Beyond The Call Of Duty

By Emil van der Poorten –November 22, 2015

Emil van der Poorten

As I write this the television newscasts are awash with the horror of the terrorist attacks in Paris. It is easy enough in such circumstances to pretty well give up on humanity as a whole. However, in stark contrast to the wanton bloodshed with which we have all been inundated recently, I have had the privilege of being witness, over several years past, to a chain of events the final outcome of which, while unfortunate to say the least, more than restored my faith in the capacity of human beings to give of themselves absolutely selflessly with no expectation whatsoever of reward of any kind, certainly not pecuniary! That this happened in my home country, to boot, was cause for more than simple satisfaction.

It was only a few days ago that we saw an old friend who trod the halls of Trinity College in the Kandyan hills at the same time as I did, breathe his last.

His passing was not without pain to him and those who knew and loved him and the fact that his deteriorating health was spread over a fairly long period of time did not, I know, make it any easier for those near and dear to him who looked after him while he, literally, faded away.

I have chosen not to name names in this piece because I believe that the burden of grief that the survivors bear will in no way be helped by their exposure to public gaze, no matter how limited or how laudatory. However, I do not think that the caring and love they displayed under the most difficult of circumstances should go unremarked. Let it, in no matter how small a way, be proof that humanity’s upper reaches have not been completely abandoned and that “ordinary” people can rise to extraordinary heights even when seemingly bereft of the material means to do so.

When I returned to Sri Lanka after a long sojourn in a place as far from Sri Lanka as can be imagined, it was either the fates or simple circumstance that brought me into contact with someone I’d known, not particularly well, at my alma mater. On our first meeting, when he was still in full control of all his faculties, he reminded me that I was responsible for his entering a school boxing ring for the first (and only!) time because, through a (misguided?) sense of loyalty to the “House” to which we both belonged, I had persuaded him to enter the school’s House Boxing Meet. The reason I had exerted my skills of persuasion was that we were having difficulty in fielding a full team for the competition and every entrant garnered a point, win or lose, towards the final tally and, even though boxing was very much an individual “sport,” the team’s success was what mattered in terms of the ethos of our school. My recently-departed friend reminded me that I had, no matter how unwittingly, pitted him against one of the hardest-hitting and most skilled boxers in the entire schools system at the time and that, as a result, he only had a very vague recollection of what transpired in the ring on his first (and last!) foray into competitive boxing!                                  
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