Here is another post that condenses a chapter of memoirs that I wrote 20 or more years ago about an episode in my life and Wendy's. This one has the benefit of some photo illustrations.
In the Christmas-New Year week of 1975, I was briefed at the South East Asian Regional Office of the World Health Organization (WHO/SEARO) in New Delhi for a mission in Sri Lanka. I was asked to examine, advise and report on the status of education in maternal, child and family health at the two medical schools in Sri Lanka, the 100 year old University of Columbo medical school and the recently established new medical school on the Peradenya campus, near Kandy.
Structures used by ancient astronomers (astrologists?) Delhi
After my briefing, by rights I ought to have flown direct from Delhi to Columbo I had made provisional bookings to do this, before I left Ottawa. Both Air India and Air Lanka had direct, non-stop flights. But somebody in the Regional Office in Delhi made a costly blunder. My reservation had been erased from the new computerized booking system. My ticket had to be rewritten, and I had to fly Delhi - Bombay - Columbo. Because of the way the flight schedules were arranged, I had to stop overnight, and furthermore, on New Year's Eve. To cap it all, the only hotel that had any rooms free on that night of all nights in the year, was the Taj Mahal, the most expensive luxury hotel in Bombay, if not in all of India, prices far above the normal room rate allowed to WHO consultants. When I arrived at the Taj Mahal Hotel, the clerk at the registration desk said that because they were so heavily booked, the only space they could give me was the Viceroy Suite on the top floor, which was normally rented at an astronomically high rate; but as the booking had been made for me by WHO, they would let me have it at the regular room rate. I had to promise to be out of there by 9 am on New Year's Day, as one of the local millionaires had reserved the suite for a private party starting later in the morning. I assured the reservations clerk that this would not be a problem: my flight for Columbo departed at noon, so I had to be at the airport by about 9.30-10.00 am. That New Year's Eve at the Taj Mahal Hotel was one of my rare luxurious experiences. Too bad I was on my own, and too tired and too poorly dressed (no smart dinner jacket) to enjoy it! The Taj Mahal Hotel that New Year's Eve was playing host to many of Bombay's Beautiful People – Bollywood movie stars and directors, their mistresses and lovers, captains of industry and commerce and their spouses, the rich and famous people of that great city, all sumptuously dressed, or for many women, undressed with much succulent and shapely brown skin on display. I was very hungry and had to wait over an hour for my modest table for one, discretely hidden behind potted palm trees in a corner by the servery door where no one could see my scruffy bush jacket. I ordered the hottest curry that they had, a serious mistake: my mouth was sore and numb for several days. I was still eating, and washing it down with ice-cold beer, far into the night.
Later I strolled out into a velvety warm and balmy Bombay night, to be accosted by the most revolting collection of deformed beggars I have ever encountered. They scuttled around me, silently for the most part, like nothing so much as a horde of large spiders, holding out hands, or stumps, in some cases feet. Probably most had been deliberately deformed as infants, their arms and legs broken and left to set in bizarre positions, so that they could eventually become professional beggars, arousing pity by their appearance, part of the property of some pimp who used them as other pimps use prostitutes. I had heard about these pathetic creatures before I came there, indeed I had gone outside on purpose to see them for myself. The reality was much worse than my expectations. Rohintin Mistry writes vividly about the underside of Bombay in his wonderful Dickensian novels, but wisely draws the line this side of describing the appearance of these deformed beggars. It may have been the most stomach-churning sight I have ever seen. I retreated, walked a little longer in the private interior courtyard of the hotel, then retired to my suite, which occupied about half the top floor of the hotel, with a superb view out over the bay, a crescent of silvery waves below the Esplanade, the row of lights and handsome high-rise towers along the shore all the way to the India Gate and beyond. How sad to be all alone in this splendid setting!
Next day I got to the airport in time to ensure a window seat near the front on the left-hand side, and on a clear sunny day I flew down the coast of India, much of the time just out to sea far enough for the coast and the land immediately behind it to be clearly visible. We had already started our descent by the time we came to the southern city of Trivandrum in Kerala the home town of my friend and Ottawa colleague Rama Nair, and I had a clear view of its beaches and the rolling breakers coming off the Sea of Arabia, fishing nets hanging to dry from palm trees.
Sri Lanka in 1976 was at peace, if rumbling ominously a little. Occasionally I met people, such as an elderly Hindu holy man in Columbo, who could tell of arbitrary arrests and torture. But at both campuses of the University of Sri Lanka, Sinhalese and Tamil staff worked amicably together, most of the time in English. What is more, though we often complain about the wasteful repetition of memoranda at the University of Ottawa in both official languages, at least both have the same alphabet. In Sri Lanka, every notice, every set of handouts at the medical school, had to be in three languages each with its own alphabet: our customary alphabet for the English version, the curlicues and circles for Sinhalese, the hanging squarish script for Tamil. Some exodus of talent had already begun by 1976, but this was mainly the lure of higher incomes in the rich oil states of the Middle East, or the superior research opportunities for gifted people that led so many of these very bright Sinhalese and Tamil medical scientists and scholars to leave for Europe or America. Of course the flight of talent, and of many others, got a lot worse after the war broke out to establish a separate Tamil state a few years later.
Rural market, Sri Lanka
Base of the ancient rock fortress, Sigurya - we climbed the ladders and paths to the top, definitely the scariest climb of our lives!
Both in the weeks that I was on my own, and in the weeks that remained after Wendy joined me, there was a great deal to see and do in Sri Lanka, as well as my official duties. In addition to many photographs in the family album, I have a plethora of vivid and colourful recollections, too many to relate fully without exhausting me and boring anybody who reads this. This account can't aspire to be anything other than some random recollections.
I started my work in Columbo, where I stayed at a small hotel frequented mainly by cut-rate German tour parties. It was odd to hear the waiters and the room maids talking in broken German no better than my own, as they took orders from the guests. There was air conditioning (very welcome, but noisy) and a small swimming pool, but I avoided it as I had ones much like it in Jogjakarta and Surabaya in Java a few years earlier - here too, as there, I noticed that many of the plump herren and their often shapely fraus or frauleins who did use it had red eyes and irritating skin rashes later. I was struck by how cheap everything was. I bought a whole pineapple one day for the local equivalent of less than a
cent, could almost have had a bath in its plentiful sweet juice; and paid about a cent to have my sandal strap sewn back on when it broke.
View of Sri Lankan countryside from summit of rock fortress of Sigurya (about 250 m above surrounding countryside)
cent, could almost have had a bath in its plentiful sweet juice; and paid about a cent to have my sandal strap sewn back on when it broke.
View of Sri Lankan countryside from summit of rock fortress of Sigurya (about 250 m above surrounding countryside)
Columbo is a large, dirty, noisy city and seaport. It had gone downhill since I had first been there, going ashore from the RMS Strathnaver that took me to England in 1951. In those days, the Galle Face Hotel on the sea front, where we young Australians en route to England had stopped briefly for a cold beer, was a proud, grand, exclusive place that had been reluctant to admit a rather rowdy and casually dressed bunch of youngsters. By early 1976, it had a musty, mouldy atmosphere, its carpets had become threadbare, its elegant furniture scuffed and decrepit, its staff demoralized. The deteriorating esplanade in front, and the lawn that had once been immaculately manicured, were strewn with litter and the tawdry stalls of street vendors. Even in late morning a few street-walkers plied their trade there, something that would never have been tolerated in the old days, I was told. Some new luxury hotels were being built, though I fancy none were then complete, at any rate in Columbo. In some ways Columbo resembled a shabbier and small-scale version of any large city in India at that time. Several of the expatriates I met, people living and working there for longer periods than I, who were familiar with both countries, remarked on the similarities, and the way India was advancing but Sri Lanka was not. The differences undoubtedly got a lot greater after the war began. Almost the only make of car was the Indian-made Morris Minor (in India the locally made version of the Morris Oxford was most popular at that time); and many of these Morris Minors were on their last legs, or wheels. When Wendy and I were on our way to catch a train to Hikkadua on the south coast to celebrate our wedding anniversary a few weeks later, the taxi that was taking us to the station lost a wheel. As we sat in the back, we looked out and saw the wheel rolling along beside us, and a moment later there was a grinding crunch as the hub scraped along the road surface. We missed the train because of this, and had to go south uncomfortably by bus.
View from our bedroom, Mrs Wickramasuria's guest house, Peradenya
View from our bedroom, Mrs Wickramasuria's guest house, Peradenya
Names in Sri Lanka reveal people's ethnic background, as they do in Ulster and in the former Yugoslavia. The Sinhalese, a proud, even arrogant race, handsome in a heavy-featured way, mostly have polysyllabic names ending in -aratne, -asnaika, -asuria, etc, though some have ancestors who adopted Portuguese names during the period of colonization that began very soon after Vasco da Gama serendipitously "discovered" this island that he called Serendip. So there are Soysas, Fonsecas, Fernandos. The Tamils also have polysyllabic names but they are completely different, with quite recognizably different endings: -anayeram, -sanderam, -underam and the like. The Tamils began moving into Ceylon many hundreds of years ago - it is almost possible to walk across the shallow sea from the southern tip of India in Tamil Nadu. In British colonial times, many Indians from Tamil Nadu were imported to work as cheap labour on the tea plantations; so the numbers, especially in the northern quarter of the island, rapidly grew. The old Sinhalese culture resisted colonial dominance and successfully defended itself for several generations from its highland fastnesses. When we went by train to Kandy, sitting in the parlour car at the back with its picture windows and specially inclined seats to look back as we climbed the precipitous cliffs of the escarpment on the way to Kandy, it was easy to see how this highland region could be defended against everything except modern weapons. The Sinhalese culture has ancient origins, going back to the earliest days of Buddhism, perhaps earlier. They are very musical people whose festivals at the Poya (full) moon and at the innumerable ceremonies in the holy city of Kandy, are dominated by music (bells, pipes, flutes, drums). We met several talented musicians: "Bas" Basnaike the professor of physiology at the Peredenya campus, and Ralph de Fonseca, the professor of public health at the Columbo campus, were both brilliant pianists. I met a rather beautiful young woman at a party, who was about to leave to begin training as a concert violinist in Germany. The 5th Century frescos that have survived almost intact beneath an overhanging rock face high on the side of the fortress of Sigiriya, include several musicians (although there is more emphasis on beautiful bare-breasted damsels serving fruit to their masters).
During my visits to the Peradenya campus, I found a wonderful place to stay, first on my own and then with Wendy. This was a guest room in Mrs Wickramasuria's home, the Menaka Guest House (named for her younger daughter, Menaka, a young woman with Cushing’s syndrome). Mrs Wickramasuria's marriage had broken up. Her husband was a disgraced member of the medical profession who had gone to Australia, leaving her to survive with the remnants of her dowry, her family estate, and to eke out a living by renting rooms in her home. She was still young enough (late 30s, I would guess) to attract a lover, a member of parliament who visited her at weekends. One weekend during my stay, before Wendy arrived, I was working in my room while she and her lover were noisily enjoying themselves in the room next door. She emerged to get me my evening meal late in the afternoon, with towsled hair, her sari hastily rearranged. I was not too surprised when we got a Christmas letter at the end of that year, announcing the arrival of "Baby" - not named until some years later, because a good Buddhist custom is to await a favourable astrological conjunction of the planets before a child is named (also, until recent times, it made sense to wait until there was a reasonable likelihood that the child would survive infancy).
Eighth Century ruins, Anarhadnapura
Carved lintel, Kandy
We shared our bedroom at Mrs Wickramasuria's guest house with a family of very quarrelsome sparrows whose nest was in the cover of the fixtures for the ceiling fan. They got quite upset if I turned the fan on. There seemed to be two cock sparrows who had fierce territorial fights, drawing blood and shedding feathers, waking us every morning an hour or so before we needed to get up. We had a superb view across the valley to the high hills and the tea plantations on the other side, where the peaks were often cloud-covered. At dusk every evening we saw a great cloud of large fruit bats gliding by from their roosts in the trees of the National Botanical Gardens to the orchards on the outskirts of Kandy on its hill at the head of the valley.
I walked everywhere. There was a bus service to the campus but it was erratic and infrequent. It was about 3 kilometers down the hill, along the road and across a few lawns and playing fields of the Peradenya campus to the medical school where I was working. My task was to interview the staff, to discuss with them their curriculum development plans and to advise them about innovative teaching methods, better ways to use their contact time with students, integration of basic and clinical sciences, etc. (After we returned to Canada, I described this and the prima donna conduct of professors who ran their departments like potentates of medieval fiefdoms, in a little paper called "What determines quality in medical schools?"). My routine was to walk down the hill in the morning, back most days at lunch and siesta time and then back and forth again in the late afternoon, a total of about 14-15 Km a day, most of it in warm but not too hot sunshine - Kandy and Peradenya are high enough to be spared the steamy heat of the coast. Peradenya is a new campus with residences for students who come from all over the island. Sri Lanka had universal education for both boys and girls, free to the end of secondary school, and only a nominal charge for university tuition. Entry requirements were relaxed, so a very high proportion of young people went to the universities – they, of course, did not want to spend the rest of their lives working in the paddy fields. At the Peradenya campus many students lived in residences, the ‘boys’ on one side of the campus, the ‘girls’ on the other. It was just as well. Even with the distance that separated them the sexual tension among these youngsters was palpable -- I could almost smell the pheramones. Their light clothing in that tropical island didn’t help. Most girls wore miniskirts rather than saris, and that didn’t help either… Entry to medical school and to a few other faculties such as law, was more rigorously rationed, but the output of the two medical schools when I was there far exceeded the national need for doctors. This little nation was exporting at that time well over half its output of fully trained health professionals, nurses as well as doctors. And the training was good, by and large. Such a hemorrhage of trained professionals could not be long sustained, and would soon have had to be controlled by some means. It’s too bad that it had to be a brutal war which brought this about.
The little lake in Kandy
On sitting and standing: I learnt the hard way that on public transport it is mandatory to give up one's seat to Buddhist monks, no matter how young they may be. Many children enter their period of service at or even before puberty. One evening during my time at Peredenya I came back from a meeting with the Minister of Health in Columbo, tired, hot, late on a crowded bus (I had to use the bus because the trains had been stopped by a lightning strike). I had to stand, propped up really, between scores of other hot, tired, irritable people, until we reached the head of the pass to the highlands. Then gratefully I seized a seat. But a young lad in Buddhist robes came and leant over me, and everyone around me made me aware in no uncertain manner that I must stand so he (about a third or less my age and strong as an ox) could sit. We had similar experiences many times. Wendy also soon found out that her bottom was broader than those of the locals, which seem to be wedge-shaped. They had an extraordinary facility for spotting a tiny postage-stamp sized piece of seat between two sitting passengers, and insinuating themselves into this space. Thus a train seat meant for six people soon came to hold ten, perhaps more.
Standing Buddha, Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is a truly beautiful place, a jewel of an island every bit as lovely as Java, and with no active volcanoes. It has more than Java in several ways, notably that there are large numbers of elephants. They are used as beasts of burden and in the innumerable ceremonial processions and religious festivals in Kandy. There are also a few remaining herds of wild elephants, one of which we saw one day as we were being driven to the ancient ruins of Anuradhapura. We also saw, or I did, the daily bath, complete with soap and scrubbing brush, that the elephants get if their work includes carrying Buddhist priests to the sacred Temple of the Tooth, which holds a very holy relic, a tooth from the Buddha himself. There are many water buffalo, gentle, lovable beasts, and monkeys which are often very tame. I have a nice picture of Wendy feeding a monkey which took food straight from her hand. We were so fortunate to see it all while Sri Lanka was still at peace, and to see so much of it. Yet even then we were warned against going to the northern tip of the island, where the population is almost 100% Tamil. I think the repression of the Tamils, and their inevitable revolt against this, had already begun, but news of this was being carefully suppressed.
Wendy making friends with a distant relative, Sri Lanka, 1976
There were other problems. The worst from my point of view was the stifling bureaucracy which brought almost every activity to a standstill. The paper work involved in the simplest transactions was horrendous. Wendy experienced this too. Soon after I arrived, I lost my sunglasses, and told Wendy about this in a letter. She bought me a new pair and unwisely posted these to me from New Zealand. A day or two before we were due to leave, we got a notice to say that they were at the main Post Office for us to collect, after we had fulfilled the formalities and paid the customs duty. Wendy set off to do this early in the morning. It took her all day to move through the various queues and file the necessary documents, and at the end of the afternoon when she was approaching the head of the line, the place was closed and she was told to come back next day. She could actually see the packet she had mailed a few weeks earlier, and was so angry that she leapt over the counter, grabbed it, and stormed out in triumph. She was probably very lucky not to get arrested and roughed up: most likely the officials were so astonished by this unexpected behaviour from a mild-looking and well-behaved European that they were too slow to intercept her before she made her getaway. Or they were too lazy. Laziness is a national affliction. Sri Lankans have never had to work very hard to plant or gather their rice crops, fruit falls from the trees, fish almost walk up from the sea into the nets. Since the earliest colonial times there has always been great eagerness to adopt the national and traditional holidays of whichever nation happened at the time to be the colonial master; and as well there are the Buddhist religious festivals to celebrate as holidays, starting with every Poya Day, or full moon. The end result was that slightly more than half of all the days I spent in Sri Lanka were holidays of one sort or another. The combination of excessive paperwork and frequent holidays offered abundant excuses for not getting anything done at all, let alone done on time.
I think we would have tired of this eventually, as we would of Sri Lankan food, despite the good cooking both at Mrs Wickramasuria's and at the hotel in Columbo, and at a few government-run resorts where we stayed, notably the one at Hikkadua where we spent our wedding anniversary that year. Sri Lankan food consists mainly of rather indifferent curries, and string hoppers: glutinous rice, squeezed through tiny holes to make thin spaghetti-like pasta, which is usually deep-fried and not very adequately spiced with condiments. On the other hand, there is fresh fruit in abundance, mangos, paw-paws, pineapples, many kinds of bananas, and a wide variety of exotic fruits I have not seen elsewhere. It is odd that this lovely place, so close to India and to the Spice Islands, should have such bland food.
After two months there I had had just about enough. But we were not to escape easily. Our flight for Madras should have left in late afternoon. We waited at the airport before even boarding, till long after midnight, and took off for Madras about 4 am. It is less than a two-hour flight. When we came close, the captain came on the air, announcing in a sepulchral voice that he "regretted to inform us" that we could not land because of fog! Both of us, and everyone else on the plane was in despair. We turned about and went back to Columbo, waited there for an hour or so for the sun to burn off the early morning fog, then finally left, and landed safely in Madras about 16 hours late. It was a fitting way for Sri Lanka to cling to us at the end.
Our arrival in Madras was by no means the end of the wonderful time that Wendy and I had on that expedition. In some ways the best was yet to be. We met an Indian colleague of mine in Madras, and had a good look at that old city and its colonial British remains, a second look for me. There is a graveyard containing many graves of British officers, their wives, and children, dead at an early age of malaria, cholera or other tropical diseases (malaria was especially lethal). We flew on to Bangalore and came by car from there to Kajhuraho, the site of one of the best preserved of the temples of erotic art; then from there we went on to Agra, where we saw the full moon rise over the Taj Mahal before spending the greater part of the next day exploring this lovely shrine to the beautiful Mumtaz who died so young. And then to Delhi, where I had been several times before, but Wendy had not. We stayed at the old and somewhat seedy but very convenient Janpath Hotel, within easy walking distance of Connought Circus. Wendy found the beggars disturbing, though there were fewer than usual: the government was trying to resettle many of the permanent street people in villages and hostels far removed from the centre of New Delhi, sprucing the city up for an imminent international conference.
Heraldic carving, Kajhuraho
While I debriefed at WHO/SEARO, Wendy explored the many-layered civilizations of this great city; and we had a few days exploring it on our own, thanks to a convenient weekend. This was to be my final mission as a consultant for WHO/SEARO. To some extent I am myself responsible: my report recommended that it would make more sense, and be cost-effective, to bring visiting consultants from other countries in the region rather than from the other side of the world. But this, of course, was not my final visit to India, nor to south and east Asia. I went back en route to Singapore in 1982, to visit the All-India Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Calcutta (described in the chapter on “A Day Trip in Bengal”). I had two visits to China, in 1981 and 1982, and two to Japan in 1991 and 1996. And in 1997 I had another fascinating visit to Thailand, which was primarily for another WHO mission, but that one was arranged from WHO headquarters in Geneva rather than from the regional office in Delhi. My explorations of those parts of the world have been brief and superficial, but richly rewarding. I wouldn't have missed them for anything.
Taj Mahal, Agra
Red Fort, Agra
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