Futile bid to teach Father bridge

(Excerpted from Chosen Ground: The saga of Clara Motwani by Goolbail Gunasekera)

I am often asked if Mother had any social life to speak of The answer would be yes and no. She had very little leisure, but this was of her own making. To her, visiting her school hostel in the evenings and chatting with the girls, or just chit-chatting with her family constituted what Mother would term leisure. But she did have many close friends.

One was Lady de Silva whose nephew I eventually married, although we did not meet as a result of that friendship. Lady de Silva was on the Board of Trustees of Visakha. Mrs. Constance Gunasekara was another dose friend. Mother admired her forthright attitudes, and appreciated the enormous support she got from Constance whose daughter Rohini was a pupil of the school. Such. was the involvement of parents in Visakha at that time that Dr. C.H.Gunasekara activated a rarely used artistic talent to build the sets for the operetta The Bohemian Girl.

Miss Chandra de Zoysa, the Vice Principal of Visakha (long after Mother had left), and Yoga de Soysa were personal friends as well, following Mother in the role of President of the Sri Lanka Women’s Federation. She often spoke of Mrs. Winifred Rodrigo, a lady she very much liked for her unorthodox views. Mrs. Rodrigo (Wincy) was a lady ahead of her times. She was, in fact, the first woman to graduate with a degree from the University of Ceylon.

According to Mother, Wincy once dressed herself as a village woman and sat in a hospital queue, just to prove that the common person found it hard to get medical treatment in a hurry. When Wincy eventually reached the doctor, she found she knew him socially.

“What on earth are you doing in fancy dress?” he is said to have inquired.

“Checking on you, and your goings on,” she replied laughing.

Now that sort of tale Mother remembered. She and Wincy enjoyed a long friendship.

The famous Canadian-born doctor, Mrs. Mary Rutnam, was another close friend Mother admired a great deal. I was a ‘Rutnam baby’, in fact, as she was Mother’s doctor when I was born. Dr. Rutnam had married a Tamil, and had four highly educated sons and one daughter. In common with other educated foreign mothers, Dr. Rutnam wanted an educational variation for her five children.

Accordingly, Donald went to Cambridge and became a civil servant. Alan went to the University of London to study medicine, Robin went to the prestigious Macgill University in Canada while Walter went to Antioch University in the USA. Robin and Walter joined the business world of Colombo while Helen, her only daughter, went to Paris and then to Canada.

Dr Rutnam’s granddaughters, Anne and Nadine, are family friends as well they might be. They had a perfectly stunning mother to whom I quite lost my four-year-old heart two years before Anne was born. Anne grew up being told by tactless friends, “You are pretty of course but not a patch on your mother.” She’s resigned to all of this.

As a Sindhi, my father belonged to a community that had a large representation in Colombo. While he did not belong to the wealthy merchant class (alas), he was nonetheless very respected as an academic. My parents often stayed with the Chandiram family in their huge mansion down Charlemont Road. It had to be huge, to accommodate Mr. Chandiram’s family of eight children all of whom (the girls, I mean) were Mother’s pupils.

When the Chandirams experienced business reverses, Father reminded his old friend of the time he had advised him to buy land in Nugegoda which was going at a ridiculously low price. Father was fond of saying ‘I told you so’. He did so now.

If you had listened to me,” he told Mr. Chandiram, “you’d have that land as an investment.”

It was true that Father was a whiz at advising others how to make money, but never made it for himself

“How would I, a mere professor, dare to advise a business tycoon,” he would tell his friend, Muni Kundanmal, and then proceed to advise him on every aspect of his financial affairs. Father understood finance, but he used to say his nerves would not stand the strain of any risk. He had no trouble, however, advising others to take risks.

Mother got on excellently with her husband’s Sindhi community. Kamala Hirdiramani and Dru Mirchandani were frequent bridge partners of hers. But apart from this, we often had fabulously cooked Sindhi food at their homes as well as in the homes of the Shewakram and Melvani families. In Nuwara Eliya we did likewise in the Butani household. Mr Butani’s daughters Maya and Pushpa are still friends. Try as they might, our cooks never quite learned to get that flavour.

Apart from Dr. and Mrs. E. M. Wijerama, whom we saw on a regular basis, Mother was very fond of the first pupils she had had at Visakha. After all, she was barely a few years older than they were when she became Principal of the school at age 23. Su and I were often flower girls at their weddings, and most of them remained her friends until she died. Among these were her very dear pupils like Beryl de Silva, Lakshmi Edirisinghe, Bona de Lanerolle, Christobel Weerasinghe and several others I have mentioned throughout this book in one connection or another.

Eileen and Conrad Dias were another couple for whom Mother had a great affection. She would always say that Conrad was the epitome of a perfect gentleman, in that he never raised his voice. She would accompany them on week-end trips out of Colombo. It was usually a sort of bridge holiday. Father was not included in such outings, for the simple reason he was not often in Colombo and even if he were, he just could not learn the game. He tried.

“How can I be expected to know what cards people have in their hands?” he would complain.

“Follow the bidding,” Mother would explain.

“But they try to hoodwink me,” he would say indignantly. “It’s cheating.”

“Nonsense, dear. You must try to out-guess them.” “I’m a trusting being,” he would reply.

As the names of Mother’s friends come crowding into my mind, I realize the futility of attempting to mention them all. Her life revolved round her schools. Her leisure time was greatly taken up by us, her two daughters, but when we went away to university, she had the time to indulge in her favourite pastimes: playing bridge and studying comparative religion.

During the last 18 years of Mother’s life, she lived with Bunchy and me. He was high on her list of favourite people, superseded only by Su, Khulsum and myself. Mother had a heart condition, and for this reason I felt happier when she was under my roof. When I asked Bunchy if I could invite her to live with us, he complied with an alacrity I found very sweet. Mother told him this herself Not wishing to show emotion at this emotional moment, he said:

“I have a reason, you know. When I fight with Gool, you always take my side.”

Mother’s living with us meant our daughter Khulsum grew up with a live-in grandmother. I recommend this to all young couples. No mother will have the patience of a grandmother, who willingly becomes a captive audience to children wanting to act out plays, dance and sing. No one but a grandmother will so cunningly ensure that the game of Monopoly always goes in a grandchild’s favour.

I would watch Khulsum and Mother seated at a card table. In front of Khulsum were notes of every Monopoly currency. At Mother’s end of the table, notes were in very short supply. Khulsum was a real little Rockefeller.

“Pay me, Granny,” she would chortle, as Mother moved up five properties to land on a Hotel bearing one.

“That was a four you threw,” I’d tell her.

“No, I saw a five,” said Mother, paying out a few hundreds more than were needed.

“I saw a five too,” little Miss Croesus would say indignantly.

“And why can’t you count out the money accurately?” I would ask Mother.

Her mind would scurry round for an excuse.

“I’m an American. I never learnt to count in pounds,” she would say. “This little girl is just so clever.”

The little girl in question would preen happily while Bunchy and I gasped with exasperation and left them to a game played entirely to Khulsum’s satisfaction.

But Mother did not only play Monopoly with Khulsum. She also taught her to play Scrabble, thus ensuring that her granddaughter familiarized herself, painlessly, with unusual words. Khulsum was soon scoring unbelievably high marks by putting down words like `Zo’ and Xd on triple word squares. Mother did not allow her to win in Scrabble unless she was able to do so on her own steam.

When Mother died, the vacuum she left in our lives was unbelievable. By then her great-granddaughter had also been born, and her last words were to Tahire.

“I love you, Granny,” Tahire said as she said goodnight.

“I love you too, honey,” Mother replied, before falling asleep. She never woke up.