Going off to a new life in Singapore

Sold my appliances and pyrex to Abans to pay my bond

by Sumi Moonesinghe narrated to Savithri Rodrigo

Our romance flourished. We kept seeking ways to be together, keeping our meetings under wraps and very secretive. Most often, our rendezvous was at the hotel where it all began, Hotel Suisse in Kandy. We always booked adjoining rooms – 91 and 92 — and met over the weekends. We would leave on Friday evening and return on Sunday, but deliberately traveled separately.

I was under the impression that our relationship was top-secret, but Susil’s friends had by now deduced the story and would rib him whenever they met him about the young lady he had fallen in love with. This included Susil’s good friend Upali Wijewardene, probably one of the country’s earliest successful entrepreneurs and founder of the Upali Group. He took to teasing Susil incessantly with the coined phrase, “91-92”.

I had been invited to the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) meeting in Manila. The ABU is a collective of over 260 members from 70 countries and a member of the World Broadcasters’ Union with the mandate to develop broadcasting in the region. Being a broadcast engineer, I was very excited to be among other similar-minded professionals. After my training at the BBC, this would be first time I would be having a dialogue and participating in discussions in not just broadcast engineering, but standards, systems and frequencies pertaining to radio and television. And another reason for me to be excited; as the head of CBC, Susil too had been invited to the ABU meeting.

When we returned to Sri Lanka after the meeting, Susil took my passport, saying it was for safekeeping. By this time, I was totally in love with him and never asked questions. He also told me he had decided to leave his wife. Throughout this time, I had well-meaning friends who would advise me about my actions. They would constantly tell me how wrong I was in engaging in an affair with a married man, that I was breaking up a family and as a last resort, that I deserved better, in an attempt to tap into my self-worth and dignity.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know right from wrong. I understood that my friends were right and what I was doing was wrong. But the attraction was just too strong and there was also that stubborn recklessness in me that must have liked taking things to the edge – living on the brink. I just carried on regardless.

It was understood now that we were together.

When I underwent a minor surgical procedure, it was Susil who visited me in hospital every day, feeding me meals prepared by his mother. He came from a family where sons could do no wrong especially in a mother’s eyes and hence, when he did tell his mother about me, she seemed to approve. It was not that I didn’t have my bouts of good sense kicking in. There were times when I would feel a semblance of guilt and cut off all communication with Susil. Then it was his mother who would call me and plead on her son’s behalf.

Since Susil had told me he was leaving his wife, it was more or less understood that the next step was marriage although he never articulated it until many months later. While returning from Kandy one day, he said, “You must say ‘Yes’ to getting married.” Susil had this way of asking me things and I could never say “No” because I was deeply in love with him. But this time, I stood my ground. “No way,” I said quite adamantly. “I’m going back to England. I want my passport back!” But of course that never happened.

As luck would have it, Susil was going on an official trip and we decided that I would join him. I took a month’s leave from the station. To avoid any unnecessary gossip, he left earlier and I joined him later in Karachi. From there, we first went to Paris so he could attend to some work pertaining to CBC. As a businessman, Susil had acquired a wide network of contacts and we were wined and dined quite extravagantly; although when it was just the two of us, we spent some idyllic moments – cruising on the River Seine and walking the streets of Paris.

From Paris, we flew to London. Susil had obtained special [permission from Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike to visit London and Paris, citing a need to meet the people he had met in broadcasting circles. In London, he called Mrs. Bandaranaike and asked if he could go to Washington DC as well. Again she agreed, but asked him to meet the Sri Lankan High Commissioner in London and the Ambassador in Washington DC.

Susil would never let me leave his side. He took me wherever he went, which also meant I was with him at every one of his official meetings, lunches and dinners. So, I accompanied him to dinner at High Commissioner Tilak Goonaratne’s official residence in London and then, when we got to Washington, to Ambassador Dr. Neville Kanakaratna’s residence as well. While in DC, Susil took me to a play at the Kennedy Center and I laughingly reminded him of the play we went to in Colombo, when he couldn’t take his eyes off me.

We traveled from Washington to Hong Kong and stayed at the Mandarin Hotel. From there, it was onto Singapore. Somewhere along this trip, we had decided that we would definitely get married. But that decision also meant many feathers would be ruffled in Sri Lanka. We realized that given Susil’s status both in politics and in society, we couldn’t continue living in Sri Lanka after we married.

Having thought long and hard about what we could do, when we landed in Singapore, I made contact with the Chairman of Singapore Television whom I had met at the ABU Conference in Manila. I asked him if he could find me a job and he unhesitatingly said “Yes” because my training in colour television at the BBC was a rare commodity. At very short notice, he organized an interview for me with the Head of the Singapore Institute of Research Dr. Lee Kum Tat, who offered me the post of lecturer at the Singapore Polytechnic, the first and oldest polytechnic in Singapore. My new appointment would give me the status of an expatriate lecturer plus a very attractive salary and a lovely apartment to top the deal off.

With this job in hand and knowing we had a route out of the country, Susil and I took the flight back to Colombo. With my job confirmed at the Singapore Polytechnic, my next task was to resign from my post at CBC. I quickly wrote my resignation letter and handed it to the Director General of CBC. The resignation was readily accepted. We could never have predicted however, that the acceptance of that letter was to be his last official duty as Director General of CBC.

As we landed in Colombo, the news hit us that Susil had been dismissed from his post at CBC. Neither of us could understand the reason but Susil surmised that it was the powerful Minister of Public Administration Felix Dias Bandaranaike who was instrumental in the dismissal. It was well known that since the attempted coup d’etat in January 1962 when a group of officers from the military and police planned to topple Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s Government, Felix was responsible for aborting that coup and the investigations that followed and had thus become a very influential member of her cabinet.

Mrs. Bandaranaike entered politics in 1960 following the assassination of her husband Prime Minister S W R D Bandaranaike by a Buddhist monk at their Rosmead Place home Tintagel. She was the first woman Prime Minister in he world. Her Government stayed in power until 1965 when she lost the election, but she remained in Parliament as the Leader of the Opposition. She regained power in 1970 with her United Front Coalition, a triad of the Communist Party, Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party.

This was 1970 and Mrs. Bandaranaike’s second stint as Prime Minister. Susil concluded in hindsight, that after a decade in politics, Mrs. Bandaranaike should be a mature politician and didn’t quite need to be influenced by her cousin Felix. But there was no point in pondering over questions we didn’t have answers to. Whatever the reasons and whoever directed it, Susil had been dismissed.

During our one month away, we had been blissfully unaware of the wheels which had begun turning in Sri Lanka in our absence. Susil’s wife Ganga had heard about us and visited my parents, of which again, I was unaware. Having no inclination of Ganga’s visit to Kegalle, I made my habitual visit to see my parents after we returned from our one month overseas. They never confronted me but kept repeating, quite vehemently, that I shouldn’t return to Colombo.

This insistence went on for hours, with my mother in tears and my sister very upset. Ignorant of what had transpired, this behaviour was quite baffling to me until my little niece spilled the beans. In all her innocence, she said, “A fair aunty came in a big car from Colombo to see Achchi and Seeya.” I deduced this was Ganga as being of Sindhi’ descent she was fair complexioned and the big car was the Moonesinghe car.

In the close-knit environment of my conservative village in Kegalle, gossip is rife. Everyone knows everything about everybody and news generally spreads like wildfire. So, if someone says, “Your daughter has eloped with a married man,” there would be absolute loss of face for my family. They were teachers who had always been held in high esteem in Kegalle and a black mark like this would be hard to bear. Susil’s family, on the other hand, were hardly affected because his mother already knew about us and these things were accepted as part of life. There was nothing scandalous.

Despite my family’s pleadings, I had to get back to Colombo. My sister’s husband drove me back. It was quite a silent drive as there was quite a dark cloud of unspoken questions that needed answers hanging over our heads.

Colombo was teeming with the news. I had never realized this would be the way it all panned out. It became unbearable and I just wanted to escape. To assuage some of the troubles that kept bubbling to the surface, Susil wisely got a seat for Ganga on the inaugural Air Lanka flight to London so she would be spared the gossip that was swirling the city.

However, Ganga wouldn’t let things slide by so easily. Once she got to London, she made contact with my boyfriend, who until this point was unaware of the series of events that had unfolded in Colombo. I hadn’t told him anything. On hearing the entire story from Ganga, he subsequently told me he was heartbroken beyond comprehension and even had bouts of disbelief. “I still believed we were going to get married,” he said. It transpired eventually that we would remain good friends, with our families intertwined in that strong friendship we nurtured decades ago.

The next step was paying my bond. Since I had resigned from my job at CBC, I was obligated to repay my bond which was quite sizable at that time. On my various trips abroad, I had stocked my home at Sulaiman Terrace with a range of duty free appliances. I put them up for sale. There was a Hoover polisher, Electrolux vacuum cleaner, Belling cooker, Necchi sewing machine and Pyrex dishes, all of which in the 1970s constituted a treasure trove.

The country was pursuing an economy shaped by socialist ideology, which in the simplest of terms, brought on a ban on imports and import substitution. My appliances therefore proved to be a boon for one innovative entrepreneur, Aban Pestonjee, who was just starting off her business. She would eventually found one of the biggest conglomerates in the country, the Abans Group of Companies, and be the first entrepreneur to introduce Korean technology to Sri Lanka. A remarkable woman indeed!

Susil’s uncle was the High Commissioner in Canberra, and a few years earlier, Susil had sent his daughter Tara to study in Canberra under his care. However, with all that was going on, Ganga brought Tara back to Sri Lanka, much against Susil’s wishes. This disrupted Tara’s education and added to the complications. Ganga left no stone unturned to get Susil back.

Susil finally did leave Ganga and came to stay with me at Sulaiman Terrace with just the clothes on his back, two pairs of trousers and a few shirts. I lost nearly all my friends during this period. I had Loretta who stood steadfastly by my side, allowing us to stay with her until we left for Singapore. I also remember my friend Nali’s husband, whom I had known from 1960, sitting with me for two hours and coaxing me to rethink what I was doing. I was treated like a pariah because everyone felt sorry for Tara, the child caught in the middle, a reaction that was understandable.

Just before we left for Singapore, I went with Susil to see my parents to tell them about my job offer and that I was leaving Sri Lanka for some time. My mother didn’t come out to see me and only my father spoke with me. I remember him telling me, “I have faith and trust in your ability to make decisions for yourself and I respect them. Be careful.”

While there were upheavals and lots of bad blood at the time, Ganga, Tara and I eventually became very close friends and it was a friendship that lasted throughout Ganga’s last years and through Tara and her children as well. I am grateful that as I grew and matured, I managed to resolve some of the issues I grappled with, even in a small way, by being there for both Ganga and Tara as part of my hybrid family.

As a Buddhist, the resolution of the hurts we cause is an important aspect of the concept of Karma. It is a blessing to carry no evil into the afterlife. I was young, foolish and in love. But the older and wiser I grew, I realized I too had my own punishment meted out when my marriage to Susil ended and the whole cycle of love, loss and pain in was completed in one lifetime. That is the karmic cycle.