A great friend, caring and compassionate lady

A few weeks ago I was preoccupied with a devastating personal tragedy when the news of Diana’s death reached me adding to my grief. She was a beautiful, compassionate and lovable lady whom I had known from my student days at Trinity College Kandy.

Kandy in the 1950s was an idyllic town with many civic amenities. Of them the most important for us were the libraries and bookshops that dotted the town. Trinity had an impressive library which functioned under our teacher Vernon Jansze. He had co- opted some of us as curators who helped in the ordering of books, classifying them and stamping them with the college seal. As curators we could use the library freely not only during off periods but also during weekends.

The Kandy Municipal Council library was located close to Trinity on Trincomalee Street. It was presided over by the cadaverous Mr Bhai who allowed us freedom to browse through the latest magazines spread out in the front lobby and borrow three books at a time from the lending section. But our favourite retreat was the USIS library located in the basement of the spacious Lake House building. The head of the USIS library at that time was Diana Captain. Unlike the dusty KMC library, Diana’s fiefdom was ultra chic. The whole basement was air- conditioned and the book racks and tables and chairs were of stainless steel. The books and magazines were brand new and we would marvel at the technical quality and the finish of the American publications.

Diana was the most trusting of the librarians and she would allow us to borrow as many books as we wanted and was not very insistent about sticking to deadlines for returning them. But what bowled me over was that she generously allowed me to keep the back numbers and extra copies of the magazines that were on display at the Centre. Thereby I was able to build up a small library of influential magazines and books which gave me a good grounding for my university career.

After reading the Kenyon Review, Encounter, Poetry London-New York and The New York Review of Books, kindly donated by Diana, from cover to cover, I was able to enter the intellectual life of the University from my first year itself. Thanks to my familiarity with the new American poets due to my well thumbed small library gifted by Diana, I wrote an article to the Ceylon University magazine under the title of ‘’The Poetry of Siri Gunasinghe ‘’ which caught the eye of Sarachchandra and brought me into his orbit. It also interested Siri Gunasinghe and we began a wonderful friendship of over 60 years which ended only with his death last year.

I must also recount another episode relating to our first year at Peradeniya. There were four of us Trinitians who regularly visited the USIS library. They were Jayantha Dhanapala, Ahamed Marikkar, Ananda Wickremeratne and myself. We were good students and unsurprisingly all four of us were selected to enter the University in 1957. It was a time of the interregnum between leaving school and entering university. Diana was aware of this and wanted to help us. One day she called us to her office and said that a USIS exhibition was being held in Kandy and offered us positions as ushers at the week-long exhibition. We were to be paid a handsome stipend. So the four of us tidily dressed in white suit and college tie controlled the crowds that flocked to the exhibition. A few weeks later we entered University with our hard- earned stipend in our pockets. We got through the mild rag with our treasure troves undetected. I invested part of my earnings on two Van Heusen shirts and for some time I was one of the best dressed students on campus. When Diana was transferred to Colombo she was succeeded by Indra de Silva who also made us feel comfortable in the USIS library.

When I was appointed the Director of Information in 1968, I was able to resume my friendship with Diana. At that time the US administrations were quite liberal unlike the hardline ideologies that seem to prevail today. One particular aspect of this open-mindedness was the regular visits of famous US musicians, artists and film makers. Martha Anderson, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington were among them. Diana arranged those visits and the fabulous parties that followed. She had friends among all political parties, communities and professions and made it a point to keep in touch with those with no power.

She was particularly close to the leaders of the LSSP. NM, Colvin and Doric were her admirers and she treated them as close friends often intervening without fanfare to make their lives more comfortable. I know that she was a close friend of Colvin’s family and would follow the careers of the children and grandchildren with great concern. Diana’s father had been the General Manager of the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills and had interacted sympathetically with Colvin and his political cohorts who had begun their Trade Union activities with the workers there. Later Doric had been elected the Municipal Councillor for Wellawatte representing the LSSP.

She went out of her way to help Ranasinghe Premadasa when he was a novice in municipal and later national politics. As Director of Information under Premadasa who was then our Deputy Minister, I collaborated with Diana in arranging his first visit to the US which proved to be a great success. After a two-week tour Premadasa was hosted to a lunch at the UN building in New York by U Thant, the Secretary General himself. That was a great gesture since Secretary Generals usually do not even meet Deputy Ministers leave alone hosting them to lunch. There is a backstory to this lunch which space does not permit me to narrate here.

There will be many who will miss Diana. She was a great friend and a caring and compassionate lady on whom wealth and social connections sat lightly.

Sarath Amunugama