Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe

 

The Lion King

Part 1

By 

Walt Disneynayake

It was the year 18hundred something and King Rajadi Rajasinghe got Malaria and asked for Chloroquine.

Chloroquine had not yet been discovered so they gave him Koththamalli instead.

(Even if Chloroquine had been invented the idiots in the Health Department would have had a shortage of it! The Director of Health Services and his yes men could not tell the difference between their chloroquine, arses and their elbows!)

The King died. His last words were "AaaaaaH!"

He was childless. He had at least three wives and there was considerable speculation as to what he was doing with them…or rather what he was not! By the time he got Malaria it was too late to procreate.

Pilima Talave

Meanwhile back at the palace in Kandey-udarata a shifty chap by the name of Pilima Talave was managing the shop. With this sudden change of events he thought quickly and decided to install an illiterate, pimply-faced, 18 yr old fat Indian boy who happened to be the sister of one of the sons of the sister of one of the Queens of the late King Malaria.

Nepotism was rife those days. It still is. So is Malaria but Malaria is treatable now.

"Oi!" said Pilima Talave. "Ennadah!?" answered the boy who was busily engaged in scratching his arse.

"Would you like to be King?" "I don't mind" said the boy whose name happened to be Konnasami.

This being a rather common name associated with Vaddai sellers they decided to call him Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe. Sri Lankans like to preface everything with "Sri".

That is how King S.W. Rajasinghe came to the throne.

Raja Singhe means King Lion or Lion King, which Walt Disney copied many years later…

Sri Konnasami

"Oi! Konnasami!" said Pilima Talave with an obnoxious grin on his smallpox scar-ed face.

"Bugger off! I am the King now! Call me Your Maj!" said the pimply-faced boy King from his throne.

Pilima Talave threw a coconut at the King but missed. "Try that again and I will play Pandu with your head!" said the King with a fair display of courage. Pandu is Cricket by the way....

"Bugger this!" thought Pilima. "I will get the little shite!"

Time passed as it always does except when it doesn't…

*******

Pilima was getting more and more irritated with SWR the King and decided to go down to Cola Amba Thota to find a hit man. To get rid of the King.

Colombo Thota was a pretty unsavoury place those days and still is, especially in the area known as Thotalanga. The British had recently renamed Thotalanga as Grandpass but it was not that grand. 

Having wandered around a bit Pilima met a couple of local thugs. Money changed hands and Pilima was taken away by an ox drawn trishaw to Galkissa and introduced to Freddy Mahaththaya.

Freddy Mahaththaya

Freddy was sitting in a beach shack with a large red sign that said "Mount Lavinia Hotal Eka". There was no "Coca Cola" sign but only a "Ra Bomu" sign. This was near a place that the natives called Galkissa.

Freddy was wearing a pair of brightly coloured shorts and a T-shirt with the logo "I Love London". His skin was a bright boiled-lobster-red. He had a coconut shell full of Ra in front of him.

"Hullo! Hullo!! Freddy!" greeted Pilima with exaggerated cheerfulness that one needs to resort to when engaging the services of a hit man.

"Never mind the Hullo bit punk! Just call me Sir!…Sir Frederick North" said Freddy with a barely concealed sneer.

(Hit men always sneer. They do a two-week course in sneering…like Jack Palance in the film "Shane")

(to be continued)

Serious historical note: The above events are based on "The History of Sri Lanka" by K.M. DeSilva but highly jazzed up. Additional details/ideas by the usual correspondents. This is a work in progress. Ideas welcome. In case you didn't work it out this is about the last days of the Kandyan Kingdom.

 Copyright © Crazylanka 2002. First written on the 24th of October 2002