by

Manik de Silva

The early sixties were a good time to break into journalism for a just-out-of- school teenager as I was at that time. My father spoke to Esmond Wickremesinghe and I was given a kind of `learn the ropes’ job on the then Ceylon Observer under Denzil Peiris.  I didn’t expect to be paid but later learned that I’d get an out-of-pocket reimbursement allowance of Rs 100 a month to take care of lunch, bus fares and the like.

Denzil was summoned to Esmond’s sanctum sanctorum, once occupied by his father-in-law D R Wijewardene, the legendary founder of The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd, to give Lake House its full name. He was asked when he would like me to report to him and he replied, ‘7 o’clock tomorrow morning.’     

My father drove me to work at 6.30 a.m. the next day in his Land Rover after my mother had cooked me an early breakfast. On the way he told me, ‘I don’t know too much about the kind of work you are going to do, but would say that a good rule of thumb will be to keep your ears open and your mouth shut.’

That advice has stood me in good stead in what was to become a career that has now extended to over 50 years.

It was Denzil Peiris, that great editor, who gave me every possible break that could be offered to a wet-behind-the-ears schoolboy, often riding to work on a bicycle left leaning against the low front wall of the imposing Lake House building, with its ancient pichcha mal (jasmine) creeper below road level. Amongst other vital influences was Sam Wijesinha, one of the finest human beings it has been my great good fortune to know.  When such mentors spoke, I kept my ears open and my mouth shut, which did much to help my career as a journalist.

One word that would describe Mr Wijesinha is ‘earthy’.’ He has deep empathy with the have-nots and is generous to a fault. He would bend a rule where it would do some good, as he did as Ombudsman when he called various State agencies and got them to do the humane thing without any legal right to do so.

I still address Sam as ‘`Mr Wijesinha’ if ever I speak to him, much to the amusement of the regular habitués of Lakmahal (Sam would often say that he’s a ‘binna behepu’ man because he has lived in his wife’s home after marriage and for many years after her death, undoubtedly the heaviest blow he took in his long life), not only because old habits die hard but also because I believe that it is not my place to call him ‘Sam’.

I remember once asking Sanjiva (Sam’s eldest son, who’s another S S Wijesinha), with some bemusement, ‘Does your son call you Sanjiva?’ when Shivantha addressed his father thus. ‘That’s nothing,’ replied Sanjiva. ‘He calls my father Sam!’ It’s easy for a small boy to do that, but not for someone who, despite knowing Sam Wijesinha well for over four decades and having enjoyed both his friendship and unmatched hospitality, cannot yet bring himself to be overly familiar with such a personage. Sanjiva captured the exact flavour of the man when he once titled his weekly column to the Sunday Island ‘My friend Sam’.

Lake House was superbly located for access to the old Parliament by the sea which was literally a stone’s throw away. We even had an extension telephone line from outside the press gallery in the House to our office although it was only a five minute walk to get there.

Sam Wijesinha, who had moved from a promising career in the Attorney General’s Department to be groomed for a year to succeed Ralph St L P Deraniyagala as Clerk of the House of Representatives, was well entrenched in the job when I was first sent shivering to Parliament early one morning to cover the voting on the budget at the end of a debate that had gone on through the night. Denzil believed in throwing his young reporters into the deep end to sink or swim. I came back with the voting figures and not much else, Sam standing below the Speaker’s dais having called out the MPs’ names in the stentorian voice he employed on those occasions and taken the count.

Sam Wijesinha, by all accounts, was very different to his predecessor in the way he did his job. I had once read somewhere that a good Speaker’s ‘manner must be haughty, and purse mighty’. Clearly that was all about not being unduly familiar or chummy with MPs and not getting into obligation in any way. That appellation, some might say, would be also true for the first Clerk of the House.

Mr  Deraniyagala, personally a wealthy man whom I had met a couple of times, was certainly not haughty. On the contrary, I found him very friendly and accommodating. But Sam Wijesinha, though a ‘Hamu Mahathmaya’ with his roots in the soil of Getamana in the deep south, had an earthiness and bonhomie – a style all his own – and was never remote from the MPs or his staff.

His generosity in helping people by using the considerable influence that was his by virtue of the position he held was legendary. He would also dig into his own pocket whenever the occasion demanded.

Sam sometimes bent the rules. That has provoked both comment and criticism. He himself tells the story of a colleague he recruited entirely on his own initiative to the parliamentary staff, a fine officer who climbed to the top of the ladder, who told Sam in a spirit of friendship when the latter retired, ‘Sam, you sometimes did things that were wrong.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Mr Wijesinha. ‘Among them was recruiting you!’

Associating with Sam was an education in itself. I remember a day in his office when a senior Buddhist monk called on him. I tried to leave but he kept me back and I was privy to an interesting conversation. Mr. Wijesinha was told that an ecclesiastical position was vacant and the visitor queried, ‘Hamu Mahathmaya, which temple will get that position?’ Without batting an eyelid he said, ‘Hamaduruwanay,  vediya wee thiyana pansalata lebewi – the temple with more paddy will get it).’.

Naïve in the ways of the world, when the priest left his room I expressed surprise at his reply saying, ‘Mr. Wijesinha, you implied that the resources a temple commands can influence the choice of candidate.’

It would not be proper to include his blunt reply on the manner in which many of these elections are held. Suffice it to say that he dispelled many illusions of a rather naïve reporter!

In fact he once told me an interesting yarn that, when a child is born in a village, the parents often go to the priest in the temple to cast the horoscope. There have been occasions of deliberate misreading with the horoscopes of very bright boys – for a reason. Boys with bad horoscopes are often offered to the monkhood. Some priests cannot resist the temptation of acquiring the glory of the guru-shishya paramparawa (teacher-pupil lineage) by ordaining a boy born under benign stars!

Even today, at age 90 (Sam died at age 93), Sam Wijesinha is a repository of the political lore of this country. He has names, facts and figures at his finger tips. He also has various publications he pulls out now and then to offer nuggets of information few are privy to. Once he showed me that somebody called C R de Silva had won a University College award and asked me, ‘Do you know who that is?’ I didn’t. It was Colvin R. de Silva! Who in Sri Lanka would have known Colvin as C R de Silva? Few except Samson Sena Wijesinha!

I vividly recall an incident where Sam Wijesinha was required to inquire into a complaint of alleged misreporting by me by then Speaker Shirley Corea. It was a time when some of Sri Lanka’s cricket selectors had selected themselves to play for the national team. Dr N M Perera was on his feet saying Sri Lanka had no world class sportsmen. ‘What about (A J M) Lafir?’ a colleague pointed out. NM agreed that Lafir was world class, adding that we had no world class cricketers.

From my perch in the press gallery I heard Felix Dias Bandaranaike saying, ‘But our selectors are world class!’ and I duly reported him in my parliamentary column. To my great surprise, M. Sivasithamparam raised a breach of privilege question, saying the remark was made by J R Jayewardene and not Felix.

Sam took me into a room after the sitting ended for an inquiry. I insisted that I heard Felix make the remark. I do not know whether JRJ too made the same remark either before or after Felix, I said. Sam in typical fashion said, ‘Just a minute. I saw Felix outside. Let me go and ask him.’

He returned to the room and didn’t say what FDB had said until I asked him. When I did, he responded saying, ‘The rascal says he said it.’

I don’t know to whom Hansard attributed that wisecrack but I do know that these were days of the so-called Dudley-JR split and Dudley’s brother, Robert, was Chairman of the Board of Control for Cricket of Ceylon. I surmise that JR’s anxiety to claim authorship of the remark was all related to a desire to signal to the Senanayakes that he too could take cracks at them. I certainly heard no more on that one.

There was one occasion when there was a glorious slanging match between N M Perera and Philip Gunawardene when all kinds of insults were traded – incidents the two left leaders knew of because of their one-time initimacy. But as far as Hansard was concerned, the exchange never occurred.

How come, I asked Sam, who had expunged the whole exchange, or at least the juicy bits. Rightly or wrongly, he claimed that Hansard was the Clerk’s minute of proceedings and he had control over what went into the official record. Nobody, least of all the protagonists, would have wanted what was said in a moment of rage recorded for posterity.

There was once an occasion when Sam Wijesinha slapped an MP’s driver who had emptied his bladder in the great porch under the steps leading up to Parliament Hall. Mrs. Bandaranaike, the then Prime Minister, who had received a complaint, asked Sam whether the incident really occurred.

‘Were you told why I did it?’ Sam inquired.

‘Yes, I know why you did it. But you must be careful. He may have had a knife on him.’

Sam Wijesinha entertained in style in his elegantly furnished office in the old Parliament by the sea.

The House restaurant, presided over by Somisena, the caterer, provided the food. Officials, politicians, diplomats and friends – literally legions of them – have had lunch and tea in that room and been regaled by Sam’s stories. He has also completed useful business during such occasions.

Among his accomplishments was having a dana in the Parliament restaurant, probably because he didn’t feel right doing it at Lakmahal, an Anglican Christian household. He cleared the event with the Speaker, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, so there was no danger of criticism from places where it might have mattered.

He invited a host of friends and relations for the event, attended among others by his wife Mukta, but not by his mother-in-law, Mrs Esme Wickremesinghe, who was then alive. Clearly Mukta was not happy about Sam using Parliament for a private purpose and half jokingly told me, ‘You must write about it.’

I told Sam that his wife was not altogether happy about what he was doing and he dismissed the criticism saying, ‘The Wickremesinghes won’t even take a government pencil home.’ The chief monk at the event said in his anusasana that, if the Hamu Mahathmaya so wished, he could have got the Governor General there on that occasion. He seemed a little disappointed that had not happened.

Few people know that President Premadasa offered Sam Wijesinha the position of High Commissioner in the UK and he turned it down, for the reason that he was unwilling to leave the country with his wife while Mrs Wickremesinghe was alive. He later had a second offer, to be ambassador to Japan. This too was turned down for the same reason.

Then there was the time he was on a parliamentary delegation led by the Speaker, when he spotted an MP packing the airline’s cutlery into his briefcase. Sam had sarcastically called out in loud Sinhala, ‘Manthrithuma, why don’t you put that whole tray into your malla?’ Since all the delegates were seated in one block, the remark was heard by all.

When they reached their destination, Speaker Stanley Tillekeratne had sent for Sam and said, ‘You should not have humiliated him.’

Sam’s rejoinder was classic. ‘Better that I humiliate him now, rather than his humiliating all of us by repeating that performance during this visit.’

He had many `golayas’ in Parliament, K T N de Silva and Kingsley Karunatillake the most senior among them, as well as many subordinate employees who thought the world of him and would go to any length to serve him. Once a minor parliament employee whom Sam had `fixed’ to serve in an overseas mission returned to Sri Lanka and gave a ball-by-ball account of the goings-on in the mission where a senior diplomat was overly fond of the bottle.

Sam conducted me and the man to a room adjoining his office and left us alone, after telling him to tell me about such and such mahattaya. The man had obviously learned the skill of what to tell and what not to tell from Sam and he merely told me, ‘Nona mahattaya nam rattaran (the lady is like gold).’

The stories about Sam Wijesinha are legion and I should not abuse the hospitality of these pages with too many anecdotes. Sam is an unforgettable character with a style all his own. Sri Lanka has been blessed with this remarkable human being whom ‘age has not withered nor custom staled’. It’s been a long innings and I join his many friends in wishing him many more years of good health and happiness.

(Veteran Journalist Manik de Silva is the editor of “Sunday Island” and President of the Editors Guild of Sri Lanka. This article was Written for a book published by his son, Prof.Rajiva wijesinha M.P. to mark Mr.Sam Wijesinha’s 90th birthday)