"But I knew"

INTERVIEWER

So to discuss this awesome festive season, I have invited to our studio, I think, the best resource person under the sun. Kala Keerthi Rohana Pradeepa, Mr Edwin Ariyadasa, of course, he’s a well known journalist in the country and he is also the editor of the largest illustrated English version of Dhammapada called the Treasury of Truth. And to join him…

EDWIN ARIYASINGHE

Imagine — as a child I had read John Milton, Paradise Lost… works like that.

In my childhood days, these various Sunday stores from which you buy provisions for the home used to wrap whatever we bought in newspapers. Maybe sugar, maybe provisions needed for homes — and the newspapers had been imported from America. Sometimes I would read some of those. They were brought, then I would unwrap them, smoothen them and read.

Strangely enough, I can still remember that some of the goods were wrapped in copies of The New York Times, New York Times Literary Supplement and things like that.

At that time, in that remote village of ours… you know, strangely enough, I read about certain incidents in American history in them. The shopkeepers always had a kind of good feeling towards me. They… they had the feeling that this was a child who was unusual. They would make a change or two from their routine. Sometimes they would preserve things they thought would interest me, and give those things to me when I visited the place.

It was a kind of strange inducement.

When we were at the Sinhala school we had to study with children from various family backgrounds. And in that Sinhala school most of the children were barefoot. Occasionally the teacher asked us to stand around this table while he took the lesson.

One day a teacher — I remember his name, L. H. Jayasena — when I was about ten, asked each person, “What would you want to be when you left school?” Some of the boys would say, “I want to be a driver.” “I want to be a conductor”. Girls at best would say they wanted to stay at home. Or if someone was ambitious, that girl would say, “I want to be a teacher.” Those were the aims they had in life.

When it came to me he asked, “What do you want to be when you are grown up?”

I said, “maṭa kartr-eke venna ōna.” “I want to be an editor.”

Everybody laughed.

This was not something that existed in that kind of circle. Everybody laughed. The laughter was not directed at me, because they didn’t know that there was a job called editor.

But I knew. I had read extensively and was in the habit, even while at the Sinhala school, of reading English newspapers as well. Frankly, I still can’t understand what drove me. What made me so thoroughly alert to the need to read.