Decolonisation and 'the Servants' Toilet'!
It all starts out in the grand age of trade under colonial rule by European maritime and trade powers. Along the southwestern coastal belt of Ceylon, Portuguese-Indian folk settled for centuries there, grasping at the opportunities of international trade in the early 1900s. This is how by virtue of being the sixth child, I happen to own ten perches
of land, give or take a perch here or there, in the back garden of my home. It is
not an ancestral home as we did not descend from generations living in that
location. It was shamelessly acquired by the spoils of the British Empire. A tale of many colonial millionaires, my
grandfather, a carpentry person, acquired and diversified, losing sight of wood for trees and
getting fingers in many investment pies. An unworldly middle-class gent of a simpler countenance - if my father's recollection of his father is to be accepted - on account of being the largest shareholder was appointed as the unlikely Chairman of
Bonaz, a Dutch shipping company that ‘crashed!’ Ironically for the carpenter-turned-millionaire this was TIMBER!! All good: the empire giveth, and the empire taketh away, but the embers of the day left us a few bits that still glow in postcolonial and present times.
Our garden, our neighbour’s
garden and the front garden including a diagonal square at the rear, all
belonged to Lewis Charles Fernando. Well, the neighbours still live in parts of these plots, a rare phenomenon in Lankan neighbourhood development. People don't sell up on this road or here where I live in Southwest London. The rear diagonal plot was ‘pawned’ to an uncle and later retrieved by my irate mother who ordered her younger brother to play ball when her son earned enough to ‘redeem’ the property. His family live there now.
The front garden had been appropriated by the state in the infamous Mrs B plan
to rid the landed gentry of their excess land, before I was aware of being in
the world. My father opined to me decades later: 'Damn good, the village got a school!' She did not touch her relatives’ estates though leading to the wailing and wringing hands by descendants who attempt to hold on in a decolonising world. Ah, we
all have our problems! Absconding coconut
pluckers and centuries old roofs and things are a terrible travail of the
landed gentry in the 21st century.
Now the virtue of my plot of ten
perches is that it contains a plumbed toilet. It used to be called ‘The Servant’s
Toilet’ disregarding the shower entirely. I was never allowed to go into it, let alone open the door, growing up as 'podi baba' in the house. It certainly did not have Twyfords
Civic! Languishing in a state of unawareness of its lower-class status - or the planned upgrade to include research-class users. my friends - it is plumbed and ventilated. Adding to its allure is the privacy of the ‘servant’s quarters’
had any servants been granted residential status, which they had not, since Aggie
left in the '80s. This is a boon in times
of construction dilemmas. You can park your valigia, bagagli, the proverbial
Samsonite, in The Old Garage which I have earmarked to be the bed-diner with
rattan easy chair. You can install a mini-fridge and microwave in The Kussiya
and heat up stuff on the gas cooker. But the most important facility is the
plumbed toilet and shower, private and yours alone. This is the deal-breaker,
the game-changer. I could sell up and get around £30,000 for this property. But
it’s this darn plumbed toilet that says ‘are you sure?’
If the dream roles work out, I am looking at sharing my research with academic and non-academic interest groups there as well as being a biographer of individuals and institutions in postcolonial Lanka. I plan to document professional practice that is presently in danger of being obliterated by the cacophony and desolate drumming out of the past with the dirge 'All that has gone down the drain now!' Hence, one pad with a plumbed toilet, required.
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