Shakespeare in a "takarang" shed

In a tribute to Prof. Ashley Halpe, his daughter recently wrote about the time he was “forced to give his lectures in a takarang shed”. That triggered my nostalgic memories, of sitting in those takarang sheds, both as a teacher and a student. This is that story.

But, let me begin at the beginning. In 1973, I was teaching English at a remote school in the Uva, when the Vidyalankara campus advertised for English instructors. I was called for a written test, and, to my amazement, nearly 200 applicants had turned-up. I thought my chances were nil. Surprisingly, after a follow-up interview, I was selected, one of only three appointees.

Vidyalankara campus sat on a hill, at Kelaniya, not far from the Colombo – Kandy road. As one climbed the hill, back in the mid-1970s, the sports ground and the convocation hall would be on the left, followed by the science block and the library. On the right were the student center and a dormitory for female students. Teachers traveled from home and students lived mostly in nearby boarding house. A no frills, commuter campus.

After walking past these buildings, one descended the hill to a strange sight: a scattering of low slung takarang (zinc sheeted) buildings on either side of the road. On the left, one long structure housed the English department. On the right, a number of buildings housed the sub-department of English, offering general English courses to students of all majors. These courses were taught by a host of instructors, mainly English trained teachers like me. English majors, on the other hand, attended lectures conducted by professors, lecturers, and assistant lecturers.

The takarang sheds were spread among coconut palms, each consisting of a number of classrooms. The walls, which rose to about six feet, were made of cement blocks, crudely white-washed, topped by wire mesh. The roofs were zinc sheets, dented by falling coconuts and branches. The classrooms were hot, the teaching method was chalk-and-talk, and the students sat passively, bored, their minds elsewhere. On rainy days, the sound of rain on the roof was deafening, and all chairs were soon wet, not drying for days.

Vidyalankara, having been a pirivena (monastic college), enrolled a large number of young Buddhist monks. They were the better students, but, the longer they stayed at the university, the less inclined they were to remain in robes. Perhaps the easy interaction with female students showed them the disadvantages of a celibate life.

After the 1971 insurrection, Vidyalankara had been a camp for captured “Che Guevarists”, and their kurutu gee (poetic graffiti) could still be seen in the basement of the science building. A few years later, a group of trainee math teachers were brutally ragged in that basement. Already, JVP led, Marxist-oriented student unions were making a comeback.

The senior common room, actually a partitioned off space on a staircase landing, is where all teachers, irrespective of rank, met and mixed. We chatted, read newspapers and magazines, had a cup of tea, and played carrom. One player I partnered was Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, having previously known him at Maharagama teachers’ college. A man of few words, with a disdainful stare that made lesser mortals uncomfortable, he wore his shirt halfway buttoned that displayed his hairy chest, and the sleeves rolled up just below the elbow. He was already a well-known poet, and is now acknowledged as perhaps Sri Lanka’s best, writing in English.

A few years after joining, I was given permission to enroll full-time for a special degree in English at Vidyalankara itself. So I led a double life, an instructor and a student at the same time. As a student, I came into close contact with other students majoring in English, mainly young and female, as well as the teachers who taught them. My group of special degree students had five young females and me, the only male and a good ten years older than my classmates. This was when English was cynically nicknamed kaduwa (sword). What I soon realized was that, despite their shabby appearance, the takarang sheds also sheltered inspiring and passionate teachers.

"The takarang shed" (Photo: Kumar de Silva)

Prof. Doric de Souza was renowned among them. A Trotskyite politician and a Marxist theoretician, and a contemporary of NM Perera, Colvin R. de Silva, and Philip Gunawardena, Doric - tall, bald and slightly stooped – had a commanding personality. He had been a senator and a permanent secretary of a ministry, but dressed simply, in a bush shirt and cotton pants. He addressed students as Mr. or Miss. He never brought politics into the classroom.

Doric taught The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s 14^th century classic. The tales were related by a motley collection of pilgrims, including a knight, a prioress, a monk, a man of law, a scholarly clerk, a miller, a wife of Bath and many others. Doric’s mode of teaching was to read the text in his sonorous voice, pausing to explain and ask for our questions and opinions.

Some tales contain explicit descriptions of debauchery. On the day the Miller’s Tale was to be discussed, the female classmates (young enough to be his grandchildren) waited, sitting upright with bated breath, staring at Doric mischievously, wondering how he would handle the bawdy parts. Doric was up to the mark, and, looking down on the text, read right through the lines, without a pause, explanation or question! The scene is etched in my mind.

A word about those female classmates. They were from elite girls’ schools and privileged families. I occasionally overheard their off-color jokes. Occasionally, I would see bearded, long haired, sullen young men coming to the English department to meet with some of these young women. Intrigued, I snooped, and realized that the women were translating radical leftist texts for the men. These young men perhaps died, on burning tyres or in other horrifying ways, in the violence against the government a few years later. The women, with solid qualifications in English, would have gone into well-paying jobs.

Doric once invited me and two other instructors to 80 Club for drinks, where the actor Gamini Fonseka stopped by our table to mention how much he admired Doric, whom he addressed as Sir. One instructor, a smart aleck, got into an argument with Gamini.

Those were the days of strict foreign exchange controls, and even essential textbooks for our courses were not freely available. The library was bereft of books, the shelves for English language and literature holding only a few tattered, outdated volumes, missing some pages. (Instead, the shelves were bulging with the thick volumes of the collected speeches of Kim Il-Sung, donated by the North Korean Embassy, and read by no one.) All this meant that we did not have secondary sources, or access to literary criticism. So, in tutorials, we wrote mainly what we had noted down in lectures. The lecturers would have found the endless repetition of their own ideas returning to them in student tutorials utterly boring.

AMG Sirimanne was perhaps the most popular and inspiring teacher. He did not have a commanding presence, nor did he stick to the text, interposing the lecture with anecdotes, usually funny. He taught Wordsworth with passion, taking was away from the mundane surroundings to a green and pleasant land, to a time of romance and places of natural beauty. He deftly added pithy statements in Sinhala to his lectures, and we barely noticed the intrusion. Sirimanne had a thriving tuition class for AL students, and that, in the eyes of his colleagues, somewhat lessened his standing as a scholar. But not in ours.

Teachers often adopt the teaching styles of their favorite teachers. In retrospect, I realize that Sirimanne was my model. I, too, would rarely stick to the textbook, mixing anecdotes and jokes as I taught.

Here’s a Sirimanne anecdote. When he was in the USA, studying on a scholarship, a parcel had arrived addressed to him. Sirimanne was summoned to the post office, and the parcel opened before him by a counter clerk. Upon seeing and smelling the contents, the clerk exclaimed “What’s this? Sh.t?” In fact, they were lumps of maldive fish.

Ranjith Gunewardena, fondly nicknamed “Ranjith Goonda” by the students, taught poetry in translation. His forte was the Spanish poet Anthonio Machado. In his rough smoker’s voice, Ranjith didn’t teach, but performed, his soaring voice and passion carrying him away. Himself a product of Vidyalankara, and equally fluent in Sinhala and English, he would shock his sheltered, privileged students with profanities. Behind that idiosyncratic, devil-may care personality, was a tender heart. He called me “machang” (we were similar in age). In fact, he had many “machangs”.

A few years ago, I sat next to a Spaniard on a flight. As we talked, I told him about the Machado poems I had read in the 70s, and still cherished. Then I recited the opening lines of “To José María Palacio”, Machado’s bitter sweet poem of nostalgia and longing, to the amazement of my fellow traveler. I remembered how avant garde Ranjith had been.

Palacio, my dear friend,
is spring already
covering the poplar branches
by the river and the roads? On the plain
of the upper Douro, spring comes late,
but it’s so soft and lovely when it arrives!

Do the old elms
have some new leaves?

This was the time that the English department was moved from Peradeniya to Vidyalankara, for reasons too complex to describe here. That brought Prof. Ashley Halpe to us. We had not met him, but his reputation as a top Shakespearean scholar preceded his arrival. He turned out to be a soft spoken, low key, unassuming man. He traveled from Peradeniya to Kelaniya perhaps twice a week, taking the bus, so we had little opportunity to get to know him. Our loss. If he resented having to teach in a takarang shed, away from salubrious Peradeniya, he did not show it. Often dressed in a bush shirt, casual pants, and sandals, I can still picture him trudging up the hill.

Those were violent days on campuses. The JVP was in control of student councils, but UNP student unions were being formed, leading to inevitable clashes. Vidyalankara was a hotbed of these clashes, leading to frequent suspension of classes. (I stayed home so often that a neighbor asked me if I was unemployed.) Once, passing the Vice-Chancellor’s office, I saw that radical students had, once again, invaded the office. One bearded, long haired, raggedly dressed  student was standing on the VC’s desk, gesticulating wildly while lecturing the VC.

In 1977, the UNP came into power, and the campus clashes worsened. One day in March 1978, a bunch of thugs (organized by a prominent politician) swarmed up from Kandy road, armed with knives and iron rods, and attacked students at the student center. Outnumbered, the thugs were beaten-up and chased away by the students. An eerie, ominous silence descended. The road leading down to the Kandy road was deserted.

Lakdasa and I had watched this from the safety of the science block entrance, and noticed that someone was lying on the road, halfway between the student center and the Kandy road. We thought it was a student who had been ambushed.

So we walked down to the prone body and squatted down for a closer look. It was one of the thugs, badly beaten, his hair matted with blood, bleeding from the nostrils, taking horrific, long drawn breaths. He appeared to be breathing his last. Suddenly, we heard a wild yell and saw a number of thugs running up the hill, brandishing iron rods, already within a few yards of us. Lakdasa and I took to our heels, and ran uphill back for our dear lives. Had we been caught, we would have been severely beaten-up, if not killed. (The thug died the next day, and the President of the country attended his funeral.)

Lakdasa died a few months later, from drowning. He was only 36.   

Those takarang sheds hid inspiring, charismatic teachers, with a wealth of talent. Some students, too, have gone to stellar careers, in Sri Lanka and abroad. 

Vidyalankara became the University of Kelaniya in 1978. The takarang sheds survived that change.

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.