OBITUARY: D. S. Jayasekera -- the consummate educator
Mr. David Jayasekera who died past the biblical span at 86 last week,
seemed to have found the elixir of life early - he never seemed prone to
aging, at least not in the duration of his school career, which was
spent almost half of a century in fealty to one institution. David. S.
Jayasekera seemed to be a fixed reference point in a transitory world
lost in the momentous drumbeat of change.
He hailed from Dompe, a village that hugged Colombo almost at its
border, but couldn't have been more far removed from the big city's
ways.
But, as a young schoolmaster, the young man from Dompe seemed to have
blended almost seamlessly with the ways of a city College modelled after
the British public school tradition.
Jayasekera ended a 48-year career as a teacher at S. Thomas' College
Mt. Lavinia about eleven years back when he went into a retirement. It
was a furlough to which he never seemed to adjust after years of almost
quotidian dedication to the culture of work.
With his passing, the College may have also marked the end of an era,
if that obituary writers' ritual bow to cliché is permitted here. He was
perhaps last in the long line of gentleman pedants in the starched white
suits - the green- tussore, or the off white China silks. Before him D.N.
Periera, Orville Abeynaike, C. H. Davidson, C (Pol) Weerasinghe, had all
passed on. If there are a few others like him who are yet in the land of
living, at least they are not those who used to wear the spotless cream
or white jackets, with tie.
Sartorially very English, almost Etonian, the old headmaster in Mr
Jayasekera may have hidden something of the rebel in him, for the simple
reason that he taught Sinhala, and imparted bedrock Sinhalese and
Buddhist values and traditions to students, even though in a school
priding itself in its pursuit of Anglican missionary values. But if he
was a rebel, he was hardly of the zealous mould.
He unearthed talent in his teaching years, with a doggedness that all
his young charges - young men in a hurry -- would have thought, bordered
on the monotonous. But, through his patronage, especially, of the
Sinhala debating society (Sahithaya sangmaya) and the drama society (Sinhala
natya ha sangeetha sangamaya) he discovered such fecund potential
talents such as those of Gamini Fonseka and Richard de Soysa. The
latter, if you ask any Thomian, was his early creation.
That was clear from the day the young Richard - who looked every inch
the young nubile lady in spite of his early youth - was carried on the
shoulders of fellow de Saram house thespians, as the winner of the best
actor award for his portrayal of the sanda kinduri in the presentation
of sanda kinduru jathakaya.
The late D. S. Jayasekera's enduring image, perhaps, would be of the
schoolmaster (and later Headmaster) who taught several generations of
Thomians, sometimes straddling three generations in the same family. At
least two latter day Wardens of S. Thomas' College addressed him as
"Sir' out of a healthy respect for the old timer who taught them before
they went out into the world and returned to be at the helm of affairs
of what's known with a somewhat smug succinctness as "the
College''......
Jayasekera married into a family of quietly upstanding Mirigama based
Sinhalese - his late father-in-law being substantially involved in the
post war Sinhala resurgence. His father-in-law's comradeship with the
giants of the time, the late D. B. Jayatillke, and D. S. Senanayake,
perhaps warranted the brief presence of Senanayake the day Jayasekera
married his wife of 55 years, Srimathie.
It seems in retrospect, he was the last of a class of the genteel and
comfortably well off from Sinhala suburbia, who chose teaching as a
profession, before that became a vocation of the few who aspired for
higher achievement and lost their way in the melee.
Jayasekera moved with many Thomians who went onto be noteworthy
achievers. Students recall that he was felicitated on his 80t birthday
in Dompe by some student loyalists including then Minister G. L. Peiris
and a former Deputy speaker Gamini Fonseka. He was remembered there as a
traditionalist, who eschewed the almost vulgar deviation from the
Sinhala mainstream discourse in the form of the then novel Hela Haula
movement. He was in many ways therefore, a reference point -- the anchor
that imbibed qualities of consistency in young men constantly challenged
in an era of bewildering and vulgar change.
Mr Jayasekera leaves behind his wife Srima, two sons and a daughter
and six grandchildren, besides a host of old and young former Thomian
charges to whom he was the nostalgically remembered patriarch.
- The Chief Editor, Sunday Observer
|