'Who is this man?'

By Sonali Samarasinghe Wickrematunge

For Lasantha Wickrematunge was a man who was concerned with the death of one man as much as he was  concerned with the death of thousands. He was concerned with the death of one man  whether he was Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, gay, straight, rich or poor. This I know to be true. This thousands knew to be true also. "We feel like orphans now," a member of the Diaspora wrote in a condolence message to me.

Deeply cared

He deeply cared that soldiers who had paid the supreme sacrifice were merely reduced  to a number in parliament rather then each soul respected and honoured by name. His distaste for war was not a stamp of approval of the LTTE but rather a reflection of his gentle spirit. He believed the organisation should be crushed but not by violating so horrendously the rights of Tamil citizens.

It deeply hurt him, the  plight of the civilians in the north and east. And therein lies the difference between a brutish mentality and a civilised mind. The remark on BBC by this same US citizen that a hospital outside the safety zone is  a legitimate military target would have been more of a blow to Lasantha  Wickrematunge's spirit of justice than the blow he received at the hands of his assassins on January 8. 

When Lasantha and I first met in the Christmas of 1989 nearly 20 years ago he was  already a giant in journalism. I a cub reporter at The Sunday Times. I was merely  marking time as I awaited entry to Law School. In October of 1989 when I walked into  The Sunday Times office for the first time little was I to know what a strange  trajectory my life would take. 

The Sunday Times

Well armed with school certificates and magazines I had edited including The Aqui  Journalist '88 - an end of year magazine produced by the journalism students of Aquinas  College, I sat before Editor-in-Chief Vijitha Yapa and made my case for recruitment. Yapa was a kindly sort of chap. He looked at my work, looked at me and said, smiling slightly, "Sothis is your work. We have no choice. We must take you." And there it was.

Not that the pay was any good in those days. We would come in at 6 a.m and hammer away on large, rusty typewriters. I remember seeing Lasantha sometimes in the office but it  left no lasting impression.

Perhaps what did however, was a piece of paper that fluttered into view one day as  two of my colleagues Laleeni, Vasu and myself sat around chatting about the vicissitudes of life. It was a hastily written note of remuneration for free lance staff. Leading the list was 'Suranimala' and against his name the powers that be had scribbled Rs. 10,000. Twenty years ago as cub reporters not getting more than a few hundred a month that figure impressed us a goodish bit I can tell you. And we oohed and aahed a little before getting back to work.

Suranimala

Instinctively I knew who Suranimala was. It was an insignificant talent that would  later impress Lasantha a great deal. I could always recognise a voice on the phone or crack a pseudonym with reasonable accuracy. And he remained amazed till the end.

We next met at a Sunday Times office party in 1990 I think it was. Later he would  tell me it was the first time he knew that one day he and I would be married. I was a  book worm and bit of a nerd in school and I remain nerdy to this day. Ergo in 1990 I  only had academia on my mind. I was also very much in love and engaged to be married  to a law colleague of mine. In fact I was at the party with him......and again,  hardly noticed Lasantha.

My next encounter with Lasantha was in the Court of Appeal where we both practised.  We would often pass each other on the corridors of Hulftsdorp but on this day he turned  to me as I sat in the court house and told me he was starting a newspaper called The  Sunday Leader and wanted me to join. By this time I was writing occasionally to  several newspapers as an arts and theatre critic in between full time legal practice  and I declined the offer.

Visiting card

In his inimitable way he told me that I could work part time for the paper and gave me his card in case I changed my mind. I remember half heartedly accepting the card and stuffing it in my purse as I thought  to myself I would never leave the law profession for journalism. Later one of my law colleagues, Surane would tell me that Lasantha would often meet him in court and ask  to be re-introduced to me so that he may strike up a conversation.

In the meantime I continued in law rather happily and was able at the time to also do  some modest legal work together with the big names on the doping case of Susanthika  Jayasinghe and more importantly the Muralitharan chucking issue for the Ministry of  Sports. It was at the same time that Hong Kong based ergonomics expert Prof. Ravi  Goonetilleke who happened to be my brother-in-law conducted a series of tests on Murali and cleared him scientifically.

The Sunday Leader

Be that as it may, it was some four-five years later in January 1998 that I walked  into The Sunday Leader offices through a bizarre turn of events. I had arrived in Colombo  from Australia where I had been resident for a space, to attend to some domestic  matters and wanted to keep up with my writing during that time. It was to be a short visit not more than six weeks.

I was to of a morning meet Editor Manik de Silva of The Island who kindly gave me various ideas on what I  could write on and then shockingly told me that an acquaintance of mine had called him  up to say I would be coming for an interview and had 'put in a good word' for me. 

I was immediately put off by this turn of events, as I am a great believer in merit  and the strength of ones own abilities and academic prowess. Obviously I had earlier  made the mistake of making polite conversation with this acquaintance by mentioning in  passing that I was due to meet Manik de Silva to discuss some space to write.  So I scuttled off and having thoroughly castigated my acquaintance for daring to pull  strings as it were and feeling that now writing to The Island would be forever  sullied by this, I was told by a law colleague to call up The Sunday Leader.

Best in the world

Meanwhile I had followed with considerable interest Lasantha's masterly expose on the  Joel Pera murder case. In my opinion the investigative articles he personally wrote  and the standard of the expose on the Pera case that he so expertly spearheaded was so spiffingly high it was the best  the world had seen - in my opinion of course.

Anyway it was only then I remembered that Lasantha had given me a visiting card five  years before. I hurriedly rummaged in my purse for it and amazingly it was still  there browned with age. I called him up. "Mr. Wickrematunge," I said. "I'm Sonali  Samarasinghe Attorney-at-law I wonder if you remember me? I am in Colombo for a few  weeks and would like to write."

"Of course I remember you," he said rather quickly hastening to add even more quickly, "please start today." "Today is inconvenient, let me look at my diary," I said as if I were a busy executive  when in reality I didn't have a thing to do having just arrived from Aussie. I did go in, the next day met Lasantha and started work with Wijith Chickera now the editor of LMD, then the Chief Sub Editor and Arts Editor of The Sunday Leader and  Marwaan Macan Macar, then Features Editor as my interests wereÿarts, theatre and social  issues.

But within a week or two Lasantha called upon me to help him with  investigations due to my legal background. Soon he had passed on all the  investigative writing to me and Lasantha who was hitherto handling the investigations  himself felt he was finally free to concentrate on politics.

 Awards

That year - 1998 - we won the 'Scoop of the Year' Award by the Editors' Guild for work I had done on the missing Mulkirigala painting. Under Lasantha's editorship the  newspaper won 'The Journalist of the Year' title on every occasion it participated in the national award scheme. Since 1998 the newspaper swept the boards with other top  awards as well including 'Scoop of the Year,' 'Columnist of the Year' and 'Best English Journalist of the Year.'

For Lasantha this was validation of his work and a confirmation of the dedication of  his staff to the causes he espoused. Funnily enough it is this 'tabloid' as Gotabaya calls it that consistently won all the top awards from 1998 up until 2007. In 2008  The Sunday Leader was barred from participating in the award scheme stating it had  not provided free advertising to the Sri Lanka Press Institute. A matter Lasantha strongly felt would tantamount to bribery and corruption if he did.

Man of integrity

Lasantha was an International Integrity Award winner in 2000 and was presented the  award in Canada. Last September the newspaper was awarded the Global Shining Light  Award for Investigative Journalism for a series of investigative articles I had written on Mervyn Silva and the involvement of the highest in the land in a cover up.

He was proud of that international achievement specially in the year when the local awards scheme had so unfairly kept the newspaper  out. It was Uvindu Kulakulasuriya, convenor FMM who had alerted me that countries  across the globe were participating for the award and so should we. Lasantha and I were thrilled when we were actually shortlisted and ecstatic that we won it.  Lasantha would call Uvindu afterwards to thank him. 

A call of conscience

Ironically I had come down to Colombo in December 1997 only for six weeks. I stayed  on for 11 years because of The Sunday Leader. Lasantha was to tell his senior, President's Counsel Ranjith Abeysuriya in 1994, "Sir, I will be back in six weeks once I get the paper going." He stayed on for nearly 15 years until his death.

However, there are moments in our two shared lives so strangely entwined that make my eyes now dulled with tears, to still sparkle. The time for instance that he and I sat in  a street cafe in Madrid, he ordering a humongous whole roast chicken and I a small sliver of fish. I  recall him blushing with embarrassment as passers by looked shocked at the bird on his plate.

The exquisite days in Paris when he like so many other romantics before him asked me to marry him under the Eiffel Tower. Or the time in Brussels when he placed his foot on a short ledge on the  road and jokingly asked me if I could please tie his shoe lace - again much to  the shock of passers by.

Lasantha's forte was politics. But I would drag him for the premier of The Graduate  with Kathleen Turner at the West End and he grumbled as we sat in the nose bleed section - the only tickets we could afford.

I told him he must see Buddy. It was to be the only musical I forced him to see that he perhaps actually enjoyed. It may have been Tim Rice and Elton John at work but during Aida on Broadway as I watched mesmerised, not so Lasantha. He sat on a fairly expensive  seat next to me and caught up on lost sleep for two hours.

And many more memories. Of choking on horse radish in a heurigen in Vienna's 19th district. Of walking down the cobbled streets of a village in Switzerland and longing for a peaceful life. Of feeling pampered and wonderful at the Versace Hotel in the Gold Coast. I am reclusive and private by nature and would often moot the idea of living on a large farm in remote Australia. 'You would get bored before long,' he told me. 'We are both addicted to this life now, it's a vicious cycle.'

He and I would hire a car and drive along the coast of Australia and whenever I wanted to help with the suitcases or with some heavy bags he brushed me aside quickly. They'll think I'm letting the woman do all the work he would say. However one must add that he had no such qualms in Sri Lanka.

Book club 

Lasantha and I belonged to a book club. A book club of two members. He and I. We took  it very seriously and would discuss each book over dinner at a restaurant. Once a  friend who had observed wild gesturing and heated conversation came up to us and  asked if we were fighting. "Yes," he said, 'over this book machang, and she has lost  the plot.' 

On the day before he died Lasantha told me to check the internet for accommodation in  Australia or Canada. In Australia he wanted us to find a house in Melbourne. The choice of state was because  it would then be easy for him to have access to his three beautiful children whom he adored.

We were looking  for cheap accommodation in Dandenong or Noble Park. It was something he had told me to  do even a month before. He also wanted me to check for possible jobs for him. I told  him that as I had part of my education in Australia it would be easier for me to get  a job. I told him I am ready to leave any time and that it was he who had to make the  decision about the newspaper. Okay he told me smiling. "It will be soon." 

But he often toyed with going to Canada as well. It is a country that held his heart because his beloved  parents and sisters resided there. He could never talk enough about them.  He would often take me to Kotahena  - the city he grew up in and delight in giving me a guided tour. He had done it so many times that I knew the places well but I always pretended I had seen it for the first time.

He would show me lanes and houses and even a rock he said he had sat on and eaten a thosai. He was intrigued that I had been born at the Police Bungalow at Hill House Gardens and baptised in the Anglican Gal Palliya close by. 'So you are  ultimately from my neck o' the woods too,' he would tease. Though just as often he would tease me about being elitist and privileged and unaware of the grassroots. "You Ladies College Colombo 7 girls," he would chide.

That last night at the Cricket Club where we had dinner he ate spaghetti  bolognaise. It was his favourite dish. He told me, "My sister cooks a mean bolognaise,  when we go to Canada, you will taste her cooking - it's the best," he said proudly.  Earlier that week he had called up his travel agent and booked us two tickets to Canada for May 8. 

As we travelled back home that night little was I to know that in a few hours my best  friend of 11 years and my husband would be dead.  This column started in June 1998. It chronicled the life of a woman who adored her  family, delighted in nature and was able hopefully to laugh at herself. On January 8 the Life was leeched out of Eve even as it was cajoled out of her Adam by foul assassins.

Life has no more to offer Eve in its poisoned garden of eden.

Today Eve dies.

The Galle Literary Festival, in retrospect

A small African man ap-proaches an even smaller, glowing red, Australian gentleman in a lurid bush shirt,

"Mr. Keneally you know you are my favourite author,"

"Ah the renowned Mr.  Isegawa  who would have ever thought that we'd  finally  meet in Sri Lanka."

Serendipity. That rather hackneyed and generally abused term - finds true expression at the Galle Literary Festival. And like the fortuitous meeting of acclaimed authors in the maze of the fort, it was a series of happy, again serendipitous, coincidences that gave rise to the festival - a British businessman, a Dutch fort, a tropical island - in the first place.

And the festival in turn gives rise to more happy and unlikely coincidences - Booker Prize winning authors negotiating Galle's narrow lanes, sudden spur of the moment creative collaborations between local literary personalities and innumerable chance reunions and impromptu meetings.

In fact in the context a Booker Prize wining Australian author stumbling across a fan, who happens  to be a rising literary star from Uganda,  is hardly remarkable at all.

What really stands out about the festival  is the intense creativity that runs through the entire event from - the intelligent use of Galle's various spaces to the variety of the events and workshops that take place.

The very concept -  a literary festival in Sri Lanka, is fabulously creative and the idea of stimulating interest and tourism in the country through literature is fantastically novel. 

What is perhaps more fantastic about the concept is that it works. Hotels across Galle are full for the duration of the festival - and for a change Sri Lanka is mentioned not for some natural or engineered calamity, but for its beauty and the creative talent of its people.

There exists in Galle, for the few days of the festival, a real buzz that cuts through the fear, depression and disorder that at times seems to dominate life on the island. With its streets teeming with local and international visitors, caf‚s and restaurants filled with people dissecting yesterday's discussions and workshops for the duration of the festival the ancient Fort feels refreshingly alive.

From its inception the festival has somehow succeed in defeating the pessimism that often surrounds the country but of course the Galle Literary Festival is more than just a tourist promotion event;

International personalities interacting with local academics, artists and intellectuals, old stalwarts like Anne Ranasinghe  and young stars like Ameena Hussein all share the confined space of the Fort and the level of discussion and conversation that results is genuinely impressive.

The breadth of topics covered, everything from Islam and poetry to conservation - has grown over the years and the event is no longer ÿan exclusively literary festival but deals with a whole spectrum of cultural, creative and artistic topics. 

While literary heavy weights of the order of Vikram Seth were notably absent from this year's event, even this, 'lower key' festival, was able to boast such luminaries as Thomas Keneally and such vividly and controversial personalities as Germaine Greer.

Significantly however, this year the festival had much more of a local flavour  with pride of place given to local artists. In past years the festival has been criticized for being foreign even somehow colonial in character but like so many other foreign/ colonial influences the festival is slowly  and inevitably being localised.

The festival is no longer simply an opportunity for moneyed expats to oggle famous foreigners, and it now provides the local, English reading, public with access to Sri Lankan writers  - Romesh Gunasekera, Yasmine Guneratne, who have succeeded in making a mark on the wider world. 

With a host of young Sri Lankan writers also on display the event has become as much a  forum for aspiring local writers as a stage for international literary heavy weights.

Another extraordinary aspect of the festival is that the various authors aren't simply placed on a pedestal as totemic visiting dignitaries rather they are, when not delivering lectures and workshops,  let loose to wander through the warren of the fort.

You can start a conversation with Colin Thubron while he's looking a little lost - or accost Thomas Keneally while he's standing in line at the drinks counter.

In fact in the creative chaos of the festival its hard to know whose a literary super star and who is  simply a tourist. 

Seeing as the entire literary, dramatic and creative corps of Sri Lankan society is gathered in such a small space nearly everyone you meet is a writer, a poet a photographer, or a short film maker, anyway.

For Sri Lanka's creative class the festival has become Mecca, as it succeeds in cutting through the isolation so keenly felt by those working/ writing in English in the country. And the true value of the festival lies not in its various cocktails parties and its  gourmet dinners but in the opportunity it gives local writers to meet, network and discover each others talent and works. It is simply the only occasion where so many of country's creative personalities are gathered in such close proximity.

Of course to say the event is entirely free of expat snobbery and general elitism would be going too far - this is naturally a somewhat elitist event - appealing mainly to expats and Colombo's English literature-loving classes.

Attempts have been made however  to make the event more accessible with discounted tickets for students and a festival volunteer scheme, and anyone from any background who appreciates English literature would have been able to appreciate the quality of the workshops and lectures.

Watching local school children attending Michael Morpurgo's talks on children's literature was particularly s satisfying.

Ultimately the gathering of so many artists, poets, and playwrights in the dusty street of the  ancient fort - is a heady mix, and the whole spectacle is enough to inspire even those without any previous inkling to take an interest in the world of literature. And that is really what the festival is about - it makes you want to read to write  and to become more a part of the creative world and process that can, in the special atmosphere of the fort, feel genuinely magical.

Now in its third year - having experienced various minor dramas and the predictable uncertainly of this island and prevailed the Galle Literary Festival has succeeded in becoming something of a story in itself.

-  R. Wijewardene