There are many ways of living as there are of dying...

To our dearly-beloved son, now dead

.................for Mahathero Gunasena, in memorium

(Note: Half-way through my first year in London during 1955 at Gloucester Road, I heard the Sri Lankan authorities had opened up a Vihara there, and so I began a short-lived association/friendship with a Sinhalese Buddhist monk who headed the Centre, for before the year ran out, he was replaced by an Indian monk who didn't want me around. "Gunasena" was his name, and he later became the "Mahathero" (Chief Monk of Sri Lanka). While he was in London, he attempted to take a degree course at the School of Asian and African Studies, University of London: the professors there decided that they should be the ones who should be learning from him, and so it came to pass as they wished, but the SL government had him called back all of a sudden which put an end to an unique relationship between a Tamil lad of 21 and a mature Sinhalese Buddhist monk. This poem recounts what he showed me on the fly-leaf of a book his parents presented him with on the day - as a boy - he took the saffron robe as a lifelong calling: "To our dearly-beloved son, now dead". T. Wignesan)

In a makeshift vihara in the heart of London
Bikku then disclosed his parents long gone
Might one dare utter after all these years
Was it yesterday he would shed dry tears

Somewhere in the saffron folds of his faith
A lonely boy still lurked wanting his mother
Or brother sister and hope-dislocating father
Of how they could abandon even this wraith

Just a single line in the inner board of a book
Over dried blue ink his fingers caressed words
A life he might’ve had in who knows what worlds
He just wanted to say: ‘See, who so forsook !’

In an unwatched vihara in the heart of London
A forsaken boy dared break out of monkdom
Might one dare utter after all these years
Was it yesterday he would shed dry tears

Too late he had come to own up this truth:
‘If there’s a Supreme Being leave Him well be
He knows best what He’s doing forsooth
Mind your own business leave Him well be !’

Should one gauge the measure of a man’s humanity
From his ability to outgrow imposed attachments:
Such as confines of his community race or country
But most of all withstand the viral encroachments
Of his conditioned beliefs upon his own personality.


Copyright ©: T. Wignesan - Paris, September 8, 1983 - (from the sequence/collection: "Words for a Lost Sub-Continent", 1999.)
Copyright © T Wignesan | Year Posted 2012