[email protected]
35, D.R. Wijewardene Mawatha, Colombo 10.

Dr. Wijesekara’s love

by Chandrasena THALANGAMA

D r. Wijesekara was in his consulting room waiting for his last patient in the morning session. At that moment a woman who was about forty years old, came into his room.

He was rather uneasy when he saw her, but pretending he was calm inwardly, he asked her to sit down and got ready to consult her.

He checked her body several times by placing his stethoscope on her chest and back and tried to write the prescription. But, before writing it he looked at her again.

“Your name?”

“Lalani Swarnalatha”

His heart-beat doubled at once. He wanted to have a second look at her but he didn’t and tried to write the chit as fast as he could. He gave it to her asking her to get medicine from the room next to his and went to the window.

He felt comfortable only when she left his room, but his heart had begun to stir with unrest, he had never experienced before.

‘Oh, how wonderful is life! How fantastic are these chance encounters! No doubt, she was the girl who loved me and whom I loved very much in our school days! How beautiful was the time we spent in the same village! ‘was she able to recognise me? If it is so, it may be very serious! She may tell others that I was her former lover. Then, what will happen to me? It mustn’t happen.

Next moment he could see her talking with her husband in the hospital ground. There were several packets of tablets and capsules in her hand. Hiding behind the curtain of the window he was looking at her face secretly. He wanted to investigate her face, her features. They had still remained unchanged. Even the birth-mark under her left eye and the scar on her forehead could be seen. He thought they have come forward to remind him of the memories of the past. She had been ageing and her beauty had faded away as a result of poverty and suffering, he thought.

He could hear them clearly:

“What did the doctor say?”

“He said that I’ve been suffering from wheeze and my lungs have been infected. He said that the job I do now may make my disease worse.”

“That’s what I also told you. Stop the bloody job! How much can you earn by sweeping the store?”

“The money you earn as a labourer is not enough for our living. That’s why I do this job.”

Dr. Wijesekara sighed and left the window. How unkind life is he thought. The fate that bound two lives together now has parted them as the sky and the earth. The love which was like a flower on his palm now has become a dark star in the far sky.

Dr. Wijesekara sat on his chair with a confused mind and began to think. He could remember the life he lived in Mr. Amarasekera’s coconut estate in Kurunegala where his father was the watcher. How nice life was then he wondered whether there were any difficulties at all then.

He was about sixteen years old. It was at that time that he came to know Lalani. The normal friendship between them had turned into a love affair. He could remember how he ran into her hut one evening with a heart full of love and emotions and kissed her lovely face very dearly. But, it is merely a dream now, a dream that had faded away from his heart.

Everything in his life had changed unexpected. He had been selected for the medical college and had to stay at a relative’s house in Welikada from where he could attend classes very easily. Meanwhile his parents had to move in to Mr. Amarasekera’s bungalow in Colombo for work instead of working in his coconut estate in Kurunegala. He can just imagine even now, how she looked at him with tearfilled eyes on the day they were due to leave the coconut estate. She sent him many letters with love even after he left the village, but he had no time to write to her. He had to burn midnight oil as he wanted to be successful in studies and to get rid of poverty into which he and his family had sunk. Apart from that his dream-like past had been erased by the new relations in the city. Having passed the MBBS Examination, Wijesekara had to work as a doctor in several hospitals in the island and after some years he married a girl in the same rank with a good dowry.

He thought of how his life has changed within a period of some twenty or thirty years. She was like his shadow, then. But, today she is far from that. He understood that he would never be able to travel the long distance between them and reach her as before.

He felt deeply sorry. If Lalani had the same social status as he had, everything would have been different, he thought. But, unfortunately, there was a huge wall between them. The dead body had to be sent to the mortuary. It was useless to check its pulse.

Dr. Wijesekara looked at his wife decisively, when he went home for lunch. She also understood that there was something unusual about his behaviour.

“You seem to be rapt in thought today. Why?” she asked.

“I think it is better to get a transfer to Colombo,” he said.

“Why?” we haven’t spent a long time here?”

“Why not? How many years have we spent here? It has been more than four.”

He had taken the decision because seeing her frequently would have been more painful for him or perhaps because his social status wouldn’t match with hers, he couldn’t understand.n

A soldier’s mother weeps

A Day before
The poya day
You visited me
With your beloved
And left
Promising
You’d be back
For New Year
You promised
And I believed
Ultimately,
You came
Making your
Promise
A reality.
But not in the same
Manner you went
Yet in a sealed box
Making us
All mourners
To whom should
I call Putha
For whom should
I be awaited
At the fence
War, I curse you
You took mine off
Making me
An eternal mourner
And loner
My tears frozen
And no longer can cry
Yet I’m awaiting
And awaiting you
My dear son
Till my existence

Saumya Sri Chaturanga

A bulbul in a lost world

Oh, My..! My....! My........!
What a world I woke up to?
Where has the precious emerald boon,
Gone with the enchanting and scintillating bloom!

Gorgeous blossom, tingling fragrance
And soothing breeze, all that’s no more!
I can’t believe my own eyes, though
For, what ever done to the world’s splendour!

Where have all my kith and kin gone?
Where are the butterflies, wondered in the grove?
What ever those cables are for,
No use of a sky with barriers, any more!

Let’s get annihilated, pay for what they’ve done
And let me please, have my world back, now
I am counting on you, Good Lord, Oh yah!
For, I am only a bulbul, innocuous by far!

Jayatissa K. Liyanage

The liberation journey

No easy way for us,
Passionate human beings,
Sailing through the vast ocean,
Of anger, hatred and discrimination,
Looking for a shore of happiness,
Yet, only another destination,
In this long voyage of life.

The real shore of wisdom and compassion,
Once been found,
By eliminating the passion,
And contemplating the truth,
Once been investigated,
By the Enlightened One.

Once been followed,
By thousands of ancestors,
The path to the eternal freedom,
No easy way for us,
But the time has come,
At least to try.

To reach the complete blessedness,
To walk along the way to ‘Nirvana’

Diroshi Prathima FONSEKA

Sweet Philadelphia

Sweet Philadelphia,
You catch my heart,
The city of independence and brotherhood,
The city of liberty.

Sweet Philadelphia,
How can I ever forget you,
Remember Coatesville,
And Black Hose Road.

Sweet Philadelphia,
I enjoyed your winter nights,
Travelling alone in the light city,
I truly love you.

Sweet Philadelphia,
I want to go to the Ruby Tuesday,
To have chicken with garlic bread,
You filled up my gastronomical sensations.

Sweet Philadelphia,
I walked along your streets,
The giant City Hall,
Where Sylvester Stallone
climbed to be the Champ.

Sweet Philadelphia,
I need to go now,
I will be back some day,
Until that time,
I kiss you goodbye.

Dr. Ruwan M. JAYATUNGE

Message of peace - not far

War,
Began slowly.
Increased gradually,
Shot, Killed, moaned, destroyed,
Got shot, got killed, moaned and destroyed,
Fatherless sons and daughters,
Childless fathers and mothers,
Husbandless wives,
All weeping and lamenting together,
Over our heroes,
Before monuments.
Surrender enemies, surrender.
Wild is not big enough,
For you to hide.
Over the era,
We respected and buried,
Wrong bodies,
Come, surrender,
Not far -
The PEACE

Bandula GUNARATNE

Surgeon of the wild

by R. L. Spittle

Very popular anthropologist historian, lover of jungle and fiction writer, R. L. Spittle was born on 9th December 1880. He received his primary education from schools in remote areas, Hambantota, Puttalam and later in Kurunegala. He inherited his love for the jungle from his father for whom he dedicated his book ‘Wild Ceylon,’ written in 1925.

He entered Royal College, Colombo for secondary education and then the Ceylon Medical College and became an LMS at the age of 24. In 1905 he left for England for his postgraduate studies at the Middlesex Hospital and subsequently at King’s.

After his return to Sri Lanka he was appointed as a third surgeon at the General Hospital Colombo. The ulcer ward of the General Hospital was under him and it is said that his methods revolutionised the treatment of ulcers.

He rendered a great service as a lecturer at the Medical College, during which period he wrote three books on surgery. Surgical Ward Work, Essential on Surgery and Framboesia Tropic. For the reputed British Medical Journal he wrote a monograph on yaws. Because of his great service for medicine he was awarded the CBE (Commander of British Empire). The epithet ‘Surgeon in Wilderness’ was conferred on him for his greatest works of healing in the impenetrable jungles shrouded by perennial darkness. He did his best to cure the people of Vanni of venereal diseases and malaria.

At the age of 54 he retired from the government service. His writing showed his deep and intimate knowledge of jungles and his interest in veddhas. He analysed history, aboriginal myths and jungle mysteries of this country.

As an anthropologist he had become an authority on veddas and was accustomed to every aspect of their lives. Dr. Spittle’s theory of vedda was that they were an offshoot of one autochthonous tribes of India who had crossed over to Ceylon in prehistoric times before the two lands were separated by the inroads of the sea water that gave birth to Palk Strait. As an author and a man of letters his contribution was unparalleled.

“Vanished Trail” and “Savage Sanctuary” are two books about the social lives which described three generations of Veddhas at that time. “Where the White Sambur Roams and “Wild White Boy” are fictions that relate the adventure of a Dutch boy Hans Vender Meer who was shipwrecked, lived in jungles and married a Veddha girl. “Brave Island” unfolds a story of two marine captains, one Dutch and one Portuguese. “Wild Ceylon” and ‘Far off things’ are two books written on vistas of hidden customs, beliefs and folklore that existed in the jungle habitats. He also wrote a short monograph on the Devil Bird in his last days of life. He died on September 3, 1969 at the age of 88.

Compiled by Ishara MUDUGAMUWA

[email protected]