To the love of my life
Remembering my grandfather on his 91st
Don Abilinu Siyambalapitiya was born the sixth child in a family of seven, on 28th May, 1930. Legend has it that his rather unusual name ‘Abilinu’ was a tribute to a close friend of his father, my great-grandfather. He was D.A. to his colleagues and students later in life, and Abey to a few close friends. To me he was Seeya, grandfather, in Sinhalese. I lived with him for 27 years. This attempt is to remember his life. To make sense of some of my memories.
What is our first memory?
I really can’t say.
Surely I did not know him when he was a child.
Yet, I see him in the lush mountains of Badulla, in his shorts and crisp white shirt, bellowing “God save the King” to the cold, misty air. I can picture him munching away all the kevum and peni appa, sitting on the polished cement floor in the evenings at Makevita, his birth home, before being chased away by the ammas and akkas. I see a young man, ferociously cycling his way to school, passing the beautiful colonial houses along Negombo’s main street, his future, uncertain.
Memory. It is a strange, strange thing. Scientists say that we rewire our memories every time we recall them, altering them slightly in process. Thus memories are part a record of events and part imagination, intertwining with the reality of our present. My memories of my Seeya are many. Maybe they are real events or conversations. Maybe they are my own visual interpretations, created to support his storyline as we chatted over tea and biscuits.
And maybe, it doesn’t matter.
OF GOD, FAITH & HOPE
Like children of most families who adopted Catholicism sometime during the 400 plus years of Western colonialism in Sri Lanka, Seeya was educated in missionary schools. Sometime during the late 1940s, as Sri Lanka (Ceylon at the time) was gaining independence from the British, my grandfather failed his Advanced Certificate exams. Disappointed and disoriented, he got on his bicycle and began to pedal along the coconut tree laced roads of Negombo.
He pedalled and pedalled and pedalled.
He then recalls looking up at a church on top of a small hill. Climbing up the stairs he realized that he was at the Church of Our Lady, Kimbulapitiya, where he ended up praying that whole evening. The next day he got a call from his principal, asking him if he would like to train as a teacher. That fateful day, he had found his vocation. He would go on till the ripe old age of 83, retiring from the Buddhist and Pali University as an English instructor. His love and devotion to Mary, Jesus’s mother, was henceforth, absolute.
Years later, he would meet people who held a vastly different perspective of life. None made a deeper impression on him than his English friend John. A teacher and non-believer, he adopted more than 10 children and home schooled them. He would ask me once, “Would we, with our faith and supposed selflessness choose such a life? Why do we think that we need to have our own children, when there are so many others who are in need?”
I do often wonder about this.
He would go on to proclaim one day that he didn’t think that man needed God in order to be good and do good. That he now understood the many ways of living and being in the world. I believe that to him his faith was simply a way of life, of what was familiar, of what he needed to survive.
HARRY POTTER & ELEPHANTS
Seeya loved biographies, political non-fiction and interpretations of history. Our home library is filled with books from Sri Lankan authors, of colourful political lives, of war and of betrayal. So it was no surprise that for the life of him he couldn’t understand my addiction to Harry Potter. “What on earth can you learn from fantastical worlds of wizards and goblins?”, he asks. “Learn from real people!” This would often lead to me frantically trying to explain the story, how it was steeped in eternal values of love and friendship. His very able ears turned deaf at that point!
His deep empathy coupled with an outrage for injustice was apparent every time some poor villager would get killed by an elephant. “Why on earth can’t we bundle up a few and sell them to countries who don’t have them?” was his ingenious solution. Alas, I would try in vain to explain to him that elephants were a keystone species and that removing them from the eco-system would have dire consequences. He would not hear of it.
I randomly think of these arguments of ours, and smile. Is there greater beauty in the world than an 85 year old man, born in British colonized Ceylon, arguing with a 25 year old, full of ideas about all the things that went wrong in the 20th century?
TO ETERNAL YOUTH
I’ve often heard the phrase, “You can either grow old bitter or grateful.” Seeya was most definitely the opposite of bitter, and was the joy and pride of our home. He was the centre of attraction whenever I had friends over, always curious about what they were up to. At times he would just quietly smile at our giggles from the corner of his room.
“Your grandpa watches Big Bang Theory!” exclaimed one friend from Prague who was visiting Sri Lanka as an exchange student. “Now THIS is a story I will tell everyone when I get back!”
Big Bang Theory was just the tip of the iceberg (and a rather dull example of comedy, that!). Thanks to him we grew up watching Yes, Minister!, ‘Allo ‘Allo! and reading a whole assortment of rather intellectual satire. “Look at the humour in every situation and you’ll be fine!” was a rule he lived by, and I think it allowed him to live in joy, self love and contentment till the very end.
THE END
This is not to say that there wasn’t suffering. Isn’t living on without the love of your life for 12 long years suffering enough? I remember those first days without my grandma, my lokuamma, just clouded in a veil of tears. I remember the ten odd pills he would have swallow everyday; the constant loss of appetite. I remember him getting weaker and weaker. Mentally sound and sharp as ever, his body failing him before his eyes. “I look a haggard, old man, don’t I?” were his exact words, as he sift through my graduation photos.
But you know what struck me the most?
He never complained. Not of his pain, not of his loneliness, not in vanity for the loss of his good looks.
I never got to say goodbye.
My last physical memory of him is when I left Sri Lanka in July of 2017, sitting on his bed dressed in one of the many colourful sarongs he owned. We were both weeping. We both knew that this, this was the last time. In someways, yes, it was goodbye. But it was too painful to come to terms in that moment.
He left us on October 29th, 2017, at age 87.
This is me, remembering Seeya. He would have been 91 today.
