Features
Chilaw”s Poet Laureate

By ECB Wijeyasinghe
Number One, Jetty Street, Chilaw, is perhaps the most famous front door in the North-Western Province because it is here that “Gallinago” lived and entertained almost everybody who was anybody in that part of the world.Gallinago, the scientific term for Snipe, was the nom-de-plume of the Poet Laureate of Chilaw, and concealed the identity of the Attorney-at-Law who was christened Joseph Jasper Herschel Gamini Benjamin Pandittesekera.
Herschel died a few days ago, but his witticisms and his songs will be recalled for many decades to come. Ceylon has produced serious poets like Tambimuttu, Alfreda de Silva and D. J. Thamotheram, but in the domain of light verse Herschel was one of the finest products of the age and takes his place alongside Charles Ambrose Lorensz, Edmund de Livera and Hilaire Jansz. Perhaps Mervyn Casie Chetty and Renee David are the only people now able to match the effervescence of his style and both of them happened to be his close friends.One of Herschel’s favourite poets was Omar Khayyam. Like his father C. V. M. Pandittesekere before him, he knew the Rubaiyat by heart. Both father and son were Crown Proctors of Chilaw, but the similarity ended there.
SHOW-PIECE
C. V. M. Pandittesekere was a cousin of the redoubtable Coreas of Chilaw. In addition to being a leading lawyer he was a great horticulturist. He experimented widely with grafts of all kinds. I believe there is a variety of mango named after him. In his orchard at Bowatte in Bingiriya, there was once a citrus tree with four branches which was the show-piece of the village. One branch had orange, another carried clusters of mandarins, the third branch had limes and the fourth and strongest branch bore the burden of the jambola.
But alas! C. V. M. Pandittesekere’s son and heir Herschel, was a fruit-hater. Anybody who flung a ripe plantain at him could be his enemy for life. Going back to Omar Khayyam, there is an interesting story of how Herschel parodied the Persian poet and tried to get his client off a criminal charge. It happened this way. Herschel was appearing for a man who was accused of having altered a cheque. His clever client had changed Rs. 100 to Rs. 400 and attempted to cash it. Herschel got up and told the Court in defence:
Some moving finger wrote, and having writ Moved on; nor all the Prosecutor’s witnesses nor wit Can prove which finger changed ‘One’ to ‘Four’ Nor on my client pin the guilt of it.
The late Mr. A. S. Ponnambalam was the Judge. He asked Herschel to repeat the quatrain and wrote it down word for word, on the Record. He then gave Herschel a benign smile and convicted his client. When the Judge got down from the Bench, Herschel rushed to the Chambers and spouted this verse:
Alas, alas, what boots it to repeat,
Wise judges are not carried off their feet
By putrid poetry, and mine’s of no avail
The paths of Pandittesekere’s clients lead but to the jail.
Mr. Ponnambalam then called to his peon to bring the Record. “No, sir” pleaded Herschel, “please let that not go into the Record.” And the kind judge heard his plea.Herschel’s greatest virtue was his ability to laugh at himself and he excelled in the sport of devaluing his physique, looks, wealth, pedigree, intelligence and everything, except his prowess with a gun. One of his most amusing prose compositions was what he described as his “auto-obituary in advance” which he wrote ten years ago, soon after he relinquished the office of Crown Proctor.
His only child, his daughter, Dilhani, wife of Major Srilal Weerasooriya of the Ceylon Army, who has inherited a good deal of her father’s talents, has preserved his ‘speech’ which was meant to be his own Reference in Court when he passed away. Incidentally, Dilhani and Herschel often corresponded affectionately in verse, and that is not strange, because their forbears were more or less professional poets for many generations and the courts of the Sinhala kings resounded with their wonderful songs.
So much so that one of their ancestors was given the title Pandita –sagara (Sea of Knowledge) a name which has undergone the usual corruptions.Herschel’s auto-obituary is now in the possession of his daughter, and the temptation to quote copiously from this unique document is irresistible. It takes the form of a “reference” in Court and begins with a quick review of his life from the day he lost his mother when he was born, and then five maiden aunts took charge of him.
His father rescued him from the cotton-wool of their tender care and sent him off to S. Thomas College, then in Mutwal. Heeding his grandmother’s plea that the poor innocent, motherless lamb should not be thrown amidst the ravening wolves of a college boarding house, Herschel says he was mollycoddled by a succession of fond boarding mistresses. That is why until his dying day he could never make a cup of tea for himself or take a laundry account. Now, hear what Herschel has to say of himself:
After a protracted stay at the Law College he passed out at last and came to Chilaw to inherit his father’s vast practice, which despite his assiduous efforts he was unable to totally dissipate until the time of his demise. After more than a third of a century at the Bar he could still be described as Mr. Necessity, because necessity knows no law.
But he was not altogether untalented. He had in great measure the gift of nonchalance which has been aptly described as ability to look like an owl after you have behaved like an ass. Yes, Sir, he was indeed a man with a brilliant future behind him. If ever inanity was personified it was personified in him, but such was the amiability of his inanity that he rose on the crest of a wave of tolerant popularity to become Crown Proctor of Chilaw.Over his early love-life Sir, let me draw a kindly veil. Suffice to say that after flitting from flower to flower he came back full circle to marry his own first cousin. What this lovely lady saw in him has been a matter of lively conjecture among his friends. It is indeed his good fortune that his daughter has gone completely after the mother’s side.
SONGS
Herschel then goes on to tell of the 400 popular songs that he “parodied mutilated and maimed” to the accompaniment of the ukulele which he called his “hiramane”, the good old Sinhala word for coconut scraper. He admits that his besetting sin was his idol worship of the gun. As each man kills the thing he loves he went for snipe in a big way.Snipe, as everybody knows, are not natives of Sri Lanka. They come here in thousands every winter from Siberia to enjoy our warmth and worms. And as for the flesh of the snipe any gourmet will tell you there is nothing to match the delicacy of its flavour. It is the champagne of the meats.
Shooting a snipe is not like killing a sitting duck. It requires the highest coordination between eye and arm. In the first place nobody sees the bird till it rises and then it flies like lightning at two or three different angles. In April the birds fly back to Siberia with loads of accumulated fat.
Herschel in his “Obituary” has given this pen-picture of himself:
Hunched like Punch, Chin meeting nose, Crooked of arms, Craggy of toes,
Thin as a mast, Bald as a coot,
But up to the last, He still could shoot.
Though Herschel has written hundreds of parodies of popular songs and his original jokes were legion, he never descended to vulgarity. He hated blasphemy and obscenity and his “Sinhala Belles” which is based on ‘Jingle Bells’ as well as the parody on Bubby Achchi’s Bicycle’ have a touch of genius. They can now be heard on tape records in remote corners of all the five continents.
Herschel had a presentiment that he would cross the border earlier than most of his contemporaries and it was this feeling that prompted him to suggest that when he died W. J. Cory’s immortal lines on Heraclitus could not be improved upon by his friends. Here they are with slight alterations.They told me, Herschel Pandi, they told me you were dead, They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed. I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. And now that thou art lying my dear old Chilaw guest, A handful of grey ashes long long ago at rest,Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake: For Death, he taketh all away but them he cannot take.
(Excerpted from The Good At Their Best first published in 1980)