One of the great delights to be derived from pleasurable reading is when a passage, or even a word or two, prompts some assault on the senses: exhilaration, indignation, contemplation, confusion, a voice form the past, an invitation to know more or to visit some far-away place. All countless stimuli from words and how they have been assembled.

I was reminded of this when feasting recently on Jan Morris’s marvellous sketch of Oxford. And although I am familiar with the City of Spires, it was the reference to a sari that caught me eye. Sari: one beautiful word that transported me back 30 years to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka and far too long on the world stage as the result of the Sinhalese/Tamil conflict.

Even back in the late 1980’s, mature travellers and Sinhalese residents alike referred to that 25,000 square mile teardrop of an island nestled at the tip of the Indian sub-continent as Ceylon, named by the British in 1815. The Republic of Sri Lanka - the ‘resplendent isle’  - was formed in 1972. But its world renowned tea sill displays ‘Ceylon’ on packages found in our supermarkets.

With a Sinhalese counterpart, I spent a year as the coordinator of a cross-cultural, development/educational exchange involving 70 young adult participants from Ceylon and Canada: thirty-five from each country; six months in Ontario and six in Ceylon.

For the Ceylonese, mostly from desperately poor rural families, it was their first exposure to Western ways and the first part of their programme was spent in comparative comfort with their Canadian counterparts on Ontario farms. On the other hand, most of our participants were making their first trip to Asia and after their arrival in Colombo, they were billeted in small villages where they encountered primitive living quarters, often without water or electricity. Often with unwanted wild life and illness.


By comparison, apart from when I visited the five villages in the programme, I had it soft in my ‘digs’ with a High Court judge and his wife and three children. My residence was a short bus ride from downtown to Ratmalana, along the Colombo/Galle road, close to Mount Lavinia and the grand old colonial hotel of that name. The lush, palm-lined garden of our house boasted a self-contained annex which I seconded and in which Mr Justice Walter Widyaratne had once escaped to study his legal briefs at a time when his children were younger and noisier.

Upon appointment to the bench he was posted to Chilaw, a couple of hours’ drive away on the west coast, and the annex lapsed into disuse. Insects, large and small assumed squatters’ rights; so Walter’s wife Manel and the children welcomed me there as a temporary but more amenable tenant. His schedule was a weekly shuttle that saw him leaving his family on Sunday nights by car and driver and returning Fridays in the early evening. Even before the hostilities escalated, Ceylon was not the safest lace to live and the family enjoyed having me around as Walter was away so much of the time.

Meanwhile, the disarmingly charming, piano-playing Manel, loved, adored and cherished her countless saris and appeared in a lungi only when some messy chore needed completion, for which there was usually a servant on hand. Perhaps it inappropriate to suggest that a High Court judge’s wife did indeed glide sinuously by in her sari but my! she looked marvellous in every one of them. And Jan Morris’s words reminded me every time I recall Manel attending to family and other household responsibilities. She served me every morning at breakfast and often for other meals at weekends: smiling, courteous, shy but firm in expressing her views, and always wearing yet another never-seen- before sari. Immaculately draped.

Sunday evening snapshots I shall never forget are those of the driver arriving to take Walter to his bungalow in Chilaw. Having had afternoon tea with the family, I was usually there to bid adieu and watch him and Manel file down the wide, open staircase in the house. The Judge first, spotlessly groomed, attired in a black suit and tie and white shirt. Sari-clad Manel followed behind him, carrying his bag clothing for the week in one hand and a voluminous, bulging legal brief case in the other.

Not a familiar scene in my house. But a normal part of life in another world, in Ceylon.

I don’t thinki ever saw Manel in the sam sari twice. When I came to know the Widyratnes well, I asked her one day how many she had in her closet. She smiled, nodded and gently rolled her head from side to side in the graceful way the Ceylonese have, and didn’t say a word.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked.