The death of Vasantha Karalliedde:

A slice of childhood lost

Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

In the lexicon of some Sinhala literary critics who know a little of post-modernism, nostalgia is a dirty word. It is regressive and retrograde and smacks of a futile attempt to return to the past. However, in a darkening and confusing time when so many certainties are crumbling nostalgia may be the only way to keep sane.

Nostalgia for one's childhood is a particularly powerful emotion for it embodies a search for lost innocence. Those were the days before the fall, before one's eyes were violently prised open to the sordid realities of life. Such a sense of bitter-sweet nostalgia seized me when I heard the news of the sudden death of Vasantha Karalliedde our childhood neighbour, I discovered after his death that he was only nine years my senior but when one has known somebody from the time one has been a toddler that gap can be intimidating even in one's adulthood.

A lawyer by profession Vasantha came from a distinguished family. His father W. B. Karalliedde was a Member of the State Council and was a member of Executive Committee on Education which was instrumental in introducing free education to Sri Lanka. He was a close friend and associate of A. Ratnayake, later a Minister and President of the Senate. I remember him as a courtly Sinhala gentleman of the old school embodying the best qualities of classical, oriental culture and western liberal culture.

Vasantha's mother a stately but kind Kandyan lady was a sister of the late Sir Nicholas Attygalle the first Sri Lankan Vice Chancellor of the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya and a formidable successor to Sir Ivor Jennings. Vasantha's elder brother Prof. Lakshman is a distinguished anaesthetologist maintaining the medical tradition of his uncle and his son Dr. Lakshman Attygalle.

With that kind of background Vasantha had the world of his feet but he was made from a different clay. He was the playful younger son, the irreverent imp, the bohemian bachelor. The comfortable milieu of the Law College in the 1960s where you could go on and on if you had the time, money and inclination was the perfect setting for him.

As the distinguished lawyer Franklyn Amarasinghe has recalled in an Appreciation he was excellent company of a sing-song and a wonderful mimic. In a cameo from those time's Vasantha was taken into custody for breaking the curfew during the 1971 Insurrection. Looking at the thin, dishellveed young man produced before him the next day the Magistrate required what he did for a living. Quite composedly Vasantha informed the Magistrate that he was a lawyer by profession. He was warned and discharged.

As a lawyer he served Julius and Creasy and worked in London for long for a firm of solicitors. On returning to Sri Lanka he was associated with ETV, the television station then owned by his brother-in-law Nahil Wijesuriya.

During his last years in Kandy he was a virtual recluse. He was obviously in the grid of some inner sadness which not even his family could fathom. He never lost his wit and good humour but in the cavers of his heart he was a lonely man. Being much younger I naturally could not probe the secrets of his soul and anyway did not meet him regularly. But what his death brought powerfully to mind was Martin Wickramasinghe's description of Aravinda's convalescence, death and his funeral in his celebrated novel 'Viragaya'.

Coming from a distinguished Kandyan ancestry, Vasantha did not care for the baubles of family, status or wealth. He was not a political rebel but obviously had a deeply-ingrained anti-establishment streak in him. Said Martin Wickramasinghe of Aravinda's funeral: 'People came in their numbers for Aravinda's funeral for they knew by instinct that he was a good man'.

Vasantha Karalliedde's death evokes memories of childhood walks from my grandfather's home at Trincomalee Street to the leafy edges of Udawattakelle where the Karallieddes lived. Eventually we moved in next door. Now our family's ties with Kandy are sundered and a last link in a chain of friendship has snapped. The leisurely days of innocence are retreating into the mists of nostalgic memory.