Sujeev Wickramasekara was probably around 17 when I first met him. He was a maths student at Royal College, a couple of years junior to me and I got to know him through his classmate, my friend and chess teammate Lakshan Fernando, better known by his initials, ‘PCL.’ I had heard that he was one of the top students in his class, but I also knew that he was passionate about literature and theatre. Quite rare at the time. He showed a decent degree of respect to me on account of seniority at school but it was clear to me even back then that he was intellectually way above anything I could aspire to.
I remember him as ‘Sujeewa’ and that’s how I addressed and referred to him. Apparently he’s ‘Sujeev.’ Maybe that was a shortened form used by friends which he didn’t bother to correct. He was like that.
We had the opportunity to get more acquainted in Los Angeles more than a decade after leaving school. He was a physics student at the University of Southern California (USC). I was visiting my classmate Kanishka Goonewardena, then a masters student in planning the same school. We were joined by Anil Rupasinghe, then a doctoral student at the New School for Social Research, New York.
The year was probably 1990. Spring break. March, I believe. Kanishka was (and is) a Marxist. My position on the political spectrum at the time was probably close to his but perhaps less red, possibly because I was less read than he. Anil, who was JVP-leaning in his early days at Peradeniya, had ‘moved out’ probably due to the influence of our mutual friend, Arjuna Parakrama, whose ancestral home was in Doratiyawa, Kurunegala, close to Anil’s village. Sujeev? I couldn’t have pinned him even if pinning was an objective at the time. Then, and now, he was a free thinker, unencumbered by ideological fixations.
So the four of us talked about all kinds of things. The conversation wandered to songs and lyrics. This was just after the ‘bheeshanaya,’ that terror-filled time of abduction, torture, burning alive, proxy arrests and a complete suspension of the law, decency and civilisation. The green-red terror, one may call it. The songs and lyrics that won the day (and lost the moment, one might say) were of Nanda Malini and Sunil Ariyaratne. In a word, ‘Pawana (The Wind)’.
Anil, for all the anti-JVP sentiments he had acquired by that time, was quite in awe of ‘Pawana’ and Nanda Malini. I don’t think we spoke about the ideological ‘voice’ of Pawana, Sunil Ariyaratne. Sujeev wasn’t impressed. He opined that the true worth of a song is better obtained by longevity. The songs in the Pawana album, he said, are ‘for the moment.’ The moment passes and the song is gone. He mentioned some of Nanda Malini’s earlier songs. And of course those of other artists, especially Amaradeva.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I too liked the Pawana songs, although I liked her previous albums better. In the almost 40 years that have passed, I’ve revisited Sujeev or rather his observations. This is why I, like many in my generation probably did, laughed hearing about Pawana songs blaring out at political events organised by parties whose policies were vehemently objected to by the likes of Nanda Malini and Sunil Ariyaratne.
But we moved across subjects and came to ‘love.’ Sujeev’s observations on this subject cut deep and remained encrusted in heart and mind. Love, he said, cannot be defined, but can perhaps be realised by the ‘visthara nokarahaki aanandaya (the bliss that’s beyond words)’ and the ‘daraagatha noheki vedanaava (the unbearable pain).’
We were discussing romantic love, which I suppose was all the love that concerned us at that time, at that age. Sujeev may have but I had not delved into the discourses pertaining to sorrow in Buddhist philosophy, for example, ‘appiyehi sampayogo dukkho and piyehi vippayogo dukkho (it is sorrowful to associate people one dislikes and sorrowful too the separation from those one likes).’ Likes, loves: both applicable. There’s an unspeakable joy that rises within me when I see one of my daughters, and each time they go away for a long period of time, I cry. But yes, it was romantic love that we spoke of in Los Angeles almost 40 years ago.
Sujeev went on to obtain a doctorate in particle and quantum physics from the University of Texas at Austin and from 2005 onwards taught at Grinnell College, collaborating with research groups such as MathPhys Research Group, University of Valladolid, Spain. I didn’t know and wouldn’t have known, for we never met after that except once in Boston when he pursued a heart-interest, unsuccessfully. I know and I think I knew some years ago as well (but had forgotten) when Kanishka informed me that he had passed away, probably from a heart attack.
This morning, Sujeev arrived from across oceans and decades. He floated through rain, cutting through conversation and cacophony like the strongest wind does (or the lightest rain and softest breeze). I felt him watching me with a half-smile and a knowing gaze as I revisited an old poem:
I'm unperturbed by things
that consume physicists
for the magic of number and formulae
has never mesmerised;
light bends, time too
how many decades erased in a moment
how many generations fled our universe
how many words and silences between them
conjured dust particles of the possible?
This was and is
and that's a poem
that will never get written.
I was not the reference to physicists that opened a mind-window through which he could blow away words and thoughts, rearrange them and wreck the space-time continuum. In fact I was not thinking of him when I wrote that line. But I do believe that the last three lines were inspired by those words uttered in Los Angeles in a different century. I might as well have dedicated it to my friend who, thinking back, had one of the purest hearts I’ve known. I do so now.
I remember him as ‘Sujeewa’ and that’s how I addressed and referred to him. Apparently he’s ‘Sujeev.’ Maybe that was a shortened form used by friends which he didn’t bother to correct. He was like that.
We had the opportunity to get more acquainted in Los Angeles more than a decade after leaving school. He was a physics student at the University of Southern California (USC). I was visiting my classmate Kanishka Goonewardena, then a masters student in planning the same school. We were joined by Anil Rupasinghe, then a doctoral student at the New School for Social Research, New York.
The year was probably 1990. Spring break. March, I believe. Kanishka was (and is) a Marxist. My position on the political spectrum at the time was probably close to his but perhaps less red, possibly because I was less read than he. Anil, who was JVP-leaning in his early days at Peradeniya, had ‘moved out’ probably due to the influence of our mutual friend, Arjuna Parakrama, whose ancestral home was in Doratiyawa, Kurunegala, close to Anil’s village. Sujeev? I couldn’t have pinned him even if pinning was an objective at the time. Then, and now, he was a free thinker, unencumbered by ideological fixations.
So the four of us talked about all kinds of things. The conversation wandered to songs and lyrics. This was just after the ‘bheeshanaya,’ that terror-filled time of abduction, torture, burning alive, proxy arrests and a complete suspension of the law, decency and civilisation. The green-red terror, one may call it. The songs and lyrics that won the day (and lost the moment, one might say) were of Nanda Malini and Sunil Ariyaratne. In a word, ‘Pawana (The Wind)’.
Anil, for all the anti-JVP sentiments he had acquired by that time, was quite in awe of ‘Pawana’ and Nanda Malini. I don’t think we spoke about the ideological ‘voice’ of Pawana, Sunil Ariyaratne. Sujeev wasn’t impressed. He opined that the true worth of a song is better obtained by longevity. The songs in the Pawana album, he said, are ‘for the moment.’ The moment passes and the song is gone. He mentioned some of Nanda Malini’s earlier songs. And of course those of other artists, especially Amaradeva.
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I too liked the Pawana songs, although I liked her previous albums better. In the almost 40 years that have passed, I’ve revisited Sujeev or rather his observations. This is why I, like many in my generation probably did, laughed hearing about Pawana songs blaring out at political events organised by parties whose policies were vehemently objected to by the likes of Nanda Malini and Sunil Ariyaratne.
But we moved across subjects and came to ‘love.’ Sujeev’s observations on this subject cut deep and remained encrusted in heart and mind. Love, he said, cannot be defined, but can perhaps be realised by the ‘visthara nokarahaki aanandaya (the bliss that’s beyond words)’ and the ‘daraagatha noheki vedanaava (the unbearable pain).’
We were discussing romantic love, which I suppose was all the love that concerned us at that time, at that age. Sujeev may have but I had not delved into the discourses pertaining to sorrow in Buddhist philosophy, for example, ‘appiyehi sampayogo dukkho and piyehi vippayogo dukkho (it is sorrowful to associate people one dislikes and sorrowful too the separation from those one likes).’ Likes, loves: both applicable. There’s an unspeakable joy that rises within me when I see one of my daughters, and each time they go away for a long period of time, I cry. But yes, it was romantic love that we spoke of in Los Angeles almost 40 years ago.
Sujeev went on to obtain a doctorate in particle and quantum physics from the University of Texas at Austin and from 2005 onwards taught at Grinnell College, collaborating with research groups such as MathPhys Research Group, University of Valladolid, Spain. I didn’t know and wouldn’t have known, for we never met after that except once in Boston when he pursued a heart-interest, unsuccessfully. I know and I think I knew some years ago as well (but had forgotten) when Kanishka informed me that he had passed away, probably from a heart attack.
This morning, Sujeev arrived from across oceans and decades. He floated through rain, cutting through conversation and cacophony like the strongest wind does (or the lightest rain and softest breeze). I felt him watching me with a half-smile and a knowing gaze as I revisited an old poem:
I'm unperturbed by things
that consume physicists
for the magic of number and formulae
has never mesmerised;
light bends, time too
how many decades erased in a moment
how many generations fled our universe
how many words and silences between them
conjured dust particles of the possible?
This was and is
and that's a poem
that will never get written.
I was not the reference to physicists that opened a mind-window through which he could blow away words and thoughts, rearrange them and wreck the space-time continuum. In fact I was not thinking of him when I wrote that line. But I do believe that the last three lines were inspired by those words uttered in Los Angeles in a different century. I might as well have dedicated it to my friend who, thinking back, had one of the purest hearts I’ve known. I do so now.
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