(Continued from last week)

Death in the family

In the meantime, in spite of the time spent at conferences and meetings relating to food policy reforms, I saw to it that our regular Tuesday afternoon review meeting with the Minister and Deputy Minister took place. By early 1978 my father’s condition was deteriorating. He was gradually losing interest in food and getting very weak. He was almost 89 years old and the doctors felt that the system was beginning to shut down due to age. Towards late February, he also began in a weak voice sometimes hardly audible, to say, what was for him, very unusual things.

He said he saw a collection of beautiful birds with the most colourful plumage. Sometimes he said that he heard the most beautiful music, and one day he said that he was present at a very pleasant musical show. What was most surprising was that I had never known my father to listen to any music. He showed no interest whatsoever in this area. Neither did he show any interest in birds.

The only interest that he and my mother showed in birds was when men came around occasionally, selling birds, whether they be parrots, mynahs or house sparrows. On many such occasions they used to bargain with the seller on a wholesale price and release the whole lot from captivity.

For months afterwards we saw large numbers of them on our roof and the roofs of surrounding homes. These visions of my father were very unusual and we were wondering whether there was any significance to them, particularly when on some days he referred to “Heavenly” birds. His sunken eyes used to light up at these recollections.

On Tuesday 14th of March we were at our weekly meeting with the Minister and Deputy Minister. There were a number of items to be discussed and by 9 p.m. we had not quite finished. At 9.15 p.m., we were about to finish when I received an urgent telephone call from home to say that my father’s condition had taken a serious turn, and asking me to come immediately. I rather suspected that all was over, and left immediately. The Minister and others were very upset that I was not at home at a time anyone should normally have been there.

As I suspected, I found when I reached home that my father was dead. He had died whilst my mother was feeding him. His eyes had suddenly gone up and that was it. There had been no struggle or pain. He had a serene expression on his face and his body was still warm. I spent a few minutes alone with him in the room.

When I came out of his room, the immediate issue was to contact Dr. Hudson Silva’s cornea bank, because my father was keen that his corneas should be gifted. This was done and soon someone came around with a box packed with ice. Thereafter, we had to discuss funeral arrangements and we decided that it should be on Thursday the 16th. The crematorium had to be booked and we were contemplating this when the Minister Mr. S.B. Herat, the Deputy Minister and some of my colleagues arrived.

The Minister was still upset. In spite of my protests he said he would immediately personally go to the residence of Mr. B. A. Jayasinghe, Colombo’s Municipal Commissioner and ensure that the crematorium was booked. I later found out that when the Minister arrived at Mr. Jayasinghe’s residence he was asleep, and since banging on the gate and tooting the horn brought no response, he had jumped over the wall, banged on the door and woken him.

As I had referred to earlier, the Minister had been a racing motorcyclist during the not too distant past and was still energetic and fit, although some poison administered to him by a political rival, about which I will relate later, had undermined his constitution to an extent. The Minister, one of the most decent human beings I have met, had openly appreciated my work and felt distressed that I had to be in office at 9.15 p.m., when my father passed away.

He was therefore, determined to render whatever assistance that was possible to lighten my load in making the funeral arrangements. He was aware that I was an only child and had no brothers and sisters to share the load. This was the reason for his extraordinary nocturnal adventure of scaling walls. He phoned me later that night and said that the crematorium was booked.

Deputy Minister, the M.P. for Dompe Mr. Saratchandra Rajakaruna, was also very concerned at what had happened. He had to go out of Colombo on a fairly long journey the day after my father’s death. But he came home at about 9.30 p.m. and announced that he had come to stay the whole night. He said “Just get me some coffee and you go to sleep.” My protests were useless. He had come to stay the whole night, and was determined to stay.

He was equally determined that both I and my wife should sleep. My wife and I were packed upstairs to sleep and Mr. Rajakaruna stayed the whole night along with a few of my relations. These gestures of concern and support by both the Minister and the Deputy Minister were appreciated by all who knew what they had done and was a source of solace and comfort to me at a difficult moment.

Director, Shipping Corporation

Things settled down and in late March 1978 the Minister of Trade and Shipping Mr. Lalith Athulathmudali appointed me to the Board of Directors of the Ceylon Shipping Corporation. The former Commander of the Navy, Admiral Rajan Kadirgamar was the Chairman and after his sudden death, Mr. M.L.D. Caspersz of the former Civil Service was appointed Chairman. An important issue we faced during this period was containerization. This also went along with the energetic port development policies of the Minister.

The ordering of vital equipment such as gantry cranes had to go hand in hand with the pace of containerization. In this respect my batch mate in the Civil Service Harsha Wickremasinghe, the Additional Secretary responsible for shipping in the Ministry of Trade and Shipping played a key role. He had developed both a knack for and a degree of specialization in the whole area of port development and shipping.

It is my belief that but for his own vision and his energetic pursuit of the Minister’s policies, we could not have achieved the rapid development that occurred in this sector. The Corporation went in for container vessels and the port of Colombo had gantry cranes before Bombay or Karachi.

In June, Harry Guneratne, an officer very senior in the Sri Lanka Administrative Service and former Controller of Imports and Exports joined the Ministry as Additional Secretary with responsibility for the co-operative sector. This was a strength to me. Harry was responsible and balanced. He also possessed a temper which was very useful at times. On one occasion, he got very angry with a Member of Parliament who was complaining to the Minister about some alleged negligence on his part. More than the content, Harry resented the disparaging tone adopted by the MP and at one stage fixing the MP in a steely gaze said “Remember, I am a public servant. Not a domestic servant.

” It was splendid stuff. His towering six-foot presence added emphasis to his manner. The Ministry at this time had both a Secretary and an Additional Secretary who were six feet tall and well-built, not the best combination for the negotiation of food aid programmes. On the subject of Additional Secretaries, it was interesting that the Ministry never had an Additional Secretary handling Food. The reason for this was, that food was a subject where decisions had to be taken very quickly, if not, sometimes immediately.

Therefore, there was no time for matters to be filtered through another layer. The Food Commissioner and the Secretary had to be on the phone several times a day, and many matters were decided on the phone. We recorded the decisions so reached in our respective files, for the purposes both of record and further reference. If the matter was important enough, I sent across a formal note to the food

Commissioner confirming the conversation and the decisions. Such working arrangements were necessary, because often decisions had to be taken before a market opened the following day, or because you could not risk a Currency fluctuation, or could not idle whilst a master of a vessel containing 10,000 tons of your cargo, had radioed that his ship had broken down in mid-ocean. In such instances, a delayed or a careless decision could lead to financial loss, legal problems or stock problems.

Wheat Tour to the US

In June, the US Wheat Associates, the umbrella organization of wheat farmers enjoying official status with the US Department of Agriculture invited me and a delegation from Sri Lanka for a Wheat Tour of the United States. By this time, most of the urgent deadline-oriented work was successfully completed, and the Minister was keen that we should go. The visit proved both useful and relaxing. We left in July. The team consisted besides me, of Captain Hayward Fernando of the State Flour Milling Corporation, Mr. Ramanathan who headed the Corporation’s laboratory; and Mr. Pulendiran, Deputy Food Commissioner (Imports).

In a near three-week tour we visited Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; Idaho; Lincoln, Nebraska; Kansas; Oklahoma and Washington D.C.

The visit entailed a great deal of travelling and field visits. During the course of our journey, we had discussions with Grain Exporter’s Associations; viewed trading sessions at Grain Exchanges; visited Grain Elevators and bulk wheat loading facilities; went to railway yards and viewed the discharge of wheat from 60 ton box cars which were raised from the ground on a hoist and then tilted in two directions; viewed the discharge of wheat from 300 ton barges; visited grain laboratories, including the well-known DOTY laboratory; saw the operation of feed mills; visited university research laboratories and agriculture faculties.

visited farms and travelled on huge combines whilst harvesting was being done; saw experimental wheat plots; food and nutrition research centres; noodle and pasta making plants; grain marketing research institutes; and circle irrigation methods. We also saw sights that could not be seen in Sri Lanka such as a train with three engines pulling over 112 very large wheat loaded waggons. The waggons kept coming and coming. One thought that one would never see the end of the train. We used to laugh and say that the lead engine must be in the next town, by the time the last waggon passed this town.

The visit also gave us an opportunity to widen our general knowledge and experience. We therefore, whenever possible visited facilities such as museums and planetariums. In Oklahoma, we visited an oil well that had been pumping for 16 years.

The oil was being pumped from over one mile down. As the leader of the team, I had extra duties. I had to make numerous speeches after official lunches and dinners and give several TV and radio interviews. We also met important people such as Governors and Lieutenant Governors of some of the states we visited, as well as others in industry, trade and government. This gave us productive opportunities to talk about Sri Lanka.

We ended our tour in Washington D.C. We had travelled from San Francisco on the West Coast to the capital in the East, taking in some important areas of the mid-west. In Washington too, we had a number of meetings with important organizations such as the US Wheat Associates our hosts and the Flour Millers National Federation. We also had a round of meetings with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Ambassador hosted a lunch in our honour. Whilst in Washington I was able to have lunch with Ambassador Chris Van Hollen, former US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, about whom I had written in an earlier chapter. It was a pleasant and interesting two hours.

On the way back, we were briefly in London, and took the opportunity to visit the Sugar Terminal and see sugar trading being conducted on the floor. We also went to the Baltic Exchange, connected with shipping and freight. Overall, this visit was a tremendous education. I was fortunate that I had this exposure so early in my career as Secretary Food. It deepened my knowledge and gave me new knowledge and insights. Subsequently, when I chaired a tender board to purchase flour and later wheat, I had much greater awareness of quality and other aspects. I knew enough to ask pertinent and relevant questions even on technical matters and insist on proper answers.

Local agents couldn’t fool me with excuses and stories generated in their imaginations. We were also able to obtain information directly from the contacts we had made, including the USDA. This visit proved invaluable for another reason. Prima Singapore was constructing the flour mill in Trincomalee. We in the Food Ministry were on the verge of switching over from flour purchases, about which we knew a great deal, to the purchase of whole wheat for the mill, about which we knew nothing.

(Excerpted from In the Pursuit of Governance, autobiography of MDD Pieris) ✍️