The gweilos at the Temple

1.  From David Johns, retired professor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong

I almost forgot to mention Ron and Veronica Clibborn-Dyer who lived in a temple in the New Territories. (Veronica sold her tea set to you if I remember correctly.) On one of their hikes in the NT they came across a temple with a notice posted on the gate requesting interested parties to apply to live and restore the temple. Ron who was fluent in Cantonese contacted the number and discovered a Chinese expat living in the UK who came back to assist in trying to get someone to live in the temple. There were ancestral bones in large earthenware jars stored for the return of loved ones to pay tribute each year so there weren’t too many takers to live nearby. Anyhow, Ron and Veronica expressed an interest and to this man’s surprise took on the job. 

The temple had been deserted for years and there was an enormous amount of work to be done to make it habitable. Over the years they did quite a lot of cleaning up but it was in no way a place where you or I would want to call home. They expanded their independent living by keeping goats, chicken and anything that would produce something useful for their consumption. When we visited we were in awe of their Spartan lifestyle but they seem to enjoy being away from the madding crowds of HK. 

What was most fascinating being their stories of intruders interested in their livestock. In particular, the appearance of some very large pythons who would regularly devour the odd chicken or on one occasion a goat! Literally opened up its throat and swallowed a goat. According to Veronica she caught the snake in the process of devouring the goat and retrieved the goat before it managed to get the horns past the point of no return. Not sure what the reptile thought of that but she assured us that the python was not aggressive but they always knew when a python had paid a visit as the hens went very quiet presumably mourning the loss of a friend or relative. Once discovered hiding in the chicken shed Ron and Veronica and their helper would bag the snake and record the markings under its chin and return it to the surrounding bush. We imagined that they gave names to the pythons all beginning with the letter “P" and accepted that the word got around among Peter, Penelope and Philippa that they could always rely on a good meal at the temple. 

2.  From Ian Wilson, retired professor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong

I read the message by David Johns on the nunnery and Ron and Veronica. We were friends almost from when we arrived at CUHK in 1990. We left in the Summer of 2002 when Ron was in the last stages of his cancer. I was one of the volunteers clearing the grounds and making the roof almost leak tight (Veronica never unpacked her boxes). Ron was an expert in the local Gods and the history of the local villages, looked after the bone shed and restored the waterways round the nunnery. We spent many a happy evening sitting in a pool he made by damming the stream sipping beer or on their balcony with wonderful views of the villages below, Tolo Harbour, the border hills, and Egret Island. We were there when the annual ant flight took place and I asked why he had not closed the windows, he told me that was because they were coming out from the inside. As a retired policeman he could not kill the protected pythons that fed on his stock, he took them away as far as he could and released them. We always thought there were python signposts guiding them back. Ron was also a keen gardener and was very proud of his lovely flowering ginger plants, bougainvillea, roses, etc.

It is great that he is remembered, a wonderful man.

 

3.  From the South China Morning Post

https://www.scmp.com/article/319779/keepers-temple-flame

Very interesting article from 2000.

 

4.  From the Royal Asiatic Society of Hong Kong

 

Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong 2018. Recent Activities Visit to the Wan Jing Jai Temple (蘊貞齋) & Garden of Veronica Clibborn-Dyer Written by Helen Tinsley

On this cool and cloudy Saturday, Hong Kong’s urban areas, including nearby Fanling MTR station, were full of hustle and bustle in preparation for the coming New Year Festival holiday period leading up to the Chinese New Year of the Dog. However, about 30 RAS members and guests chose to take this special chance to accept Veronica Clibborn-Dyer’s generous invitation and visit her beautiful temple based home and extensive gardens. These are situated in a quiet and peaceful New Territories setting, overlooking Starling Inlet (沙頭角海) and the start of the Wilson Trail, in the north east corner of Hong Kong not far from the border with mainland PRC. For most of us this was a first visit.

Veronica Clibborn-Dyer

After some interesting car and taxi rides followed by a short walk along a path to reach our secluded destination, Veronica welcomed us warmly, with steaming mulled wine and open wood fire braziers in the courtyard. She then introduced us to the temple buildings (Kwun Yam (觀音) and Shing Wong (城隍) their gods and altars, and surrounding terraced gardens --with their history, along with the fascinating story of how she and husband, former policeman Ron, came to live there after 1996, initially with a menagerie of animals and birds. For years in the past the place had been used as a refuge- with very basic facilities- for retired amahs, once their working lives were over. Some of the Chinese character signage reflects this role. Wan Jing Jai ( 蘊貞齋 ) here ‘Wan’ means to gather/store/collect/accumulate/save/amass, ‘Jing’ means chastity, and ‘Jai’ means temple/ hall/ vegetarianism/ Buddhism. So putting them together, it literally means Gathered Chastity Temple.

After Ron passed away a few years ago, Veronica chose to stay on as custodian and continues to enhance this beautiful setting with help from her local gardener—truly a place of wonderful peace and tranquility. With some vivid story-telling and videos Veronica guided us around the buildings, before we enjoyed an informal but magnificent and delicious buffet curry lunch, catered by Shaffi’s of Yuen Long.

5.  Postscript

Ron Clibborn-Dyer retired as a senior superintendent of police and passed away in 2009. 

And my link to all this? The Clibborn-Dyer’s donated a lovely Noritake tea set to the Chinese University Women’s Organization’s annual auction, and I bought it. When I retired from Hong Kong, the tea set first traveled to Sri Lanka and then to my son’s home in the USA.

---

[1] Gweilo - Cantonese term for westerners

Six years in the Heart of Dixie Part II

In 1989, while finishing graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, I accepted a teaching job in Alabama, where license plates proudly proclaim it’s the “Heart of Dixie”. Dixie is the nickname for the eleven Southern states that formed the Confederate States of America, which fought and lost the Civil War with the Northern Union states. These Southern states have a terrible legacy in terms of slavery, the KKK, and the murderous treatment of black people. These areas are also notoriously backward in terms of literacy, standard of education, and healthcare. 

Not all my friends in Austin were pleased with my move to Alabama. One, a liberal woman from New York, said that she would “not stop to change a flat tire in Alabama”. I was aware of the legacy of the deep South, but most universities are open minded communities, and English departments oases of liberalism, so I didn’t anticipate much prejudice. The job market was tight, and, as a foreigner, I felt fortunate to find a job.

The University of South Alabama in Mobile is a comprehensive university, with medical and engineering faculties, in addition to arts, sciences, business, education, computer science, nursing and social sciences. In 1989, the enrollment was about 12,000 students.

The English Department was, in every sense, traditional, dominated by White males and gracious Southern ladies, all of them White except for one Black female professor. James Dorrill, the chairperson, was a Jesuit priest and a Harvard man. To their credit, they hired me - the first from Asia (and the face, skin color, and accent not matching the name) - to teach English to Americans.

Mobile, Alabama

The city of Mobile was the epitome of a conservative, Southern city. During the Civil War, it was one of the last Confederate cities to surrender to the Union Army. Mobile port, used to ship cotton from large, slave-holding plantations during antebellum (pre- Civil War) times, became a leading dockyard during the two World Wars, two hundred ships having been built during World War II. When I arrived, the port had seen better times, although cruise ships would occasionally dock, and timber and coal had replaced “king cotton” as the main export.

Vestiges of Mobile’s halcyon days remained in the downtown area, dominated by the Greco-Roman style Catholic cathedral.  Gracious Southern homes, with their open verandas, large casement windows with wooden slats, tall Grecian pillars, and the weathered brick walls gave the area a 19^th century appearance. Streets lined with old oak trees that met in the middle enhanced this ambience. Some houses, in the Queen Anne style, had elaborately decorated exteriors. The gardens were full of flowering shrubs, shaded by magnolia, weeping willow, and ancient oak trees hung with moss. What these homes evoked was a leisurely lifestyle – iced tea, mint juleps - and old money. Uniformly, all these houses were occupied by whites.

Not far off, but in a world apart, lived the poorest Blacks. Their wooden houses - mainly of the one-room shotgun style - were near collapse due to neglect, and I wondered how people managed to live there. A scattering of discarded furniture, rusty appliances like refrigerators, and even vehicles raised on cinder blocks, filled the weedy yards. People sat on their porches, staring at the road, or hung around aimlessly, apparently with nothing much to do. A supermarket or even a 711 was nowhere in sight.

Two roads lead away from the downtown area, westward. One was Old Shell Road, where the houses and vegetation resembled the downtown area. Spring Hill College, an old liberal arts university, was on this road. It even owned an 18-hole golf course. The newer parts of Mobile were along Airport Boulevard, which ran parallel to Old Shell Road and was the main thoroughfare. Here, Mobile resembled a typical American mid-sized city, with a few department stores and numerous strip malls, McDonalds, Burger Kings, and other fast food outlets. Typically, affluent subdivisions, housing spacious, stately homes, were set far back from the road. The less affluent houses - flat, single storied, ranch homes - lined the roads. Apartment complexes catering to tenants of various income levels were scattered throughout the city. The most prominent tree was pine, not of the coniferous Christmas-tree variety, but unattractive, with thin, long needles. These pines grew along the roads and alongside the houses. Fallen pine needles and cones smothered the grass.

Mobile’s population was about 200,000. Religion triumphed over everything: more than 200 churches, mainly Baptist, served the community. Catholic churches were also numerous. Typical of conservative societies, rich people and businesses paid low taxes, and the result was the erosion of funding for public education and health services. For lack of permanent classrooms, some classes met in converted mobile homes. This problem was often discussed on TV and in the newspaper, but no solution was in sight.

Air pollution was high. A number of paper factories operated nearby, and when the wind blew towards Mobile, a foul odor of sulphur dioxide enveloped the city. I would get up some mornings to this odor and a thin sheen of polluted mist, which might last till midday.

Teaching

I taught writing, what Americans termed rhetoric and composition, both at the freshman (first year) and senior (fourth year) levels. In addition to Americans, the freshmen classes had international students coming from a range of countries in South and Central America, Asia, and Europe, the latter mainly from former Soviet republics. As a result, in terms of accents, varieties of English spoken, and cultural features, my classes resembled a mini-United Nations. I found this delightful. In a class of 25, I could have students speaking 15 different languages.

At the more advanced class, the students came mainly from engineering and computer science. Many students were older adults, either returning to university after taking years off for full-time work, or starting university after raising a family. I had interesting conversations with some of them – about their jobs, their struggles to meet tuition payments, growing up in the South, pros and cons of American cars - and gleaned much about American life. One topic never touched upon was race relations.

My classes were taught in a computer lab, for which I had raised funds. For some students, this was their first use of a computer. Teaching composition is my forte, and I received positive evaluations from most of my students. American students could be blunt and confrontational at times, but, despite my “foreignness”, I never heard a racial slur in or out of class, or read a racist comment in the anonymous end-of-term evaluations that students provided.

Among my colleagues in the English Department, my favorite was Patricia Stephens, not the typical Southern belle by a long shot. Pat, who taught American literature, had a smoker’s rough voice, and a no-nonsense, direct manner. She had attended college in Memphis when Elvis Presley was performing at the clubs there. I introduced Pat to V.S. Naipaul, and she told me his travelogue “A turn in the South” was the best book about the South that she had read. Later, we team taught a graduate course titled “Rushdie and Naipaul”.

 

My wife and I also had a close friendship with Prof. Dorrill (we called him Father Dorrill), the Chair of the English department. Once in a while, we invited him home for a Sri Lankan meal, which he enjoyed. We kept in touch over the years, and, in 2016, I returned to Mobile to see him when Father became feeble after his health deteriorated.

 Race relations

Since arriving in the United States in 1984 for graduate studies, I had lived in Washington DC, Philadelphia (for one semester) and Austin, Texas. In Washington DC and Austin, I had met Black students and professionals, studying or working confidently alongside Whites and apparently being treated equally. In Philadelphia, where the University of Pennsylvania was in the downtown area, I often saw down and out Blacks, some homeless and others perhaps addicted to alcohol or drugs. Raggedly dressed, trundling a shopping cart that held all their belongings, they would sometimes wander around campus, and even walk disruptively into lecture halls. In Alabama, a state where Blacks people had been persecuted since the days of slavery, and where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s struggle for civil rights that had been met with violence, I did not expect to observe smooth relations between the Blacks and Whites.

So, I was surprised to observe the two main races getting along without any visible friction. Black professionals appeared to be respected - we had Black professors and even my doctor was one – and a few could be seen managing department stores and other businesses. But, on Sunday mornings, when everyone attended church, the racial division became clear. Most Blacks  people attended their churches, while the whites went to theirs. Although a few Black folks attended church alongside the whites, I could not imagine a white person in a Black church.

From my readings and observations, I gradually began to realize how matters stood. As long as the Blacks knew their place, and stayed there, the society could be harmonious and functional. When these invisible boundaries were crossed, trouble could erupt.

In this milieu, how could my family define ourselves? We were clearly not white, and had no Black roots either. The term Asian was for Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Koreans. My wife Fawzia had a Muslim name, but hardly anyone realized that. Americans are notoriously ignorant of world geography. When asked, I told them that Sri Lanka was the little island below India. But, how many of them could even point to India on a world map?

Fawzia worked for a while as a librarian at Spring Hill College. Not once did Fawzia or I face any type of racial discrimination in Mobile. But, when our son was attending high school there, a clash broke out between students from the two races, which turned into a minor riot. When we went to pick our son up, the area was surrounded by police cars and armed policemen.

Two incidents provide evidence of the acute racial discrimination that had existed in Mobile before my time. In 1958, Jimmy Wilson, a Black handyman, had been condemned to death for stealing $1.95 (yes, less than two dollars) from a white woman. The jury may have been influenced by the woman's testimony that Wilson had spoken to her in a disrespectful tone. (Fortunately, due to an international outcry, including a plea from the Pope, Wilson's sentence was commuted). Second, the last recorded lynching in the USA had occurred in Mobile in 1981. A young man was killed elsewhere, but brought to Mobile and hung from a tree. During my 2016 visit, I was shown the tree.

After six years in Mobile, in preparation for a move to Hong Kong, I had advertised my house and car for sale. One day, a Black family came to see the car and later came into my house to discuss the deal. After they left, my neighbor, a middle-aged White woman, rushed in, saying “I hope you are not selling the house to them”. She didn’t mind Sri Lankans, but didn’t want any Blacks in the neighborhood.

Coping with the siege on our planet

 A few weeks ago, 470 pilot whales beached themselves in Tasmania. Although this phenomenon has been observed for years, no valid explanation has been offered, but the depletion of fish stocks, noise made by ships, rise in water temperature - all caused by humans - are suspect.  

Humans have been killing whales for centuries. According to The New Yorker magazine, traditional whale hunting was for subsistence, using whale body parts for food, shelter, and amulets. But, in the sixteenth century, Basque whalers changed whale hunting into a trade with the use of harpoons. Using larger ships, they killed more than 40,000 whales near the Atlantic coast of Canada between 1530 and 1610.

By the late 18^th century, the Dutch, the Danes, the British, and the Americans had joined in. First taken for food, whales were later hunted for their oil. In the 19^th century, about 230,000 sperm whales were killed. Male sperm whales grow to 70 feet in length, and, in the 20th century, the slaughter of these magnificent mammals exceeded 700,000. The total number of whales killed from various species was nearly three million. Miraculously, they escaped extinction. 

Now, let’s turn to the humble pangolin. They are elusive creatures. When one was found in Pannala, NWP (in Sri Lanka), recently, it made the news. Pangolins are hunted for meat, for their scales (for use in traditional Chinese medicine), and for their skins. At one time, about 150,000 pangolins were killed in China each month for their meat and scales till they became nearly extinct in the mid-1990s. From 1975 to 2000, about 613,000 pangolins skins, mainly from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, were traded legally in the international market.

As for pangolin scales, between 1994 and 2000, about nineteen tons of scales (amounting to 47,000 pangolins) were exported from Malaysia alone. When Asian pangolin numbers declined, African pangolins became the target. Just one seizure of scales in the Cameroons weighed more than five tons. In April 2019, Singapore seized two shipments of pangolin scales, of 14.2 tons and 14-tons, both from Nigeria, from an estimated 72,000 pangolins. In fact, the scales have no medicinal value, consisting of keratin, the same substance as in hair and nails.

I have gone from whales to pangolins, but, for the sake of brevity, will not describe the devastation humans have caused to fellow creatures. Suffice to state that the UN estimates 1,000,000 species are threatened with extinction. Please see https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

Turning to vegetation, the Amazon forest, the world’s largest, is losing more than 150 acres every minute, and 78 million acres every year. Fires are also burning there as I write. Brazil is also home to the world’s largest wetlands, the Pantanal, which is on fire. So far, more than 25,000 sq. km. have been destroyed. Meanwhile on the West coast of the United States, unprecedented fires have devastated more than 4 million acres of forest, which included precious Redwood trees. Closer home, in Indonesia, an estimated 2.4 million acres of rainforest is cleared and lost every year.

Watching a forest burn or another majestic tree falling before a bulldozer on TV is becoming stressful for people like me. Rage, helplessness and utter despair come in waves, enough to make one physically ill. The mantra for many years has been “Think globally, act locally”, but thinking globally has its costs.  

Jane Goodall, the well-known primatologist and anthropologist, perhaps has the answer. She said "People say think globally, act locally. Well, if you think globally, it is overwhelming and you do not have enough energy left to act locally. Just act locally and see what a difference you can make!"

 

"Kai Tak Heart Attack"

 In the mid-1990s, when I began to play casual cricket in Hong Kong, some games were at Mission Road grounds, in Kowloon. Cricket was a low priority sport, so football was also played there, and the grass was somewhat patchy. Kowloon is a crowded part of Hong Kong, and we could see mid-rise buildings and a multi-storied public school nearby.

Chinese U cricketers with supporters at Mission Road, 1996

Cricket at Mission Road was dramatic, but not due to the prowess on the field. The ground was right beneath the flight path to Kai Tak airport, only about two nautical miles away. Kai Tak was one of the busiest airports in the world, and jets landed every five minutes or so. And some of them flew over Mission Road.

A thundering noise of a low flying aircraft would signal another approaching flight, and a great shadow would glide across the field as a giant 747 flew past. The noise drowned everything, and perhaps only the batsmen, the bowler, and the wicketkeeper (not even the umpires) kept their eyes on the ball. I, for one, in the outfields, couldn’t help but gaze upward, trying to identify the airline: Cathay Pacific, United, Northwest, JAL, ANA, Korean, Malaysian, Thai, Singapore, Qantas, British Airways, Air France, KLM, Lufthansa, Air Lanka - all flew past. This process - the ear-splitting roar, the massive, gliding shadow – was repeated over and over again during a game.

 

Even more dramatically, as I watched, the aircraft would bank sharply to the right just as it passed the grounds, and disappear from sight. I read that a checkerboard painted on a hill just past the grounds was the sign for a plane to make that sharp, 47 degrees right turn, while descending from 600 to 150 feet, so that it could line-up and level off for landing at Kai Tak’s only runway. All this had to be done within a few seconds, manually, because the maneuver wasn’t possible on auto-pilot. If you turned too late, the aircraft would plough into a hill. They said the ride would “give a Valkyrie the heebie-jeebies”. No wonder pilots nicknamed the descent “Kai Tak Heart attack”!

As I began to travel in and out of Kai Tak, I learned a little secret: the most dramatic views of the landing were from the economy class, in a seat above the right wing. When I did manage to get the right seat, the experience was beyond belief.

As the aircraft descended rapidly over busy Victoria Harbor, skimming over ships and ferries, then onto the crowded Kowloon side, over a vast cemetery, almost touching high-rise rooftops, a speck of greenery here and there, the engines reviving up and reviving down, and the sound of landing gear being lowered. The runway was not yet in sight, but I knew we had just passed Mission Road grounds because the plane made the sharp right turn, and lined-up for landing through a canyon of housing blocks. I could see the residents going about their lives - cooking, sitting down for meals, watching TV - quite nonchalantly, as if unware of the gigantic flying object passing by their windows. Would the wings snag the drying laundry – T shirts, pants, underwear - from the balconies? Would the plane spotters on the flat roofs be dragged along? As the plane came to a stop, spontaneous applause might break out in the cabin. A mixture of exhilaration and relief.

Beloved Kai Tak shut down on July 6, 1998. A little bit of Hong Kong’s magic died with it. And cricket at Mission Road was never the same again.

 

Viva Kamala Devi Harris

 I was going through a supermarket checkout in Alabama when the cheerful cashier, a young Black woman, and I got into a conversation. Noticing that her name tag said CHANDRA, I asked her if she knew what it meant. She didn’t. When I told her it meant “moon”, her face lit up with joy. “I can’t wait to get home to tell my parents”, she said.

Years later, when I heard of Kamala Harris the Senator, I wondered at her first name, knowing she was Black. Did her parents name her Kamala because they liked how it sounded? Was this another case of “Chandra”? But I came to know that Senator Harris’ mother was an Indian from Madras, and that explained Kamala.

But I did wonder why Harris did not talk about her Indian origins. Obviously, the Black aspect more attractive to voters than the Indian heritage. But, now that she is the Democratic Parties’ nominee for the Vice Presidency, her Indian heritage has received wider publicity and is certainly an asset.

Indian Americans are a formidable ethnic group in the USA. More than four million in number, they have the highest median household income, US$119,858, in the country. (For Whites, it’s $65,902.) Indian CEOs lead formidable companies: Shantanu Narayen, Adobe; Sundar Pichai, Alphabet, the parent company of Google; Satya Narayana Nadella, Microsoft; Rajeev Suri, Nokia; Punit Renjen, Deloitte; Vasant Narasimhan, Novartis; Ajaypal Singh Banga, Mastercard; and Ivan Manuel Menezes, Diageo, just to name a few. The entire list is longer. According to the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, 221,000 doctors of Indian origin are in the USA.

These Indians are, literally and metaphorically, a gold mountain. Within two days of Harris being named the VP nominee, $23 million in donations flowed into the Democratic Party campaign, although how much came from the Indian American community is not known.

Shayamalan Gopalan, Harris’ mother, left Madras at the age of 19 to study in the USA, and, after obtaining her PhD, became a cancer researcher. Harris’ sister, Maya, a prominent lawyer (she became Dean of a law school at 29), was Harris’ campaign manager in 2020.

My life has been entwined with Americana since my father bought a subscription to the Reader’s Digest when I was only 11. In those days, the USA was a beacon for the free world. Personally, my graduate studies were in the USA, at no cost to me, and my career took off there. I want the USA to do well. The debacles in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the racial inequalities, the rabid partisanships, the disrespect for science, and government incompetence has made the USA a far cry from the country I first saw in 1984. Most hurtful has been its fall from leadership among nations. So, I am glad that the Biden-Harris partnership offers hope for a much needed change.

Sri Lanka also has a prominent link to Harris. Rohini Lakshmi Kosoglu, of Sri Lankan origin, was Senator Harris’ Chief of Staff during her campaign for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination.

Interesting times ahead, indeed!

Trinity College, Kandy, Jokes

Mistaken Identity

A prominent politician, who was the MP for Kandy in the good old days, had three sons at Trinity.  Two were twins.  As was his custom, the feared vice-principal and disciplinarian Mr. Sahayam was doing his rounds of the school when he spotted one of the twins standing outside the classroom.  Upon enquiry it was revealed that he was thrown out of the class for being a disturbance.  Mr. Sahayam sent the boy back into class asking the latter to see him at 3.05pm at his office when school closed for the day.  

3.05pm - Sahayam had forgotten about the matter.

3.15pm - Looking outside from his window at the end of school, Sahayam sees the culprit scooting away.  He immediately shouts and gets him into the office, and the usual 3 cuts follow.  

Just as he finished, a knock on the door and in walks the other twin, the real culprit! 

The first one did not know why he was caned till then (one never questioned Sahayam).  The second was not let off - he was given 6 cuts, 3 being the punishment for the disturbance and the other 3 because it would be profoundly unfair that he should receive just the same number of cuts as the innocent one! 

An unforgettable leaving certificate

One troublemaker was regularly sent by the class teacher to the vice principal’s office for punishment, and whenever he turned up, the 3 cuts were perfunctory. One day, the troublemaker turns up as usual at the office. Without a word, Sahayam rises from his seat, approaches with the cane, asks the subject to bend down, and metes out the usual punishment. Sahayam returns to his desk, only to see the boy still loitering in the office. “Why are you still here?” Sahayam asks, only to be told that the boy had already left school some time ago, and had only called to collect his leaving certificate!

The missing full-back

The Trinity rugby side had gone down to Colombo by train to play Zahira. Bob Harvey is doing the commentary on Radio Ceylon when Abdul Majeed of Zahira picks up the ball and speeds all the way down the flank to touch down for a magnificent try.

The returning Trinity team is disembarking at the Kandy railway station where the Trinity full-back is met by his father, who sternly inquires where the son had been when he was supposed to be playing rugby in Colombo. "What do you mean?" retorts the surprised full back, "I was doing exactly that". "Stop talking rubbish" says the irate father in choice Sinhalese, "even Bob Harvey was saying when Majeed scored that try, ‘Where is the Trinity full-back? He is nowhere to be seen!’”.

(from various sources)

Six years in the Heart of Dixie

Six Years in the “Heart of Dixie” – Part I

In 1988, when I was a year from finishing my doctoral studies at the University of Texas at Austin, I had arrived at a crossroad. Fawzia and Roy had joined me only the previous year, and Fawzia was working towards a second bachelor’s degree while Roy was  in high school. If we stayed on in the USA, Fawzia could go on for a master’s and Roy could enter university. But, in the back of my mind, I also thought of returning to Sri Lanka.

All that changed in October, when a letter arrived from my father back home, warning me that it was a dangerous time to bring my son back. Roy was only 15 at the time, but tall for his age, and two conflicts were raging in Sri Lanka: one between the Sri Lankan forces and the LTTE up north, and another with Marxist rebels waging a brutal armed revolt in the south. My father feared that, in one way or another, Roy would become the victim of these conflicts.

Alabama license plate – “Heart of Dixie”

Now that the choice was made for me – staying on in America - the only way to continue was to find a job, and, in my field of applied linguistics, teaching. So, I scrambled, looking somewhat desperately for any openings.

I faced a challenge even before my job search began. I am not a native speaker of English; while that would not matter in science, engineering, computer science and every other field in finding a teaching position in America, would I be welcome in an English classroom where the students were native English speaking Americans? In English departments throughout the country (3000 universities and four-year colleges), hardly any nonnative speaker professors were visible. So, I would be venturing into the unknown.

New Orleans

One of the largest academic conferences in my field, the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) was to be at New Orleans at the end of December, between Christmas and New Year. Many job interviews are conducted at such conferences, because both professors and graduate students attend them. So I applied for every job opening that had scheduled interviews at the conference, and waited anxiously for invitations, by phone or letter, in those days without email. In the end, I was invited to 11 interviews, the most among my contemporaries in the foreign language education and English departments.  (I did have unusually good credentials.) When academic departments have a vacancy, a small recruiting committee of professors is formed to vet applications, and being invited for an interview meant that I had cleared the first hurdle.

In late December, I traveled to New Orleans with three friends from the English department, all literature majors. They, too, had applied for jobs but only one had managed to land an interview. The others went, hoping for walk-ins. The job market was very tight those days, and more so for literature majors.

In New Orleans, the weather was cold and rainy, the streets slush with mud. The interviews were usually conducted by the chairperson of the respective academic department at the hotels where he/she stayed. Not being familiar with New Orleans and the hotels, and before the days of cell phones, I was literally running all over town, panicking at being late and denied interviews. Having to dress formally, in jacket and tie, added to my nervousness.

The interviews also gave me a window on future bosses. One department chairman, who had obviously scheduled too many applicants, timed each interview with a timer. Barely 10 minutes into my interview began, the timer went off and he abruptly ended the interview. Some seemed confused when I turned up, perhaps expecting to meet a white person, not having read my CV carefully to discern the Sri Lankan origins. I could even read the disappointment on some faces when my accent and skin color didn’t match my name. The interview I best remember was with an elderly gentleman, who introduced himself as James Dorrill. He was easy going with the questions and we had a friendly chat.

On-Campus Interviews

The next step in the hiring process is the on-campus interview, for which two or three of those interviewed in New Orleans would be short-listed. About two weeks after returning from New Orleans, I received invitations for three interviews, one in Mobile, Alabama, where James Dorrill taught, and the other two by universities in Missouri. These were all expense paid trips, with two or three nights’ hotel accommodation and roundtrip air travel. I would meet with the English department teachers (professors and instructors), make a formal academic presentation to them, and be interviewed by the recruiting committee. A tour of the city and available housing options (usually conducted by a real estate agent) might also be on the itinerary. A professor or two would accompany me to every meal.

When I arrived in Mobile, AL, I was met at the airport by Professor James Dorrill himself, this time in a Roman collar! He was a Catholic priest. From then on, my presentation, the interview, and informal meetings with teachers and students went quite well. Mobile is an old port city, in a very traditional Southern state. Most professors were older gentleman, and there were a few ladies as well. Most were gracious and curious about me. Prof. Dorrill, being was from Boston, was quite an anomaly.

Colorado Apartments, married student housing at the University of Texas at Austin

But the most memorable interview was at Springfield, Missouri, a beautiful town into which I flew on a tiny plane. As we came into land, I saw a colorful landscape with sweeping hills in the distance. (I am a sucker for distant hills.) The English department staff were comparatively young and very friendly. My visit lasted three nights, staying at a comfortable hotel, and I was wined and dined. One of the professors was especially impressed when she learned that my thesis supervisor was Prof. James Kinnevy, and called him the “father of modern rhetoric”, which in fact he was. My presentation and the formal interview went smoothly, and an enthusiastic real estate agent showed me the town and some houses on the market. I felt that the English department staff were keen on me coming there. I learned that the actor Brad Pitt was from Springfield, and that the Holiday Inn chain of hotels started there. The entire department came for the lunch before my departure, at a nice Chinese restaurant with an open kitchen, and we again got along quite well. I knew that Springfield was the place for me.

Upon my return to Austin, the wait for follow-up phone calls and letters was nerve racking. Would I get a job offer? What could I do if I did not? To bolster my morale, I talked frequently with my classmates who were also on job hunts. We were desperately trying to finish our thesis writing, while also teaching two or three freshman writing classes for the English department and taking courses ourselves.

A disappointment, and a job offer

The first rejection came from the other Missouri university. It was just a polite a form letter. I hadn’t liked that place much, so wasn’t very disappointed. One down, two to go. About a week later, I was overjoyed to receive a letter from Prof. Dorrill, in Alabama, offering me the job, setting out terms and conditions, including the salary, and giving me two weeks in which to decide. But my first choice was the position in Springfield, and when a letter from there finally arrived, I opened it nervously, only to have my hopes shattered: despite all the positive vibes I had received during my visit, they had turned me down. Thinking back 30 years later, I realize that my life, and that of Fawzia and Roy, may have taken an entirely different turn if that Springfield job had come through.

So, I accepted the Alabama offer. Not all my friends were pleased. One, a woman from New York, said that she would “not stop to change a flat tire in Alabama”. I was aware of the terrible legacy of the deep south, of which Alabama was a part, in terms of the Civil War, slavery, the KKK, and the murderous treatment of black people. These areas were also notoriously backward in terms of literacy, standard of education, and healthcare. But, most universities are open minded communities, and English departments oases of liberalism, so I felt secure. In any case, I did not have the luxury of choice.

Mobile, Alabama

The next step was to visit Mobile to find housing and attend to paperwork. So, a few months later, I drove the 600 miles from Austin to Mobile in my small Isuzu car, going east on Highway I-10, passing through Louisiana and Mississippi. I can’t recall if I stayed overnight during that long drive but I did pass through a landscape that was quite foreign to me. The polluted, oil refining area of east Texas and Louisiana, the swampy, pine forested backwoods, the small and larger towns along the highway that flashed past because I had no time to stop. I would get to know these areas better in a few years’ time.

Without the pressure of a job interview, I saw Mobile and the University of South Alabama more clearly. Compared to the University of Texas at Austin, South Alabama was a small university, with no history, having been founded only in 1963. A state institution, it did not have the red brick, ivy covered buildings that are the landmarks of revered old universities. Most buildings were utilitarian, lacking any aesthetic value. The founding President of the university was still in charge after more than 25 years.

Downtown Mobile street

Linda Callendrillo was the English department’s writing specialist and the director of freshman composition. She was on the recruitment committee and had pushed for my hiring. I got along well with her and her husband, John Guzlowski, who taught American literature. (His parents had been Auschwitz survivors.) They showed me around town, suggesting suitable apartments that I could rent.

Downtown Mobile was where the wealthy old families lived in their beautiful homes along oak lined streets. It also had the magnificent Catholic cathedral, and a few quaint restaurants. The tallest building, the Holiday Inn, was owned by the President of the university. But, I also saw rundown homes, the shotgun type, where poor black people lived.

As the city spread west beyond the I-65 highway, the shopping areas and less affluent houses could be seen, along with apartment complexes. I found a suitable apartment on Hillcrest Blvd., not far from the university, put down a deposit, and said goodbye too Linda and John, looking forward to working with her when I returned in September. But she had a surprise for me.

Finishing-up in Austin

Fawzia was finishing her second undergraduate degree and Roy his sophomore (second) year in at Austin High School. I had transferred to UT at Austin in 1986, and they had joined me the following year. Their first year was a difficult one; Fawzia faced a major health issue soon after her arrival, and the culture shocks and adjustments were hard on her and Roy. We struggled, living in a small, subsidized apartment provided by the university to married students, and barely surviving from paycheck to paycheck. It was very hot in summer, because the air conditioning couldn’t cope with the blistering Texas heat.

Completing a PhD in three years is a challenge, and I had taken on other activities (running the Sri Lankan student’ association and keeping the peace between Sinhala and Tamil students), starting an academic journal), so the three years in Austin were the most hectic of my life. Even that summer, I was taking courses to fulfill the required credit hours. But, we were ready to go in August.

U-Haul towing a car (stock photo)

Our many friends came to say goodbye, and helped load the hired U-Haul with our furniture (all bought second hand), pots and pans, clothing, and other brick-a-bat. So, on a steamy morning in August, we left Austin, towing the car, with Fawzia and Roy sitting with me in front. We stopped at a motel in Louisiana for the night, and reached Mobile the next afternoon.

Air Force Days - Part II

After the month long training at the Diyatalawa combat training unit, I was assigned to the Regiment of the Air Force Base at Katunayake, Sri Lanka’s largest air base. The Regiment is the ground combat unit of the Air Force. In addition to flying squadrons, the base also had administrative, engineering, logistical, supply, and other units, along with a hospital.

The base is on a large coconut plantation, and sat next to Sri Lanka’s international airport, which was built long after the base was established. The two runways – of the air force and the international airport’s - ran parallel. The sound of jetliners landing and taking off was noisy and was a nuisance at night. I was given a room at the officers’ mess and meals were served at the dining room, which also had a bar.

I reported to the Regiment every morning and hung around with little to do. Most afternoons, I took a nap after lunch. Because home, where my wife and son lived, was only about an hour by train, I only stayed at the base overnight when I was the duty officer. (More about that later.) After a tough, month long training, and fighting fit, the routine was an anti-climax. Perhaps I expected too much; the fact is, peacetime armed forces have little to do on a day-to-day basis.

Katunayake had been a Royal Air Force base till 1957. Well laid out, solidly built, it still retained signs of the impeccable British touch even twenty years later. During RAF days, even the non-commissioned officers’ family quarters had carpeted floors, I heard, and during my time the quarters of senior officers were well equipped and comfortable. But, the tropical weather and poor maintenance had caused a visible deterioration.

 

As I came to know the base culture, I saw a clear hierarchy, which cut through the officer ranks. The flyers – those who piloted fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters – were the elite, and only a flyer could become the Commander. Everyone else - engineers, logisticians, regimental types, and others – were considered a slot below. Last came volunteer officers whose primary allegiance was to our civilian employers (our paymasters), and for whom the air force attachment was only temporary.

Among officers, the most detested were those who strutted around with puffed chests, thinking highly of themselves. The Sinhala language has an apt term for such behavior: “pakum” (swollen with self-importance is the nearest equivalent I can come up with). Of course, this term was never uttered to the officers’ face.

My neighbors at the mess were a mixed bag. The regular officers, except for those in engineering and medical units, had joined directly from secondary schools and undergone two years of intensive training as officer cadets. Some cadets had been recruited because they were outstanding sportsmen, in cricket and rugby, during their schooldays. During my time, the air force had a champion cricket team, Adastrians, and a renowned rugby team.

Unfortunately, despite their training, not all of the young officers fitted in. Petty jealousies and personal disputes were not uncommon. One problem was the easy access to alcohol from the officers’ mess bar. A few became heavy drinkers, leading to other problems such as fights with fellow officers and bullying of batmen - the young men who were assigned to clean our rooms, iron our clothes, polish our shoes, carry messages, etc. A young fixed-wing pilot, whose room was near mine, had run-up high debts at the officers’ mess bar and was denied any more liquor. So, he would disappear for days, going on drinking binges, with rumors floating back that he was seen lying drunk at railway station. We did not expect him to live long, but, in fact, he did, after coming off the alcohol, I assume.

Eksith

Among the regular officers, I made two friends. The first was Eksith Peiris, who towered above everyone else at 6’6”. He had been an outstanding officer cadet, was dedicated to the air force, and was a rising star in the Regiment. He was also the leader of the air force’s newly formed commando unit. We hit it off, and he helped me adjust to life at the base and also at the Regiment. Easy going with fellow officers and enlisted men, which hid his steely resolve, Eksith was indeed a gentle giant.

Sunil

The second friend was Sunil Cabraal, a helicopter pilot, who lived across the courtyard from me. One day, I told him that I had never ridden in a helicopter. From then onwards, when I was around and a seat was available in the Bell Ranger he flew, Sunil invited me to come along. So, I saw a good part of Sri Lanka from the sky with a pilot who occasionally went out of the way to show me a familiar sight, such as Kandy in the central hills where we had both gone to school.

Numerous stories, some humorous, circulated at the base. One was about a helicopter pilot, not Sunil, who got entirely lost while returning to base as darkness was falling. (I think the helicopters flew without sophisticated navigational aids at that time.) The only open patch of land the pilot spotted turned out to be a cemetery when he touched down. The bewildered locals who rushed up must have been dumbstruck when the pilot asked in which part of the country he had landed!

My routine at the air force was broken only on a few occasions. One was an all-day motor tracing event, for which the air force runway was used. Massive crowds turned up to watch and I had my first and only experience of crowd control. Another was a failed attempt to provide flood relief in the Chilaw area. In addition, because the air force was in charge of security at the international airport, I had to make occasional visits there.

About once a week, I was the base duty officer for a 24-hour period. The duty officer was in charge of the guards on duty, and could conduct inspections at any time of day or night. At the end of the duty period, I would write a report for the CO of the Regiment about the previous day's happenings. Often, there was little to report. My last tour was around 11pm, and I liked to do it with a foot patrol consisting of enlisted men - they were called aircraftman (AC) and leading aircraftman (LAC) in the air force – along with a corporal and a sergeant. The walk, in the cool of the night, was enjoyable because I got to chat informally with the men. Most of them were village lads, away from home for the first time, and I was curious about how and where they had grown up. Late at night, the base had a quiet feel of a coconut plantation, which in reality it was.

All that routine came to a shattering end on November 15, 1978. That night, in the midst of the mother of all thunderstorms, I had taken a Land Rover to do the rounds. As I was returning to the officers’ mess, around 11.45pm, I saw a huge aircraft aborting its landing on the airport runway. Then, as I sat down for a cup of tea, I was told about the crash of a passenger airliner not far from the base, and I quickly caught a ride to the crash site and saw a sight that will stay in memory all my life. The aircraft had crashed into a coconut grove and the fuselage was on fire, with charred bodies still strapped to the seats and beyond help. The tail section had split from the fuselage and was standing at a 45⁰ angle. On seeing me, a sergeant came running saying “Sir koheda hitiye, api call karanawa, call karanawa” (Sir, where were you, we have been calling and calling). I didn’t know what he meant.

Eksith was already there, and told me that he had rescued a number of passengers from the tail section. Google tells me that the DC 8 aircraft, chartered from Icelandic Airlines, had been taking returning Haj pilgrims from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. Of the 262 passengers and crew, 183 died and 79 survived, some with severe injuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Airlines_Flight_001

No civilians were killed, but I knew the locality and realized that a worse disaster could have occurred. Not far from the crash site is the village of Kimbulapitiya, where the making of firecrackers was a cottage industry. Every home had a stock of explosive gunpowder.

I later learned why I had been repeatedly called after the crash. The Regiment had a jungle rescue unit, set-up after a previous air crash, with equipment such as axes, ropes, ladders, and the key to the supplies depot was with the duty officer. But, I had not been given a key, did not even know about the jungle rescue unit. When they couldn’t contact me - I was in the Land Rover in the midst of a thunderstorm, and this was long before cell phones – they had broken in and taken the equipment.

Barely a week later, disaster struck again, when a powerful cyclone hit the eastern coast of Sri Lanka, devastating the area and taking more than one thousand lives. Sunil was to go on a reconnaissance flight and invited me to join. As we flew over the Mahaweli, Sri Lanka’s largest river, what I saw below was a strange sight: what appeared to be matchsticks lying along both banks of the river, all facing downstream. They were not matchsticks but teak trees, stripped of their leaves, which had been uprooted and swept down when the massive rains following the cyclone caused a raging flood.

As we flew low towards a major town, Batticaloa, we saw the staggering devastation. About 10 years earlier, I had experienced a cyclone on the western coast where I lived, but that was from the ground level. From the air, the destruction was absolute: thousands of coconut palms lay flat, or broken in two; tanks (man-made lakes) had overflowed and the rice fields were flooded; power and telephone lines were down; roofs blown off churches and homes, and hardly any structures still upright. Clusters of terrified people, perhaps without a meal or even drinking water for two days, huddled under whatever shade was available to escape the blistering sun. They watched the helicopter, in vain, hoping for a food drop, but we had none.

We landed near the Batticaloa cathedral, where more people sheltered under plastic sheeting amidst wrecked homes and public buildings. I had never seen such misery. When Sunil asked what he could do, he was told about a leprosy hospital on a nearby island, from which all communication had been cut off. So we took off and flew over the hospital and found that the buildings were intact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fMaBk9fFes

 On returning to Batticaloa town, way past lunchtime, I saw that Catholic nuns had set up a large field kitchen and were serving canned fish, parippu (lentils) and rice to everyone. I am amazed by the resilience of nuns, who always rise to the occasion, whether running an orphanage, an elders home, or providing social services. That simple meal they cooked and served, in the midst of a major catastrophe, was delicious.

After doing a few more trips around Batticaloa, we flew north to another air force base at China Bay, near Trincomalee town. It was late, and Sunil decided to stay overnight, so I caught a flight back to Katunayake on an Indian Air Force plane. The IAF had rushed in after the cyclone, bringing food and fuel. They had better, larger, and more sophisticated aircraft for the job.

In 1995, seventeen years after the training, I stopped by the Diyatalawa unit while on a road trip. On the way out, I stopped at the officers’ mess for a minute, and as I was walking to the car, heard someone coming running behind me. It was Cpl. Gamini, our drill instructor, now a commissioned officer. He had recognized me, and took me back to the mess to show our group photograph which was hanging there. I was delighted to see him; no one deserved the promotion more.

I still have one item left over from those air force days: my peaked cap.