Vignettes of the Public Service -JAFFNA

by Gamini Seneviratne

Jaffna was probably where the Kachcheri and its adjuncts in district administration functioned most smoothly. The GA enjoyed two advantages: ‘the ordinary people’ looked to the government to solve their problems, and he was required to serve a public that included a large number of public servants, many of them pensioners. That meant that not only were ‘the public’ accustomed to the discipline and procedures of the public service, they were, at least in the major towns, aware of the services the Kachcheri, (as well as other, stand-alone, departments), were expected to provide.

The large number of pensioners and their willingness to engage in social work bolstered such institutions as the multi-purpose cooperative societies, the fisheries cooperatives and weaving centres, mostly handloom, (which produced good cloth though they lagged behind the old centres in Batticaloa, in the Kattankudi area).  They all made a substantial contribution to the welfare of the people. They were well run, there was scrupulous attention to the cash-flow, and the what & why of the actions of the management were both open to scrutiny and were scrutinised.

Dr. N.M.Perera had initiated the organisation of the Nalavar people, the toddy-tapper caste, into cooperatives. The conversion of palmyrah toddy into a semi-distilled form of arrack on a commercial scale commenced then, in the 1960s. There occurred a consequent boost to their income, unfortunately, unwelcome to the Vellalas who had controlled their lives.

A negative input by the government came, not much later, in the form of the Markfed, a State ‘cooperative’ federation. District unions, including the Jaffna Cooperative Federation, one of the strongest in the country, were, predictably, weakened by that intrusion – as Philip Gunawardena’s Multi Purpose Cooperative Societies had undermined primary societies that had developed since the 1930s.

 The culture of the Jaffna pensioner was informed by an urge to help – even in the matter of providing unadulterated arrack on a no-profit basis to fellow pensioners. Whether Jaffna, or some segments of it, is /was a matrilineal society or not and whether that culture came from Kerala or not, the purse was in the hands of the wife. A friend who pioneered the ‘fair-bar’ afore-mentioned, gave the following mournful account of a misplaced control of the purse.

He had asked for 10 rupees, he said, to put in a gallon of petrol and a shot or two of the OS, but his wife had flown into a rage. The provocation for that being that his unmarried sister had left a substantial sum with him to cover her funeral expenses, when, as must happen some time, the need arose. His wife had directed him to the almirah: the smallest note in that bundle had been a hundred rupees.

On his way back home from the petrol shed and bar, a concrete post had detached itself from its moorings on the pavement and collapsed on the bonnet of his car; it was mid-afternoon he said, fully three hours before lighting up time for the CEB and he hadn’t seen it coming. The figures showed that the release of 10/- rupees in time would have saved 5000/- on repairs to his Morris Minor.

‘That, boss,’ he concluded, ‘is being penny-wise and pound foolish.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘she must have known you might take a drop too much and been too angry to care at the time. She couldn’t have known that a light-post would pre-empt her by punishing you before you got back home.’

My first visit to Jaffna was in the mid-1950s for an inter-school chess match with St. John’s College. In ‘board order’ our (Royal College) team was Delvin Knower (who became an Evangelist), myself, Jim Silva (who took to engineering), C Vaseeharan (mathematics and political activism) and Valentine Perera (who moved from Greek & Latin to IT and, latterly, to writing novels).

It being the school holidays we were lodged in the Hostel, with their Head Prefect, Samuels, as our host. On the morning after our arrival he told us that the UE/HSC results had come in and he had failed in Physics. Vassa looked at the question paper and sorted out the problems that had baffled Samuels, demonstrating the solutions on the sand with his toe.

As the chess-match progressed – we were ahead – a bevy of saree-clad giggling girls from Chundikuli invaded the battle-ground. Knower, who believed that girls, unlike boys, were the instruments of the Evil One, ignored them, and I was in some trouble deciding how best to finish my game. They may have made an impression on the others but we retained our lead into the next day. Somebody had decided that drastic measures were called for and we were sent to Keerimale for ‘a refreshing bath’ (with sweet toddy to follow); despite the cautions issued by Knower, some mouthfuls of toddy were consumed but it had little effect on the outcome of the match.

Peter Somasunderam was the master in charge and made us all welcome; he lived close to the school down a lane named after his family: the LTTE didn’t like him and made that known after their fashion. He was a formidable man to our eyes and my impression was that he was as much an iconic figure at St. John’s as Elmo de Bruin was at Royal. Many years later, his brother, A.J., whom I had met over the board on several occasions, sold his collection of books on chess at give-away prices; hard times, then, not financially.