The flights of the brothers Piyasiri and Jayasiri

Pic courtesy www.secretlanka.com

About six months ago, I drove along one of the most scenic roads in the country — Palapathwala to Ibbagamuwa through Yatawatte. It was a desire to avoid Katugastota on my way from Elkaduwa to Kurunegala that took me down that road. I wondered several times if I had taken a wrong turn. Even if I had, there were no regrets. It was that beautiful!

On Monday, July 13, 2020, I took the same route. This time I was driving from Oruthota to Ibbagamuwa and had offered to drop off a friend in Matale. He advised me on the shortest route to Ibbagamuwa and it sounded familiar. I asked him if it went through Yatawatte.

‘That’s my village and yes, it does!’

After dropping him off at his place in Aluwihara, another friend and I proceeded towards Ibbagamuwa. It turned out that it wasn’t the first time he was taking this route and told me of a good place to have a cup of tea.

And so, not too far along the road after passing the Yatawatte Police Station, just before a sharp bend, we stopped. The view was just as I remembered it. It was around the same time of day too. Back in December 2019 this is how I described what I saw and did:

‘The sun was chasing the far off mountains. Mountain-blue grappling with sky-blue. Clouds, white and grey, in intercourse with the last rays of the sun. Gaze swept from mountain top to mountain top and down to the valley below, catching innumerable shades of grey.’

This time my thoughts went back to the year 1993 and a conversation with a friend. That’s probably because I had spoken with him at length a few days previously, recalling times spent together as colleagues at the Agrarian Research and Training Institute.

I remembered a trip to Bandarawela in 1993. It was a ‘faculty retreat’ for the research and training staff of the institute. As the editor, I was tasked to function as rapporteur. We were all traveling in a bus. There was merriment. I noticed Piyasiri Pelenda gazing into the distance as we approached Beragala. Piyasiri has a good sense of humor. I feigned intoxication and addressed him as ‘Jayasiri.’

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t seem annoyed either. He said softly, ‘machang, mama piyasiri…jayasiri kiyanne mage malli (I am Piyasiri — Jayasiri is my younger brother).’ And then he told me about his brother.

A few years earlier, while Piyasiri was reading for a doctorate in Russia, his brother had been abducted by one of the pro-government vigilante groups that roamed around the country. He was never seen again.

Piyasiri wasn’t a JVP sympathizer. He was ideologically closer to what was known then as ‘The Old Left’ (the JVP is now too old to be a ‘young’ counterpart of ‘The Left’) but he understood why young people like his brother were drawn to that movement.  

It was mid-morning. Below us the land fell off into different shades of green before rising into green-grey blur conjured by mists thin and thick and eventually met an unblemished blue. The geography was very much like that which I would  encounter in Yatawatte almost three decades later.

Piyasiri said something about all of this which I can’t recall exactly. He was moved by the landscape and saw it as layered metaphors, this I remember.

'Un monavahari deyak dakinna athi machang…(they must have seen something)’ he said softly.  

There was silence.  ‘Saw something’ could be read in so many ways, but he was speaking of a kid brother who was ‘disappeared’ during the most violent and brutal period in post-Independence Sri Lanka (1988-89) referred to as ‘The Bheeshanaya’ or ‘The (period of) Terror,’ a movement made mostly of youth fighting a brutal regime with perhaps some notion of a better world.

We don’t know what exactly happened to Jayasiri. We know that landscapes such as that which roll like epic narratives visible from places like Beragala and Yatawatte have been splattered with blood.

Early this morning Piyasiri came to me in a dream. We were in a small hut. I corrected the mistake of having deliberately misnamed him.

‘You are Piyasiri!’ I said.

He looked at me. He sported the same expression that was on his face 27 years ago when I called him ‘Jayasiri.’ He didn’t say a word. He walked to the window that was just a few feet away and which, in my dream, opened to a landscape such as I've described above. He climbed on to the window sill. He flew into the distance. I hadn’t noticed that he had wings.

Maybe he always had them.

This article was first published in the DAILY NEWS [July 15, 2020]

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

 

The fragrance of burning manuscripts

Turning points

Let's take a moment to take a knee

Anyone for inclusive grieving?

Wildlife in the Department

The far and near of police brutality and racism

David Dungay couldn't breathe either!

Field Officer Jayatilleka Herath

Suku's family and heart

When the Government lowered the bar

Mother and mothers

Back to the nursery

Homeward bound

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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Pasan Kodikara left behind the softest footprints

Pic by Nilantha Gamage

There was a time when those who graduated from universities in the former Soviet Union couldn’t find jobs in Sri Lanka.  Doctors were routinely stumped by the infamous ACT16 (named after the amendment to the Medical Ordinance) but they could at least practice.  Those in the social sciences and humanities had it tough. 

During the early nineties an oasis for these ‘Russians’ materialized at what was then called the Agrarian Research and Training Institute (later named after Hector Kobbekaduwa).  My father, the then Director, did not hold anything against ‘Russians’.  He recognized credentials and potentials.  And so it was that the ARTI got a bunch of ‘Russians’ or ‘Russo’ as fellow researchers referred to them, sometime in the year 1993. 

Piyasiri Pelenda, Sisira Edirippulige and Udaya Rajapaksa had doctorates which Ravichandran had a Masters.  All four knew their onions and much besides.  They could talk about politics, political philosophy, films, theatre, music and literature.  And love.  Since I was ‘Editor’ at the Institute, I worked closely with researchers.  Since interests were common I spent a lot of time with the Russians and even today, years after all of us have gone our separate ways and taken up residence in different parts of the world, we keep in touch.

The institute’s Russians were frequently visited by their Russian friends.  They were all colorful characters.  All of them, without exception, were excellent conversationalists.  All unique.  The most striking of them all in terms of appearance was this young man with long hair, a flowing beard, keen eyes, a voice that did not betray the intensity of thought and a readiness to break into peals of laughter.  He was so much a child, this thinking, reflecting and extremely energetic man who looked as though he would be blown over by the gentlest breeze.  Yes, Pasan Kodikara, was that thin!

He was writer, a translator of several important works including Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ and Boris Bulgakov’s ‘Master and Margarita’, a playwright and a university lecturer.  Those who associated him closely would recount hundreds of Pasan-stories.  He was versatile. 

I remember two anecdotes which perhaps his friends would say describe his essence (if not they would I am sure interject with better representational stories).  The first happened in Borella and the second in Punchi Borella. 

Pasan and a friend had been at the Borella junction waiting for a bus along with dozens of others.  A bus had come but had not stopped at the halt.  It had proceeded beyond the halt and had stopped a fair distance away.  One man had sprinted and somehow managed to get into the bus but unfortunately in the process a file he was holding on to had slipped out of his hand.  Papers, notes perhaps, had scattered all over.  It was impossible to gather them in the rush of traffic.  Pasan had laughed.  His friend had chided him.  Pasan explained, ‘What seems like a life and death situation at one moment seems incredibly small and funny in another’.  Pasan then took his friend to his time in the Soviet Union.

Most Sri Lankans who obtained scholarships to the Soviet Union at the time were children of active members of the ‘Old Left,’ especially the Communist Party.  They were mostly Marxist in ideological orientation.  Apparently a bunch of such scholars after their first few months in the ‘Mother Country’ so to speak realized that the Soviet Union was nothing like the Socialist Utopia they had imagined. They decided that the citizens of that country needed to be re-taught Marxism.  So they formed a group.  It was called nyashtiya (Nucleus).  Pasan, since he attended a university different from that which the others were enrolled at was tasked to write the constitution of this new group.

He wrote it.  This was before laptops, floppies, pendrives and such.  He wrote it by hand.  It ran into several pages.  He rolled them all up one afternoon and set out to share it with his friends.  Pasan, cloaked in a winter coat that probably outweighed him trudged along, battered by a snow storm.  Tragedy struck.  A gust of wind caught his sheaf of papers and scattered them all over the snow.   It was impossible to gather the nucleus of the Nucleus could not be gathered. Those were KGB days.  He fled.  He didn’t sight that university for three months.  No wonder he laughed that other afternoon in Borella, thousands of miles away from that other afternoon of a snowstorm and the scattering of foundational principles. 

Then there is the Punchi Borella story.  Pasan and some friends ended spending the night at Udaya Rajapaksa’s house after a long session of conversation and alcohol.  The following morning when they awoke they were all reluctant to get off the mats they had slept on.  They were lying there, talking.  At one point someone said ‘we should get up now’.  Pasan had said ‘ha…ehema karala vath balamu hari yaida kiyala!’ (Ok, let’s do that and see if that, at least, works).  Wry humor.  Deeply philosophical Pasan Kodikara, through and through.

He’s gone now.  He has left a soft footprint in many hearts and along many pathways, literary and otherwise.  So soft that it will take some effort to obliterate. 

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