The voice of a compassionate crusader
So long ago and yet so clear in the memory it could have been last night, two adults and a young adult were walking up Alfred House Avenue, Colombo 3, one evening in 1971, when a voice called out from a darkened doorway. The voice was friendly and kindly. The two syllables of our name were half spoken, half intoned. In music terms, it was a descending major third, an E followed by the C below.
The voice was that of an 18-year-old Sunila Abeysekera. Two years earlier, she and 11 others had gone to the US on a student exchange programme. That was how we became friends. The three persons walking past her home that night were the music critic Elmer de Haan, Father, and self. To give the occasion a context, it was shortly after the first uprising of the revolutionary Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna.
That night – like almost every night in Father’s routine – we were on our way to Lion House, where the two older men would continue their conversation over cups of tea, while we listened – and learned. Mr. de Haan was a daily visitor, and his visits were never under three hours long. If Father needed a break, he would suggest a stroll to Bambalapitiya.
When Elmer de Haan turned up the next night, his first question was about the voice that had called out the previous night. “There was no light, so I couldn’t see her face, but would I be correct in saying that the young lady who spoke to you must be a very kind and compassionate person?” he asked. She is, we replied, basing our answer on a two-year-old friendship.
The sound of Sunila Abeysekera’s gentle voice speaking in the dark had fallen favourably on the hyper-sensitive, hyper-critical ears of Mr. de Haan. Like Father, Mr. de Haan read faces and voices with uncanny accuracy. Mr. de Haan, it should be added, was also much charmed by young female company, and Sunila Abeysekera’s youthful, engaging voice that night had impressed him to a surprising degree.
On September 11 this year, when Younger Brother heard that we were heading to Maharagama to attend Sunila Abeysekera’s funeral, he asked whether the deceased was the same person whose voice had so beguiled family friend Elmer de Haan 42 years earlier. In 1969, Sunila Abeysekera and the 11 other Ceylonese students joined hundreds of foreign students from around the world who had come to the US as mini-ambassadors for their countries. We would live with American families, attend high school, and be exotic guests in the American community. That year overseas would have a life-time impact for many of us. America was an exciting proposition and destination for any 17-year-old curious about the great world out there. As it happened, 1969 and ’70 were watershed years for the US, and for the rest of the world.
On the night of July 20, 1969, one week before we flew to the US, we switched off the lights and turned up the radio to hear an American voice, indistinct with radio static, announce, at 20:17:40 coordinated universal time, that Man – an American – had for the first time set foot on the Moon. A more momentous time to make our own first landing on American soil, in the week of the giant leap for mankind, could not be imagined. The excitement the First Man on the Moon felt on picking up a sampling of lunar stones to send back to Earth would have been like the thrill we felt as we scooped up a handful of American soil, bits of grass attached, to slip into our first letter home from the US.
The hundreds of foreign students parted ways at the campus of Hofstra University, Rhode Island. We boarded Greyhound buses and headed out to our respective States to begin the next chapter of our lives. As far as possible, we were found American families to match our own. Sunila Abeysekera was placed with a politically active Jewish family, not unlike her own socially and politically driven family. Her father, the late Charles Abeysekera, was the founder of the Social Scientists Association and president of the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality.
The next 12 months would be the most instructive, enriching, eye-opening and tumultuous time of our lives.By any reckoning, ’69-’70 was an extraordinary time. The Moon landing might have been the high point, but much of far-reaching import was happening on Earth, on and off US soil: ’69 was the year Richard Nixon became US President and announced the first withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam; anti-war demonstrations were taking place across the nation and student unrest was shaking up US campuses; ‘69 was also the year of the Stonewall Riots in New York that set off the gay rights movement. Counterculture was in and Flower Power was entering its peak season. It was the year of the rock festival Woodstock and everyone was talking Peace and Love.
It seems, in hindsight, as if these US experiences had come together to create a template for Sunila Abeysekera’s future as an activist.We returned to Sri Lanka with a couple of life-defining experiences, along with American clothes, books and music. Sunila Abeysekera toted the famous Woodstock album, which would inspire her hip and gangling brother Prasanna and his gang to cause sonic rock waves in Colombo.
In the years that followed, Sunila was the only one of the 11 other US returnees we would meet regularly, if not daily. We stopped to swap US experiences. Her knowledge of and feel for world literature and music and Western culture was such that it came as a small surprise to find this very English-educated young lady from CMS Ladies’ College equally, or even more deeply, steeped in her own culture. She could be as Sri Lankan as a village nonaa in hetta and redhdha stoking a dhara-lipa to cook the day’s meal.
We would chat at the entrance to her home. Her house opened directly onto Alfred House Avenue. One day she invited us inside. The atmosphere within was of books, music, art, film, theatre. Intellectuals with Trotskyite and Leninist goatees would visit. We admired the home and its contents, including the comfortable, artsy rattan-weave chairs we were occupying. Sunila said they were designed by a well-known architect. We discussed the chairs and the architect’s main work. Almost with regret, she added: “Too bad he has an unkind way of speaking about people.”
This was an unexpected observation, but it came from someone who, to our knowledge, never spoke an unkind word about anyone. Is unkindness that bad a thing? It can be a harsh form of truth-telling. The ferocious music critic who had heard the inflections of a kind spirit in Sunila’s voice would rather say unkind things about people than pronounce a good word. We are not saints. Perhaps Sunila Abeysekera was some kind of a saint.
We lost touch with Sunila Abeysekera in the mid-’70s. Our paths had started to diverge. Around 1975-’76, Duplication Road cut a swathe through Colombo 3 and created shortcuts. We stopped using Alfred House Avenue to reach the Galle Road, and so lost sight of the Abeysekeras. Over the next 40 years, Sunila Abeysekera would be in the news through her involvement in this or that social and political cause, often at risk to her life, before cancer took her life in September this year. She was 61, an early age to die, but she packed more into her years than many do in much longer life spans.
The spunky comrade and crusader has earned many tributes in the media. Photographs show a matronly, grey-haired woman with a mischievous smile. It was the sporty smile we remembered from the ’70s, before we lost contact. We would get to see Sunila Abeysekera on only two more occasions after that. In January 2009, she was one of the speakers at the funeral of slain journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge. She spoke in Sinhala, and with passion. The voice was instantly recognisable. We thought of going up to her after the funeral, but the press of the crowd was too great.
In 2011, we bumped into each other at the Galle Literary Festival. That time we came face to face. It took her a second to recognise us. She smiled and spoke our name, but asked not one word about how we were or where we had been all these years. She had more important matters – and persons – on her mind. She was chaperoning a group of young people from the North whom she had brought down to experience the international literary get-together, and she was counting heads before taking them out to lunch. They disappeared into the crowd, and that was the second and last time we saw Sunila Abeysekera, post 1974-’75.
In the latter 40 years of her life, Sunila Abeysekera’s voice was heard, here and around the world, at forums on equal rights. Her other voice as a singer of freedom songs was also widely heard. In the early years, she had moved with members of the JVP. Her voice was heard at rallies, as it was on stage, film and radio.
It was strange to be hearing eulogies of Sunila Abeysekera just three years after hearing her voice in tribute to Lasantha Wickrematunge.
Among those who spoke at her funeral was her daughter, who said her mother made magic out of life and art. She talked of Sunila taking her to see a Pedro Almodovar film, a bold choice of entertainment for a child of 12; how her mother would switch off the house lights on full moon nights so the family could experience moonlight at its purest; how they took a terminally ill Sunila to the beach in Wellawatte so she could dip her feet in the sea for the last time, and how she looked up at the setting sun and declared, “This is nice.”
On clear nights, around midnight, we walk our dogs along Duplication Road, and sometimes we turn into Alfred House Avenue. The Abeysekera’s former home still stands, in shadow. We remember the voice in the doorway, one night in 1971.