Thilak, the boy from Galle
Thilak, the boy from Galle
Itwas in the quiet, dust-specked days of 1973 that I first met Thilak Pathirana. I was eighteen then, the youngest lad in our batch at the apprentice school for overseas telegraphy. In those times, long before the world began rushing through invisible wires and fast internet, we were learning the gentle, deliberate art of tapping out messages to far-off places.
I had come straight out of a Colombo Christian school, proper and perhaps a little too neat around the edges. Thilak was quite different. Fresh from Mahinda College down in Galle, he possessed a raw, restless energy. He spoke quickly, with a brutal, unpolished honesty that took me by surprise, his broad smile infectious and he lodged in a modest boarding house in Nugegoda. During our quiet moments, he would sit and narrate the endlessly colourful goings-on of that place, turning the ordinary routine of landladies and fellow boarders into small, lively dramas.
We clicked almost at once. During our midday breaks, we would wander off to local eating houses, the air thick with the aroma of hot tea, spices, and frying dough. We had little to our names, often borrowing small sums of rupees back and forth, completely untroubled by the future and simply set on enjoying the day.
The rest of our batch — an all-male group in their early twenties — carried themselves with a certain stiffness. Their families held grand expectations for them, and the weight of those hopes seemed to sit heavy on their shoulders. But I had no grand expectations to live up to, and I don’t suppose Thilak had any either.
Our monthly stipend was two hundred and fifty Sri Lankan rupees. To a young lad in those years, it felt like a small fortune, just enough to keep the tea flowing and the days bright. Thilak was two years older than I was, but there was an easy, welcoming quality to his eagerness for fun and his total lack of pretense. In a world full of young men trying desperately to grow up too fast, his untamed honesty was the most inviting thing I had ever found.
What has etched itself most deeply in my memory was the time Thilak invited me to spend a weekend with him down in Galle. On a Friday afternoon, the moment our lessons finished, we made our way to Colombo Fort station and boarded an express train, the coastal breeze sweeping through the open windows as we rattled south. Galle was not actually Thilak’s birthplace — that was Matara, some forty kilometers further down the coast — but having spent his school days there, he claimed Galle as his true home. When we arrived, his friend Piyasiri, whose family ran a business, was waiting to receive us. We stayed under Piyasiri’s roof for the weekend, treated like old companions.
The highlight of that trip was a morning when Thilak took me into Galle town for a cup of tea. As we sat there in the small restaurant, Mr. Dahanayake, the local Member of Parliament, casually walked in and took a seat at a table, just as ordinary and unassuming as the two of us. He was a famous figure — a former Prime Minister of our island nation — known everywhere for his eccentric, unvarnished simplicity. Folks still talked about the time he had marched into Parliament wearing only a loincloth to protest the rationing of cloth. There he sat, quietly sipping his morning tea while reading the Dinamina newspaper. When he finished, he ambled up to the cashier’s counter, paid his few cents, and walked out into the dusty street. It was a wonderful, unscripted slice of small-town life, where even statesmen lived simply among the people.
Yet, despite the warmth of that weekend, youth has a way of scattering friends to the wind. Not long after, Thilak was offered a clerk’s position at the People’s Bank. He packed up his things, left the apprentice school, and stepped into the world of banking. I was offered a bank job too, but I chose to decline it, opting to stay on and master the telegraph keys. And just like that, our shared chapter came to a gentle end.
Decades drifted by. Life had carried me across the ocean to Australia, while word reached me that Thilak had become a remarkably successful businessman back home. Curiosity got the better of me, and through the quiet magic of the internet, I tracked him down. This was in 2010. When we spoke on the phone, thirty seven years melted away in an instant. We talked with the very same easy candour of our teenage years, though I was now a father watching four grown children navigate their own twenties and late teens.
When I visited Sri Lanka around that time, Thilak insisted on sending a car to fetch me. He brought me to his office and then to his sprawling bungalow, where we shared a grand meal and reminisced about the old days. By now, Thilak had a son in his early twenties and two daughters in their teens.
I saw him again recently in 2026. Time had brought its gentle rustle of quiet.
In my mind’s eye, no matter how many years roll past, Thilak will always remain that eternal young lad from Galle — the one who offered me his untamed honesty, shared his few rupees, and showed a green young boy how to find joy in the simple unfolding of a day.
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