Gunadasa Kapuge is calling…

I am not someone who listens to the radio. I was never fascinated with music or songs in that I didn’t look for them, collect, reflect and discuss. What songs I know and have come to love have for the most part been those played by people around me or what I heard over a radio switched on by someone else. Random, mostly.

And there’s a random line from a random song that I heard, with a twist, on an unforgettable afternoon over a car radio where the press of a button had connected to someone else’s choice of frequency. That line was the last of a lot of things Kingsley said during that programme on Sirasa Radio.

I was at the wheel, returning from my sister-in-law’s homecoming in Matugama along with mywife, pregnant with our second child, our first who was just two years, and some relatives. ‘Dan chithakaya dalvana mohothai…samugena yanna apen thava mohothai…nododa inne ai [It is now time to light the pyre…there’s only a moment left before you bid us goodbye…why are you silent?]’ It’s a line from the duet that Gunadasa Kapuge and Malani Bulathsinhala sang, ‘dam paatin laa sanda basa yanava…[the moon, in mauve, is setting].’

Sirasa moved onto some other programme. The words, the man who was no more and what he meant to me and of course to thousands of others, stayed. There may have been other listeners who too went silent, who too could not stop the tears, I don’t know. It’s been twenty years since that day for he passed away on the 3rd of April, 2002; it feels like it all happened a few days ago and it also feels like it never happened at all. Maybe that’s how it is with artists and others who touch many lives deeply.

Kapuge stays, not just with songs, but the things people have to say about him. Little things. Acts of kindness and compassion. Thoughtfulness. The things he valued far more than money, accomplishments or fame. Too many to recount, but I wrote down a few, around ten years ago in a piece titled ‘The lost songs of Gunadasa Kapuge.’ I had forgotten what I had written, so I looked it up and found a comment which too I had forgotten about.

Chathura Sachith Weerakoon remembered Kapuge aș a great friend of his father, who he says wasn’t a fan. Kapuge, apparently would visit their place in Ratnapura on his way to concerts without bothering to check if anyone was home.

He remembered that Kapuge treated their maternal grandmother as though she was his own mother. Once he had brought her a Glucometer because he remembered their mother’s response to his question over the old lady’s blood sugar level. He never bypassed or passed through people’s lives; Kapuge stopped, stayed and that’s why he remains in people’s hearts even today. 

‘He cried at my grandmother’s funeral.’

There are many ways to describe the life he led, but perhaps the most poetic capture could be drawn from the song sabanda api kandu novemu (let us not be [like] mountains):

වියරු ගිනිදැල් නොවෙමු
වනය අවුලා  තබන
මිහිර දෙන වැස්ස වෙමු
දැවෙන කැලයට වසින

‘Let us not be like intemperate flames that set fire to the thicket, but instead be the rain that delights by quenching the burning forest.’

He was like the softest rain. He simply sang with us, sang of us and for us and, as I wrote so long ago, ‘mirrored mirrored the rhythms and rhymes that make up our lives and took us to places where we could see ourselves and therefore understand where we should go.'

He wasn’t singing only about the ways in which our world trembled, shattered and burned, but was also healing our senses with a balm that can only be produced by someone who was acutely aware of what had happened and had suffered the same losses, same sorrows.

 

He is gone. He stays. Why then is he saying nothing, I must ask myself the question Kingsley asked twenty years ago. I don’t have to wait long. There’s a voice that arrives. It is a call, an andaheraya, untranslatable but easily recognized by hearts that have known or desire heartbeat. It’s Gunadasa Kapuge.  

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

Other articles in this series:

Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California

Hemantha Gunawardena's signature

Pathways missed

Architectures of the demolished

The exotic lunacy of parting gifts

Who the heck do you think I am?

Those fascinating 'Chitra Katha'

The Mangala Sabhava

So how are things in Sri Lanka?

The most beautiful father

Palmam qui meruit ferat

The sweetest three-letter poem

Buddhangala Kamatahan

An Irish and Sri Lankan Hello

Teams, team-thinking, team-spirit and leadership

The songs we could sing in lifeboats when we are shipwrecked

Pure-Rathna, a class act

Jekhan Aruliah set a ball rolling in Jaffna

Awaiting arrivals unlike any other

Teachers and students sometimes reverse roles

Matters of honor and dignity

Yet another Mother's Day

A cockroach named 'Don't'

Colombo, Colombo, Colombo and so forth

The slowest road to Kumarigama, Ampara

Sweeping the clutter away

Some play music, others listen

Completing unfinished texts

Mind and hearts, loquacious and taciturn

I am at Jaga Food, where are you?

On separating the missing from the disappeared

Moments without tenses

And intangible republics will save the day (as they always have)

The world is made of waves

'Sentinelity'

The circuitous logic of Tony Muller

Rohana Kalyanaratne, an unforgettable 'Loku Aiya'

Mowgli, the Greatest Archaeologist

Figures and disfigurement, rocks and roses

Sujith Rathnayake and incarcerations imposed and embraced

Some stories are written on the covers themselves

A poetic enclave in the Republic of Literature

Landcapes of gone-time and going-time 

The best insurance against the loud and repeated lie

So what if the best flutes will not go to the best flautists?

There's dust and words awaiting us at crossroads and crosswords

The books of disquiet

A song of terraced paddy fields

Of ants, bridges and possibilities

From A through Aardvark to Zyzzyva 

World's End

Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse

Street corner stories

Who did not listen, who's not listening still?

The book of layering

If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain

The world is made for re-colouring

The gift and yoke of bastardy

The 'English Smile'

No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5

Visual cartographers and cartography

Ithaca from a long ago and right now

Lessons written in invisible ink

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness'

A tea-maker story seldom told

On academic activism

The interchangeability of light and darkness

Back to TRADITIONAL rice

Sisterhood: moments, just moments

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows

Sirith, like pirith, persist

Fragrances that will not be bottled 

Colours and textures of living heritage

Countries of the past, present and future

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains

The ways of the lotus

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville

Live and tell the tale as you will

Between struggle and cooperation

Of love and other intangibles

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions

The universe of smallness

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills

Serendipitous amber rules the world

Continents of the heart

  

The allegory of the slow road 

 

 

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Homeward bound

Pic, courtesy Daily News

‘Homeward Bound’ is a Simon & Garfunkel song that’s all about the solitude of a struggling poet-singer in a strange city. It speaks of nostalgia for ‘home’. It is claimed that Paul Simon wrote it at a railway station near Widnes waiting for the early morning train to London. ‘Home’ apparently was a woman called Kathy Chitty. For him. At that time.

‘Home is where the heart is,’ we have been told. That’s true. Home is also family. It is village or community. It is nation. It is also, well, home; the place you live, the place you grew up in, the place which more than anywhere else holds the most and most poignant of memories.

Covid-19 has either forced people to inhabit home, either physically or through that interesting device called nostalgia. Much more than they did before. Some are homeward bound, as in they are on their way home, and others are home-bound for they can’t leave and are possibly learning that some binds are not easily severed.

‘Home,’ in Sri Lanka, is still something that pulls. We may work far away from what was ‘home’ before studies, work and preferred lifestyles took us away, but come the aluth avurudda, this home-pull is what empties Colombo. People go back to the gama, the ‘village’ that is coterminous with ‘home,’ in our cultural sensibilities. And wherever we choose to set up residence, we try to implant bits and pieces of ‘home,’ things that remind us of a different place and time.

Everyone wants to go home now. Those who have left village to ‘make it’ in the city or were compelled to find employment far away because income earning opportunities were hard to come by, want to go home.

Take the case of Vadivarusan, a resident from Hatton. He’s married and has a two year old son. He’s stuck in Colombo where he has been working as a laborer, earning Rs 1300 a day. Now had he worked on a tea estate back home he would be earning 500 rupees less. Of course he ought to be getting at least 1000 rupees per day but that’s a different story. So it makes sense for him to work in Colombo.

Really?

What is the value of being able to spend time with family? How does one calculate the worth of a son-father relationship marked by immediacy? Clean air, familiarity, proximity to family and friends -- how do we measure such things? Why don’t we detract from the Rs 1300 things such a loneliness, frustration, the inevitable discomforts of shared living quarters and poisons breathed and consumed? Can we put a value on such things? And is it because such things are hard to calculate and categorized that we consciously or unconsciously leave them out of the equation? Isn’t this why it becomes easy to compare 800 with 1300 and pick the latter as the better option.

And there are people living abroad, young and old, out there for studies, work or because they wanted to migrate for whatever reason. They want to come back. That wish is understood. We all know the pull of ‘home,’ and we can’t and indeed don’t want to resist.

It’s a good thing. Anything that has anything to do with roots has the potential to yield something wholesome.

This, however, is a crisis situation. It falls under categories such as unprecedented, unexpected and overwhelming. In a word, extraordinary. We don’t know if we will ever get back ‘ordinary.’ I’ve always believed that significant transformations happen with earth-shattering events or with the most delicate and even imperceptible acts — a mind-finger dipped in heart-ink writing a single word, ‘love’ or just three words, ‘let’s just be,’ for example. Covid-19 in what it is and what it has done probably falls into the former category.

We don’t know how things will play out. Maybe we will get back to the poisons that we embraced in our ignorance and arrogance. Maybe we’ll just go home or, if that's where we are in body, mind and conviction, stay home.  And therefore, let me finish this note with the words written by Dayasena Gunasinghe and sung by Gunadasa Kapuge and Sandya Bulathsinhala. It is one of Kapuge’s lesser known songs. The first line is ‘වියලී ගිය දෙතනේ නැත කිරි බිඳුවක් එරුනේ (not one drop of milk seeped into the parched breasts…).' Here is the last verse.

මතු යම් දිනක සිතුවිල්ලෙන් සිටින සඳ
දෑතක පහස සිහිනෙක මෙන් දැනේවිද
සිතියම් පොතේ ලොව විමසා බලන සඳ
කඳුලක හැඩය මහා සයුරේ දකීවිද
 
If there comes a day when when deep in thought
as in a dream will the touch of a hand be felt
if gaze was cast across the map of the world
will (you) notice in the Indian Ocean a tear-shaped isle?

Other articles in the series 'In Passing...':  [published in the 'Daily News']   

 

Vesak and THE WORD

The dignity of a kos-kola otunna

Avurudu in enhanced circumstances 

The Theory of Three Chillie Plants

The story of an aththamma and an aththa

The underside of sequestering

Potters, named and unnamed

Eyes that watch the world and cannot be forgotten 

Gunnepana: Planet Earth's new name

Melodies in and out of the 64 squares

Let's raise an army of rain-makers

Happy birthday Raj Amirthiah

Let's not stop singing in the lifeboats
When the Welikada Prison was razed to the ground 
Looking for the idyllic in dismal times    
Water the gardens with the liquid magic of simple ideas, right now    
There's canvas and brush to paint the portraits of love    
We might as well arrest the house!
The 'village' in the 'city' has more heart than concrete
Vo, Italy: the village that stopped the Coronavirus    
We need 'no-charge' humanity 
The unaffordable, as defined by Nihal Fernando

Liyaashya keeps life alive, by living 

Heroes of our times Let's start with the credits, shall we? 
The 'We' that 'I' forgot 
'Duwapang Askey,' screamed a legend, almost 40 years ago
Dances with daughters
Reflections on shameless writing
Is the old house still standing?
 Magic doesn't make its way into the classifieds
Small is beautiful and is a consolation  
Distance is a product of the will
Akalanka Athukorala, at 13+ already a hurricane hunter
Did the mountain move, and if so why?
Ever been out of Colombo?
Anya Raux educated me about Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA)
Wicky's Story You can always go to GOAT Mountain
Let's learn the art of embracing damage
Kandy Lake is lined with poetry
There's never a 'right moment' for love
A love note to an unknown address in Los Angeles
A dusk song for Rasika Jayakody
How about creating some history?
How far away are the faraway places?
There ARE good people!
Re-placing people in the story of schooldays   
When we stop, we can begin to learn
Routine and pattern can checkmate poetry
Janani Amanda Umandi threw a b'day party for her father 
Sriyani and her serendipity shop
Forget constellations and the names of oceans
Where's your 'One, Galle Face'?
Maps as wrapping paper, roads as ribbons
Yasaratne, the gentle giant of Divulgane  
Katharagama and Athara Maga
Victories are made by assists
Lost and found between weaver and weave
The Dhammapada and word-intricacies
S.A. Dissanayake taught children to walk in the clouds
White is a color we forget too often  
The most beautiful road is yet to meet a cartographer

malindasenevi@gmail.com

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The barbed-wire that divides and impoverishes

Gunadasa Kapuge comes to me in strange ways and times.  He died in early April 2003 and I did not realize that this is why the Sinhala radio stations were all playing his songs one crazy afternoon.  I remember thinking that if he were to die I would be asked by Manik De Silva, editor of the newspaper I worked for at the time, to write something about the man and that I would not have the words.  That’s what happened.  I was asked to write and I struggled and came up with a line: ‘With you, Kapuge, “goodbye” is a ridiculous word’ (http://www.island.lk/2003/04/06//leisur04.html). 

I still remember listening to a description of the funeral proceedings. I think it was Kingsley from Sirasa FM, but I may be wrong. I was on my way back to Colombo from Matugama after attending a wedding.  The time had come to light the pyre. The commentator ended the programme thus: samu gena yanna apen thava mohothai…nododa inne ai (the moment of departure is upon us; why are you so silent?).   The car was full of wedding guests.  I’ve never experienced such silence.  I just cried. 

He comes, in strange ways, as I said, and I realized that I was right when I wrote 7 years before that ‘goodbye is a ridiculous word’.  This was Aluth Avurudda, 2010. April 14. Taking off from Kottawa, going to Kegalle.  Switched the radio on.  Siyatha FM, I believe.  Kapuge, Gunadasa.  A song written by Ratna Sri Wijesinghe, which was first aired in 1990 I believe.  The song: ‘Bimbarak Senaga’.

It speaks of a land of plenty. A land that gave birth to people who were like the sun and the moon, powerful and benign, a land that was subsequently ravaged, its tanks breached, waters stolen and territories divided. 

The song was written in the late eighties or at least of that time.  A time, let us never forget, was marked by the massacre of innocence, the unnecessary deaths of over 60,000 people, the vast majority of whom were unarmed and had committed no crime other than being born in the wrong decade.

Minee mal pipunu seethala nimna bhoomiye ata katu sathara riyan kada ahimiva vilaapaya nagai.

On the cool plain now decked with ‘funeral flowers’ there are skeletal remains wailing on account of being denied the minimum dimensions of space that the dead are usually guaranteed.  True.  We saw all that.  No one talks about it now, not one asks for ‘Truth Commissions’, or punishment for the guilty.  There is selectivity in these things, one observes. 

Vaekanda kapaa bim katu kambiyen bedaa me rana bime hisa gasaa damana kaduwa bima helau…

It is a directive: drop immediately the sword that seeks to behead this proud and heroic land by breaching dam and dividing the land with barbed wire!

 

That’s the line that struck me most.  Ratna Sri Wijesinghe points out that the invaders came from land, sea and air: yuddekata avith rupu sen sath muhudu mathin guvanin.  And what did they do?  They tried to parcel out with barbed wire this splendid land (kambi wata kale manaram maaligava do?). Well he uses ‘manaram maaligawa’ (beauteous palace) as a metaphor clearly.  The key word/term is the katu kambiya and the reference to parceling, the undermining of commonalities and other things that can be categories as ‘common’ or podu, common property included.

It struck me that the song is as relevant today as it was in 1990, in 2003, ever since the divide-and-rule doctrine was put in place and ever since the seeds of separatism were sown on the seethala nimna bhoomiya. 

Today, after a regime that vanquished a terrorist organization and defeated the ideology of separatism that spawned the monster called the LTTE, we have all kinds of anti-Sri Lanka forces demanding that the Government be ‘magnanimous’. The Government is required, in essence, to kick in the butt the aspirations articulated by those who voted it to power and defer in favour of the politics, ideologies of the defeated.  The vote was an endorsement of a policy of reconciliation in which separatism did not have a place. No, not even the step-by-step separatism couched in the devolution (to imagined ethnic enclaves) discourse.  The people rejected all that.  That was what was buried in Nandikadal, symbolically in May 2009. 

Today there are both external and internal forces wanting to play the katu-kambi politics of dividing communities, separating peoples and thereby keeping alive the threat of communal politics. 

There is need for vigilance.  Those who talk a lot about democracy must understand that there cannot be any kind of democracy without representation. It must be understood that representation today, by the ruling coalition, is about preserving the unitary character of the state (among other things of course).  There cannot be any room for breaching dams, and parceling out territory to every Tom, Dick and Harry who touts myth as fact and posits aspiration as right.  All those who talk of ethnic-based devolution and thereby pander to Eelamism have to explain the logic of such an exercise given histories, archaeological tract, geographical factors and demographic realities.  Factoring out the sentiments of those who are against such division is not democracy, simply because those who are for the unitary state constitute the vast majority. 

If their sentiments go unheeded, then it will come at a huge cost.  Remember 1988/89.  Quite apart from the fact that the JVP and UNP leadership at the time were bloodthirsty brutes, we have to understand that the former fed on seething resentment at having an absolutely ridiculous proposition thrust down their throats (the 13^th Amendment) and the latter had to defend a horrendous accord signed by the previous regime. 

Gunadasa Kapuge gave voice to some words penned by Ratna Sri Wijesinghe.  If we want our nation to be the manaram maaligawa that it has all the potentials to be, then we have to get rid of the katu-kambi, especially those rusted instruments of division that have been written into our constitution without our permission. 

It’s 7 years after he died, but Gunadasa Kapuge keeps singing and as long as we have his voice and of course Ratna Sri Wijesinghe’s words, we will have heart and mind necessary to call ‘rubbish’ that which cannot be described by any other word.  We are indeed a blessed nation, I feel.

Malinda Seneviratne is the Editor-in-Chief of 'The Nation' and an be reached at msenevira@gmail.com.  The above article was first published in the 'Daily News' (April 2010), for which newspaper he wrote a daily column titled 'The Morning Inspection'.

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The lost songs of Gunadasa Kapuge

Ranbanda Seneviratne is a man who never abandoned the ordinary and especially subjugated segments of this country, not where the Yoda Ela bends and not anywhere else either.  He died on December 5, 2001.  The mortal remains of this lawyer cum lyricist and self-confessed ‘bayya’ from Mahakanadaragama, Anuradhapura was cremated a couple of days later.

‘We should ask why Gunadasa Kapuge was sitting in a far corner of the cemetery, all by himself, and weep copious tears,’ a friend told me a few days later when we reflected soberly on the loss the nation had suffered.  That question was produced by a history. 

Gunadasa Kapuge had done what no one expected him to do.  He had sold his aathmaya or soul.  He had signed a contract to do produce an album with the band ‘Sunflowers’ which according to some was more about profit and less about being sensitive to the human condition.  The connection with Ranbanda was this: he wrote the lyrics for what became one of Kapuge’s most endearing songs, ‘Davasak pela nethi hene’ which is about the unfailing quality of a mother’s love.  Whereas even a wife’s love could pass one by ‘where the Yoda Ela bends’, a mother would wait by the wicket gate outside her humble home until the son, reviled, ridiculed and abandoned, returns home.  That was the line.  The point was this: Ranbanda was appalled by Kapuge’s decision and didn’t mince his words when expressing objection.  Hence the tears or so we thought.

Kapuge passed on a year and a half later.  He did not explain, he did not apologize, he did not defend himself.  He wasn’t one to complain. He kept his sorrows private. 

Last week, randomly, a group of artists spoke about Kapuge [yes, he enters conversations without notice, stays without intruding, leaves without saying ‘bye’].   Two anecdotes. 

The first. This was when Kapuge was either staying in a boarding house in Nugegoda or visiting friends who were boarded.  Saman Athaudahetti, we were told, would vouch for the veracity of the story.  It was night.  Kapuge had stepped out to get something.  He had returned without his shirt.  His friends had quizzed him. 

‘There was a man without a shirt and he was shivering. I knew there would be a shirt for me at the boarding.’  Simple.

The Second.  One night Kapuge had been walking along Bauddhaloka Mawatha.  Night.  It was raining. He was walking towards the Kanatte.  He noticed a man struggling to fix a polythene sheet over the shack that was clearly his house.  He stopped.  The man apparently was taking care of pideli or clumps of grass that were sold by the piece.  He had explained that the sheet was too small to cover the entire hut, but that he didn’t want his three children to get wet. He didn’t mind getting wet, he said.  Kapuge had asked how much it would cost to get a better roof, for example one made of cadjan.  ‘Ten thousand,’ the man had answered.  Telling the man that he will check if he got the roof fixed, Kapuge gave him Rs. 10,000.  It was his annual bonus that year.  Simple.

There’s a third story and it gave a rare definition to his humanity. 

Kapuge had collected the payment for his part in the ‘Sunflower samaga (with) Kapuge’ album, a few hundred thousand rupees, and gone straight to visit a friend who was suffering from cancer and needed money for surgery/medication.  He left the money with his friend.  Then he went home.  Simple.

The friend/patient has a name.  He died less than a year after Ranbanda Seneviratne passed away.  Sugathapala De Silva. 

What were those tears shed in Anuradhapura that evening in December 2001, then?  Was it for the loss of a friend or the inability of the general public to understand him, he who gave so much with voice and melody?  And what of those who thought there’s a question that should be directed at the lonely man grieving in a corner of a cemetery? 

There’s a question that needs to be asked.  It’s not about Kapuge.  It is not about how we read the man.  It is a question we can ask ourselves in the language and tone of our choice.  We can word it as we will.  It doesn’t matter when or where or how we fashion the question.  To me it is inspired by a song; alyrical blend of several lives caught in the vicissitudes that make the human condition, threaded by some random incidents in a man who left us more than ten years ago, but stays and stays and stays. 

msenevira@gmail.com

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