Living Lewis’s Life, Eight Thousand Kilometres Away

Living Lewis’s Life, Eight Thousand Kilometres Away A grandson in Sydney traces the quiet echoes of his Sri Lankan grandfather’s life — duty, wandering, reinvention — and discovers he’s been living Lewis’s story all along. When I try to remember my grandfather’s face, it comes in fragments. A white tweed trouser leg stepping out of a Hillman. A matching jacket. Hair combed straight up, as if he were refusing to bow to age. Thick glasses that made his eyes seem both distant and very present. He would have been about my age now — or older — but to the boy watching from the shadows he was simply old. His style seemed fixed, as if it had walked out of the 1950s and decided to stay there. Only now, at seventy‑one, can I imagine him in his forties and fifties, wearing exactly the same uniform while the world rearranged itself around him. My own clothes, my haircut, my glasses have shifted every decade or so; his, once chosen in middle age, never seemed to move. I don’t know how he spent his days in detail, but I know he carried people. A herd of young teachers, disciples really, tucked under his wing. Younger brothers and sisters he made sure were placed, even if they never finished their formal studies and “only” became teachers — as if that weren’t already a noble way to spend a life. He was the big man in their small world: the principal at school, the eldest son at home, the one who knew where the paperwork was and where the bodies were buried. I grew up believing life was a straight line you walked without looking down. You are born, you go to school, you find a job, you marry, you raise children, you collect a few hobbies, you retire, and you exit quietly. I have no idea where hobbies would have fitted into my grandfather’s version of that line. Maybe he never had any. All I really know is that he was the boss of people — students, teachers, his younger siblings, their families. A man whose time belonged to others. By the time I finished school it was the seventies. Young men in Colombo were starting to wear long pants, bell‑bottoms, hair brushing their collars. There was a sense — at least to me — that we could make small waves even in a place that barely registered on the map. I doubt my grandfather had that luxury when he was my age then. I picture him in a sarong or a pair of shorts, helping his siblings and his farming father, squeezing his studies into the cracks between chores. No posters, no pop music, no bell‑bottom swagger. Just duty, and whatever passed for hope in that time. My strange good fortune was to arrive in the age of technology. Somewhere between curiosity and accident I discovered that you could shed skins and put on new ones. Reinvention wasn’t just possible; it was a survival skill. The David Bowie poster above my bed — all eyeliner and angles — was a nightly reminder that you were allowed to become someone different, more than once. I took that lesson seriously. From Sri Lanka to Dubai to other Gulf cities and eventually to Sydney, I kept stepping sideways, saying yes to industries I didn’t yet understand. Thirteen companies, five major banks, countless offices. My working life was never a straight line; it was a staircase that kept turning corners. I chased life rather than money, but the economic gains trotted along behind anyway. When I think of my grandfather’s adulthood, what leaps out is not romance but responsibility. Don Lewis Jayawardane married “late” for his time, around thirty‑five. His bride was fifteen years younger. Ten years into their marriage she suffered a mental breakdown and was sent to an asylum, which meant he was effectively widowed and a single father while his wife still breathed. On top of that, when a younger brother died in his twenties, my grandfather took in those children too. He fought legal battles to reclaim family property that others had quietly squatted on, then handed it back to his siblings. He owned a paddy field and made sure the harvest was handled fairly, that the farmers working it didn’t get cheated in the usual ways. He educated his children in Christian schools and boarded his only son — my uncle — at premium schools in Colombo. For a village principal with a salary that barely stretched, that was a kind of madness. Or faith. Become a Medium member I’ve seen his last will. He wrote it himself, not a lawyer in sight, in looping English that still smells faintly of ink and effort. He divided everything so that each child inherited equally, and he kept a share aside for the nephew he had effectively adopted. There is nothing dramatic about the language, but the intention is loud: no one gets forgotten. Sometimes I wonder if I inherited that particular defect in his character: the urge to rescue your own. Three months after I left home for Dubai, my younger sister eloped with a man much older. The fallout was immediate and vicious. My parents were disgraced in the eyes of the small‑town gossips, dispossessed in more practical ways, and then my father was politically hunted by the government of the day and sacked without proper process. From thousands of kilometres away, I did what I could: sent money, made phone calls, helped him fight for reinstatement and unfair dismissal. I backed my younger brother through his studies until he became a scholar in Canada. Like Lewis helping his orphaned nephews and niece, I have done my own small rounds of rescue. Over the years I helped two overseas students in Australia through their tertiary education and migration. I helped two orphaned boys into university; one of them is now a Buddhist monk. One of the things I am proudest of in 2025 is helping a transgender boy from Sri Lanka, who had faced tremendous hardship for his sexuality, gain permanent residency in Australia with the help of legal aid from the Refugee Council. These days I am quietly proud of the mentoring I offer a First Nations intern in Sydney, and of the young monk I nudge along as he takes his dhamma to Europe. It feels like an echo of Lewis’s work, stretched across continents and generations. None of this was heroic; it was simply what you do when you are the eldest son of someone who once did the same. At fifty‑five, not forty‑five like my grandfather, I found myself single again, having left the partner who is the mother of my four children. I kept supporting the kids financially, making sure they finished their education and built good careers. It felt, in an odd way, like continuing his work in a different language — keeping the line steady even when the family story wobbled. In his last days, my grandfather moved into my parents’ house, into the room that would later become mine. My mother nursed him there. I remember his frail body against the same walls that later held my pop posters and my contraband magazines. That room has seen more versions of us than any of us will ever know. Now, as the calendar tips toward my own last acts, I am planning to sell the house I live in and move closer to one of my children in Sydney. Another relocation, another downsizing of furniture and ego. Like Lewis, I have been a wanderer with a toolkit for making homes. He built houses when his family was vulnerable — two on ancestral land, one on his wife’s property, which I conveniently inherited. I built my first in Sri Lanka, then five more in Sydney, and now I am lining up an apartment rather than a construction site for what I tell myself is the final move. Each time I have moved, I’ve started again: new keys, new neighbours, new stories. And like Lewis, I’ve learned — slowly, stubbornly — to be at home with myself. That might be the real inheritance, the one that doesn’t show up in a will. I’m living his life eight thousand kilometres away from where he lived it, in different clothes and under different skies, but the shape of it feels familiar: a man standing between past and future, trying to look after his people and make peace with the person he has become.