Sumitra, Lester and our French connection
Apart from our love for the moving image, the special bond that Sumitra Peries and I shared was France. Centre-stage in this very private equation was the great Lester James Peries.
Although clearly a generation apart, the French language and culture was the glue that bonded us since I first met them in 1986 when I joined Bonsoir.
Madame Pay-Rees (as the French referred to her) absolutely loved recalling her early student days in France in the late 1950s. She sailed the Mediterranean seas in her brother Kuru’s boat. Ambling on a street in St. Tropez, she once accidentally came across (the then starlet) Brigitte Bardot acting in ‘And God Created Woman’. She met LJP for the first time in Paris when he was en-route to the Cannes Film Festival with Rekawa. The list goes on.
Many years later in 1995 she returned to Paris as Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to France. This completed her own ‘Rekawa’, her personal line of destiny with the country LJP and she loved so much and the one we call our “spiritual home”. In recent years she was also on the Board of Directors of the Alliance Francaise de Kotte in Colombo.
Ours was a private little ‘Club Francais’. We were the sole members. Just the three of us. We were incurable insomniacs too. How often have we chatted over after-dinner coffee at their (then) Dickman’s Road house, well past midnight.
The domestics would often hang around, accidentally coughing so as to remind me to leave and let the couple retire for the night. Sensing thinly veiled impatience, Mrs. Peries would ask them to clear the table and go to sleep.
And we carried on regardless, journeying back in time to Paris, to the Lumiere Brothers and their cinematograph, to Versailles, to Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution, to the vineyards of Burgundy, to the lavender fields in Provence … what journeys those were.
I remember once taking Iranganie Serasinghe and Yashodha Wimaladharma to one of these late night coffee trysts. Yasho and I listened open-mouthed as the three legends began relating their stories from the pre-Rekawa days down to Vaishnavee.
Mrs. Peries loved her cheese. She knew them very well. To me the French cheeses are better and more delectable the more pungent they are. We were thus guaranteed that the domestics would never ever touch those cheeses.
Our little “French Triangle” was complete, when in 2014, the Government of France decorated Mrs. Peries as “Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters”. I had got the same title two years prior. LJP had been decorated even before that and in the highest grade of ‘Commandeur’.
How we rejoiced that night. We celebrated. Our little Club Francais was honoured.
LJP and Sumitra are both gone now. Our little Club Francais is empty. I feel as though I’ve lost my parents all over again. My grief is heavy, very heavy. It weighs me down. If wishes would and could come true …. I wish I meet them both in future births ….
(The writer is author of the biography of Lester James Peries -‘Lester on Lester’)
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