Articles | S. Thomas' | Souvenir 07

Did you know, Godot has come to the Royal Thomian ?

A Thomian from Los. Angeles who wanted to catch up with the Royal Thomian via cyber space spoke to me recently. He ended up throwing up on his computer keyboard. I say it was a virtual experience. He virtually ruined his computer. But it was all in good spirit. Somehow the whole episode reminded me of that poignant verse that was penned once in a College maga­zine by a Thomian whose name unfortunately I shall never know.

He wrote :
I gaze upon
The cherished scene
I'd longed to see.
Thro' all these years
Of wondering
It lived with me
In Memory's store -
The College that I love so well

Countless Thomians have been hopelessly nostalgic about the old school, some in a way that seems positively queer upon retrospect. One wrote in a Thomian magazine that boys stood in a class 'taken by the redoubtable pedagogue Mr. J.H.S. Peiris' "in whose pres­ence we tiny mortals shook like autumnal eaves on a stormy night." Makes one think the school by the sea was in Dover.... Neve mind.

All of nostalgia is about never growing up. But such forms of nos­talgia exist in a time warp. Some folks come from the graveside to the Royal Thomian. They have buried a classmate a day before. Others come to savour their lost celebrity. This means last year's Thomian and Royal captains. All categories are hopelessly nostal­gic, but what beats them all is the cyber Thomian who thinks the Royal Thomian is a click of a mouse away.

Of all the hopeless nostalgias, those who involve themselves in the activities of the old school sometimes are the most ardent. Some­times, even though it's unfair to think so, it appears as if they are acting upon their unfulfilled class monitor fantasies. If they couldn't monitor the class in the Upper Third, they would do so by monitoring the Colts tent twenty years later - or at least something like that.....

Some folks still see the Royal Thomian through old and unchanging sepia tones. They feel that Duleep Mendis would come back, and that mini skirts would come back. The only songs they know are by M.S. Fernando. But when you are in there at the match, with your butt settled heavily onto a tin chair, you cannot live vicariously.

I know the Thomian teacher who comes for the Royal Thomian match hoping to take the catch of her life. Every year she keeps coming for the match they say - and now she is the oldest spinster in town.

It's always like that. Legends grow around this series.

This is the first proper year that the Royal Thomian is being played under the influence of the Mahinda Chinthana. Those under the influence of a different sort think that they would be restricted by all of the strictures that Mahinda Chinthana has placed on imbibing of any kind of spirits - such as the strictures against drinking in open spaces.

But Mahinda Rajapakse is a President who went to Thurstan Col­lege and sent three of his sons to S. Thomas. They say it's because he saw enough of Royal through the fence in his early days, to disgust him for life.

That's also why he doesn't grace the occasion at all, the way some Presidents used to. Those who come for the Royal Thomian at all, year after year, harbor deep insecurities. Last year, 1 saw the formi­dable company CEO wearing a Mustangs tent badge almost beg­ging to be let into the Colts tent.

He had made it to the highest notch in the social totem - but his Clotish instincts leads him to doltish behavior. There is an over­grown schoolboy therefore in every Thomian - even tough I do not know about Royalists.

There is probably a hidden Thomian inside every Royalist, because at bottom Royalists envy the Thomian driftwood type of permanent adolescence. The Royalists cannot do that. When they were ado­lescent, they couldn't do adolescent either. That's why a Royal cap­tain never makes a sporting declaration.

Royalists just do not have the instincts to go for a defeat that looks like a victory such as one that is due to a sporting declaration made at the correct time.

Even as I wrote that sentence I realized that it was a very schoolboyish thing to state (truth though it may be), leave alone put down on paper. But that's the whole point.

The Royal Thomian is the world's most blatant display of perma­nent unleft adolescence. But, this situation is problemetized by the strictures that have been imposed on our society and by extension not the conduct of the match. Mobility between tents is restricted. This to old timers and even some not so old timers is akin to slapping a seat belt law on a pedestrain.

Moving from tent to tent is banned, due to the need to keep folks from invading the pitch - a laudable objective indeed.

But, the result is that spectatorship has been straight -jacketed. But all it means is that another generation of match goer has been created; a generation whose members might share a glass of virtual Scotch, taken surreptitiously probably via MP3 technology -courtesy Hans Wijesuriya - with kindred sprits in a tent to which they do not belong.

The news down the grapevine is that Royal has never been so de­moralized in centuries. The sodden sprits have got to do with the fact that a Royalist lost a battle for this country's Presidency not to a Thomian but a Thurstanite. Centuries of losing to Thomians incul­cated a Royalist tendency to take it out on the perceived lesser mortals next door.

But Thurstan had its comeuppance. A Thurstanite beat a Royalist to become President and some old Royalists last year welcomed the loser to a newly formed tent as 'the future President of Sri Lanka." They have been waiting and waiting for that particular Godot.

RAJPAL ABEYNAYAKE

 << BACK