(Excerpted from Chosen Ground: the saga of Clara Motwani by Goolbai Gunasekera)

Mother had frequent staff meetings so that she could guide us in teaching methods to her liking. I give below some of her rules, which I now pass on to my own younger teachers at Asian International. What she taught then, holds good even now. And what did she teach me?

1. Begin all your classes standing. Never sit as you enter a class. You must dominate and show you mean business.

2. Do not talk too loudly. A teacher with too strong a voice will irritate pupils and they will begin tuning out.

3. “Always be perfectly turned out. (By this mother meant all-round neatness, not high fashion. One morning Mother was electrified to find Indrani Mendis, a former Games Captain just recently turned teacher, wearing a hipster sari. Indrani had a lovely figure and the hipster looked stunning. Nonetheless, Indrani will never forget what followed. Mother made her drape the sari all over again in her office with the minimum of bare skin showing. Nowadays I should think that would be considered an infringement of one’s personal rights! No one thought such traitorous thoughts then. Indrani now teaches at Asian International, and still has her good figure.)

4. Give your class one written assignment a week under test conditions. They must do the work in front of you, otherwise much of the work done at home will be actually their parents’ doing.

5. Corrections must be done within two days, or else a child will lose interest in the result of the assignment.

6. If a child is doing really badly all the time, try giving her a slightly better grade than she deserves. She will then make that better grade on her own the following time.

7. A child’s energy curve soars when praised. Try to do this more often than giving her a scolding which will probably have no effect.

8. If a class is noisy never say, “Don’t talk, class.” Pick out one of the children and say, “Don’t talk, Nimi.” The whole class will stop talking just to hear what you are going to say to that one child. It is a ploy I have often used.

9. If you do not know the answer to a question, never bluff. Tell the child you do not know, but you will look it up at home and tell her the following day.

10. Never try to fool a child. It cannot be done.

11. Be perfectly prepared before you attempt to take a class.

12. Never read from the textbook. You should know what is in it.

13. Give unexpected one-word answer tests. Children will never know when one is coming and will therefore listen all the time.

And so on. The list was even longer, but these are some that I remember. Certainly the teachers at BLC (Buddhis Ladies College) and I were highly successful, as our excellent results proved. My English Literature results at the O-Level were only rated ‘Most commendable’ in Mother’s parlance, while the word ‘Superb’ sprang to my own mind.

Teachers under Mother practically memorized their textbooks, as she had a disconcerting habit of turning up in classrooms with a deceptively kind smile saying:

“Now you just continue with your lesson, while I sit here quietly at the back and learn something new.”

None of us was fooled. It was a tactful way of checking whether we knew our texts or not.

‘One morning I was teaching Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The White Company to the O-Level Literature class. It was the Government text for that year, and its plot is set in Europe, in the Middle Ages. Medieval History had been my forte at University, so while Mother sat calmly at the back of the room I wickedly switched the subject-matter of my lesson, and gave the students a little background history of the Middle Ages.

Most fascinating to girls of that age is the Droit de Seigneur, which literally meant that the nobility of Europe had the right to sleep with the wife of a tenant farmer on his wedding night. The all-girl class was somewhat shocked, very thrilled and full of questions.

Mother sat through it all and then left, saying, “An interesting lesson!” to me. A few minutes later her peon handed me a note which read: “See me when free.” I assumed I’d gone too far and resigned myself to a lecture. Obediently, I trotted off to her office to face the music. Mother was all smiles and for once, full of praise.

“That is one lesson the girls will never forget,” she told me. “Frankly, neither will I, but that is hardly relevant. What pleases me is that such a lesson may get them reading History on their own in search of equally strange facts. That was good teaching , darling.”

I walked on air the rest of the day.

My old schoolmate, Smith College-returned Susheela Paul, also a teacher with me at BLC, had her entire class gaining Distinctions and Credits at the O-Level in Botany one year. Mother’s paean of praise had Susheela quite overcome. Susheela married Chari de Silva (who eventually became Chairman of Aitken Spence) and stopped teaching to bring up her family. Strangely, Mother did not protest at losing her fine teacher. Mother always felt family life should come first. One morning Susheela came to school but asked for leave midway through the morning.

“Is it urgent?” Mother asked.

“Fairly,” Susheela had replied and went on to explain why she wanted the rest of the day off. Apparently Ladies’ College follows the custom of not releasing prize lists until the very morning of the prize giving itself. Susheela had just been informed that her little daughter, Sharmini (aged six or seven) had won the Form Prize. She therefore had just a few hours to rush home to get Sharmini into a starched uniform, white shoes and a red ribbon to match.

“Run along then, my dear,” Mother is supposed to have said, and congratulated Susheela on a clever daughter. I snorted angrily when Susheela gleefully reported all this to me. I was recalling Mother’s refusal to grant me similar privileges for any reason at all.

“No one must think I favour you, darling,” Mother said soothingly to me, as if any one would be that demented, seeing that I was the hardest worked teacher on her staff.

Although Mother’s contracts with the schools she headed always had a furlough clause written into them, she rarely took advantage of it, preferring instead to have my grandmother come to Sri Lanka. The result was that both my grandmother and my aunt Arline visited the island several times and made many friends here. They needed to do so if they wanted to see my busy Mother.

But now Mother needed a holiday. After ten years or so, BLC was doing very well indeed. Leaving me in charge of the school for six months, she departed for the US, not without much misgiving. Right up to the time she went through the Customs gates she continued to hand out advice to me on just about everything.

“I’ll manage, Mother,” I eventually told her in exasperation.

“Oh, I have no doubt at all that you will,” said Mother, proceeding nonetheless to prove that she didn’t believe it for a minute.

Disastrously for me, my more lenient approach to the length of school uniforms and generally relaxed administrative manner (I preferred to use the phrase ‘modern manner’) resulted in one of the senior students eloping with the Geography master. I did not have any desire to read Mother’s outraged letter to me more than once, and so I tore it up instantly. It was quite some time before Mother gave me so much responsibility again in subsequent schools, as her days at BLC were at an end – though at the time she did not know it.

Mother was expected to return to Colombo after about six months, but before she could do so a blaze of adverse publicity left Mother initially more puzzled than hurt. Religion was at the bottom of it all.

As a Theosophist, Mother had no difficulty in running Buddhist schools in the manner Buddhists wanted. She followed the philosophy, and was good friends with the Bhikkus of Vajiraramaya – notably Bhikku Narada and Bhikku Piyadassi.

She did not go to Church and make a display of her Christian beliefs. Neither was she a temple-goer. The only places of worship we visited as a family were the religious sites to which Father took us in India. In Sri Lanka we visited and worshipped at the Dalada Maligawa, the Madhu Church, the Nallur Temple (when we were in Jaffna), and at Kataragama when Father decided our souls needed a little burnishing.

The fact that Mother rarely went to Church was just that she had very little time for it when she first came to the island. Hers had not been a very church-going family back home in the States, in any case. Now, as she entered her fifties, Mother decided to take up the study of her own religion again. She was studying Islam at the same time, but no one talked about that.

In one of her regular letters to the Chairman of BLC, Mr. de Mel, she mentioned the fact that she was enjoying the Church services in her mother’s parish. Reacting as if he had been stung, Mr. de Mel told Mother that on no account would he tolerate a practising Christian at the head of a Buddhist school.

Mother might have mentioned that at that very moment Visakha Vidyalaya, a premier Buddhist school, was getting along very nicely with a Christian Principal at its helm, and no one seemed to mind. She was more puzzled than hurt by her Chairman’s dictum, especially because Buddhism was not a subject that was ever discussed between them. But her bewilderment soon turned to anger when she was told of the manner in which the news that she would not be returning was broken to students and staff of BLC.

Mr de Mel summoned the entire school to an assembly in the Hall. He then had a priest from the Vajiraramaya speak to the captive audience who sat silently aghast, while Mother was literally vilified in front of her pupils and her teachers for no reason other than that of going to Church.

Unfortunately, Bhikku Narada was not in the island at the time, and the priest who came to deliver this bombshell was not someone who should have been entrusted with this delicate and tricky situation. Quite unsuspecting of what was going to be said, I was in the Hall myself and heard, to my complete fury, this Bhikku speak against my Mother in the most unacceptable language possible. He spoke in Sinhala and a literal translation would make his words border on vulgarity.

I got up, and walked out of the Hall. The priest was by now in full spate and did not connect my exit with my Mother. He carried on. That evening my husband accompanied me when I visited the Vajiraramaya to personally tell the Bhikku what I thought of him.

To this day my respect for many priests remains low. The Bhikku concerned denied saying anything.

“I heard you myself,” I told him angrily.

“You must have misunderstood,” he replied blandly, not accepting any blame. “In any case, I was told to make sure nobody got upset that your mother was not returning.”

With the benefit of hindsight, I realized that Mr. de Mel had been trying to forestall a repetition of the Musaeus College walk-out. He need not have worried. Many years had passed since that time, and the situation was not the same. Mother was not in the island, and did not return until after my daughter Khulsum was born.

But what really made Mother wonder sometimes if her life’s work for the Buddhist girls of Sri Lanka had been worth the effort she put into it, was the behaviour of certain chauvinistic Buddhists who not only refused to speak to her, but also saw to it that the newspapers played up the story.

“Principal Sails Away,” ran one headline, while Letters to the Editor debated the issue endlessly. Close friends rallied to Mother’s defence. It deeply concerned Mother that I was left to face all this criticism alone. My sister would have done a far better job than I did of confronting those who chose to be judgemental. I was quite unable to think of suitable retorts to questions such as “Isn’t Buddhism good enough?” and other nasty little innuendos.

“Tell everyone Mother has returned to the religion of the Ancient Greeks,” Su said dismissively on the phone.

“The Olympian gods? That was hardly a religion.” “Exactly.”

“I can’t say that sort of thing,” I quavered.

“Try the Druids then,” she said unsympathetically, and rang off.

In the end, Mother herself took it all philosophically, in spite of pinpricks which were often more like stabs. It was a bad time for me in many ways. No one enjoys hearing things said about one’s parents, even when the matter was so trivial. My husband’s family rose nobly to Mother’s defence. They made the next few months bearable, for it was not pleasant to have one’s mother’s religious preferences debated by those who knew very little of the matter. The Gunasekara family are strong Buddhists. My sister-in-law, Lakshmini is a devout adherent, yet her sensivity in the handling of this entire episode, particularly of my wounded feelings, is something the Motwanis will never forget.

It was a matter of bad timing. Buddhists were becoming very protective of their faith, and Mother’s actions were taken as a kind of slur that they found hard to forgive. Yet there were those like Lakshmini who remained totally non-judgemental and accepted that religion is, after all, a private matter. Is it any wonder that she remains from then to now, my closest friend and confidant.

One hurtful incident involved a lady who had been one of Mother’s favourite pupils at Visakha. Lillian was a girl with no mother. Her father would, more often than not, delay to pay her hostel fees. Mother was very fond of Lillian and would often tell me what beautiful long hair she had. On Mother’s first furlough back to America (I was four years old at the time), Lillian was sitting for her Matriculation examination in Colombo.

Running true to form, Lillian’s father had not paid the fees and she was withdrawn from the exam. Hearing of this, Mother indignantly cabled the office and insisted that Lillian’s name be entered on the list of those being sent up. Lillian always remained a favourite with her, probably because she had no mother. When the Bandarawela evacuation began, Lillian was taken along in a student/teacher capacity, and Mother even arranged for her to be paid a small salary.

Yet Lillian did not repay Mother with loyalty … or even with sympathy. She was the first to be openly critical of her in public — and, of course, Mother was told of this, for there are always ‘friends’ who enjoy passing on hurtful gossip. That was one of the few times I have seen Mother weep. She smiled when she heard that well-known civil servants or other VIPs had not been at all kind, but Lillian (who was by worldly standards not a person of importance) … Lillian hurt her most of all. When Lillian died shortly afterwards of cancer, Mother wept again at her funeral. Less forgiving, I refused to accompany her to it.

When Mother’s old friend, Bhikku Narada of the Vajiraramaya, heard of the whole matter, he sent for me. I told him that I had vowed never to enter any temple again after my brush-up with the representative of his order, who had been so hurtfully libelous of my mother. But Mother visited him, and he was saddened that it could not have been he who had given that talk to the students of BLC.

Still, memories are very short. Within a year of returning to Sri Lanka, Mother was being asked to write a series of articles on education for the local papers. Everyone forgot about Mother’s religious preferences and she decided to return ‘home’ permanently and enjoy retirement with her newly born granddaughter, Khulsum, and us. She ignored my husband Bunchy’s sardonic smile at the word ‘retirement’. Surrounding herself with books, Scrabble boards and bridge-playing friends, she managed to get along nicely for two months.

She enjoyed all this, but it was not in Mother’s nature to ‘retire’ and not be actively engaged in more strenuous educational work. When she was approached by Mr. Linton Kuruppu, the owner of a small school in the suburbs, who asked,her to transform it into a bigger and better Colombo school, she accepted the challenge. Thus, Sujatha Vidyalaya opened its doors in the fashionable Queen’s Road area in Colombo 3, and has been very successful.

Becoming wealthy through education was something that never entered Mother’s head. If she had been business-minded, she might have had a clause written into her contracts which gave her a percentage of the profits of the new schools she started, because there were profits. Mother never knew what they were, because she left finances to the Board.

I always told her that she had no head for business at all, for the owners of the Buddhist Ladies College and Sujatha Vidyalaya certainly did not make any losses while she headed them. Mother’s reputation, her genuine love for her students, her care and concern for all aspects of education, made her a legend in her time. Her name was a magnet that drew pupils to any school she headed, and the many thousands of children who passed through her hands were proud to say: “Mrs. Motwani was our Principal.”

While she was at Sujatha, the President of Sri Lanka at the time was J.R. Jayewardene. He instituted a system of National Honours which gave national recognition to citizens who had ‘done the state some service’. Mother was on that first list of recipients, and was the first person to be honoured in the field of Education. I was standing by her when the call came from President’s House, asking if she would be willing to accept the Deshabandu Award for her services in the education of Buddhist girls in the island.

It took some time for the President’s secretary to make Mother understand she was the chosen one. Mother was essentially a very humble person. It never occurred to her that she was considered important enough for a National Honour. I was always so proud to be known as her daughter and often told her so.

“It’s nice you feel that way, darling,” she would say, not really understanding that she had an awesome reputation. My husband and I were invited to watch her receive her award from the President’s hands. It was the first and last time I had a meal at the President’s House and it was a memorable occasion. Making the day all that much nicer for Mother, was the fact that Dr. P.R. Anthonis was also a recipient of a national honour in the field of Medicine.

Just before I married, Mother had needed to have very serious stomach surgery due to strangulated intestines. Before she went into surgery, she made my father-in-law-to-be promise that if she died he

would ensure my marriage went ahead (if not the reception). He promised, and it was perhaps a premonition of a mishap that made Mother extract that promise, for in the course of surgery, Dr. Anthonis told me later, he almost lost her.

Dr Anthonis was the foremost surgeon of the time in Sri Lanka. He still is! His gentle manner and almost aesthetically sensitive looks had endeared him to Mother at once. They became good friends. When the time came for Mother to settle her hospital bill she noticed there was no surgery charge. She queried it, and was told by the office that Dr. Anthonis had said he could never charge someone who had been nothing but a boon to his country.

It was a tribute he would pay her on two more occasions when she needed his services again. And so it was with much pleasure that these two people who had done so much in their respective careers for the people of Sri Lanka sat down to lunch together at the President’s House at the Inauguration of the National Honours List. Mother’s Deshabandu Medal and the Certificate of Honour she received at the hands of the President of her adopted country, are now treasured family heirlooms.