The Kandy of my boyhood, in the early 1940s, was a friendly little town which enjoyed a sense of intimacy and neighbourliness. Cars were few and generally found only in the upmarket vicinity of Queen’s Hotel, Elephant House and Cargills. Everybody walked.
Each morning Father and I walked to school up Dharmaraja Hill from our home in Cross Street. Domestic chores sent me to Elephant House on Ward Street to buy butter , inhaling ‘en route’ the deliciously pungent smell of the ‘karavala kadays’ and watching sturdy coolies [as they were then called] of the ice store hefting huge slabs of sawdust powdered ice on their gunny covered backs.
I yet remember my first trip to the Bank of Ceylon on Ward Street to cash Father’s cheque , stuffing the enormous sum of One Hundred Rupees into the pocket of my shorts, firmly clutching it in a sweaty fist till I reached home, greatly relieved at not being waylaid. Of a weekend our family, two parents and four children, walked to Sri Pali College, Katugastota for lunch and conversation with Father’s good friend the Principal Arlin Perera.
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| The ‘Karavala kaday’ corner of Brownrigg Street in old Kandy |
On holidays, with my Trinitian friends Bruno and Roger Rodrigue, I ambled round the Lake doing the usual boy things of skimming flat stones on the water or bouncing pebbles off the shells of peacefully coupling tortoises. Rare visits to the Empire or Wembley cinemas inspired our pavement games.
Honouring Robin Hood, flexible twigs from Udawattakelle were strung with twine into bows and blunt arrows. And Tarzan’s fearsome yodel had many of us boys trying to out yell each other – only to have our ears boxed by irritated parent.
An occasional treat was at The Muslim Hotel to gorge on godamba roti , ‘fowl’ curry and incredibly sweet wattalappan. We enjoyed a sense of ownership as the splendour of the Perahera passed majestically right before our home, watching it crowded, shoulder to shoulder with families from faraway hamlets, our blood throbbing to the rhythm of the drums…..Bliss it was, then, to be a boy – and in wondrous Kandy.
Tea and culture
A brief historical excursion at this stage would be appropriate to understand the Kandy of 70 years ago. It was the twilight of the colonial era. An English Govt. Agent lived in King Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe’s Palace. English was the language of administration, secondary education and often, even personal conversation in the informal group of my father’s friends. Their lives and interests centred round Kandy and its environs. Colombo was rarely visited. It was a self-sufficient little enclave where our grown ups seemed to know everybody – from teachers, doctors and lawyers to ‘vatti-ammas’ and ‘kaday mudalalis’.
Many of my father’s friends, who shared his cultural interests were fellow teachers from Dharmaraja, Trinity and St.Anthony’s, journalists, as well as a few young lawyers. Unlike in later post-Independence decades, the Kandy of that era had no band of young University educated Staff Officers interested in cultural pursuits. These friends shared many interests, much of them involving Kandy’s environs and its history. They were fortunate in that similarly interested pioneers had already established two fora where such kindred souls could meet and share their interests. These were the Kandy Historical Association [KHA] and the Kandy Literary Society [KLS].
As a young schoolboy, very much on the fringes of their activity, I remember them as informal little gatherings of minimum formality. However, given the schoolmasterly predilections of the majority of members, minutes maintained in stout Monitors’ Exercise Books were read out before the evening’s proceedings.
The KHA met at The Polytechnic on Castle Street, opposite my favourite haunt Yusuf’s Corner Bookshop. Mr. Nambiar, the Principal of The Polytechnic was an interested member and glad to make his premises available for these gatherings, which rarely exceeded 20 participants. On special occasions short eats were provided by the members’ good ladies. Interestingly there were no lady members. In hindsight it strikes me that this was because, in that era, lady teachers were confined to the Primary school whose curriculum was devoid of ‘high culture’ – and as such, presumed to be uninterested.
The KLS met at the ‘Firs Hotel’ an imposing old mansion, set in a spacious garden of ‘fir’ trees [probably casuarinas] on the shores of the Kandy Lake. Strictly speaking it was no ‘hotel’- rather a respectable guest house for visitors in town on official business. Its manager, or proprietor, was probably a member as both the KLS and the KHA had the unique distinction of having neither membership fees nor funds to rent halls for their meetings. It is almost impossible to imagine today, the civilized milieu that prevailed in Kandy 70 odd years ago.
Among those present
The membership of these societies was not identical, but frequently overlapped. Who were these ‘intellectuals’ [a word they would have abhorred] of that Kandy of yore ?
Vicar Lakdasa de Mel heads the list – there were no English savvy Bhikkus at that time. Among other members [to the best of my fading memory] were Evan St.Clair Rode, Richard Abeysekera, George Denlow and Ben Van Reyk, all of St.Anthony’s College, my uncle D.A. Devendra and S.N.R.Breckenridge of Trinity, my father D.T.D, Walter Dias Dheerasekera and Hector Weerasinghe of Dharmaraja, Arlin Perera of Sri Pali, the geographer Leiter from Finland, lawyers Noel Wimalasena and A.D.J. Gunawardena and journalist M.T.Jaimon. There were quite a few others whose names now escape me.
The discussions at the K.H.A centred round such topics as the architecture of Kandy’s Devales, perahera rituals, folk customs and rediscovered monuments such as the colossal Buddha of Elahera. Some of these talks were later written up and published in newspapers and journals.
I have far hazier memories of what went on at the K.L.S. The literary sensation of that decade was the author J.Vijaya-Tunga whose lyrical "Grass for my Feet" had just had the distinction of being published in England. As a fellow "boy from Galle" he called on Father. I remember a dapper little man in a white suit conversing with him, seated on our verandah as we children watched in awe. Vijaya-Tunga readily accepted the invitation to address the KLS and spoke to a rare "standing room only" crowd.
On a later occasion Father spoke about his own first book "This Other Lanka".
I remember listening, with some puzzlement, to an account of life in pre-war England by a speaker who had just returned from there. He raised laughter with his account of a friend who had filled the bath-tub and had an "ah-gudoos" bath standing on the bathmat, shocking the landlady with the resulting waterfall cascading down the staircase.
Casualty of war
Our family bade a sad farewell to Kandy in 1943. No longer were we to participate at the informative gatherings of the KHA and KLS. Meanwhile Kandy’s peace, now shattered by rumbling trucks, marching troops and air-raid drills, no longer had space or time for genteel literary pursuits . The KHA and KLS became another casualty of WW II.
I wonder whether any historian of the future will discover the two old Monitors’ Exercise Books of KHA and KLS Minutes and glimpse, through a dim window, these two lively oases that flourished, all-too-briefly, in that golden twilight of culture in old Kandy.
Until such time, this reminiscence may have sounded the Last Post for the KHA and the KLS.
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