THE SEMICIRCULAR VERANDA

LAST LETTER TO A FRIEND,JEHAN RAHEEM, WHICH WAS READ TO HIM BY HIS WIFE A FEW DAYS BEFORE HE PASSED AWAY ON OCTOBER 25, 2023

Dear Jehan,

Your message sent through your dear wife Eleanor, that you were in ” a closing out mode”, was received with much sadness , but wanting to send your friends a composed message even at such a time, has also warmth and evocations of where that warmth had its origin and growth.

We entered Peradeniya University in the same batch of 1955 and met by chance sitting opposite each other at the first meal in the large location of the dining room of Ramanathan Hall. Amongst other things we ate together, thrice a day, for four years

We soon were active in the university dramatic society where both found theatre growing in us. Later I did some at the Lionel Wendt and you I remember, when you, in the seventies, were United Nations Resident Represent in Nepal directed Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed in the open air by the light of a bright moon. Our friendship grew over about 70 years . We migrated to opposite parts of the earth, sometime after university, you to north America to join the United Nations and marry Eleanor, and I just to join Australia , but our friendship grew over the long decades, with visits and stays at each other’s homes across the world. Our life partners Eleanor, whom I got to know and Nalini who you knew well from undergraduate days became part of the friendship.

There are different categories of people in reacting to a troubled world. Vast millions will not even know of the current terrors between Israel and the Palestine. Another category will be totally submerged in despair at the nature of humans, yet another will know all about it, read all about it, yet “mind their own business”, both in the commercial and metaphorical sense, in not getting emotionally involved or in thoughts about it. You belonged to another category. You showed concern and were troubled by the world at large, yet found alleviating comfort and meaning in the society of friends you have grown up with, and your family. You have a large family. Three sisters and five brothers. All Islamic without offering the public external evidence.

Our lives are really a “short time” as many scientists and philosophers see it, and I now, at my age, recognize. Yet many are the memories. One that remains a strong and meaningful image is a semicircular veranda at the back of your home with an attractive rose garden, on Clifford Road Kollupitiya. There were many chairs in that meeting place veranda and it was packed whenever there was a gathering, which was eagerly frequent in the mid-fifties and sixties of the last century. The originals were your boyhood friends from Royal College. There was C.V. (Puggie) Gooneratne, later to be a cabinet minister, Mahalingam ending up in Peradeniya a professor, the Ponnusamy brothers Deva and Sure, “Gumbo” Nanayakkara,. “Bambare” Samarasinghe, Bihan “dhiga ” Perera, “Kalua” Mendis, Geevaka De Soyza and wife Jane , “Kalu” Goonda, Jeremy and Rhona Marjen, some that memory still has room for. And many others, post Royal, gathered in the binding social veranda, with you harmonising and yourself being conditioned to some meaning in life to friends and family despite being very conscious of a sometimes-meaningless larger world.

Your last composed message to your friends that you are in ” a closing out mode”, has the warmth of that veranda, of long ago. It also reminds with equanimity, those of my age and condition that you have stepped forward a little ahead.

May you be blessed, Jehan.
Love, Mac