my old friend Nimalsiri at his home in Panadura.

Now Nimalsiri and I have been pals for a long, long time, having first met in primary school in what he describes as our baby days. In fact a few years ago he once introduced me to a colleague by saying "Meet one of my baby pals’.

From those far away days we have been classmates and friends – in the primary classes, then the senior school and subsequently in medical college – so we share a lot of memories. What is significant about Nimalsiri is that he has preserved records of many of these memories in a large filing cabinet in his study that he calls The Archives. Neatly filed in alphabetical order – one file for each of his friends - are letters, cards, newspaper-cuttings, photographs and other items of information about each of us. It is not the stuff, I hasten to add, that a blackmailer would find useful – rather it constitutes as permanent a record as it is possible to maintain about the people with whom he has shared his life.

The drive down to Panadura that evening was an ordeal, because I made the novice’s mistake of leaving Colombo around 6 pm and heading straight into the southbound evening traffic along the Galle Road. The 15 kilometres from our home to his took over one and a half hours, as I inched my way along the Galle Road in the company of innumerable other cars, buses, lorries, cyclists and three-wheelers. I finally reached the Panadura bus stand and the famous clock tower built by that great philanthropist Mr. Lambert Dias (I wonder: does the clock still chime Lambert, Lambert?) and at last managed to reach the street leading to Nimalsiri’s house in one piece.

After I had a shower and changed into a comfortable shirt and sarong, he poured us each a drink and we settled down on the cosy chairs in his sitting room. His wife produced bowls of cadju nuts and banana chips and joined us. I recalled the first time I met her, when Nimalsiri took me along to visit her at her parents’ home soon after he was granted visiting rights. He never told me why he selected me of all his friends to accompany him on his first ‘official’ visit there – I fondly believe it was because I was the best behaved of his friends and the one least likely to embarrass him that day in front of his intended parents in law. Anyway it was a pleasant evening as I recall. Because the two young lovers had eyes only for each other, which put Nimalsiri’s garguantan appetite on hold for the evening, I was able to engage in polite diversionary conversation with Nirmali’s parents while I diligently polished off three large slices of the Green Cabin chocolate cake that had been brought for us.

Now, thirty years later, here I was seated in the living room of their home. Nimalsiri carefully pulled out my file from The Archives. The folder was bulging with a variety of items: some photographs of a class trip to Horana when we were about ten and of another trip to Uswetakeiyawe when we were in university, a Christmas card I had sent him during our O Level days, a group photo of our class taken in our first year of medical school, the invitation that we had sent him and Nirmali for our wedding. There were letters I had written to him from various parts of the world, the letterheads constituting an undeniable record of posh notepaper pinched from hotels in which I had stayed and hospitals in which I had worked.

Each item evoked a story, an anecdote, a memory of ‘way back when’. These were souvenirs of chapters in our journey through life – and it is only with a precious few that we can share these memories.

As Mma Ramotswe said, You can go through life and make new friends every year –every month practically – but there is never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years.

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4. Gulliver’s Party

" ‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home

- John Howard Payne: from the opera ‘Clari, The Maid of Milan’ (1823)

We had just returned to retire in Sri Lanka after