Measured sweetness

 

[‘A Splash of Honey,’ by Christabelle Corea-Aturupane, published by BCONNECTED, 2025, reviewed by Malinda Seneviratne]
 

All lives are epic, even those that are brief. Epic lives are not always written, for not everyone is a writer or feels compelled to gather and string together indelible memories. Some lives are by choice lived privately. And scribes can be selective — they write, if at all, the stories of known personalities that are more public, even if they border on the notorious. Such stories sell.

All lives are epic and so was the life of Christabelle Euphelia Corea-Aturupane. She, in her later years, decided to write about moments and people that mattered most to her. Published not too long before she moved to regions inaccessible even by love, she called her recollections ‘A splash of honey.’ Sweet. As was she.  

I knew her as the mother of Harsha and Harinlal, two of the most gifted chess players Sri Lanka has produced, both national champions and at one time the highest rated players in the country. I saw her briefly at the funeral of her husband, Herbert, which took place in his home town of Kegalle, in 1980 I believe. Years later, actually decades later, I had the opportunity to meet her more often. This was at her son Harinlal’s place where chess friends from St Thomas’ Mount Lavinia and a couple of Royalists would meet to play chess and bridge and make merry in other ways. Those evenings would inevitably end with Aunty Christabelle accompanying that bunch of friends on the piano. Among them, R.D. Gunaratne could sing quite well. The others tried. She didn’t mind. She just played. She smiled. And addressed everyone as ‘darling.’

This book is not about her sons’ friends, but every page has her signature good-heartedness, celebration of life and especially good times with her near and dear, and of course her elegance.

In ‘A splash of honey’ the author gives the reader measured sweetness. She is honest in her recounting of incidents and people, meticulous in mentioning one and all, eloquent in description and perhaps a little coy when it comes to the warts and infirmities that are inevitable in individuals and collectives.

The book can be read as the history of a clan. The Coreas. The Coreas of Chilaw, to be precise. The author has made her intentions clear at the outset: a ‘desire to document one’s lineage and impart one’s knowledge.’ Following Kanin, she exercises ‘[T]he freedom to roam and rummage in the attic of [her] yesterdays,’ because ‘the ability to relive those parts of life that have been significant is a fight equal to life itself.’  

She has painted the Chilaw of her childhood with delicate strokes, having dipped her brushes in idyllic pigments to give us landscapes, culture and history. It’s not the attic of her yesterdays that she invites us to visit but a time and country far removed from the Chilaw and Sri Lanka we pass through or inhabit today.

Places obtain meaning on account of people they contain or are shaped by. For the author, it’s primarily family. Primarily clan, really. So it’s not grandparents, siblings, husband, children and grandchildren, but uncles and aunts, granduncles and grandaunts, cousins, nieces and nephews. Indeed it’s also about the other Coreas of Chilaw.

Coreas, as she points out, constitute one ‘C’ of the three Cs associated with Chilaw, the others being crabs and coconuts. She mentions a fourth following the ascension of Bishop Emeritus Duleep De Chickera of the Church of Ceylon: Committed Christians. Obviously, Chilaw or rather Halawatha (she has interjected the legends associated with that name as well!), was made of other people and other faiths, and these too she has detailed in their vocations, fervor and faith.

They were aristocrats, clearly, not least of all on account of a lineage traceable to national heroes such as Edirilla Bandara and possibly to Parakramabahu the Sixth and even earlier, Siri Sangabodhi. The aristocracy in Chilawan times, if you will, came primarily from wealth and vocation. Feudalism was more pronounced in those times the relevant hierarchies do find their way into the text, but certainly without the vulgar superiority and condescension characteristic of the aristocratic class. The author lays it out as is and with much grace as evident in the chapter titled ‘The Ayahs and the Carter.’

It is probably pertinent to interject here the notion that did the rounds some decades ago and perhaps finds traction even today in certain circles: ‘in Chilaw if you are not a Corea, you are a pariah!’ It’s probably something that less savoury sections of the clan coined. Christabelle Corea-Aturupane, to my knowledge, was too refined to indulge in the obnoxious. She is clearly proud of her family, but speaks as fondly of the non-Coreas of her childhood or the Chilaw of those times.

The book contains, as promised in the Prologue, ‘a wealth of fascinating tales of power, fame and love.’ These obviously must have had relevant undersides, those of powerlessness, infamy and heartbreak or hate, but those are not what the author was fascinated with. The absences don’t detract too much. To the extent that the history of people and families and especially clans are windows into the history of the places they inhabit, ‘A splash of honey,’ would certainly pique the interests of the historian.

All lives are epic and no journey tracing lineage can be expected to capture even the most pertinent of the epic-slices of each and every individual mentioned. The author has picked and chosen. She writes of her Uncle Stanley’s pranks and the escapades of her brother Ranjith with great delight. Others are mentioned in passing when she recounts holidays and special occasions, family routines and parental priorities, playmates and pastimes, and even penpals.

There’s a chapter on ‘treasured memories,’ but that’s what the entire book is about. We walk with Christabelle when she was a child, we watch her as she grows into a beautiful young woman and wish somehow that we were privileged to know of the years when she was a wife, a mother and later a grandmother. Her focus however is Chilaw and the Coreas, not Mount Lavinia and the Aturupanes, places and people privileged to be graced by her presence no doubt.

She was 90 when she put these recollections together. One cannot help but think that Christabelle has roamed freely in the yesterdays of her life and given fresh life to what may have otherwise gathered dust and perished in the attics she rummaged in. She was a pianist and a painter. The book is musical. It is a work of art, made that much more elegant by the team at BCONNECTED (Pvt) Ltd who coordinated, edited, designed and printed the book.

Christabelle Corea-Aturupane has offered facets of a Chilaw that is no more and a clan which, though old, continues to generate youthfulness. It’s a gift to the Coreas. It could inspire other families, aristocrat or otherwise, to record stories that don’t often get written or told.