The Eldest: a story written on face and in eyes

The eldest in a family, traditionally and in the case of large families, is like a second father or a mother, as the case may be. If they so choose, one should add. The ‘Loku Duwa’ (Elder Daughter) or ‘Loku Putha’ (Eldest Son) has all kinds of responsibilities placed on her or his shoulders. It’s not a law. It’s a custom. If the eldest does his ‘bit’ or a ‘bit of the bit’ it would earn him or her a pass mark, if you want to put it that way. If he or she chooses to nothing, that’s fine too. 

Ananda Thilak Bandara Herath was the eldest of five boys in a farming family in Madadombe, a village around two kilometers off Gallewa, on the Galgamuwa-Moragollagama Road. That’s ‘tank-land’. Their house was downstream from two reservoirs, Mahawewa (as the name suggests, the bigger of the two) and Kudawewa (Small Talk). Thilak, like his brothers, attended the village school and later the school in Ehetuwewa. They walked to school and back through shrub jungle. They helped their parents in the paddy fields and in the chenas. 

Education was important to their father whose siblings included a teacher and a bank employee. The banking uncle supported Thilak. In due course he entered the University of Peradeniya. From Day One, Thilak was single-minded in one thing: educating his bothers. That was the Loku Aiya Way.  

The banking uncle couldn’t support two nephews, especially since he had got married around the time Thilak entered university. So Thilak tried to find a job for the eldest of the mallis, Upali. And he did. Upali found employment in Kotmale, where a dam was being built at the time. And things went sour. 

Upali fell in love with a local girl and their love began to grow on its own, as in the Kenny Roger’s song — ‘The long arm of the law’. The result was that the third in the family didn’t have the support he needed. Wickrama should have become a doctor but he ended up as a nurse. By the time the next boy was sitting his ALs, Thilak had the social capital to help out. Wasantha entered the Medical Faculty at Ragama and graduated as a doctor. The three brothers, still single, helped the youngest, Vipula, who would graduate from Peradeniya and join the Army thereafter.  Then they all found life-partners and settled down. Except Thilak. 

The Eldest, whose English knowledge was limited to being able to recite the alphabet at the time he entered university, became a teacher. It took time for him to put all his brothers on their feet. His ‘moment’ if there is such a thing, passed or rather passed him by. Partly on account of circumstances and partly by choice, the matter of taking care of aging parents fell on his shoulders. 

All this took time and in the passing of time, their father died. Upali, the much-loved principal in their village school died a few years ago. He was just 48. Wasantha died in a tragic accident. Vipula survived the war. Thilak, by then a senior teacher in charge of English Medium education at the Ambanpola Central College, even at the time of Upali’s death, was helping his brother educate his two sons. He would travel to Kurunegala to conduct tuition classes. The money he earned went to pay the tuition fees the boys had to pay for extra classes.   

Through all these years, The Eldest held on to the one passion in his life. Music. Endowed with a wonderful voice, Thilak obtained a Visharad degree (vocal) from the Bhatkande Sangeet Vidya Peet, Lucknow. He wrote songs. He asked lyricists to write for him. He sought out exceptional musicians to compose melodies. He saved what money he could. He recorded these songs. He was occasionally invited for musical programs on Rupavahini.

‘I just do it because I like music. These songs are for my friends. And for myself,’ he says whenever his friends urge him to put together an album.  

One of the first songs he recorded was a duet with the late Malani Bulathsinhala, ‘sirimedura kiyaalaa.’  It’s about marriage, of a couple building tenderly their dream castle, only to discover they’ve in fact constructed a prison, and when they try to flee upon this discovery find their children guarding the ‘prison doors’.

We are all prisoners of one kind or another. Thilak is married to his music and to the notion of duty. He is his own jailor, just like any one of us. He wakes up early, cooks breakfast and lunch, feeds his ailing and bedridden mother, waits for a caregiver to arrive, then goes to work. He never leaves her alone. He supports his nephews’ education. He sings, most to himself. He calls his friends. 

Our lives get written on our faces. Few stories are better engraved on countenance and eyes than those pertaining to duty. The narratives of The Eldest are rarely written. Few, if ever, get recited. Years have passed. Decades too. Personal targets were postponed, year after year after year and were repeated with less and less conviction until they became inaudible. Non-existent, now. 

‘This house is for Wickrama. I have found a home for the elderly to which I will retire eventually,’ The Eldest doesn’t intrude or inconvenience. 

He is conscious of what time does. ‘Don’t take my picture — you always take it at the wrong angle or the light is all wrong; I am beautiful!’ He laughs as he says this for he does not have a grain of vanity in him. 

‘I will write about you!’ I told him.

‘I’ll give you a nice photograph to go with the story,’ he suggested.

‘No, you’ll give me one that was taken years ago!’ 

Banter between friends.  

Ananda Thilak Bandara Herath. An eldest. THE Eldest of all the eldest sons and daughters that I know in my generation. And for many reasons, the most beautiful. Few would disagree. 

This article was first published in the Daily News (December 25, 2019). 

malindasenevi@gmail.com. www.malindawords.blogspot.com

Other articles in the series titled 'In Passing...' :
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

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Remembering ‘Tyre Sunil’: may his tribe increase

Sometime in the year 1991, Ananda Thilak Bandara Herath, a final year student at the University of Peradeniya (Arts Faculty) held a one-man concert called ‘Vihinsana’ which could be translated at ‘extreme violence’.  They were all new songs, written by friends as well as a couple of reputed lyricists.  The music, for the most part, was composed by his batchmate Nishad Handunpathirana, probably the most accomplished esraj player in the world today. 

Thilak, as he was known, was from Galgamuwa and teaches in a school close to home.  He sings, still and has recorded many originals. Someday he will be a better known name in the music scene. I remembered him and his concert because of one particular song, the title of which escapes me now.  It was about the loss of a son to that terrible period called bheeshanaya when thousands of unarmed people were arbitrarily abducted by vigilante groups unleashed by the then UNP government, tortured and summarily executed.  It was written by D.B. Sunil, then a second year student at Peradeniya, reading for a special degree in Political Science.  This is a story about Sunil and not the song he wrote or the concert in which that song was performed or the artist who won appreciative applause. 

D.B. Sunil is known to all his contemporaries as ‘Tyre Sunil’.  He was the thinnest boy on campus.  Probably the darkest too.  He was among the tallest in his batch.  He entered university in 1990.  This was immediately after the bheeshanaya.  It was a time when no one wanted to talk politics.  This was understandable.  It was as though the university was out of bound for politics.  Politics, however, does not take notice of such rulings.  It entered nevertheless.  Sunil, even as a fresher, argued that the political is not contained in the university and neither was the university insulated from it.  He wanted students to speak to issues that spilled over the university boundaries and indeed that activism should go beyond the Galaha Junction.  He was vilified by a student population that was averse to treading any path that may lead to the kind of chaos the eighties had seen.

‘Umbata tayar ekak udin yannada oney?’  he was asked (do you want to perish on a tyre?).  The reference was to the method of evacuation preferred by the vigilantes, tossing people on pyres made of old tyres and setting them aflame.  That’s how he became Tyre Sunil. 

Sunil was one of the brightest students at Peradeniya.  Life was never easy for Sunil, given the kind of background he came from.  He was tempered by the circumstances of his growing up and was mature beyond his years.  He had a girlfriend who ditched him around the time they graduated.  Supposedly due to a caste-mismatch.  He held no grudge.  He could not.  It was not in him. 

He sat the Foreign Service exam and passed.  He had answered all questions accurately at the interview. He didn’t make the cut for reasons best known to those on the interview board.  He worked for a couple of years as a data collector for the Agrarian Research and Training Institute, collecting price information from major markets.  He supplemented the meager income by giving tuition.

When he first started teaching, he had only 3 students.  The return on investment was minimal.  He told me then that he will continue to teach them because they had responded to the advertisement (a few handbills).  It was a responsibility.  He fell in love, married and had a son.  He purchased a small piece of land close to Peradeniya. 

‘I skipped lunch on certain days and had a plain tea instead.  When I wanted a cup of plain tea, I drank water.’

That’s how he saved the rupees and cents. 

I visited him in the year 2000 and spent a night at his place.  The house was not ‘half-built’.  It was less built than that.  Tyre Sunil treated me like a king.  I was given his ‘study room’ to sleep in.  ‘The Study’ had one bed and a table that held all the books he had, most of which were prizes he had won in school.  Among them was a familiar book, Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gora’.  The English translation, that is.  It was familiar because, I found out soon enough, it belonged to me.  He had borrowed it way back in 1993 when he stayed at my place.  April 30^th, I remember, because we were planning to go out on May Day. 

I flipped through the pages.  It was full of notes.  Words were underlined and the meanings of the underlined words were written on the corners of the particular page, with pencil lines connecting word and translation.  Almost every page had such comments.  That is the kind of effort that Tyre Sunil expended to improve his knowledge of English.  It must have taken him a long time to read the book, even though he must have read the Sinhala translation before.  Tagore to Malalasekera and back to Tagore after every 5-10 words takes a long time, I realized. 

He had, by that time, got a Government job as a teacher.  His first appointment was in some small school in a remote corner of the Hasalaka electorate.  He told me that he was not looking to get a transfer.  He told me that a few weeks after joining the school, the principle had invited him to speak at the assembly.  There was a lot of pride when he said that he spoke about making the best of what one has instead of cursing those who had and lamenting over one’s lot. 

Sunil still teaches.  He has sold that property and purchased one closer to the Kandy-Colombo road.  A couple of years ago, when I visited, he was in the process of building a house there. It was more than half-built.  He has hundreds of students now.  He is as thin as he was as an undergraduate.   Works hard.  Goes out of his way to make sure his students do well and while learning about the subject learn something about the world around them as well. 

Sunil did not ‘go over a tyre’.  Many Sunils did, though.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the secret of the monumental human resource crisis our country suffers from,  as my friend Werawellalage Premasiri (Director-Development, Upcountry Development Authority), who hails from Kumarigama, Ampara points out frequently when our friends get together. 

[Courtesy, Daily News, October 1, 2011] 

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