The seventeenth of January

The seventeenth of January has always had special memories for me – because it was on Tuesday 17th January 1956 that I first attended primary school.

Although it was such a long time ago, I can clearly remember the events of that day – being lined up two by two with my new classmates to be led to our classroom which was one in a block of rooms known as the Lower School situated at the east side of a large playing field. The door to the classroom was at the front on the left. It was kept open during the day so that those of us lucky enough to be seated at the set of desks at the left extreme of the class had a lovely view across the green playing fields towards the blue sea stretching out to the horizon.

Somewhere between where the playing fields ended and the beach began was the railway line built by the British in the late 19th century that stretched between Colombo and Matara. Several times a day we would see trains rushing past – including the sleek new diesel locomotives recently donated by the Canadian government and named after the provinces of Canada that used to haul the romantically named Ruhunu Kumari train.

We had 38 in our class, with names representing the various religious and ethnic groups of our country. They ranged from Achilles, Bartholomuesz and Collette past Jayawardena, Mendis, Perera and Ponniah all the way through the alphabet to Weerappah, Weerakoon and Wijesinha. We even had to take our seats in the classroom in alphabetical order!

It was not the seating in alphabetical order that I found objectionable – it was the fact that during our first week we were all taken to the school sick room to be given inoculations against typhoid, a common and feared condition in those times. This was long before the days of disposable needles and plastic syringes, so the injections were given to the boys of each class in alphabetical order, with the needles and syringes being individually disinfected between injections by being boiled in a steriliser.

Now it was all very well for my classmates Abeysinghe and Amarasuriya who got their injections at the head of the queue with needles fresh out of their packs – but by the time they had been repeatedly used and boiled and reached those at the end of the alphabet like myself and Wimalaratne, the needle (having gone through the thick skins of five or six schoolboys before us) was quite blunt! The pain of having an inoculation was exacerbated by the number of times that needle had been previously used!

While the pain of those injections has not been forgotten, there was plenty to enjoy in our first year at school. Lunch used to be either brought from home – or bought from the school canteen, known then as the Tuck Shop. A plate of stringhoppers with curry and pol sambol cost 35 cents, a coconut roti, a glass of lime juice or an ice cream cone would each cost just ten cents – and the euphemistically known jam tart (which was more tart than jam) was also ten cents. How times and prices have changed!

Remembering the pain of those injections reminded me of my father’s primary school friend Tarzie Vittachi who taught me about the Sovereign Republic of Amnesia.

Having endured years of blunt injections at the end of the alphabetical class list, Tarzie (like me) hated injections.

Unfortunately, as deputy director of a large United Nations organisation, Tarzie was required to travel all over the world – and everywhere he went he was required to have passport and health certificates ready for scrutiny by eagleeyed immigration and health officials. Their task was to make sure these documents were stamped, dated and signed in all the correct places.

In those days you not only needed to have a visa stamped in your passport in order to enter a country, you also needed a little yellow book called an International Health Certificate, which had pages that had to be stamped and signed every time you received a vaccination, as proof that you had been immunized against the common infectious diseases such as cholera, smallpox and yellow fever. All this was purely to convince health officials at airports and borders that an arriving visitor was not bringing undesirable diseases into their country.

The inconvenient thing about cholera vaccination was it only gave immunity for six months – so if you were a regular traveller like Tarzie, you had to get yourself jabbed every six months just to have your health certificate officially updated.

Since Tarzie hated injections (and since he also had supreme confidence that he was long past the stage of contracting cholera or any other infectious diseases) he decided that he would have to do something about this torture.

So when he next visited Sri Lanka he had a rubber stamp made up with a suitably impressive coat-of-arms in its centre plus a scroll inscribed ‘SOVEREIGN REPUBLIC OF AMNESIA – DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH’ surrounding it. Every six months or so, whenever he felt that his next cholera vaccination was due, he would stamp his health certificate with his rubber stamp and then date and sign it himself with a flourish. His certificate would then be ready to show any health official who wanted to check his documents whenever he landed in a new country.

Now nobody, least of all a uniformed government official, likes to admit that he is ignorant – especially when he is confronted with something he knows nothing about. So whenever Tarzie confidently presented his impressively stamped documents, the official concerned – assuming, no doubt, that Amnesia was one of those newly independent sovereign states lying in the ocean somewhere between Antigua and Zanzibar – would flip though the pages and solemnly hand the book back.

“Not once,” Tarzie used to enjoy telling us “did any of them venture to ask me where Amnesia was!”

More importantly, not once did he have to suffer, since he obtained his Amnesic stamp, the painful trauma of another inoculation!