THE NATIONAL COSTUME

Siridasa Abeysekera (better known as Abey) was one of the greatest nationalists that Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) had produced. It was he who gave pride of place to the national costume at a time when the Ceylonese during the colonial regime were trying hard to ape the West by wearing the European costume complete with coat and tie and incidentally sweating like pigs in them. Abey, of course, had to suffer insults and indignities not only from the Europeans but also from the local "Kalu-suddas". Nevertheless, he stuck to his costume till the end in spite of marrying an English lady whom he met in the United Kingdom while studying at Oxford.

One day Abey’s motor car broke down and he had to travel home by bus from his office where he was Managing Director. He got into the bus and saw his clerk who was in ‘full European costume seated just in front of him. The conductor who was issuing tickets came to the clerk and asked “Mahathmaya, where are you going?" But when it came to Abey's turn, he addressed the latter as “Thamuse !” 

As stated above, Abey's“ wife was an English lady. Both of them went to Cargills on a shopping spree. Mrs. Abey bought some goods and asked the salesman for a labourer to put them into her car. No labourer was to be seen and the salesman pointing out Abey said, “Why not ask your driver to take these away?" 

At the onset of the Easter season, the warmest period in the Island, a friend asked Abey whether he was not going to Nuwara Eliya, and the latter's reply was-

  

"I say, why should I go to Nuwara Eliya? The Europeans, of course, go there because they can't stand the warm climate here. But our ”Kalu-suddas" are blindly aping them. Our people spend money in buying warm clothes and in Spite of them they shiver from head to foot in that ’ice box Why all that suffering?

One day Abey called over at the Department of immigration and Emigration to obtain a passport for his family to visit England. He found the Staff Officer engaged in conversation with one of his clerks. Abev, therefore, sat down on a bench there. 'The Staff Officer, presuming that Abey did not 1 understand English, asked the clerk in the latter’s hearing, Who Is that chap In national costume’

“1 don't know, sir, replied the clerk, “these days you don' t know whether one is an M. P. or a Peon, because both look alike!