He bowed to the unalterable

It is two years since Regi Siriwardena died at the age of 82 on December 15, 2004, and they have been barren years for those who read his writings and heard his lectures, and yearned for more. This second note of remembrance from a septuagenarian admirer of a versatile Sri Lankan intellectual, the greatest literary and artistic critic that our country produced, focuses on Regi’s “intimations of mortality”. He articulated those thoughts eloquently and elegantly in his last years, and without a trace of bitterness or rancour, over the bodily decrepitude that ageing causes. He bowed to the unalterable as he described the plight of old age with a wry sense of humour and a lightness of touch.
When you are old, you find that simple things
You took for granted are no longer simple.
Climbing the three steps to the office door
Is now an Everest-scaling feat; crossing
The street a perilous odyssey…
In his Prologue to Among My Souvenirs, he describes vividly but without sentimentality a near serious accident he had on the escalator of the Liberty Plaza, where he had gone to buy a packet of paper and a ribbon for his computer printer.
I could feel (the plastic bag with the paper and the ribbon) weighing me down as I staggered out of the shop. Not for the first time in the last year or two (when I have felt that once simple routine physical operations had become major tasks), I thought of the line in that poetic passage in the Book of Ecclesiastes: ‘And the grasshopper shall be a burden.’
How was I to get down to the ground floor with this weight making my unsteady steps even more insecure? I briefly considered three options: to walk down the stairway, to step on the escalator and to take the lift, and decided the last was the safest. So, with the burden of that packet of paper growing every moment more painful, I walked down the corridors twice, and couldn’t find the lift. What I should have done, of course, was to ask somebody; but, as often happens, I had an attack of self-consciousness. So in a sudden impulse, while passing the escalator, I thought I would chance it, and boarded the downward rolling mechanism. Or at least, I planted one foot there securely, but the other was a moment too late: I overbalanced and fell. There was I, spread-eagled and face down on the moving escalator… There was a crowd on the ground floor at the bottom of the escalator watching a cricket match on the TV in a shop window. Sri Lanka was playing Pakistan. It was my salvation that two of the spectators had seen the accident. As my supine form neared the end of the escalator, my body was lifted off it by four strong arms, which proceeded to set me on my feet. ‘Are you alright, Uncle?’ one the two young men asked. Miraculously, yes, there were no bones broken; I had only, as I discovered later, sustained a few bruises…”
While accepting the inevitability of ageing, Regi also rejoiced in its compensations.
…You have grown,
Perhaps not wiser, but at least more prudent.
You can admire a woman’s charm and beauty
With no possessive demons plaguing you.
Books and CDs you once cherished dearly
Are burdens now you’re glad to shed: even
The sight of the half-empty shelves is pleasing.
And my heart’s no longer tossed
(I’m glad) by living beauty.
The roar of its dangerous seas
Withdrawn, I turn to the quiet
Waters of friendship for ease.
He gave utterance to his emotions about the cruelty of time that changed the remembered physical landscapes of childhood but kept intact its dreams and their despairs. In Returning to Roots he remembers a suburban spot,
where sixty years ago
I lived not a stone’s throw from here. The house,
of course is gone. What memory keeps of the place
is the garden; the hedge with small pink flowers;
beyond it what seemed to me then a vast space,
open, empty, stretching to the church wall.
(Builders have left part of it still bare.)
And the girl next door, with whom I went to school
I remember her name, not face; hands or hair.
But it’s that empty space that holds the clue to
To my childhood’s dark fatality. One day
I came out of the garden, walked past the hedge
towards the open ground, saw on the way
a man on a bike, found a huge pit,
wide and deep. And sprawled in it were people with despair
written on the their faces. I knew at once it was the end
of the world; they were in hell. Standing there,
I shared their hopelessness. Then woke…The house is gone,
the landscape all changed over sixty years – all
all but that remnant of ground, grown wild.
Yet, living here, I still recall the fears
and despairs of that dream, sense that there yet exists,
under the accretions of the years, that hopeless child.
At the age of eighty, Regi wrote about his longevity that he “never hungered for” and felt surprised and thought it “strange” and “embarrassing” to be alive at eighty:
To have existed while the planet made
Eighty revolutions round the sun is no
Achievement, but I must confess I am
Rather surprised to find myself still here.
He also expressed his grief over the passing of younger, better people before him:
It’s scandalous at eighty years to walk
The earth where younger, better people now
Are dust and ashes,
as he thought of those
Who died of violence and had much more
To give -Rajini, Richard, Neelan-
makes it “embarrassing to be alive”.
In Jaffna at 4 o’clock in the morning on 21, November, 1989, Regi composed these lines for Serena Tennekoon, who died of cancer, 2 January 1989; and Rajini Thiranagama, shot dead, 21 September 1989:
The gunman’s hand is as blind as the virus. How strange
that I, smouldering on time’s slow pyre,
should live to write this, when your two young lives
are gone –snuffed out, your minds’ bright fire!
Regi would have had much more to write about death in our land,
when there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,