From prankster to prim and proper civil servant

Down memory lane

By Roshan Peiris

Along the way, Mr. Wijayadasa acquired an enviable range of managerial, administrative and organisational skills and capabilities. 

A civil servant for 35 years he sat for the civil service examination in 1959 and was placed third in a batch of 600. 

An honours graduate in Geography, he has a post- graduate diploma in economic development from Oxford, and is fluent in English, Sinhala, Tamil and French.

His early memories go back to the time of the Easter Sunday raid on Ceylon by the Japanese during World War11. "I was only six then and I saw the dogfight in the skies between the Allies and the Japanese from the garden of our home at Gangodawila, Nugegoda." 

In the aftermath of the attack he recalls watching a flood of people with bag and baggage leaving Colombo. 

Two thirds of Colombo's population was evacuated. 

"My father was the headmaster of the Dambuluwana Government School near Ratnapura and my mother was a teacher at Udahamulla school. So my father took us away to Dambuluwana. 

"We also spent our holidays with him often." 

There were no roads, Wijayadasa recalls, to get to the village and the school. So it was a real treat to go across the Kalu Ganga in an 'oruwa' (a canoe). 

"My father's pupils, the older ones, sometimes allowed us little fellows to climb on their backs while they swam across. Such memories remain vivid to this day." 

He also reminisced on how the boys caught large prawns, found in abundance in the Kalu Ganga. An ingenious trap was made with ekels and a piece of coconut as bait on a stick. 

He also recalls using charcoal to brush his teeth since tooth-paste was scarce. Young Wijayadasa studied at the biggest Buddhist school at the time, Dharmapala Vidyalaya, Pannipitiya. 

He laughs as he recalls it was a mixed school. "There were many pretty girls in my class and there was heavy competition to win their affections," he mused. 

Now very much the prim and proper civil servant, he recalls how he was made to kneel in class for throwing paper balls while the teacher was writing on the blackboard. 

He also placed rubber seeds on the four legs of the teacher's chair so that when he or she sat down, there was a mild explosion which frightened the teacher. "We never sneaked about each other. If we were punished both girls and boys - the whole class got punished. 

"During the war we collected rice from our small paddyfield and stored it away carefully at night, because we were made to hand it over to the government because of the prevailing scarcity."

As a youngster he worked in vegetable plots at home and at school he helped to grow vegetables, yams and sweet potatoes to make up for the lack of rice. 

One gathers from Wijayadasa's colleagues and also by association that he was a humane person. This quality was evident even in his youth. 

He recalls an incident when his mother hired a buggy to take her children to school, during the days when petrol was scarce. Their journey took them through a steep hillside which the bull often found difficult to climb. 

The carter would beat the bull and twist its tail to get it to proceed and the young boy who could not stomach this cruelty in protest had got down from the buggy and walked the two and a half miles home. 

He married attractive Nimalka, the daughter of the retired Deputy Director of Health Dr Roland Weerasuriya. "We had 500 guests at our wedding held in Nimalka's huge house and garden."

He has a daughter who studied law but works in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). 

Mr. Wijayadasa has many a humorous anecdote of his days in the civil service. 

In 1961 Chelvanayakam, Sunderalingam and Amirthalingam led a satyagraha in Jaffna as a protest against the Sinhala Only Act and the Sri sign in cars and generally to press for their rights. They kept a twenty-four hour vigil at the Kachcheri end at Sri Kantha, the Government Agent's private home, keeping him virtually under house arrest. 

Wijayadasa was a cadet working under Nissanaka Wijeratne, then Government Agent of Anuradhapura. Mrs. Bandaranaike requested that they leave for Jaffna and while a convoy of Kachcheri cars with police escort left for Jaffna, N.Q. Dias, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs also left for Palalay. 

Wijayadasa was asked to escort him. But N.Q. found his way blocked by a sea of protesters. So he and the young cadet had to be carried by the police over the Satyagrahis' heads!

"The incorrigible Sunderalingam clutched at N.Q. Dias's white 'verti' and the police fearing it would "come down clung to it as well!"

"Sunderalingam, however, "managed" says Wijayadasa, "to tear it and poor N.Q. had to borrow a cloth from Nissanka to return to Colombo." 

Today Wijayadasa says he does not live beyond his means, never harms anyone, and does not dabble in politics which he thinks is a dirty game. 

"I work only in the national interest, I don't follow anyone blindly and do not mind calling a spade a spade. I am against terrorism, separatism and federalism and whatever I do, I try to do it perfectly relying on myself as best I can." 

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