![]() My acquaintance with officers in the foreign service was, for the most part, casual, that is to say, not related to our work, and, despite a hiccup or two, cordial as well.
I knew of my namesake while I was busy through each interval seeking, as we all were, championship honours at French Cricket. Actually there were four of us Gamini Seneviratnes at the time in school, including one who took to medicine and Aetaya who opened batting, the senior-most who is wrapped around or within these lines was better known as Gadaya, a nickname he had inherited from his brother who retired as the IGP, G A D E A Seneviratne, (better known as Ana). I do not know whether the same nom de guerre had been conferred on brother Nalin, who retired as the Army Commander.
I was in one of the lower Forms when Gadaya or Gudson was inducted into our cricket team for, of all matches, the Royal-Thomian. He opened the bowling and, as was to become apparent in his later life, put everything he had into it. He swung his arm over with commitment and passion and before he had gone through half his spell, i.e., in the first over, we saw his shirt flying loose behind him. As far as I can recall it was a match that St. Thomas’s won by an innings, but there could be no besmirching Gadaya’s name in that connection: he batted at the bottom of the order as he had bowled at the top, and was the only batsman who remained ‘not out’ in both innings. It did not matter that he made no score; after all, our Captain got a pair of ducks, OUT each time.
Gadaya served in senior positions including those of Ambassador and I have, when asked by chance acquaintances, whether I had just returned from Bangkok or wherever he had last been required to lie for our country, out of my respect for matters of ‘fact’, disclaimed any part in such goings on. He too had been embarrassed by the receipt of congratulations (not by academics in our Departments of English!) on some poem of mine. In the business of ‘overseas administration’, conscientious as he was, he seemed to be on the same wave-length as the old Treasury-wallahs who knew what the AR and FR could do, though the rules may have been mis-formulated in terms of what they were meant to do. For the old hands at the Treasury, the wave-length wavered; for the unsuspecting Gadaya it did not.
Also, at school, we had Charlie Mahendran, who competed with Sappie Pieris, (later, the Director of Census & Statistics and the first head of department to be incarcerated – by J R – for carrying out his duties as mandated), in the matter of putting us to sleep in class. Between them it was a close call and Ceylon History sank into an ageless slumber. He suffered a hiccup in Africa that he may not have got over yet and a major – well, ‘faux pas’ might not be the right term, – in New York in the line of duty or out of it. He went on and down into politics.
Rodney Vandergert was the self-effacing ‘big’ brother of my classmate, Beverly. Actually they were both small-made by the standards that then prevailed, especially among the Burgher boys in school. Ludekens, for example, was tall, Vandendriesen both tall and broad, Bartholemeusz had a paunch as well and Muller possessed biceps that he could flaunt and did – regularly at the Royal-Thomian (and, on a memorable occasion, under the tamarind tree where he took on Viswa Weerasooria in a battle for a ‘lady love’ in a lower class).
Many of our lot dispersed all across the globe and when some years ago a hulk, armed with a moustache and a seven o’clock shadow or whatever, had appeared at one of our ‘get-togethers’ and been presented as ‘Beverly’, there had been an eruption of disbelief, more or less polite. I wasn’t among those present but, as I said when I heard about it, they should have asked ‘Beverly’ to give them Gene Autry’s ‘Lonely River’: it was the song he sang at scout camps, perhaps the only song he knew.
My classmate, Jungle Dissanayake, came in from outside the Service as Ambassador to Indonesia where, good, committed, conservative though he is, he revealed a revolutionary streak towards the business of running a Mission. He moved on to Brussels, a key to our relations with Europe; what has given him greater satisfaction, though, is his avocation as a recorder of and commentator on politics in this country and the personalities who were/are engaged in such shameful games.
Another schoolmate, Mahen Vaithianathan, too joined the Overseas Service via a novel route (mentioned below).
From campus days I knew or knew of John Gooneratne (who made the typically ‘Thomian’ gadol joke (“Banda shot today – in the morning!”), Karunakaran Breckenridge, Chandra Monarawela, Jayantha Dhanapala, Nihal Rodrigo, Wilhelm Woutersz, K Wijesiri and Janaka Nakkavita.
John, I believe, was our Ambassador in Iraq when what the US oil companies refer to as ‘the Gulf War’ was conducted for them by Bush Senior; our Mission had a rough time evacuating Lankans from those parts, especially from the Iraqi province of Kuwait. He graduated into Strategic Studies and headed the Institute since named after Lakshman Kadiragamar, the only Leader this country has had since Sir Baron Jayatilake. By all reports, that Institute is now being trashed: what a unique tribute, and to such a man!
Breck was a man apart (when I discovered that his younger brother, Ranji, Professor of Zoology in Peradeniya and, in his retirement, Principal of their old school, Trinity, was also known as ‘Breck’, I was annoyed). Despite his rugby and his theatre, Breck was not a typical product of that school (he’d have learnt a great deal more at, say, Royal or at St. John’s Jaffna). He built up his knowledge by other means, mostly through his sensitivity to the lives of other people. He ‘knew’ the people he met.
But he was no know-all. A large gap in his knowledge of how this world runs had to do with wheels. I know that he could ride a bicycle, and I believe that he and Nimal fell in love while commuting by car between New York and Washington. Breck’s handling of a vehicle with four wheels, however, was infected by his insouciance. On his way to work he had driven his brand new car into the signal post at Bambalapitiya junction, and been forced to borrow a colleague’s brand new car to get home – and managed to rip its side on the axle of a bullock cart. No, he said, he was thinking of lunch, not of a Guinness record. I borrowed his brand new car, not the same one, this was a Volkswagen, for a rush trip to Kurunegala and ripping past Pasyala, discovered a whisker away from a major, a murderous, accident that it had no horn. My knees shook the rest of the way. Looking it over before the return journey I found, yes, that it had no spare wheel.
Breck was not given to ‘constructing a career’, and it is everybody’s good fortune that Shirley Amerasinghe spotted his gifts and brought him in to assist at the consultations that led to the adoption of the Law of the Sea; it would seem to be the only major piece of legislation that remains enforceable across the world.
It was the practice for recruitment to the Overseas Service to be made through the Civil Service examination. Those who topped the list could opt to join the COS; salaries etc being such, few did. (The Overseas Service was renamed the Foreign Service under a new Minute about ten years ago). In the late nineteen fifties, however, that practice was overlooked, just the once, because it was time to bring in ‘more mature’ people into the service. As it happened, it was just about the right time for S W R D’s Permanent Secretary’s son and for the daughter of his ‘class’ mate, Dr. Naganathan, as well as a few others who had matured beyond the age limit prescribed for the exam to come help the country.
Mahen Vaithianathan, life-long a ‘maverick’, as such terms are applied to those one does not know at all or not well enough, was not interested in taking a job courtesy of his father. Despite a year in London at the School of Asian Studies immersed down to his shoulders in the Chinese language, he did not stay long in the COS. A few others, like Nimalasiri Silva, went for more abundant pastures that suited his tastes. Tissa Jayakody remained on duty till the end of his service-life and beyond.
Tissa, like Breck, was ‘different’. With a First in Economics and all, he had initially joined the Central Bank which sent him to the London School of Economics for his Masters (on capital accumulation in Ceylon in the 19th century). His was a very generous but unforgiving nature and he didn’t seem conscious of the difference. Like Breck and some others I knew, ‘not too many’, he was a professional diplomat. He did his homework, much of it, in the traditional manner, on the cocktail circuit, and entertained well with decorum and spirit. I recall his getting down a load of orchids from here for a farewell party for the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps in Geneva; the food was Lankan, delivered from Austria. Being single he had to obtain the assistance of the widow of a diplomat to function as hostess.
Being single had its ‘compensations’ too. The evening before I visited him in New Delhi for an extended break there had been a ‘Singles Party’ at his residence. I cannot vouch for the statistics; I repeat the figures I was given by the Editor of the Times of India who chortled through his story. There had been food to feed an army, he said, two cases of whisky, a case of brandy, four cases of beer and eight cases of f….ing in the garden.
While I was there, the late Naina Marikkar came by; he had a programme with the Indian Planning Commission, and my holiday ended. It included a visit to Tamilnadu to view the State apparatus. S Gautamadasa was our Deputy High Commissioner in Madras/Chennai (Tissa had another spell there at a crucial time) and took us to meet the Chief Minister, M G Ramachandran. I had not quite forgotten my Tamil then and sat up when MGR said, “They should divide the country straight across through Kandy.” I looked across at Gauths but his thoughts were far away and Naina Marikkar asked, ‘How do you manage in this little room?’ Naina was not thinking of Tolstoy and his ‘How Much Land Does a Man Require?’ – (I related that story to him on our way back); he was bewildered by the CM’s Office being a cubicle with a desk, chair, telephone and a couple of benches for visitors. MGR had been born in Kandy district and estate workers had portraits of him and Sivaji Ganesan alongside those of Gandhi and Nehru on the ‘line-room’ walls.
Tissa was inducted into the management of the Provincial Council system, and several key figures from Jaffna, including Uma Maheswaran and Vartharaja Perumal kept in close touch with him. Uma was gunned down in Wellawatte; Police inquiries, no doubt assiduous, came up with ‘no suspects’. I met Perumal, a cagey figure not too sure of himself, shortly before he came up with his UDI.
Jayanath Rajepakse was the most super-conscientious member of that service I have encountered. I had to sit an Efficiency Bar examination at our embassy in Rome (a provision initially made for British public servants who were on ‘Home Leave’). It turned out that Jayanath was sitting the same exam in ‘Accounts’. I found a Harbajan Singh look-alike prowling around: Jayanath had brought in an officer from the Indian Embassy to invigilate – as he and I sat at either end of the room accounting, in my case, for my lack of preparation and the bit of, um, dicey, palm-reading I had done in Paris to support a few friends who’d ‘given their all’ in the Pigalle on day one of our holiday.
Stanley Jayaweera and Joseph displayed conscientiousness of a belligerent kind at a seminar on Public Service Ethics. Ethical conduct, in chorus they declared, begins with keeping to time (they weren’t thinking of symphonies, concertos and things of that sort). Public servants should do their clock-watching at home and get to work well in time. I was chairing the morning session the following day but they weren’t there. When they came in half an hour late it was occasion for a “Good Afternoon!” They went missing after the tea break.
Jayantha Dhanapala and Maureen were with us in campus and have remained in touch, though not enough. Courtesy comes naturally to Jayantha, and coupled with Maureen’s charm and down-to-earth good sense, it was a great comfort to us that when they were in Washington and in New York, they were within easy reach or our daughter who has settled down in that part of the world.
I have not followed the mechanics of the discussions that Jayantha presided over, and which led to the adoption of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with its major skew, but I gathered that countries like India that had ‘nuclear ambitions’ had chosen to go along with it on the back of a long-term horse deal.
When I got to Canberra for an FAO conference, Nihal Rodrigo was holding the fort in Canberra as Neville Jansz had been ‘retired’ as High Commissioner. We had between us A$36 and Pounds 25 for ‘entertainment’. That wouldn’t have paid for a round of orange juice for the delegates but entertaining was done of key delegates, Chitra providing ‘a good string-hopper feed’ with Maname to enliven and mati-laampu to enlighten the scene. Years later we spent some contented hours walking around Broadway, talking of many things.
When I came into the Ministry of Industries, I found H M G S Palihakkara to be the brightest of the Staff Officers there. Some of his colleagues, ‘dealing with’ big businessmen in the course of work, have undergone a sea-change and are in ‘business’ themselves. Am glad for him that the UN itself has asked for his services.
Encounters with people in our Foreign Service, including Sarala Fernando, Wilhelm, Nesaratnam and others as with non-career diplomats like Sarathchandra would take some telling some other time. I have to meet a deadline. |
