The passing of an iconoclast

by Anura Gunasekera

More than fifty years ago, my friend Jayasena Sirimanne, then a struggling amateur actor-cum-producer, and I, impressed by the dark, saturnine good looks of Nihal Ratnaike, his deep, rumbling baritone voice, the tall broad shouldered frame on which clothes sat with an uncontrived elegance, his avowed Marxism and casual contempt for the established order, named him the “Maha Kalu Sinhalaya”. We found it quite natural to conflate Nihal, the journalist, with the deposed Walagamba fleeing the advancing Chola.

Nihal, in our youthful eyes then, was the eponymous dissident, the quintessential bohemian. He lived that life as it came to him naturally. Politically, he was committed to an intellectual attachment to the extreme Left but he did not actively fight for his convictions.

In my early twenties, his little single bedroomed flat on Havelock road was a very convenient place to sleep off the excesses of a night, before presenting myself at my parental home the following morning. That was an abode which very frequently saw similar traffic. Nihal was always unquestioningly hospitable, sharing with all-comers meals he cooked himself in his tiny kitchenette. One wall of the sitting-cum-dining-cum- bedroom was covered with packed bookcases, prominent among the titles that I can still recall being Hemingway, Steinbeck, Silone, Moravia, de Beauvoir, Henry Miller , Orwell, Wilde, Mailer, Fitzgerald and other dissidents and icon-bashers. The playwrights ranged from Shakespeare to Ibsen, Beckett, Arthur Miller, Nabokov et al whilst Eliot was a preferred poet. There were also shelves dedicated to Ceylon history. On every available ledge rested dusty brass figurines, and sculptures and carvings by local artists, whilst a wide range of paintings, line drawings and sketches adorned much of the wall space. Very prominently featured was an iconic poster of Che Guevara and, alongside, a billboard print from the Moulin Rouge. The latter he had acquired whilst living in Paris.

Before I met Nihal in person I used to be an avid reader of his regular column in the Daily News, written under the pen-name “Viranga”. I liked the name so much that when our son was born many years later, we named him Isuru Viranga. But that is another story.

In 1967 my friend, the late Trevor Rosmale-Cocq, amused by my admiration of the writings of “Viranga, introduced me to the real man. The meeting took place in the then Art Centre Club bar, a dimly lit watering-hole above the Lionel Wendt, the meeting place of choice for both the artful and the artistic of Colombo. It was then managed by Ananada Gunatillke, who soon became my friend, entirely because of my frequent visits to the place.

Nihal could be found at the club on most evenings. Before entering the place you knew he was there; the deep, distinctive rumble of his baritone emerging clearly from the babble of voices, punctuated occasionally by the belly laugh, an equally deep extension of the voice, the man himself leaning against the bar, glass in one hand and cigarette drooping from the other, invariably in intense argument, either about current politics, theatre, film, art or books. Those were the subjects closest to his heart, those which invigorated his senses.

In the group around him would be Ernest Macintyre, Winston Serasinghe, Dhamma Jagoda, Chitrasena, Nihal’s dear friend Bevis Bawa, Geoffrey- the equally famous but less outrageous other Bawa brother- journalist Ajith Samaranayake, painter Manjusri and other assorted writers, theatre producers, journalists, actors and actresses, playwrights and artists; not all of them at the same time but at one time or another. There would also be yet others , not to be classified as belonging any cultural milieu but simply interesting personalities, some who worked hard at sustaining such an image, like the eccentric Eustace Fonseka. Tony Muller was a fixture at Nihal’s side, generally unsmiling and uncommunicative, opening his mouth only to sip from his glass.

The Art Centre Club then was where the off-beats and the oddballs gathered, along with star-struck youth such as I, feasting off an exotic table. The conversation was always interesting and often brilliant, the company very colourful and bewilderingly varied, whilst the drinks were cheap and the older patrons very generous. Impecunious, unemployed youth such as I could stride in confidently, with only the return bus fare in hand and, a few hours later, stagger out with the bus fare still intact.

Nihal was one of those exceptional people with a genuine personal magnetism, which made others to gravitate to him. It was not a consciously cultivated state but a natural composite of luminous intelligence, sardonic wit, a deep sensitivity to social and political dynamics, a genuine caring for people and a brutal honesty of opinion. What you saw was what you got. His imposing physical stature and rich, deep voice complemented the other attributes.

When I joined the Police Department as a Sub-Inspector in 1968, Nihal was horrified. In his eyes the police was a necessary evil but also an “extension of a fascist regime”- his own words. He recommended that I read George Orwell’s “1984”, as an extreme case scenario of life under ultimate repression. Some years later, after I had read Solzhenitsyn, I suggested to him that life in Stalinist Russia was the closest one could get to the Dystopia of Orwell. However, whilst conceding the excesses of the Bolshevik regime, he rationalized them as a regrettable case of individual freedoms occasionally being subjugated for the common good. When I left the police to become a planter in a British owned company he was amused, asking me how I planned to justify my admiration for the revolutionary vision of Che Guevara, whilst being an agent of the oppressive colonial model of plantation management. I cannot remember how I dealt with that question.

As a writer and journalist and in his views candidly expressed on other platforms, Nihal was aggressively anti-establishment. He openly despised the United National Party political doctrine. Unsurprisingly, the very day after the UNP election victory in 1977, he was dismissed from his then position as Deputy Editor of the Daily News. When I phoned him from my estate home in Nuwara Eliya he said, ” Anura, the Dharmishta government has done something very Adharmishta to me”, his very words. Subsequently, he successfully contested his dismissal at Labour Tribunal and was awarded compensation. Later, he did a short assignment for “CARE”, followed by a spell as the editor of “Focus”, another publication which enjoyed a brief but interesting life. With the changing of regimes he returned to Lake House where he was, variously, Associate Editor, Editor-in-Chief and Director, Editorial. He was also Media Consultant to the Prime Minister during Ratansiri Wickramanayake’s term. In between there were also spells at the Sunday Standard and the Island.

Nihal was a deeply complex, non-conformist who led an extremely simple existence. He attracted people to his orbit very quickly and retained them as friends for life. He was genuinely indifferent to the accumulation of wealth and assets, or material gain. Quite content with what was sufficient for the day, he lived a life which was governed by his uncompromising principles and unconventional personal beliefs. His passing was also consistent with the way he lived, quick, without drama and extended farewells. He had left strict, detailed written instructions for his family, for the immediate and unceremonious disposal of his physical self. His much loved sisters, the twins Indrani and Manel, and Waruna, his loving nephew, all of whom cared for Nihal in his final years when ill-health enforced dependence on this otherwise fiercely independent man, followed his final directives to the letter.

Nihal would have considered this tribute an embarrassing ostentation but I feel obliged to tell the world of a man who, at an early stage of my life, compelled me to examine my world view from different angles. We disagreed often but delighted in the debate. In the last couple of years, restricted by Covid-induced protocols, we did not meet often. My last meeting with him was a couple of months ago, when I sat by his bed for a few hours and reminisced on old times, discussed the books that we both enjoyed, together deplored the current state of the country, chuckled over interesting incidents of the past and revived memories of old friends who have passed on.

Nihal was older than I with a near generational gap between us but, together, we have sat through the final rites of several mutual friends. Trevor Roosmale-Cocq and Abey Ekanayake were two such in the last decade. The most recent was in 2019, that of Scott Dirckze where, as he was laid to rest, Nihal said to me with great sadness, ” he was a good and dear friend; I shall miss him very much”. I shall say the same of Nihal, my dear friend of over half a century.