You need to meet her in person to experience the full impact of her incomparable spirit. There she is, so thin, looking like a small girl as she sits in her wheelchair, unable to use her voice ever since a tracheostomy was performed to help her breathe.
She greets me with a kind of a smile and you don’t immediately notice the obvious signs of the debilitating Motor Neuron disease that has afflicted her for the last three years. It is the same rare condition that afflicted the brilliant scientist, Stephen Hawking, and is also called Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
But she has written her story for all to read, in a soon to be publishedbook entitled “Go Slowly Lovely Moon” – written it simply and naturally and with a constant breakthrough of her incredible sense of humour. It isn’t the sort of best-seller material that is generally common today. It is, instead, a moving testament to the resilience of a human being and the faith that sustains her. It will evoke both laughter and tears and the person who emerges will be unforgettable.
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| In happier times: Vinita in 2006 |
Vinita tells of “My Indian Roots”, of her greatly-loved father Brigadier Kunduvara Sankaran Kutty, Director of the Indian Army’s Remount and Veterinary Corps (RVC), a Hindu from Kerala, of the Kshatriya or warrior caste. Her mother Vilma was from the well-known P. de Souza family from Mangalore in Karnataka.
Vinita’s parents married in Lucknow in 1952 and Vinitha was born there in 1956.
Vinitha Kutty met Sarath Piyaratna at the Delhi School of Economics where both of them studied for their Master’s degree. It may not have been love at first sight, but Vinita felt immediately drawn to Sarath when she saw him cross the road to help a blind student across the busy campus street. The initial attraction was due to the evidence of his caring nature, and it was a case of like calling to like, for compassion and concern for others is second nature to Vinita.
The first 26 years of their married life had an enchanted quality, with two children who were their pride and joy, a host of loving relatives and steadfast friends.
Sarath rose to the position of Deputy CEO of HSBC and Head of Consumer Banking. He took up golf with zest. Vinita has been for over 20 years, Country Analyst on Sri Lanka, reporting faithfully to the Hong Kong-based Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU), never missing a deadline - something she keeps at even today, despite her illness. She worked locally for Bartleets as Marketing Executive and later joined a new firm, Infotech, with whom she stayed for 10 years.
Characteristically, she also joined Sri Lanka Sumithrayo as a volunteer and became involved with AFLAC (Association For Lighting A Candle), now known as CandleAid Lanka. In fact, I met Vinita once before when I went to the Cancer Hospital in Maharagama where she had organized (as she does every year), an evening of fun, led by her friend, comedian Tennyson Cooray, for patients and families.
Sarath was posted to Hong Kong and later to Manila and, of course, his family went wherever he went. Life seemed to be fine and then they were hit by those unexpected blows. In October 2007 Sarath underwent surgery to remove a lump at the back of his neck and it turned out to be malignant. He had lymphoma. He went through chemotherapy and radiation. Two months later, Vinita was diagnosed with a Motor Neuron Disease known as Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) which affects the Neuron cells that transmit messages from the brain to the muscles.
Vinita rejoices that after bravely facing his own serious health concerns, Sarath is in remission and is back at work (he retired from HSBC in 2006 and joined Nations Trust Bank as an Executive Director). But for her, there is no known cure.
The format of her book is unusual. The Foreword by Bradman Weerakoon will surely induce anyone to start reading the pages that follow, and the reader will find, as I did, that the book is “unputdownable” – the unfolding life-story that grips you with its candour and its pathos and yet makes you chuckle at the fun-loving nature of the writer that keeps peeping through.
The preface by Sarath also draws a smile. He wasn’t too happy at first at his wife’s keen desire to write her story and he had hoped it would be a passing whim. However, when he saw how much such a project meant to her, he gave her his full support. He writes: “For me, what matters most is not whether the book is a good read or a success. It is her book and it should tell her story the way she wants to. So, although I may have had some misgivings about some of the contents, censorship was minimised.”
In the main it is Vinitha telling us her story in her own inimitable fashion. You will laugh unrestrainedly when you read her lucid explanation as to why she found that “The most difficult part for this Indian was getting used to the way English is spoken here” - as, for example, our talking of `head-baths’ and `body-washes’, our mixing up `fs’ and `ps’, so that a shopkeeper referred to “Lemon Fupps” when she bought biscuits; our habit of exclaiming, “Aney, sin, no?”
As to how I interviewed a person who cannot speak, our conversation was facilitated by a marvellous modern invention gifted to Vinita by friends, - an electrically operated keyboard on which she types with both index fingers and the completed sentence is then uttered aloud by an electronic voice, while the words can also be read on the illuminated side of the keyboard.
That amazing sense of humour pops up when I mention that I read that she now calls herself `Miss Peggy’ because of the peg to which her feeding tube is attached at mealtime.
Her fingers immediately flew to the keyboard on which she wrote, “I have another new name, my latest – “Salivanita”. I caught my breath, for it pained me. Vinita’s mouth is open and she dribbles and I wondered what it cost her to attempt a joke about that.
I said, “Vinita, don’t you ever feel like asking, `Why?’” She nodded her head. Then she typed out: “But my faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and in God our Heavenly Father, is unwavering.”
When I came home, I looked up her manuscript again, searching for some lines that had impressed themselves on me earlier. “The moon is lovely but I also know it will move across the sky and vanish to the West. I only want it to go slowly - don’t we all?”
Let the last words come from an old friend of their college days, Mohit Satyanand, whose insightful reminiscence is in the book: “They have loved each other, these two, for thirty years, and I feel a joy in having been a witness to it – from health and youthful abandon to the accepting grace of ill health. And no-one has accepted it with more grace than Vinita.” |
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