When Professor Vithanage was Vice Chancellor at the University of Peradeniya, he asked my father, a junior lecturer at the time, to be a proctor. The other proctor he chose was Sanath Ranatunga. There had been some student unrest, and Professor Vithanage had asked a proctor to go to the halls and talk to them. The previous one who had gone had been hooted at, chased off, and returned angry and humiliated. Sanath Uncle had volunteered to go, but he said, “I will decide when I will go and how I will handle this”. My father says, “That was Sanath; he was a planner.” This is one of my father’s earliest recollections of him, long before I was born.
My sister mentioned that she heard a story about Sanath uncle getting on the roof of the engineering faculty to protest against courses being in the English medium when he was a student. She said, “When I went to university, we had to take a 6-month English course before we started. Maybe that was the doing of people like him.”
Sanath uncle and my father belonged to a generation of students who came from villages and underprivileged backgrounds and could barely speak any English. Sanath uncle came from Ibbagamuwa Central, where he met Aunty Ranji, and my father came from Anuradhapura Central. Christopher William Wijekoon Kannangara’s free education system made it possible, and many of those who entered University through the Central School system, including our parents, went on to complete their PhDs in England.
I vaguely remember Dilum from our early days at Trinity College, Kandy. He was a tall, lanky kid, who had this weird, awkward running style. We used to say he ran like a koka, a heron. Then the whole Ranatunga family moved to Papua New Guinea for Sanath uncle’s work, and we lost touch for many years; Udy would have been quite young then.
In our mid-teens, we had all turned into avid readers. We were finding any books of fiction we could get our hands on and reading them, lending among ourselves, borrowing from the British Council, and buying a used book from a shop called Cindy’s in Kandy, when we could save up some pocket money. Sri Lanka was in turmoil in the early nineties, with a civil war in the North, a Marxist rebellion in the South, and an invading Indian army in the middle of it. There was an entire 9 months during my O-Level years when I wasn’t allowed to go to school; it was too dangerous; teenage boys were fodder for both the JVP terrorists and the government’s death squads.
One day, suddenly, Dilum and Lasi showed up with Sanath Uncle - they had moved back from Papua New Guinea. They were a little strange, with strange shoes and strange English accents. They could barely speak Sinhala, as they had been in an International school in PNG for years. By this time I had been pulled into the nascent young writers movement that had been created by the likes of Professor Ashley Halpe. We were having one of those conversations people have when they meet after years and are not sure what to talk about. I randomly mentioned “You know there’s this young writers’ thing. Would you guys be interested?”, and that started one of the great adventures of our teens, whose ripples are felt even thirty years later; Chiranthi went on to win the Gratiaen and Vajra the Hugo.
Sanath Uncle found a beautiful property in Geli Oya that ran down from a ridge with the access road, all the way down to the Mahaweli River. It was not far from the Engineering Faculty, so it was pretty convenient for him, though it was out of the way from Kandy city and the schools. He built a house just below the ridge with windows overlooking the Hantane range across the river. In the mornings, the valley and the mountains were covered in mist; it was a magical place for the Ranatunga boys to grow up in. He built a huge water tank that could collect rainwater and a solar-powered hot water system (this was the first one I ever saw). We could climb up onto the tank and then onto the roof of the house. Those days the sky was clear at night and full of stars. I remember lying on that roof with Dilum and Lasi, and our young writer friends, looking up at the stars and self-importantly philosophising, and talking about girls.
Soon, we were in and out of each other’s houses, engaged in our Great Project. We would ask for a little pocket money and take the Intercity train down to Colombo to meet up with the young writers from Colombo; those days, a few hundred rupees were enough for the train, the buses in Colombo, and some short eats, which was all we needed to get through a day. We were soon organising young writers' meetings at each other’s houses, doing readings, and working on publishing small anthologies in the form of a young writers’ magazine with our collected works. Sometimes the parents of our friends in Colombo would give us lunch, Coke, and snacks.
Sanath uncle had one of the best personal computers among our parents, and soon this machine was commandeered for our purposes. It was Windows 3.1 back then, or God forbid, DOS. We installed pirated copies of Pagemaker and Word on it and were soon designing our young writers’ magazines. Sanath uncle, like my father, became a sponsor of our activities. Uncle and Aunty Ranji would feed us and make sleeping arrangements for us to crash at their house on endless weekends. I once said to him, “We have become a real nuisance to you, haven’t we?” and he said, “I would rather you guys are doing this than something else like drugs or alcohol.”
Sanath uncle loved throwing parties, as did many of his colleagues at the engineering faculty. There would be a barbecue, food, and drinks flowing everywhere, and kids of all sizes running around. There would be trips down to the river and other antics. It was a madhouse of fun and laughter. Sanath uncle would be in the middle of it, working the barbecue and feeding people, teasing everyone and joking, his voice booming over the ruckus. This is the image of him that has stayed with me, defiant against the growing cobwebs in my brain; a big man with a huge heart, who had a lasting impact on everyone he touched.
One day, Dilum, Lasi, and I got it into our heads to cycle to the Daha Ata Wanguwa, “the 18 bends”, which was in Mahiyanganaya. When we floated this idea to Sanath uncle, he told us we had lost our minds. That was a 70km ride, one way, and fit as we were, it would have severely taxed us. Nevertheless, being teenagers, we were resolved to prove the stupid adults wrong and defy orders. So we snuck off in the morning and met up at the Peradeniya bridge - no small feat of coordination, given the state of communications in those days and the level of paranoid parental surveillance. We got no further than the bridge, as the ratchets on two bikes failed simultaneously. We had to wheel ourselves over to my place, where my mother was waiting smugly with folded arms, and breakfast ready. Our minds were blown; although we never figured out how Sanath Uncle had managed to sabotage ratchets on two bikes, including mine, which was securely at my place, we were convinced he had pulled some engineering necromancy. The bike ride to the Dahaata Wanguwa never happened, and our parents walked around with smug little smiles for weeks.
I used to verbally spar with Sanath uncle. I remember he once said in the middle of some conversation, “Putha, you’re such a liar.” It was said with love, as with all his interactions with us unruly teenagers who went in and out of his home, day and night. I replied, “Yes.” Everyone burst out laughing, and with a wry smile, he had to acknowledge that I had won that round.
Lasi decided to take his chances and do his A Levels at Dharmaraja College - an exercise that ultimately failed, and he ended up at Ecole International School with Dilum. However, it did expose him to the virulent Buddhist fanaticism of Dharmaraja, which can have unpredictable results if you are not carefully exposed to it in small doses from childhood, which he was not. One day, in typical Lasi fashion, he decided he wanted to be a monk and wanted to study Buddhism. He applied to the University of Delhi, and Uncle Sanath played a big role in the process, as Lasi was not good at handling these things on his own. Strangely, Sanath Uncle seemed perfectly comfortable with this career plan, which seemed completely insane to the rest of us. Finally, the day came for Lasi to go to the University of Delhi. Apparently, he rocked up to class all ready for his journey to nirvana (and certain Jedi tricks, which I suspect was the real draw), and discovered to his horror that he was in a Physics course, and that Sanath Uncle had enrolled him in a programme for Physics; at the time the University of Delhi didn’t have an undergraduate programme in Buddhist studies. We were snickering about Lasi getting Shanghaied in Delhi for years.
Sanath uncle was involved in many engineering projects, including setting up cellphone towers. Back then, we had those half-brick-sized Motorola receivers that had a battery that lasted up to 3 hours, and a minute cost Rs. 250. All heads of departments and deans got one from the University. The early carriers like Celtell and Call Link are long gone; Dialog and Mobitel must have inherited the towers that Sanath Uncle helped to build. Even today, if you take a cell phone call or get on the Internet in Kandy, it’s possible you are connecting to a tower that he worked on.
I remember visiting Sanath uncle at the hospital in his last days. I was back for the summer holiday after my freshman year at college in Pennsylvania. He was still the same old Sanath uncle, joking and down-to-earth, a gentle giant. Some of the young writers also came to see him, and we hung out outside the ICU waiting for the small time slots when they allowed visitors.
My mother remembers visiting him. She was shocked by how frail he had become - she remembered him as a big, towering man, full of life. She said, “He had great hope in his eyes about getting out of there.” But she knew it was unlikely he would. Brilliant as he was, what was happening to him was beyond his comprehension.
The last time Lasi went in to see him, he came out, his face dark. “He didn’t recognise me,” he said in a small voice. By then, Sanath uncle’s liver had failed, and the toxins in his bloodstream were messing up his brain. Not long after that, he was gone. By this time, Dilum was at Princeton. I was asked to call him and tell him. International dialing was still dicey in those days. I finally got through, I can’t remember what time it was, probably some ungodly hour over there. He didn’t take it well, and maybe I was never quite forgiven for the news I brought. I can only imagine what his loss did to the world of the three brothers, particularly Udy, who was still in his teens.
Sanath Uncle was loved, even revered, by his students. The funeral had dozens of them show up to help part, sadly, with their great teacher and mentor. The University showed up, as the University has a habit of doing in these matters. They took his body and kept it at the hall of the Engineering faculty, near where they keep that Rolls-Royce jet engine, so that students and faculty could come and say their goodbyes to the man who had made that place his home for decades, and served as its Dean. We took him to the Mahaiyyawa cemetery to cremate him. Lasi was asked to say a few words, which he did, subdued but determined; after a couple of years at Dharmaraja, his Sinhala was good enough for the task. And then Sanath uncle was gone, ashes to ashes, in the Buddhist tradition we have kept, probably for millenia; he was 58.
Years later, there is a photo I took of Lasi when we were on holiday at Nilaveli. Lasi was growing a beard by this time, and it had a fair amount of grey. I remember commenting on how much like his father he looked.
The house that Uncle Sanath built was more than just that beautiful house at the top of the ridge in Geli Oya, overlooking the mist-covered Mahaweli and the Hantane mountains, where Aunty Ranji still lives; it was the generations of students and people he helped; the technology he brought to Sri Lanka; his grandchildren who live in Sri Lanka and the US. Navam, his oldest grandson, recently visited Sri Lanka to rediscover his roots. We sat around a lunch table and talked about the antics of his father, uncles, and his grandfather, and how he’d better watch out, as his parents were more like his grandparents than they would like to admit. Now, Sanath uncle is only a cherished memory, but his house endures.