When I wrote last Sunday, to clear the air as it were, on Sri Lanka’s chairmanship of a UN Committee on Israel that goes back more than 40 years, I didn’t expect to return to the subject so soon.
But as a friend of a friend of mine with a penchant for mixing his metaphors might have said one must make hay when the iron is hot. Besides, the first chairman of that committee was an unforgettable character-Hamilton Shirley Amerasinghe our man in New York, whose corrosive tongue could shred you faster than could the razor sharp teeth of a piranha. The suave Shirley could be Mr. Charming if he chose with a repertoire of stories from his years in the Ceylon Civil Service and later in the Foreign Service.
On the third leg of the committee’s hearings into Israel practices in the Arab territories the committee members and the UN entourage checked into the hotel in Jabal Amman. Jabal meant one of the seven hills on which Amman was built. It was 40 years ago and I quite forget the name of the hotel. Perhaps it was the Intercontinental or one of the other big names. But it doesn’t really matter; we were all booked at the same place.
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| Shirley: “So that’s what is known as
yellow journalism.” |
I do remember that there was another big hotel close by and the US Embassy was within walking distance. It was under guard with armoured vehicles and even a couple of tanks placed ominously in front of the entrance. Eight months earlier King Hussain’s Bedouin troops had driven Yasser Arafat’s al Fatah out of Jordan into Lebanon but remnants of the fighters still remained in Jordan.We all checked in almost simultaneously. The Committee came from Damascus, but I had not been able to accompany it as the Syrians would not give me a visa for some reason. So I flew in from Beirut where I stayed behind enjoying the “Paris of the Middle East”.
Standing in the foyer was Sharmini ( I hope I got the name correct) Wijekoon, the daughter of Major-General Winston Wijekoon, a former army commander and ambassador to Italy in whose residence in Parioli I stayed when I covered the month-long FAO sessions in Rome the previous year. Sharmini who had just got married to an Italian working for FAO was now living in Amman where her husband was posted. She and her husband were waiting to meet Shirley Amerasinghe who came down a few minutes later.
Over coffee Sharmini invited the ambassador and me to lunch the next day. Shirley jumped at the idea as he was longing for a rice and curry. Rice and curry it will be, promised Sharmini. But there was one small hitch. Sharmini did not know how to cook Sri Lanka style though she could certainly turn out Italian and several western dishes. But rice and curry, that was a different kettle of fish if I might put it like that. So on the way to their car Sharmini confessed to this gap in her culinary education and appealed for help.
Being a cook of sorts from my school days when I served in the Boy Scouts cooking patrol because none of the others could cook rice without making it seem like a semi-permanent glue, I accepted the task with some trepidation. Having told Sharmini what I would try my hand at she said she would buy everything needed that evening. I turned up quite early at Sharmini’s flat and set upon the task of making ala thel dala, fried brinjal curry and cabbage curry while the hostess made a lovely salad with Italian dressing and a chicken curry of sorts that needed some delicate touches, red peppers, a little chilli sauce and a teaspoon of vinegar to titillate Shirley’s palate.
The problem was that Sharmini had forgotten the condiments. How was one to make a pale looking cabbage curry into something more attractive without turmeric, often mistakenly called saffron?
Sharmini had no turmeric. I searched every cupboard in the pantry for anything that would make the dairy milk in the curry turn yellow. My search unearthed a bottle of yellow liquid colouring which I hoped would be the answer to my fervent prayers if Sharmini permitted its addition. Having used my persuasive powers which did not have to be too persuasive for the hostess was getting even more desperate than the cook. So in went a few drops of colouring into the cabbage.
The lunch went off very nicely with plenty of laughs and even more wine and Shirley showering praise on the culinary skills of the hostess. Sharmini quite apologetically admitted that she did not make the Ceylonese dishes and it was my handiwork. At this point things were getting a little too close for comfort, especially when Shirley Amerasinghe said he found the thick cabbage curry particularly tasty. Thanks to a bottle of yellow colouring I said I found in Sharmini’s pantry cupboard and related the story half expecting the ambassador to fire some verbal barbs at me if not part of the cutlery. Shirley was quite a tall person. He looked down his sharp nose at me and uttered “So that’s what is known as yellow journalism.” He knew he had been had and returned quietly to his dessert.
Before we left Shirley invited Sharmini her husband and I for dinner. “This is my treat,” he said. When Sharmini and husband picked us up at the hotel, Shirley asked to be taken to a nice restaurant with music and good wine. We went to a restaurant up some hill. There was only a couple at one table. The al Fatah had done to dining out in Amman what the JVP did to Colombo’s glitterati in the late 1980s. Shirley asked for a bottle of their best wine. The wine waiter turned up with a bottle, Shirley tasted its contents and turned almost as red as the liquid. “You call this wine?” asked the ambassador in a tone that probably sounded menacing to the poor waiter. “Take it away. Bring me your wine list,” he said and the man and the rest of the hovering staff retreated in such confusion that Dunkirk would have seemed an orderly withdrawal.
Driving back after dinner flashing lights on the road stopped us. Four gun-toting toughies in ragged clothes which were partly uniforms came into sight. Two of them walked up to the car while the other two stood with guns pointed at us. They peered into the car, realized we were foreigners but did not know who. They chatted among themselves while we sat nervously not knowing who they were or what they wanted. Several minutes went by. Eventually they waved us on and we returned safely to the hotel but not before Shirley uttered several expletives on the way, a couple of them about camels.
Next morning we were to assemble at the entrance to the hotel to call on the Jordanian Foreign Minister. Ten minutes or so before departure a UN official came to me and inquired about Ambassador Amerasinghe. Was I my ambassador’s keeper? I politely said I did not know. Then came a Jordanian official and a policeman asking me the same question and I gave the same reply. Soon there was quite a bit of excitement as officials scattered in search of Shirley.
When I told a couple of UN officials about our encounter with the armed men the previous night all hell broke loose and police cars with sirens blaring shot off in different directions. They looked here; they looked there. But the Chairman was to be found nowhere. Panic stations mounted, panic buttons hit. Then suddenly a taxi turned into the hotel and stopped outside the glass entrance doors. Out stepped Shirley and everybody rushed to him inquiring where he had been and what happened. “I went to get my shoes repaired,” Shirley said unperturbed. They would surely have throttled him then and there if they could have.
I remembered the crack he had at me over the cabbage curry. So when he asked me what all the excitement was about I could not help having a shot back myself. “I don’t really know but right now I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes, even after repairs,” I said.
The writer is a serving diplomat in the Sri Lankan embassy in Thailand |
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