I was born on January 27, 1965, in a small nursing home in southern Colombo. I was taken straight from the hospital to a new family home on Hindu College Square, Ratmalana, almost opposite the Ponds factory Daddy managed.
This was home for my first five years. It was a plain three-bedroom bungalow with a small patch of lawn in front, ringed by a low parapet wall, at the non-factory end of the square in what was then a quiet, leafy, spacious little town. Ratmalana is not far from Colombo as the crow flies, but back then it felt like a distant outpost. Before urban settlement, Ratmalana had been full of coconut estates. In my childhood it still had vast patches of green – paddy fields and fruit and vegetable orchards, punctuated by “shanties” wattle-and-daub huts where the local poor lived. Not far away was Ratmalana airport, Ceylon’s first airport, and its international airport until 1967. I cannot recall hearing any noise from that direction. All it had was a small, twee art deco terminal, a short, narrow runway, and a clubhouse behind the terminal where Daddy sometimes met his friends for evening drinks.
I have faint memories of my first home and those early years on Hindu College Square – dim etchings barely discernible in the thick fog of time's passage, and only a few clearer flashbacks. Photos in the family album, some in black-and-white, some in colour; Mummy’s reminiscences; and those of relatives and old family friends, fill in some of the large gaps.
Photos: Mummy holding me delicately, just a few days old, at my naming ceremony, with Daddy and a Muslim priest standing next to her. A big party at home for my first birthday, with the birthday boy sitting proudly in his new toy pedal car. Me sitting on the swing in the lawn, neatly dressed in a shirt, shorts, white socks and sandals, with Mummy standing behind me. Sitting with her on a large straw mat on the lawn, surrounded by my collection of dinky cars. Kamala, my first ayah, who must have been in her early thirties, and Niaz, my nine-year-old playmate, both full-time, live-in servants from far-off villages, at a time when servants were still plentiful and cheap.
And flashbacks: In my new cowboy outfit, complete with a cowboy hat and toy gun in a holster, standing guard outside our front gate. Our lovely neighbours the Mohideens Mr and Mrs Mohideen and their four teenage children – who doted on me. The Jim Reeves records that their eldest son, Rifai, was crazy about. Daddy’s proud possession of a bulky Grundig radio and record player; the Trini Lopez, Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck records he used to play. As a three-year-old, seeing my new brother Reyaz for the first time. Watching Daddy batting at a local cricket match – and getting out for a duck. Mummy, her face flush and crying softly, telling me quietly one night her 89-year-old grandmother had died in Rhyl, North Wales. Daddy and male relatives in the back of a van, crowding around his father’s body, wrapped in a white sheet, about to set off for the cemetery.
Mummy continued to bloom like an English rose. She stood out in group photos: tall even by Ceylonese male standards, still slim, with a milky-white complexion unaffected by the tropical sun. She was a homebody now, with me and then my brother Reyaz to mother. But she still socialised a fair bit – dinner parties, occasional dances, and lots of Muslim weddings. Granny (Mummy’s mother) came to Ceylon twice in the late 1960s; we went on long outstation road trips both times. On the second trip, I vomited in the grand dining room of the Grand Hotel in Nuwara Eliya, Ceylon’s main hill station.
Granny, then in her early sixties, exuded vigorous health and energy and did well into her eighties and even nineties. She loved to ride a bicycle around Ratmalana, exploring its verdant nooks and crannies. One afternoon, Mummy and she happened to ride past Sir John Kotelawala’s ancestral coconut estate, right opposite the airport. There Sir John lived in post-prime-ministerial retirement; and there he hosted legendary breakfasts of hoppers, fish curry, mangoes and curd. The two white ladies caught Sir John’s eye as they cycled past. Ever the ladies’ man, he invited them in for tea and got his pet elephant to bow to him when instructed. Granny had no idea she was in prime ministerial company. But, back in Rhyl, she dined off that story for years to come.
Daddy’s career took off. His employer, the Maharaja Group, made him manager of their S-lon pipe factory right next to the Ponds factory he already managed. Then they made him a director, with a seat on the company board and a salary of 3,000 rupees a month, all when he was barely thirty. I was too young to notice, but sudden success made Daddy giddy: it changed him. He was no longer the simple, fresh-faced youth Mummy had met on the Orion over a decade earlier. Now he had a growing sense of his own importance, and showed it. With it came spiralling ambition for more professional success and its material trappings. The photos hint at this mental transformation, for Daddy looked so different from his engagement and wedding photos, and from those snaps Mummy took on the Orion. No longer was he thin and wiry; the fast-rising executive’s lifestyle had filled him out. He grew fonder of his evening tipple of whisky with water; he smoked more than ever. His face was now puffy, and he was developing a paunch.
In the late 1960s, no one – Daddy least of all – would have dreamt that political vicissitudes would turn us upside down just a few years later. Now, when I meet aged members of Colombo’s shrunken liberal intelligentsia, they turn wistful and misty-eyed when they travel back to these years of their youth and early adulthood. It was a time, for them, of secular liberality, of easy mixing among Sinhala Buddhists, Tamil Hindus, Christians and Muslims; of (relative) political stability and social peace; of (relatively) well-functioning British-endowed institutions; of manners and cultivation among the English-speaking elite; of optimism for the future. Many hark back to halcyon student days at the University of Peradeniya, surrounded by the lovely Hantane hills near Kandy.
No one embodied such liberal sentiments better than Dudley Senanayake. In 1965, Dudley came back as prime minister for his last stint, heading a UNP-led coalition. His previous stints, in the early 1950s and in 1960, had been very short; this time he was in office for five years. He remained the consummate gentleman-patriarch, and an instinctive and principled liberal on the neuralgic issues of race and religion – such a contrast to Mrs Bandaranaike, who preceded and succeeded him as prime minister.
Yet under his watch, the peace was but a surface calm. Dudley tried to implement the essentials of the old Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact to make Tamil an official language alongside Sinhalese and to devolve power to regional councils. Once again, it ran aground on Sinhala Buddhist opposition, inside and outside Parliament, dashing Tamil hopes.
Successive governments increased public spending on all sorts of social welfare programmes, but the economy was hardly growing. Budget deficits became the norm. Foreign debt increased. Meanwhile, the population was increasing rapidly. Ceylon impressed the world with its human welfare indicators on literacy, schooling and health care. New universities churned out more and more graduates, even if economic stagnation meant they had no jobs waiting for them. Unemployment increased, especially among the bulging bracket of educated youth. And Ceylon continued to suffer a brain drain as more middle-class professionals emigrated to the UK, USA, Canada and Australia.
The writer Jan Morris visited Ceylon in the mid-1960s and stayed at the Galle Face Hotel. He (this was before his sex-change operation, when “James” became “Jan”) succumbed to the island’s surface charms, but it was not, or no longer, Serendib. Ceylon had “addled politics” and “false finance”, he wrote. It had “fierce emotions”: the murder rate was among the highest in the world; and domestic violence was widespread. He concluded that “the primitive streak is strong”.
Bevis Bawa, older brother to Sri Lanka’s world-famous architect Geoffrey Bawa, captured these times and their characters vividly in a series of contemporary newspaper columns called “Briefly by Bevis”. He celebrated the quiet, laid-back, rural backwater that was Ceylon before mass tourism arrived, and the colourful, eccentric personalities of the Colombo elite. But he saw degeneration setting in. He bemoaned the new breed of politicians and government officials, giving themselves terrific airs and with no manners – no “pleases” or “thank yous”. A new coarseness was creeping into public life. But I don’t think even Bevis would have foreseen what was to come in the 1970s.
In 1970, we moved to a large, airy bungalow in Ratmalana, not far from our old house and the Ponds factory on Hindu College Square. Mummy designed it, despite no architectural training, helped by a family friend who was a civil engineer and chartered surveyor. At its centre was an open-air atrium with rockery, potted plants, and a white wrought-iron table with chairs covered by a sunshade. Much dinner party entertaining took place here: drinks and snacks were served under the stars late into the night, before guests came inside for dinner. Our bedrooms and a big open living and dining area surrounded the atrium. Reyaz and I shared a playroom full of toys. Behind the bungalow was a large vegetable garden, a swing and a well; and in front a decent stretch of lawn led to a high parapet wall, topped with shards of glass to ward off burglars. And in the driveway, under the porch, was Daddy's hulking grey Humber with plush red seats and a rigid steering wheel the five-year-old me found impossible to turn.
We had moved up in life due to Daddy’s career change. In 1969, my uncle Razeen bought the Mount Lavinia Hotel. It was not far from Ratmalana, on the beach side off Galle Road on the way to Colombo. It was what prompted Daddy to leave the Ponds factory and resign his directorship of Maharajas to run the hotel as managing director. He told Mummy he wanted to be his own boss rather than continue to make money for other bosses. Uncle Razeen, not Daddy, owned the hotel, but Daddy felt this was his opportunity to run his own show and make a much bigger mark. Not least, running one of Ceylon’s leading hotels was a major social elevation: Daddy was now a figure in Colombo society.
I still delight in going back to Mount Lavinia Hotel and can hardly believe I once practically lived there. There it stands on headland, as it has stood since 1806 when Governor Sir Thomas Maitland built it as his out-of-town residence.
