Chapter 4

Malcolm Sattambirilage-Koorkoolasuriya Nanayam Pieris was 37 when he made the journey from Sri Lanka (“Ceylon” in his memories) to Australia in 1972, trawling behind him three undernourished children, a wife, several crates of furniture that followed him (by sea), and a set of golf clubs (the must-have of any immigrant worth his salt).

If you are to gauge the compatibility of couples by their similarities, then Malcolm and Mirabelle were indeed perfect for each other.

Both were born to privileged tea planters’ backgrounds in Ceylon; both were educated in elite private Catholic boarding schools; both had a passion for the arts – both Mum and Dad dab hands with a paintbrush – and both seemed never to be short of an interest to follow.

Like Mum, Dad too was always quick to learn something new. Not long after arriving in Australia, he discovered the country’s then free Technical and Further Education system and took to it with gusto, completing courses in beekeeping, accounting, lapidiary and, inexplicably for a man destined for a life in the suburbs, Animal Husbandry.

Fluent in Tamil, Sinhalese, Russian and English, my Dad’s penchant for acquiring information on any range of completely useless and irrelevant subjects would eventually become legendary.

From the History of the Gaza Strip to the sources of Gum Disease to the Foundations of Freud’s Theories of the Mind, my Dad read widely, his capacity for both acquiring and retaining knowledge for the sake of it predating the Internet.

Our home was, as a consequence, always overflowing with books – text books, coffee table books, books on art, great novels, small works of fiction.

But the most important books were those on Gardening with my father – who held a Certificate in Agriculture – one of the absolute Masters of Growing Absolutely Anything Anywhere. Like my mother, he had his favourites of course. A long love-affair with bromeliads; an encyclopaedic knowledge of cacti; an ill-conceived and ultimately unsuccessful bid to set up a cashew plantation in Mareeba (with the seeds ordered by phone from Trinidad); a small mango plantation established in a virtually infertile soil in a new suburb south of Brisbane (eventually producing mangos so spectacular he was featured in a Special Edition of ‘The Greenthumb’s Gazette).

He also had a fascination with exotic fruits including the Black Sapote, the virtues of which Dad frequently exalted.

“The chocolate pudding fruit,” Dad explained although the first, last and only time I ate one I thought that the “Baboon Shit Fruit” was probably a more apt description.

Dad’s range of interests made him an expert on many subjects that, coupled with his natural sense of humour, ensured Malcolm was a great raconteur, the life of most parties where he would usually end up also, completely drunk.

In short, Dad was a great talker and of course the rest of us – including my two sisters, Lakshmi and Mohini - followed suit.

But his gift of the gab aside, there was one talent my Father had that I had unknowingly inherited and that I would discover only decades later.

He was an extraordinarily gifted bullshit artist and, as the years wore on, dad’s stories became increasingly bizarre until we were left wondering if perhaps he suffered from Munchausen’s Disease.

My mother had an in-built radar when it came to sussing out which of Dad’s tales were real or imagined and often, at the turning point of one of his stories – as his audience hovered in anticipation of a climax – my mother would shout from the garden or the kitchen or wherever she had disappeared to, “Don’t tell lies, Malcolm, chi!”

“Don’t Tell Lies” (or another version “all lies, men”) I should explain is a common Sri Lankan exclamation that translates in Australia to a variety of statements usually involving a description of faeces of one kind or another. ‘Bullshit’, ‘Bullcrap’ or just plain ‘Crap.’

The word “Chi” or Chick-aya” (with the emphasis on the a-ya) means the speaker things you’ve said something inappropriate, unacceptable or just plain foul. It can be translated to “Yuck” so when my mother exclaimed “Don’t Tell Lies, Chi!” what she was really saying was: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself you dirty liar”.

As it is, there were many of my father’s tales the veracity of which my two sisters and I still doubt today:

The story of how Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera Ran Away to India

In 1952, aged just 15, my father, Malcolm for no real reason decided to hop on his bicycle and ride north from his home, north east of Colombo to India. Along the way it is likely he was carted by various modes of transport: rickshaw, buffalo-back, omnibus, lorry and finally a marine craft of some description across the width of the Palk Strait that separates Sri Lanka from India. He claimed he had a desire to join the Royal British Airforce and was hell-bent on reaching England for this purpose.

He had barely reached India however, before a number of distractions connived to throw him off course. The first of these was a cricket match sponsored by the local Maharaja of Kerala held at a small playing field near the local markets. Here the young Malcolm snuck into through a tiny hole in the fence: not a great feat for a runt of a child. Lost in a sea of sarongs, the Maharajah had been short a man in his impromptu Eleven and the announcement had been made that volunteers were needed to fill the position of Third Leg. It was my father who raised his scrawny arm.

Malcolm would recollect the Maharajah as a tiny, barrell-shaped man who would not have been out of place in a retelling of “Snow White” with a high pitched voice that was at odds with his fearsome white beard. At his first meeting, the provincial ruler had been outfitted in a rich, brocaded jacket in emerald tones, worn over a white sarong. Impracticably, in Dad’s story, he had been stroking a small Chihuahua called “Mahatma” who was barely bigger than a bloated lentil and yapped annoyingly every time a run was made.

It was a fantastic match as my father, lithe as a serpent in his youth, proved his prowess in batting, bowling and fielding. He caught out the opposition’s number one and two batsmen, and when at the crease, hit eight sixes in a row, the crack of the ball drowned out by the deafening cheers of the crowd mingled with the intermittent mooing of the omnipresent holy cows and the crowing from the baskets of roosters that were typical of market days. When my father’s eleven trounced the opposition by 58 runs, both the Maharajah and flea-bitten Mahatma had been ecstatic.

“Boy! You have many talents!” the Maharajah had bellowed in the excitement. “You must come and work for me. If nothing else, we can get some meat on your bones.”

And so it was that my father’s stories became even more amazing – that he had been engaged as a powder monkey at one of the Maharajahs’ many gold mines; that he had been allowed to sleep with Mahatma at the foot of the Maharajah’s bed on a satin pillow encrusted with emeralds; how he had been instructed in archery, badminton, skeet shooting and how to light a hookah without burning his fingers; how he had been promised an education at the Maharajah’s expense – in London no less; that he had been treated like the pip-squeak ruler’s own son.

Depending on whether my mother was within ear shot, and I only heard him once, Dad would also claim that he had nearly been betrothed to one of the Maharajah’s seven beautiful and hitherto virginal daughters and how, as a lustful pubescent young man, he had managed to practice at least half of the karma sutra with three of them – at the same time. Unfortunately, it was this episode that meant he had been caught with his sarong down and physically thrown out of the Court.

He never did make it to London.

The story of Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera and His Fabulous Con

At thirteen, my father reckoned he had already discovered the entrepreneurial skill that has seen his own father, my grandfather, establish a plant-based empire across Ceylon, including a network of contacts as far as Batavia and West Africa.

The Sattambirilage name had, at least until my father’s generation, been associated with long-distance business relationships including connections to monarchies, governments and crooked politicians.

Ceylon in those days was a wild frontier where anyone with rat cunning, a gold tooth and any connection however obscure to a White Anglo Saxon, could con coconuts from the claws of the clueless.

It was a snake-oil merchant’s paradise meaning that anyone who wasn’t a native of the Island continent could lay claim to the largesse of the land as long as the right pieces of paper were signed.

Being able to lie straight in bed was only rarely a requirement.

It was an entrepreneur’s paradise, as my father would, apparently, discover.

Dad’s great con was the Lightbulb Distilled Water Company, an enterprise that saw the cunning teenager bottling up pints of water from a muddy stream near his home. He bottled the H2O into recycled beer bottles and sold it for a handful of rupees to passing motorists for use in topping up their ancient car batteries.

Malcolm, an adept artist (from whom, I imagine, I have inherited my ability to draw), even carved a logo into a coconut shell and created labels from the resulting stamp and a pot of India Ink borrowed from his father’s offices.

The crafty branding of a Lightbulb with the slogan “A Bright Idea for Batteries” added to the legitimacy of his claims that the common stream water had special qualities to guarantee a longer battery life.

LDWC was soon raking in hundreds of rupees a month and my father, unrestrained by the boring restrictions we face to day by Securities Commissions and other legal watchdogs, embarked on a project to further develop his Distilled Water Empire.

At a meeting of the local Villagers he told a sea of illiterate faces that they could become successful Muthalali’s (a Sri Lankan word meaning ‘trader’) overnight. He convinced them to buy shares in his new venture at 15 cents a piece or various products of barter. These included fingertips of the local hashish, bars of the local Kandos chocolate and in one case, a bottle of bulls-eyes a toothless old amma had been saving in an old Marmalade jar she had stolen from one of the Estate houses in which she had a sinecure.

It was only after Malcolm’s mother, my grandmother, discovered Malcolm’s callous ruse (barely nine days after LDWV was ‘publicly listed’ as it were) that the enterprise was peremptorily disbanded, the young CEO soundly whacked with the handle of a broken Ekel broom and sent to his bed.

The story of How Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera Built An Aeroplane

The year he turned 18, my father’s ill-conceived journey to India had ended when, sick with a serious case of amoebiasis, he had been despatched home by a Royal Surgeon of Kerala.

Ejected from the Maharajah’s Court after some three months, he had found himself work on the road gangs that were then busily attempting to construct the new infrastructure under the direction of the Calcutta-based Institution of Engineers. It had been five years since India had gained Independence from Britain and the whole place was abuzz with the excitement of a redescribed nation, rebuilding itself.

Months later, after Dad had become very ill and vomiting and “shitting like a bastard” as he explained, the authorities put the child on a Douglas DC-3 enroute to Colombo.

He arrived home to a hero’s welcome with a fattened hen slaughtered to celebrate the occasion. According to my Dad, after his departure, my grandmother, devastated, had kept under her pillow the handle of the Ekel broom she used to discipline him. It was incredibly uncomfortable to sleep on as her pillow was no more than a roll of fabric and she slept on a woven mat (her padura) on the hard stone floor. She had burned umpteen sticks of incense and lit endless oil lamps before the tiny statue of Buddha she prayed to each evening, praying for his safe return. Not only that, all the villagers had been in mourning for at least a week, Dad said, the community utterly saddened by the thought that the former Lightbulb Distilled Water Company CEO might have come to some horrible end at the hands of those filthy Indians.

But a matter of weeks after his arrival back home, Malcolm Sattambirilage Etcetera had stumbled, literally, upon his next big thing.

Now my father’s home, the house my great grandfather had built was a stone and wood edifice set on the ridge of a thickly forested area of Ceylon. From the top floor window of this bungalow one had a view of a horizon of gentle, deep green mounds covered in thick plantings of tea bushes. Closer by, clutches of rubber, plantain, coconut, rambutan and jack fruit connived in clumps, while to the rear of the home, a mangle of rainforest comprising strangler figs, banyans and other large, moss-covered trees created an impenetrable shield of vegetation that only someone quite foolhardy would dare venture into – someone like my father.

“Ai oh men, I don’t know what possessed me,” my Father would remember to his usually captivated audience. “I know I was a bit of a silly bugger back in those days.”

And so it was one steamy December day, on the eve of the drenching monsoons, the young Malcolm decided to venture into the hitherto unexplored depths of the jungle taking with him my grandfather’s ancient compass, an old Ghurka knife that was only a collectible displayed on the mantelpiece (blunt and useless) and a piece of chalk. He could not remember exactly how long he expected to be gone – perhaps a few hours.

In the way of such tales, it’s not surprising that my father, intent on slashing and beating his way forward into the swathe of vines and tree trunks, completely lost track of time. So it could have been a few or several hours but it was somewhere in his dogged progress through the jungle that he found it. At first all he could see was a faded red star on what looked like a flat panel, partly covered in mud. And then he noticed what would turn out to be part of a wing above his head.

“A plane!” Dad would yell, thumping his thigh with his open hand. “I had found an old aeroplane, men!”

His hands shaking and pure excitement coursing through his veins, Malcolm would tell how he had used the Ghurka knife to cut away the branches that had conspired to conceal the aircraft, which was in fact not an aeroplane, strictly speaking, but a rusted but otherwise intact Maeida Ku-1 twin boom Japanese military glider.

It was perfectly feasible that a Japanese glider might have gone down over the tea country of Sri Lanka, Dad would explain. After all, Colombo was convenient port for gun ships and other naval vessels bound for the east coast of Africa throughout the Second World War that had ended less than a decade before.

“You know how thick the mist can get. What, men, those Japs could be sneaky buggers, ninjas and all that,” and he’d make a karate chopping movement with his hands as if he were preparing for a roundhouse kick to someone’s nuts.

When Dad’s 18 year-old-brain processed what his eyes had festooned upon, that possibly late December evening, he would say that it was as if the Lightbulb on the labels of one of his old distilled water bottles had suddenly flashed to life.

Remember that Dad had always wanted to fly. He had three broken toes to prove it – the result of an ill-conceived dive off the roof of the two-storey family home holding aloft two ping pong bats which he had uselessly flapped in imitation of a bird before he had plummeted to earth.

This Japanese glider unearthed from the jungle therefore, seemed to him like a sign from above. That it was all meant to be, that dream he’d always had of commanding the skies like a bird.

As the afternoon deepened my dad had sat himself next to his new prize, a plan puddling in some deep well inside his brain.

In his thinking, it was all so simple and he had to admit, even brilliant.

He began to daydream about clouds and birds and Icarus soaring near the sun. He propped himself up against a rock and hummed to himself. He was so immersed in his thoughts he didn’t realise that, all that time while he was unveiling that rusty Kawasaki, he was being watched by one of the most vicious of the local wildlife – a peacock whose territory has been threatened.

Look, I have no idea why my father had to throw in this piece of the narrative. We would all have been happy enough with the discovery of an old Jap glider. But my Dad was an amateur storyteller and he suffered, as many of us Sri Lankans do, with a tendency to melodrama and overwriting.

So we’d let Dad go, not questioning him as, quite unbelievably, he would recount how the blissfully daydreaming youth was suddenly set upon by a ferocious bird, who, followed by two pea hens, bore down upon him with outraged shrieks.

The young man had immediately rolled in the dirt, flailing his Ghurka knife and screaming loudly enough to startle the male who, its tail of teals and purples fanned in outraged, lowered its head and pointed its beak directly at my father’s gonads.

He had wrestled the bird to the ground, grabbing its neck so firmly that the bird was soon divested of at least three of its tail feathers in its fright.

“I would have throttled the bugger but then the servants came,” my Dad would say.

Indeed, my grandfather’s huge retinue of household staff – the gardener, the watcher and even one of the dhobis making a later delivery of newly laundered bedsheets to the back door- had been alerted by the screams of the ‘mahathaya’ or master.

The descending mob was enough for the birds to surrender as they squawked an escape through the undergrowth.

It was only the next day that my father’s plan took shape. He had learned some mechanical skills on those road gangs he’d worked in and in his mind, of course he could get that old glider going.

For three weeks my father returned to that place in the jungle bringing with him his father’s Driver whose real name was Wijethunga but who my dad had nicknamed Jesus, primarily thanks to his legendary ability to resurrect absolutely anything.

Jesus, said Dad, was a multi-talented fellow who could not only drive everything from a car to a lorry or even a train, but he could also fix anything that was broken (including the aforementioned three broken toes my father sustained as a young child – it was Jesus who had bandaged and splinted up the damaged metatarsals - with the help of the top of a match box and some duct tape).

So Jesus was of course the perfect Aide in my father’s bid to revive the old glider.

As I understand it, over the course of several weeks, my father enlisted the servants to clear a large area around the aircraft with Jesus seconded to the full-time task of tinkering with the aircraft.

Fortunately, the glider had sustained only minor damage to the fuselage and apart from a wonky landing wheel was superficially in good order.

It was only a matter of a day or two before Jesus gave the Maida the thumbs up.

“All done Master,” the Driver had announced to my father’s joy – which was short lived, for he was soon, confronted with a new problem.

I told you my great-grandfather’s property was located on a hill which meant the chance of getting the aircraft to flat land, enough to create a runway was impossible.

The only solution, as Dad saw it, was to attempt to launch the plane in the old fashioned way – by literally throwing it off the hill. It was a glider wasn’t it?

First the servants were enlisted to cut a rudimentary path through the jungle 30 feet wide so the vessel could be safely pushed out of the jungle and out onto the abandoned roadway, built in the last century by more British road gangs and winding up the hillside.

The launch day was meticulously planned.

My father consulted the weather almanacs routinely broadcast on the BBC. He scouted the hilltop for a suitable area from which to launch himself. He settled on a clay platform metres from the perimeters of his father’s tea plantation where the owls circling the clouds indicated a reasonable height for an aeronautical feat. Importantly, he consulted the local Buddhist monks to ensure that they would chant for his success.

Malcolm recounted a pristine morning, blue skied and cloudless. How the entire village had been captivated by his plan and a motley assortment of people came to help him that day. There came the elderly carting an encyclopaedia of ailments – everything from flatulence and ulcers to skin rashes and halitosis. They complained loudly about their aches and pains but many were experienced tea-pickers for whom the climb was nothing. The women, crooking their saris around their necks deftly heaved their knock knees and bow legs past the rows of tea bushes. The men hoisted their sarongs around their aging testicles, and chewing beetle, prattled in either Tamil or Sinhalese as they held aloft Father’s amazing creation.

Malcolm himself cut a majestic figure. For head protection, he had borrowed an old motorcycle helmet that belonged to Jesus. To honour the occasion and to remember the very moment that the heavens had delivered the Maeda to him, he had adorned the helmet with five peacock feathers. It was a sight to behold, the teal, bronze and purple of the peacock feathers blinding in their loveliness and creating the illusion of a Spartan’s war helmet.

And so it was that Malcom Sattambirilage Etcetera, at the age of 18, found himself in the cockpit of an ancient military glider. Surrounded by a sea of villagers counting down in Sinhalese from ten to one as, with Jesus overseeing the technicalities of the manoever, a crowd of men on each wing set up a few hundred yards from the edge of the precipice and pushed, and pushed.

Over rocks and potholes, the tips of the wings brushing the border of tea bushes, they eased the machine forward until its nose inched slowly over the edge of the cliff. The collective held their breaths. Prayers to Buddha, Ganesh and any one of the tens of thousands of their gods were uttered beneath betel-stained breaths. And then, there was my father, actually flying!

In fact, as Dad tells it, he flew at least for two miles, taking in the spectacular views of tea country, waterfalls and lakes seared by sunlight. He flew alongside Eagles, spoonbills and whatever birdlife he found up there. His way was lit by rainbows, and the light of heaven itself.

Assisted by a tail wind, he sailed in the sky for perhaps fifteen minutes at a cruise speed of around 30 miles per hour, by his reckoning until quite suddenly, it gave up the ghost.

The Maeda went into a tailspin and Dad only just managed to get it horizontal before he crash-landed in a rice paddy.

Unfortunately, the glider literally fell to bits, my father flung clear into a large pile of buffalo dung that cushioned the impact.

Afterwards, he was hailed as a hero among the villagers with his exploit achieving a legendary status. His helmet and the peacock feathers, still in tact, were apparently forwarded to the Royal Museum of Colombo along with a lengthy written description of the events surrounding the extraordinary resurrection of the Maeda.

This was, unfortunately, lost in transit. At least that was Malcolm’s story.