I wonder whether this tribute will make his grade?
When he passed a year ago, I never thought of writng about him. My mother asked why I didn’t. With echoes of his voice ringing in my head “A pair of scissors like a pair of knickers” and “May I, not can I”, would I make his grade?
He was more Brit than the English. I remember a tuition master teaching him Sinhala. He taught himself essentials to make Tamil patients comfortable, and winced when we murdered the Queen’s lingo. Meal times doubled as exposure to Churchill quotes as he ate his stringhoppers and hoppers with fork and knife, and rice balanced expertly on the back of the fork. He vowed to disown us for using our fingers to eat.
Five older siblings spoilt him rotten. The age gaps were so large his eldest brother-in-law presented a tricycle to him. Cloistered at home and starting school late, he was atrociously naughty. Sent to the Rector’s office and made to kneel for a series of misdemeanours, he refused, stating that as a Buddhist it went against his principles to do so in a Catholic school. Father Nicholas is said to have dismissed him saying, “Brains are there. Use them,” and the mischief stopped.
Then, he married a Christian. His late schooling aligned his stars to be in the batch of a younger lady. The stars conspired again, and she became his ‘body partner’ in dissecting class at the Colombo Medical Faculty and they ended up as inseparable soul mates for 75 years. He humorously disputed this saying he asked for her anatomy notes but his ECG-like handwriting was misread and she replied, “Yes, I’ll marry you”. His brief time as a Christian saw him take the stage as Pontius Pilate. Thereafter, whenever he disagreed with my mother’s decisions on us, he promptly reenacted the scene, “I wash my hands off this…”
My father went on to welcome sons-in-law of different faiths. The first was my husband, the Hindu. He was asked to come home in case there were scandalous rendezvous afoot, but, ignored when he arrived. Sharp at 9 p.m. my father jingled the keys indicating his time was up. When Ranjan was in a head-on collision after a RoyalThomian and ended up in Emergency with severe injuries my father rushed carrying clothes and coffee. The next morning he raced him to the best plastic surgeon to undo the hasty sutures and embraced the son he never had. Imran the Muslim followed Ranil the atheist.
Tired of calling out ‘Dharini, Chandini, Keshini, Thilina’ he rebaptised us D, C, K and T. Except for T the names stuck. I’ve been called Cee, Cei, Zee and multiple mutations with only a handful aware of my name. Which leads me to my tattoo, ‘c’. When I casually mentioned my intent over lunch my mother let out a tiny hysterical laugh while my father not looking up from his fork and knife operation disclosed in a politically challenging whisper, “Tattoos are for the IRC and prostitutes”.
He read. Biographies of Bertrand Russell, submarine warfare and Winston Churchill fused easily with detective stories. He spawned four bookworms and never skipped a Saturday trip to the bookstore with my daughter as soon as she could read resulting in her room looking more like a library with a bed squeezed in.
He was a foodie.
His mother escaped his expectations by serving every curry in several dishes feigning a feast. He enjoyed cooking his signature dishes gazpacho, prawn cocktail and beetroot soup. He relished firing pot nit and curing ham for Christmas and scouring ingredients for my mother’s cordon bleu dishes. 5 a.m. at the St John’s fish market in his fishing clothes and galoshes for the freshest seafood. Young king coconut with the soft kernel inside and the bottom shaved for balance to serve a fragrant mulligatawny soup. Carving turkey and ham with surgical precision, firing Christmas pudding were executed annually with increasing drama. We surrounded him as his theatre staff did and dispensed as he called out, “Knife. Fork. White meat dish. Brandy”. Together my parents entertained magnificently.
We shrivelled from his smelly cheeses, Stilton, Dana Blue and Camembert, but now are guilty of sharing this love. Paradoxically, he had a weakness for canned food, a throwback from the World War II days and crammed the larder with pink salmon, anchovies, corned mutton or some such. Sunday lunch was incomplete without a tin being ceremoniously opened. It was inevitable we renamed this day ‘Tinday’.
Food followed him everywhere; to theatre staff rooms, nursing homes, banks and the hairdresser, delighting them with delicacies. In later years he sniffed out friendly chefs in town for roasts, jacket potatoes, Yorkshire pudding or chicken pies, proudly brought to our home to dinner.
His dedication to surgery escaped the hospital and crept home. Dim lighting was out of the question; it had to be as close to 160,000 lux that domestic lighting allowed. Cutlery re-rewashed to be free of germs. No movie theatre on on-call nights.
Piercings were taboo as infected cartilage shrivels and we’d be earless and tip-of-the-nose less.
Studying with the Royal Surgeon General in London, doctor to the queen and royal family he was told, “Treat the royals and leaders the same as the rest, no more, no less.” He attended to Governor Generals, Presidents, Prime Ministers, ministers and celebrities. Doing his preliminary accounts for pocket money before handing them to the taxman I noticed large numbers of FOC receipts. They were clergy from all faiths, folk with long waits at the State hospitals, anyone with a terminal illness however wealthy, doctors, men or women from the forces, neighbours, domestic aides and everyone’s friends and relations and later civilian bomb victims.
Nattily dressed in shirts of flamboyant colours horrifying us daughters, suit, suspenders, and golf cap on weekends, his trademark bowtie earned him the name ‘bowgatta’ by medical students. He scorned clip-ons, and made sure he tied his slightly asymmetrically so no one mistook it. On his passing, I delivered his clothes to the undertaker along with a red bowtie. When summoned to check before release to the parlour, there was my father surrounded by four perplexed men and the bowtie. No one knew the knot. My father’s chauffeur trained in the latter days failed. So did my husband. My daughter googled a YouTube tutorial, rested her mobile on his pinstriped suit and succeeded. I just tweaked an edge to ensure it was a tad crooked. He must’ve had a hearty laugh.