Aspects of the 1951 Sathasivam murder and the 1953 trial continue to puzzle students of the celebrated court case, writes
When the witness for the prosecution takes his or her place in the courtroom, everyone sits up very straight or leans forward, straining to hear every last word in the key testimony. The person who leans forward the most is the presiding judge. The accused, meanwhile, tries not to look overly interested; an unruffled, inscrutable expression suits the person in the dock. The witness for the prosecution is the bearer of bad news on which the fate of the accused hangs. In a murder trial, when the witness for the prosecution speaks, the atmosphere is hyper-tense -- taut as a mousetrap, brittle as an old-fashioned glass thermometer.
When servant boy Hewa Marambage William was made crown witness for the prosecution in the famous trial in which the cricket wizard Mahadeva Sathasivam stood charged for the murder of his wife Ananda Sathasivam, the whole country sat up and listened.
The country heard that on October 9, 1951, Mahadeva Sathasivam, the master of the house at No. 7 St. Alban's Place, Bambalapitiya, had compelled Hewa Marambage William, the recently employed domestic helper, to assist in the murder of Ms. Sathasivam. The servant boy's testimony was subjected to furious scrutiny by some of the country's best legal and medical minds, including that of a foreign forensic expert of world repute. After a 57-day trial that the whole country was following, Mahadeva Sathasivam, the accused, was found not guilty.
Those who stood up to see the exonerated Mr. Sathasivam leave court a free man would have then turned towards the crown witness for the prosecution, the now 21-year-old servant boy from Matara who was pardoned on condition he gave a truthful account of what happened at the Sathasivam residence on the morning of the murder. The not-guilty verdict for Mr. Sathasivam automatically slapped a guilty verdict on the servant boy. The boy's statement as crown witness would be denounced as a hideous falsehood.
The servant boy's testimony has been pored over by members of the legal and medical profession and the public for 63 years. You can accept the servant boy's story as fact or fiction. The official verdict makes the servant boy a liar and a murderer, but the unofficial, private verdict of a surprising many who have studied the case and spent years mulling over it is that the servant boy's story is essentially true.
Witness for the prosecution -- exciting words that promise shocks and revelations. We believe we first heard this arresting, sibilant sequence of courtroom words in a cinema context. It would have been around 1960, even earlier.
Older Brother as a teen was a great filmgoer, and we remember his returning from a matinee one evening full of a movie that was not about World War II or Cowboys and Indians. It was a sober, civilised British courtroom drama called "Witness for the Prosecution", and it had left a strong impression on Older Brother.
The bell rang a couple of years later, when we had begun our shadowy career in crime fiction consumption. "Witness for the Prosecution" was a 1953 Agatha Christie stage play that was made into a brilliant film in 1957 by the great GermanAmerican movie director Billy Wilder. We wouldn't see the film till years later, when we had started to collect movie classics. As a schoolboy we had read the play, along with a string of other Christie plays. These were all available, in their slim, blue-and-white-covered Samuel French acting editions, at the old seaside British Council library, at Steuart Lodge, Kollupitiya.
Having worked our way through all the Christie stage thrillers, we paused over a play that was not a Christie but could well have been. It was a comedy thriller with a playful title, "Murder isn't Cricket", written by an obscure British playwright. So very English.
A thing that "isn't cricket" is unacceptable, simply "not done." The online Oxford Dictionary defines "not cricket" as "something contrary to traditional standards of fairness or rectitude." The Oxford provides an example of usage: "An appeal by the Crown against too lenient a sentence is simply not cricket."
The black-and-white Billy Wilder classic kept cutting into our reading of Prof. Ravindra Fernando's "A Murder in Ceylon," the forensic specialist's book on the famous Sathasivam case. Each time the words "witness for the prosecution" popped up in the text, so too did courtroom images from the film.
There was also another reason the Billy Wilder film kept flashing images at us as we read through "A Murder in Ceylon": the face of Noel Gratiaen, the presiding judge in the Sathasivam case, kept merging with that of Charles Laughton, the English actor who so brilliantly played the part of the barrister Sir Wilfrid Robarts in the Agatha Christie drama, which was about a man charged with murder. In their judge and barrister wigs, Noel Gratiaen and Charles Laughton belonged together; both men had full, pudgy faces, seemed of similar age, and were cut from the same cloth. The Hulftsdorp Supreme Court setting of "A Murder in Ceylon" kept shuffling places with the wood-panelled Old Bailey courtroom film set. Art was intercutting with Life; Fiction and Make-Believe were exchanging nods with Reality and History.
Justice Noel Gratiaen's fluid and eloquent address to the jury, with its drama and suspense, buildups and climaxes, has, one might say, a bookish, literary flavour.
The literary note carries over into two books by Noel Gratiaen's writer nephews, Sir Christopher and Michael Ondaatje. Mahadeva Sathasivam was a cricket hero to the two youthful Ondaatjes and all their friends and contemporaries. The Sathasivam case is alluded to in Michael Ondaatje's recent novel, "The Cat's Table", a first-person narrative by a half-real, half-fictional Ceylonese schoolboy. The narrator informs school friends that a famous cricketer being tried in Colombo