Bandula Nanayakkarawasam : The boy who loved to read

There was a boy once. He loved to read. He also loved to write. He loved languages and the study of languages, right down to music, literature, indeed the arts in general. But he had chosen Science for A/Levels. Not a problem, until you consider that time spent reading and writing had to be devoted to studying the human body, nuclear science, and those particles that make us the humans we are. Naturally, he struggled. None of this made sense.

These were times when he would have preferred to return to the books which adorned his and his father’s library, but then his parents, particularly his father, were strict. Besides, there were exams around the corner. 

So this boy hit upon a solution. He would “read” his textbooks, and “study” them if necessary, but he would at the same time use them as a cover for reading what he wanted to read. So one fine day, having chanced across W.A. de Silva’s “Vijayaba Kollaya,” he hid it under his biology textbook and began devouring it. Certain that no one would see what he was doing, he thus absorbed himself in the antics of 16th century politics and the seemingly endless battles between kings and the love stories and the intrigue that those battles, political or otherwise, bred. So fascinated was he by these romances and the historic processes behind them that he didn’t bother to hide the novel anymore. It just lay there, barely concealed by the textbook. What happened next was, naturally then, in many ways to be expected. His father, an irate father if ever there was one, entered the room, took one look at him, went up, and slapped him. “You think you can deceive me?” he shouted at him, “Put that book away, at once!” 

Recounting this many, many decades later, the boy, now a man, stood up before a roomful of boys, most of whom would have chosen Science for their A/Levels, and told them the following: “If you want to read and don’t have the time to read owing to what you have to study, find if not make the time somehow to explore your library.” 

 

He was sent to Richmond College where his teachers, and friends, indulged in his love for literature and music. It was there that he had learnt to gaze critically at what he was reading until then

By this time, needless to say, he had become what he wanted. He had ventured into poetry, literature, languages, and had become a definitive poet and lyricist himself. While lacking proper academic credentials for these fields, he nevertheless had made up for it by his innate sensibilities and ability to pick and choose, to turn experience into veritable drops of poetry, and to extract from the mundane the lyricism that could transform the most banal setting into a set of verses, lines, rhythms, and rhymes. 

Like many lyricists from the seventies and eighties, Bandula Nanayakkarawasam came to me early on, particularly through the TV series which featured his songs and in particular through a single that later became a personal favourite (“Sina Thotak”). No longer the boy who despised science, no longer the boy who believed (at least not completely) in rebellion against fathers and mothers by resorting to deception in order to sustain one’s love for literature, Bandula, soft-spoken and yet articulate with what he says and writes, can count on all those anecdotes he now so casually refers to as the foreword, the preface, to his life later on. I will thus begin at the very beginning. 

Bandula was born in Galle, about two or three kilometres from town. His love for literature, conditioned at an early age, had actually been preceded by his love for music. “Back then there were only two radio channels, both from Radio Ceylon. I happened to be the youngest in the family. I was a bit of a loner. So when I was free, and I was free almost all the time, I would put my ear to the Mullard radio our uncle bought for us and listen to every programme and song with unabated interest. So concerned were my parents and siblings that my loku akka, knowing I thought there were actual human beings who lived inside the speakers, told me during a thunderstorm that if lightning struck, those humans would be struck and the speakers would break apart. I honestly believed her. I would have been five at the time.” 
Surprisingly, he didn’t initially look for the lyric in what he listened to. At one level this was to be expected, after all we first hear a tune, then a voice, and only then a name. The lyricist, for some reason, comes last. But there were fresh winds blowing during Bandula’s childhood, which had unearthed the likes of Amaradeva and Victor Ratnayake. “Victor was definitely a voice from my time. So was Sanath Nandasiri. It was by listening to them that I got to appreciate the full worth of Amaradeva. No, poetry didn’t figure in me much back then. But listening to Victor aiya’s songs, and writing down their lyrics, and then turning to Amaradeva’s songs, made me realise just how complex the whole process of writing songs was. That would have been my first encounter with the fusion of music and literature. In later years, I went beyond them.” 

“Going beyond them” meant getting hooked on to literature, a field that his father, a leftist and an avid reader, was passionate about. Apparently young Bandula would get as much as Rs. 100 (quite a lot back then) to buy what he wanted, most of which he purchased from a shop owned by a man called Lionel. “In my day, a book cost about Rs. four or five. With Rs. 100, you could buy a roomful.” Among the novels he read, those written by Russian authors fascinated him. “In later years I grew to admire the poets and novelists who were virtually cast aside by the Soviets. Among them was Alexander Pushkin, whom I still prefer to the more revolutionary writers. When I was young, however, almost everything I read happened to come from Russia, and whether in their original or translation, they projected a certain worldview which shaped me.” Most of these books came from Progress Publishers, incidentally. 

Certain that no one would see what he was doing, he thus absorbed himself in the antics of 16th century politics and the seemingly endless battles between kings and the love stories and the intrigue that those battles, political or otherwise, bred

He was sent to Richmond College where his teachers, and friends, indulged in his love for literature and music. It was there that he had learnt to gaze critically at what he was reading until then. In particular, one of his English teachers, W.S. Bandara, introduced him to the English translations of Chekhov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev, which made him realise how carelessly and shoddily some of the Sinhala translations of these writers were done. “Those translations were woefully inadequate. For instance, in some passages, the word ‘xam’ (kham) was rendered as ‘rapist’ at one extreme and ‘lover’ at another. It should have been rendered as ‘cad.’ These were small errors, yes, but they taught me the value of cultivating taste in a language before attempting to translate it to another. Bandara sir was a fan of K.G. Karunathilake, moreover, and he got me to read his translations, because they were the best we had.” 

Musically too, he prospered. “We would organise various concerts. I even took part in several inter-school competitions, many of them pitting us against our rival school, Mahinda College.” A chance encounter at Mahinda, curiously, had given him the idea for a song that he would write decades later. Apparently he had been taken to that school along with some other boys for an item they had to perform at its English Day. They had to “dramatise” a melody. “I remember being selected to sit atop the branch of a mango tree, a given since I was thin and quite small for my age then. We happened to tear off that branch on our way. Naturally, we didn’t bother checking it, so we didn’t notice the army of red, vicious ants that was on it. While I was happily perched, those ants crawled up my leg and started biting me. I reacted. Badly. Soon enough, the entire branch collapsed, though my friends, bless them, continued as though nothing had happened even when I yelled.” While the incident has stayed fresh in his mind ever since, he remembers it today more for that melody they had to sing: “Where are you going to my pretty maid?”, which found its way in the sixties to the baila hit “Koheda yanne Rukmani?” and in the eighties to one of my favourite songs written by Nanayakkarawasam, “Mal Pipeyi Deneth Areyi”, from Amba Yahaluwo. 

Back home, he was almost always “on” the radio. It gradually became an obsession, so much so that he found he couldn’t do without it even while studying. A man called Jinasena, a close family friend, therefore lent him some flexible wires, which he then used on an American speaker that belonged to another uncle of his. “Our house oversaw a wel yaya. When I listened to the radio in my room while, for instance, studying arithmetic, that wel yaya was always in my sight. It is a sight I cannot forget. Not even now.” And it wasn’t just songs he listened to, by the way: among the other programmes he “patronised” there were E.W. Adikaram’s “Vidya Dahanaya”, Mahinda Ranaweera’s “Sithijaya”, Lucien Bulathsinhala’s “Sandella,” and the main English series he listened to, Tissa Abeysekara’s “Art Magazine.” To this date, he tells me, he finds it easy to concentrate on something with the radio switched on. 

UDAKDEV1@GMAIL.COM