The great and the good

Prof. Thiru Kandiah reflects on the defining imprint Dr. Mark Amerasinghe left on the many stages he trod

The passing of Mark Amerasinghe four months ago opened up a painful void in the warm and wondrously rich and fulfilling friendship that he, together with his family, had so generously shared with my family and me over many good and blessed years.

It was, as we might expect, Mark's work in the field of medicine that most immediately and widely defined him in the public sphere. From the beginning, distinction came to him here almost as if it were his natural due. Particularly remarkable were his achievements in the establishment and development of the Orthopaedic Department of the General Hospital, Kandy, starting in the early 1960s. Under his command as Consultant Surgeon in charge of the fledgling department, he helped it earn very rapidly for itself a legendary national reputation as a model clinical unit, to the enhancement of the reputation of the then fast-growing hospital itself.

The accomplishment bore the unmistakable imprint of Mark's own exceptional personal qualities of mind and style, his most earnest concerns and also his specialised skills, the skills that had already earned him recognition as one of the island's finest orthopaedic surgeons. But it also reflected a characteristically long and deeply pondered approach to medical thought and practice that added further large dimensions of significance to it. Among the many matters worth noting in this respect was his insistence on the keeping of meticulous clinical records in a bid to secure the effective continuing treatment of patients, specifically by allowing effective evaluation of treatment methods.

The establishment at the time of the island's second Faculty of Medicine at the University of Peradeniya (along with what was known as the Peradeniya Medical School involving both hospital and university staff) and its nomination as the teaching hospital of the Faculty gave Mark an opportunity to pursue in depth other, if closely related, abiding medical interests of his, namely rigorous reflection on both the more abstract theoretical and academic thinking and the associated disciplinary research underpinning clinical practice, as well as on the more "applied" issue of the kind of teaching methodology that would allow thinking and practice to be transmitted in an integrated manner to the young students who were being trained as doctors. In these endeavours he received invaluable support as well as inspiration from his friend and mentor, Senake Bibile, who was in charge of the establishment of the Faculty in Peradeniya; and also from his intimate friend Valentine Basnayake (who joined the Department of Physiology in the Faculty), with whom he spent many long and fruitful hours teasing out the complex dimensions of his various ideas.

Acknowledgement of what he had to contribute to the work of the Faculty in these respects came in the form of his appointment to certain important Boards of the Faculty, where his input was much looked forward to. His own serious commitment to thinking and research in the field was shown not only in his interventions on these Boards and in his teaching and practice but also, to mention a specific instance, in his joint publication with his muchrespected hospital colleague and friend Philip Veerasingham on early weight bearing in tibial shaft structures, a copy of which he proudly presented to my wife Indranee and me when it appeared.

But his overriding concern was with, to use his own terms, his "priority number 1", "the human being called the patient. He was, for instance, very sensitive to the unique post-operational needs of his many less-than-privileged patients who after serious surgery, including amputations, on their limbs went back to recovering normal lives for themselves under very trying conditions. This demanded innovative treatments that extended considerably beyond simply the expert administration on their limbs of the skills and procedures that his medical training had made him a master at, making it also necessary, for instance, to create efficient affordable prosthetic devices adapted to the different circumstances of his patients.

His strong disapproval of a lot of the then-favoured responses to sports injuries, especially among players and coaches, to recklessly rush injured players back into a team and onto the field as soon as possible, never mind the more than very real possibilities at times of serious long term damage to their health. Mark was scathing on this practice. Lest his reaction be misread as that of an uncomprehending sports-illiterate bore, it might be worth reminding ourselves that in his schooldays at Royal College he had been no mean boxer. And who can forget the sheer delight that lit up his face and voice when he recalled the wresting back of the Bradby Shield from Trinity College by the College Rugby team he played in?!

Unsurprisingly, his solicitude towards his patients was matched by an equally thorough attentiveness in his teaching activities to the specific needs of the students he was training to treat those patients. His trademark social awareness (and conscience) had made him sensitively alert to the very different material socio-economic and other realities of the vast majority of both his students and his patients. He strove towards a pedagogy designed to help his students to take firm hold of both the thinking and the practice involved ("with understanding and without tears", as he put it), so that when they eventually went into the world of work they would be able to discharge their duties to both their patients and their profession in the best possible ways.

Among the many specific classroom matters he gave long and deep thought to in this respect was the highly forbidding problem of language, caused by the fact that while the main medium of instruction in the subject was English, the entire preceding schooling of the students had been in the indigenous languages. A particularly illustrious example of the fruit of Mark's pioneering pedagogical initiatives was the four volume set of highly innovative practical manuals he devised for use in teaching Anatomy to students in the Faculty of Medicine in Peradeniya in the 1990's. Anatomy was the subject he had cut his medical teaching teeth on in the 1950's. But his return from a (very) brief stint teaching in a Malaysian university after taking early retirement from the Kandy Hospital gave him a chance to get back to it more singlemindedly, thanks to his appointment to the Department of Anatomy in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Peradeniya. His good friend Eugene Wickramanayake not only, as then-Head of the Department, helped create that opportunity, but also showed the imagination to give him a free hand. The manuals were one of the more notable outcomes of those initiatives.

It was in music that he first made his mark on the artistic scene, with the famous P 4 sessions established in the mid-1970's by his close friend Valentine Basnayake, together with Senake Bibile, providing an ideal initial platform for the purpose. (Not a session would pass without Mark being called upon to sing, and never did he fail to oblige, accompanied on the piano generally by Valentine. His marvellous renderings in that rich, deep voice of his of a whole wide range of much-loved songs, including many drawn from, though by no means confined to, the repertoire of traditional British folk songs, gave immense pleasure and delight to an invariably highly appreciative audience. Very soon, he was giving much acclaimed public musical performances, accompanied by Valentine Basnayake (replaced in later years after Valentine had moved to Colombo by Tanya Ekanayaka).

But from the beginning the spoken voice, made even more alluring to him by an inborn impulse towards theatre and the dramatic, was beckoning him. As early as 1978 he played the lead male role in the Peradeniya University DramSoc's production of Chekov's The Bear. This year marked the beginning of an extended phase of extraordinary activity by him in the creative arts, built around a rousing series of remarkably innovative cross-generic productions. Many, though not all, of these ranged integratively across music (instrumental as well as vocal), literature and drama in a variety of imaginative ways, but all of them gave ample scope to Mark to put his voice, both in song and in speech, to marvellous use. An especially heartening aspect of these productions was their profoundly collaborative nature, for while Mark's role, both formative and performative, in almost all of them was quite central, he would be the first to acknowledge the input of the many close friends and others who variously worked together with him on them. Among these were Valentine Basnayake, Premini (Mark's wife), Chelvarayan and Nirmalini Barr Kumarakulasinghe, Tanya Ekanayaka, and, if I might, Indranee and myself.

Particularly noteworthy among these performances was A Strange Old Man, a stunningly original musico-dramatic interpretation by Valentine Basnayake of Franz Liszt's life and music (1978). Mark as narrator helped bring that interpretation resonantly alive through his eloquently dramatic readings of narrative text interspersed with Valentine's exquisite performances on the piano of a carefully selected range of Liszt's compositions. In 1979 (and again in 1983) he played a major role as narrator in several presentations of Don Quixote: An Interpretation of Cervantes' Novel and Richard Strauss' Symphonic Poem, a programme that featured readings from the novel, recorded excerpts from the music and commentary on both. Through his compelling delivery of the readings, Mark helped hold in rapt attention for the entire 2 ½ hours period of the programme an audience ranging from about 10 years of age to well over 60.

Then there was his superb performance in The Earl King, where he gave us a rivetingly dramatic reading of Goethe's ballad in English translation before moving into as excitingly expressive a rendering, in German, of Schubert's song based on the ballad. To these must be added other memorable performances as narrator in three different programmes combining instrumental music with spoken text. One of these was based on Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, another on the life and works of St. Francis of Assisi. The third, named The Four Deaf Persons, was based on the familiar Sinhala folk tale and saw Mark narrating the tale first in standard Lankan English and then in colloquial Lankan English. There was also a set of readings from Tagore. We cannot forget, either, the dynamic readings from creative literary works that Mark did in public discussions of Sri Lankan literature in English organised by the British Council in Kandy, and, further, the important contributions he made to productions of excerpts from Shakespeare by certain schools in Kandy.

It was impossible that the immense amount of creative energy on display here would not overflow into other more independent and uniquely personal avenues of artistic expression too. And so it did, issuing, in the event, in a quite new and original sort of sub-genre of the theatre that Mark created, an experimental version of a oneperson stage performance that he himself named the "monodrama". This was based generally on the translation, adaptation in imaginatively recast form and presentation through dramatised narrative of certain well known novels (though there was also in one instance a film script, Jean Cocteau's Orphée and in another, a Shakespeare play), many of them originally in French.

The first of these one-person dramas was based on Leo Tolstoy's novella Kreutzer Sonata, and it was presented in 1997. This was followed over the next ten years by a series of monodramas based on works by Albert Camus, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, André Gide, Marguerite Yourcenar and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Six of these were published, in 2009, by the Alliance Française de Kandy under the title, Sextet: Six French Novels - Translated, adapted and presented as Monodramas in English. The publication was edited by Jacques Soulie, who, as Director of the Alliance in Kandy, had helped provide the best conditions for Mark to immerse himself in the relevant French literature and culture.

Mark's monodramas were truly astonishing productions. For they were almost literally one-person affairs, with Mark as lone translator (except in the first two of them, the Tolstoy work mentioned above and the one based on Camus' The Fall), adaptor, interpreter, script writer, editor, producer, director, stage manager, technical hand, narrator, actor and almost everything else, apart from being overall maker of the whole.

But there were other, deeper treasures to savour, an entire especially satisfying set of them assembling themselves around Mark's superlative use of his voice, that solitary voice on which all of his creative efforts so crucially depended for their realisation.

Other outstanding signs of Mark's total dedication to his arts and his discipline in pursuing them are his success in learning French to a very high level of competence at what most people would consider too advanced an age to do so, mainly so that he might work at perfecting his creations. This it would do not only by helping him make himself an insider to the different linguistico-cultural experiences he was seeking to project, but also by in fact allowing him to work at his own translations of the originals, thereby liberating him to fashion his creations in ways that had the most meaning for him.

But perhaps what most sensationally won him admiration was the sheer unflagging determination with which, at again what would be considered by less adventurous people a too-advanced age, he memorised the entire scripts of his performances, and with such rigorous discipline and meticulous attention to detail as enabled him to assuredly and persuasively evoke for us the very life of the experience and characters he was presenting. Certainly, the performing arts were in no way for him simply a diversionary pastime stuck tangentially onto the main business of life, it was a passionate vocation, life itself, as much a defining part of who he was as his specialised medical profession of choice.

Readers would have noticed in my account of Mark's artistic accomplishments a recurrence of many of very same positive terms that figured in my earlier account of his medical triumphs: dedication, unyielding commitment to the highest standards, meticulous attention to detail, conscious intellectual effort, imaginative innovation, discipline, rigour, responsibility and many more. This is exactly right - disparate vocations, diverse sets of doings; yet one man, one life, one scintillating many-facetted performance. That last word, suggestively pressing itself upon us from his work in the arts, seems perhaps better than any other to capture the essence of the man and his life across all of his gloriously versatile doings, whatever the sphere of his activity.

Mark was, if anything, a performer, consummately so. It seemed to come naturally to Mark to choose to live and define his life (and himself) through an ongoing and highly varied series of exactly such acts of performance, consecrating his abundant talents and assets to their completion in the form of what effectively were attained works of art. In a real sense, all of the world around him was the stage on which he presented these different performances. But there were distinct areas or corners on that stage (the operating table, the classroom, the Faculty Boards of Study, the translator's desk, the musical platform, the playhouse, the social arena, his home and so on), and across these he moved with ease and assurance, putting his talents and assets purposively to work within each of them in bringing to completion or perfection the particular act of creativity that was under performance there.

It was this ample performativity that held Mark's multiple facets and doings integrally together and most surpassingly defined him. It was his instinctive shaping métier, his very mode of existence.

I vividly remember the time, somewhere in the mid-1970's, when he first began to awaken consciously to this recognition of who he most quintessentially was. His family and mine were already reasonably familiar friends. We had met at the P 4 sessions, and had begun to move closer together with the discovery that Mark's two younger daughters, Ishika and Manju, and our son, Niranjan were in the same nursery school (that most loveable lady, Aunty Rose's famous school in Seibel Place, Kandy). Mark had in the meantime found out that Indranee and I had some interest and involvement in theatre and drama and, further, that I was at the time engaged in trying to revive the Peradeniya University DramSoc founded by the great E.F.C. Ludowyk that had become defunct as a consequence of the transfer of its mainstay, Ashley Halpé, to the University of Kelaniya. Unlike Indranee, I was no great shakes as a theatre person. Nevertheless, one day, Mark came to me and almost confessionally let drop, "You know, Thiru, I've always had this Walter Mitty type of fantasy of acting in a play on stage. If you decide to produce a play, I shall be happy to play a role in it."

How momentous that somewhat sheepish suggestion/invitation turned out to be!

But perhaps Mark's finest performance and his most incomparable creation was his family. Like all great works of art, fundamentally collaborative, with the chief collaborator being in this case Premini, his wife. Premini was in all respects as distinguished as Mark was, if differently so, and as terrific a personality. Like him, she too had a very illustrious family background. She too was a well-esteemed medical specialist, being one-time Consultant Radiologist in charge of the Radiology Unit of the Kandy General Hospital. She too had a deep and abiding interest in the arts and a strong and independent intellect, bringing it to bear, in tandem with sound qualities of heart, on a wide range of issues and topics, to arrive at perceptive insights into them that were often startling in their distinctiveness and freshness.

Two such strong and differently outstanding personalities are by no means the conventional stuff of unruffled collaboration in performance, particularly when the end of the performance is the creation of that most demanding work of finished art, an ideal family. It is a tribute to who they were that, whatever the nature of their distinct performances, such an exceptional family is what indeed they did eventually together produce. Of course, they were joined one by one a little later by four other intimate collaborators, their beloved daughters Amila, Krishni, Ishika and Manju, each so distinctively lovely a personality in her own right. And the elder two then added further enriching variations to this theme of creative togetherness by bringing their respective husbands Anura and Jamshid into the team, to be joined in a while by several doted-upon grandchildren in what was a blessed home abundantly filled with spontaneity, happiness, singing, music, joking, laughing, affection, warmth, friendship - a truly rare, inspiring conviviality, mutuality and togetherness.

It was a togetherness that cut with absolutely natural and effortless ease across all of those cankers of social and other divisions - caste, race, religion, culture, language, gender, class, family and so on - that have brought our beloved land to the crisis of civilisation that so devastatingly afflicts it, showing them up in their utter irrelevance and senselessness. And this togetherness existed as, simply, an indisputable, objective fact. There it was, a tangible, lived reality, as the many friends from very different backgrounds who had freely been in and out of that home could powerfully attest. The in-laws in the family were particularly well placed to do so. For, contrary to the familiar stereotypical expectations, the family home was a warmly comfortable haven for them.

It is easy to recognise in this thoroughgoing repudiation of the narrow social divisions and prejudices that were so poisoning our civilisation the deep and concerned socio-ethical consciousness as underlying all that Mark did. This was a consciousness that was fully shared by Premini too.

In Mark's case, this socio-ethical consciousness derived very much from the Buddhist teachings he revered so much. As the civilisational crisis the country was trapping itself in festered, Mark began to give expression to that consciousness in the form of regular letters to the editors of the newspapers, which made some searching critical observations on several of the pressing issues of the day, never mind the risk that, given the increasingly repressive political climate of the time, this posed to his own physical safety itself. This was characteristic of the man. During the last few years of his life, creeping age and the associated physical ailments had prevented him from performing on his treasured theatre stage as he so yearned to. But even these incapacitating factors could not stop him performing at all in public, with his letters to the editor being the form that his performances took at that point. Performance was his very raison d'être, and the issues at stake mattered too much to him for him to allow even the effort and risk involved to deter him from it.

In a real sense, all of the many large issues detailed above entered in different degrees and ways into making his finest creation, his family, what it so uniquely was, with its many wondrous features. Not least of these was its beauteous togetherness. That togetherness can in itself help us understand why when his beloved second daughter, Krishni, was cruelly taken away by cancer when her life was in full bloom, this strong man had to struggle so hard to come to terms with the tragedy. Death or the prospect of death itself had itself never held any terrors for him. Several days of intense and very private struggle did help him regain a certain brave composure and a quiet calm. But, though he chose not to speak of it, something very vital in his life seemed to have gone missing, and it was not too long before he himself finally let go of it.

The stage has now emptied, and the lights have dimmed on it, the exuberant energy and lively action have ceased, the rich deep voice has fallen silent, the conscientious pen has put its last full stop in place and the searching, concerned mind and heart have become still. But I would like to think that, even as he was moving towards that quiet finale, Mark would have sensed somewhere deep inside himself that the inestimable gifts he has given us in the form of those perfected masterpieces he had created through his unceasing performances will have made the kind of lasting difference to us that will keep him always among and within us.