M. CHANDRASOMA, CCS

by Parakrama Chandrasoma

Tissa Chandrasoma lived a wonderfully eventful life. He was the epitome of the generation of children who began schooling in their small villages and sought higher education in Colombo. The post-independence leaders of the country were mostly born from this group.

The first part of this transition was magnificent for Tissa. He met and married my mother in University College, Colombo and entered the elite Ceylon Civil Service. After service in Kandy, Badulla, Kegalle, Puttalam and Gampaha, he returned to Colombo to work under Sir John Kotelawala in the Ministry of Communications. He replaced the departing British head of the Customs and Port Commission, the first Sri Lankan after Independence to hold a job vital to the economy of a country then dependent on the export of one product. There, he reached the pinnacle of his career, very much in the public eye, living in splendour and traveling the world.

I treasure a picture of him in his naval uniform introducing his staff to Queen Elizabeth at the opening of the new pier in the Colombo port, dedicated to Her Majesty during her Royal visit to Ceylon in 1952. Sadly, Tissa’s life in public service came to an abrupt end soon after the election of Mr. Bandaranaike in 1956. After a conflict with the new Prime Minister, a political disagreement strangely at odds for a man who didn’t have a political bone in his body, Tissa resigned from his beloved Civil Service. While this completely justifiable action was based on principle, it is something my father regretted all his life.

The above paragraph describes what most people know about Tissa Chandrasoma. It is largely irrelevant in the big scheme of things. The wonder of my father’s life can never be measured by his achievements, powerful as they may have been. It must be measured by who he was within his brain and his soul. That is the man I knew and will try to describe.

In the first decade of my life, which began one month after Independence, I did not know my father very well. His life was too hectic. His time at home was always rushed. While every memory I had of him during my early life was positive, one remains indelibly fixed in my mind. I must have been eight years old. I had done something wrong; I do not remember what it was. When confronted by my mother, I lied, denying that I was the culprit. My father was watching. He called me and told me to sit next to him. He asked me: “Son, tell me, did you lie?”. I knew I was caught. I nodded my head with my eyes cast down to the floor. He gently lifted my face and made me look at him. He said, “Son, lying is in itself a bad thing. But that is not the real problem about a lie. When you lie, you are admitting that you are frightened of the person to whom you are lying. You are being a coward. There is no reason in the world for you to be frightened of your family. But you must also learn to never be frightened of anyone else in the world. Do you understand?” I nodded my head. He ruffled my hair in the usual manner he expressed affection, smiled, and dismissed me. That single lesson I have tried to follow all my life. I have tried to live my life without lying or fear of anyone. Lying, as my father always said, is the primary sin. If one can lie, one can do anything.

However, white lies to preserve domestic peace are perhaps the exception that prove this rule.

After Tissa left public service, he joined Shell Company as its Operations Manager. This required him to travel for management training in England. Our whole family joined him to England a few months after his departure. At the end of the year of his training, my father and I came back to Ceylon. My mother and three brothers stayed in London, two to pursue higher education and, in the case of our beloved youngest brother Mahen, to desperately find an impossible cure for his cerebral palsy.

I had nearly three years during which I lived with my aunt Viji and had my father all to myself. His life was still busy but I was the focus of his attention. Every morning, he would drive to his office in the Fort and then give the wheel over to the driver to take me to Royal College. School was over at 3:45 and I got to his office around 4. As I walked in, my father was invariably lounged in his chair with his feet on the desk, his brow furrowed by a particularly difficult clue in the London Times cryptic crossword puzzle. He would acknowledge me with a wave and I would sprawl on the floor to finish my homework. I would watch his face turn from puzzlement to delight as he found answers. He never left the office till the crossword was done. I used to gather the Times look at the completed puzzle. I could never figure it out. Many decades later, I was at an airport with a long flight ahead of me. Browsing in the bookstore, I saw a book of London Times Crossword puzzles. I immediately bought it, resolved to solve many puzzles. During the next seven hours, my brow never displayed happiness. I could not figure out a single clue. I realized then that to be called smart in my father’s time was infinitely more difficult than when I reached his age.

Again, one conversation with my father during this time stands out in my memory. My mother and father were from different castes and we grew up in a home where caste was never discussed. When a discussion around caste arose at school among my second form friends, I had no clue. Driving back home after work that day, I asked my father to which caste I belonged. He smiled knowingly and, without batting an eye, said: “Tell your friends that your father and mother are of different castes, and that makes you a proud member of the Jarawa caste!” His disdain for the caste system was profound.

Weekends were father-son times during these three years. We took body-surfing beach trips to Mount Lavinia followed by lime juice with soda at the Sinhalese Sports Club. Regular trips back to his home in Arachikande that always consisted of fast and spine-tingling driving on narrow roads, a sea bath in the pristine beach at Hikkaduwa, king coconut water and a well bath, followed by lunch and a long siesta.

But the most vivid image I have of our weekend trips were the ones to Nuwara Eliya. The Shell Company had a vacation home on Upper Lake Road called Craig Var. After driving dangerously over the winding mountainous roads, we would have a quick bath and go to the Grand Hotel for dinner. The hurry to get there was so that my father could play billiards with Wilson, the billiards marker. After that it was my turn when they tried to teach me the game. This was a thrill as I improved, slowly evolving into a decent player over the years.

After dinner, we drove back to Craig Var to hang out in the living room. With a log fire roaring and creating a delightfully warm room, I still see my father sitting on an oversized armchair with his books and crosswords, and me sprawled on the carpet trying to figure out the answers to problems in a book of complicated mathematical puzzles that he had bought for me. Few words were spoken or necessary as we just lounged till close to midnight.

I saw and understood Tissa Chandrasoma’s real self on our short sojourns during this magical time of my life. The world may have seen a jet set fast living man. But to me, he was an incredibly simple man whose ethical code was impeccable and incorruptible. He remained throughout his life the child that he describes in his first book “Five to Eight” about his childhood in his village on the Southern Coast of Sri Lanka. All the pomp and pageantry that surrounded him in his later years never touched his basic simplicity and goodness.

He visited our home in Pasadena once. He did not like the American way of life that we lived. It was too complicated, even though he did not realize that it was much simpler than the life he lived when he was my age. He was sad that my children did not know Buddhism sufficiently. Upon leaving, he promised to write about Buddhism for my children. His book about the Buddha’s life (“Siddhartha Gotama of the Sakya Clan”) is written as a letter to his grandson Pradip, my youngest son. It is one of our family’s greatest treasures. He left us with the firm statement that he would never again go to a place where he did not have his bed in his room in his house in Sri Lanka. He never did.

He died in the last week of December 2004. He was sitting in front of the television, having breakfast. His heart and brain simply stopped when he saw the first images of the tsunami devastate the coastline around his beloved Hikkaduwa.

May he have attained Nibbana.