Ceylon Rediscovered

Opening with a discussion of the 1959 assassination of Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike by a Buddhist monk, (which led to his wife Sirimavo becoming the world's first female prime minister in 1960), Ceylonese journalist J. F. Samaranayake recounts tongue-in-cheek exchanges with a composite of Sinhalese and Tamil characters in the 1960s. A 95-pound fifteen-year-old runaway, he had bid the shores of Ceylon farewell in 1933 wearing a college uniform and carrying only a textbook in hand to return some three decades later weighing 165 pounds, temples graying, and a wife and five children in tow. He soon discovers that the real Ceylon is in the countryside whilst the city has no dearth of class and racial distinctions coupled with a conflict between national aspirations and tastes for Western ways. Worse, he concludes that the outward trappings of Ceylon as a "democracy" with a "Free Press" may just have been that-a farce.