‘The Paths I’ve Travelled’

Author: Sriyantha Senaratne

Reviewed by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

Sriyantha Senaratne who has done much of my legal work in recent years is a delightful character, and deeply moral man. His social commitment was also apparent in his eloquent reminiscences in a book about the Student Christian Movement, where he celebrated the contribution of my uncle Lakshman, who was Chaplain when Sriyantha was a student at Peradeniya.

He is also devoted to the arts, and one of the joys of visiting him in his office is the strains of opera that fill the room. But just how varied are not just his interests but also his accomplishments only came home to me when last year he published an autobiography that made for riveting reading.

Entitled ‘The Paths I’ve Travelled’ after the poem by Robert Frost about making choices in the journey through life, it covers a host of experiences of very different sorts. After a short but moving account of a village childhood, he moves to Trinity, and his love for the place illuminates the memoirs, though for good reasons he describes he did not accept an offer to take on the Principalship in the nineties.

That was one of the many surprising things I gathered from the book, along with the reason for him being called Simon, which had long puzzled me. It was because as a schoolboy he had been devoted to the Saint stories of Leslie Charteris, so he was given the name Simon, for the Saint’s name was Simon Templar.

I had thought Simon had always been a lawyer, and that was indeed the profession he started life in, having decided not to go into the Civil Service as his parents had hoped, in the footsteps of his uncle. To my surprise the revered administrator and intellectual, Godfrey Gunatilleke was the brother of his father, who took on that surname when by error he was described at university as not Gunatillekege Senaratne but rather Senaratnege Gunatilleke.

Apart from his years as a lawyer, in three different firms, he also worked in the travel trade, where both at Walkers Tours and then at Gemini he engaged in influential innovations. Oddly enough my life unknowingly crossed his nearly half a century ago, when I was asked by Chloe de Soya, with whom he worked in both travel incarnations, to write some blurbs for the new hotel concept they had developed.

Before that interlude, having worked as a lawyer with Julius and Creasy, he describes a year in America as a Rotary Scholar, when he proved an admirable ambassador for the country. That long chapter is followed by a longer one, which is basically about his marriage. His description of family life is almost lyrical, and the personality of his wife Anthea lights up the book there and thereafter. She too has produced her memoirs, launched on the same day as his, but these are confined to her childhood so there is no overlap, except with regard to their first meeting and his romantic pursuit of her.

In the course of the book, Simon notes lessons he learnt from his mentors, one from a Trinity Principal about the need to cherish a family, another from his first boss about the human dimension to the work of a lawyer. Both these words of wisdom pertained to the importance of human relations, and the narrative makes clear how he followed the advice he received, which is shown to have produced enormous contentment.

But there were disappointments, which he does not avoid recording, though he moves swiftly so that we are barely conscious of what must have been anguish. That indeed only comes across at length in his account of disappointment as a boy at not being put into the House he had wanted, a disappointment that he coped with though characteristically he did not hesitate to express it.

Disappointment is passed over swiftly later, though never glossed over, as when he was punished for his year of leave to go to America by a senior partner at Julius and Creasy who assigned him to an area which brought him no satisfaction. Fortunately for him, and for the travel trade, that led him to seek other outlets for his talents, and he moved to Walkers and then, when a change of management proved restrictive, to his own business which he called Gemini Tours. His energy soon led that firm to be in the forefront of the travel trade.

Adversity brought out impressive initiative throughout his career. So too, when after having returned to the law, to work at the firm of D L & F de Saram, he was practically forced out, for reasons that do not reflect well on some of its partners, he set up on his own. He called his new firm Simon Associates, and found for its office in perhaps the most enviable of settings for legal practice, the beautiful old Galle Face Court flats.

That is where I met him, and a team of delightful youngsters he works with. That they appreciate his leadership was apparent from the pictures of the celebration they put on for his 75th birthday. Those are amongst the wealth of pictorial depictions of high points in Simon’s life, and also routine pleasures, family gatherings, holidays in exotic destinations, newspaper cuttings of high points in his career.

Simon’s good nature shines through the book, though as when he was a schoolboy, he makes critical points gently but tellingly. He does this about the shabby treatment he received from his second law firm, and also about the takeover by Christopher Ondaatje of Forbes & Walker, which he assisted in, as to which he was told later by his friend Adrian Zecha of the Aman Group that ‘they are not investors, they are paper shufflers’.

But it was mainly good Simon achieved, as shown by his determination when he headed the National Council of the YMCA and was determined to visit branches in Jaffna though it was the war period when travel was difficult. But he persevered as he did in much else, and the satisfaction he brought to those who had felt isolated is typical of a man who has in his quiet way brought satisfaction to so many.