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Excerpted from volume ii of the Sarath Amunugama autobiography
In this chapter I do not intend to describe all the famous tourist sights of Paris because that information is now freely available in guide books and on TV. Rather let me narrate some aspects which are likely to be of special interest to my readers. I begin with the Sri Lankan expatriate community in Paris. When I lived in Paris there were about a 100,000 Sri Lankans of all communities and descriptions living in the capital city.
Of them the majority were Tamils who had left the country because of the ethnic conflict. Most of them were from the Jaffna peninsula and had little contact with Sinhalese both in Sri Lanka and Paris. But they all needed the embassy because of visa formalities. Consequently the Sri Lankan Embassy in Rue D’Astorg had to take extraordinary safety measures while at the same time accommodating genuine requests for consular assistance.
It also meant that the Embassy had to have close links with the metropolitan police and the intelligence services which kept LTTE supporters under surveillance. Our embassy parties had more than a fair share of plain clothed policemen who were good drinkers and loved rice and curry. Due to my friendship with Ginige and Navaz I became aware of their constant interaction with the Surete or the secret service.
One of the redeeming features in this situation was that most Tamil immigrants were generally upwardly mobile and wanted to use the free education, health and social services for the betterment of their children and were generally law abiding, though paying lip service to the LTTE. This was not the case with LTTE ‘enforcers’ who extorted money from them by threatening to kill their relations who were left behind in Jaffna.
The work ethic of the Tamil expatriates was admired by the French. We could hardly go out to dinner, to the movies or to a supermarket without running into young Tamils who would gladly work double the time for half the pay. After some time most of them became friends with Sinhala and Muslim immigrants, especially because they could use them as intermediaries to get their work done at the embassy.
By the time I left Paris many enterprising Tamils had set up “Groceries” especially in the La Chapelle area even selling arrack, Vimto, Kandos chocolates and Sinhala newspapers. Others had set up travel agencies, money exchanges and telecommunications centers. Some enterprising Sinhalese also tried to enter the western business world but lacked staying power or were pulled down by their own kith and kin.
There was an ambitious young man called Galappathy from a well-known Trincomalee Sinhala family. He tried his hand at the export-import trade and was bankrupted. He escaped to Sri Lanka unable to face his debtors, especially middle aged women who had been promised big returns by him in investing their hard earned savings. He was murdered in Trinco allegedly by the LTTE.
In almost every western country I visited I found that some Sinhala expatriates established small restaurants offering Sri Lankan cuisine. In Paris there was one such cafe which was patronized by the embassy. They catered at embassy parties and at ‘danes’ for the few monks living in the city and their guest monks from nearby countries who came for sightseeing. But these cafes soon folded up due to absence of custom and internal conflicts.
On the other hand there was a restaurant run by a Tamil entrepreneur near the Elysee Palace, the residence of the President of the Republic, which served Indian food and was patronized by President Mitterand himself. It was no easy task to run a successful restaurant in Paris which is referred to as the ‘gourmet capital of the world’.
My friends Manu and Premachandra had many years ago opened a ‘Bistro’ in the Latin Quarter. It was next to the famous night club ‘Tabu’ which had featured Julitte Greco as its lead singer. Greco was the favourite of the existentialists who patronized ‘Tabu’. However that enterprise failed and the two Sinhala ‘patrons’ had to make a quick exit. But old stagers still talked nostalgically of ‘Tabu’, the legendary Juliette Greco and the small restaurant close by run by Prema and Manu which served delicious Asian food.
The expatriate Sri Lankans in Paris fell into several categories. The first group consisted of refugees who were fleeing from our armed forces or the recruiters of the LTTE. After the failed JVP insurrections many Sinhala youth fled to Europe. Tamil youths had been sent by their parents to escape recruitment by the LTTE. Many of them however were LTTE sympathizers though hiding out in western countries. The LTTE networks reached into every Tamil home to extract ‘kappan’ or extortion money which was used to fund arms purchases and propaganda efforts on behalf of the LTTE.
Many Tamils were not happy at these forced contributions but they had to grin and bear it. Another source of migration were young men and women who had befriended French tourists and had been brought over as aides or housemaids. A few of them were a part of gay rings which operated at very high levels of Parisian society. These ‘gay rings’ had penetrated many major institutions including UNESCO.
I was surprised to see several youngsters from Colombo working as office boys in UNESCO, World Bank and other important international institutions. Most other young people found jobs as drivers, cooks, waiters and other middle grade professionals, married French girls and settled down to a comfortable life. Later they banded themselves into local branches of Sri Lankan political parties and were happy to fraternize with politicians of various hues who visited Paris for both business and pleasure.
The Catholic Church sponsored refugees from the Catholic belt. This was not as prevalent in France as in Italy where large numbers of migrants from Wennappuwa, Wattala, Chilaw and Negombo found refuge not only in Rome and Milan but also in almost every small township. It gave me great pleasure when our friends from Italy visiting us in Paris for their holidays identified themselves as coming from Venice, Verona, Rome, Milan or Tuscany that we first learnt of while studying Shakespeare’s Italian tragedies in school and University.
Some even came from Pompei which had, according to our school text books, been destroyed in the ancient past by an erupting volcano. It was nature’s come uppance to the venal Pompian rulers. When corrupt French politicians reached the end of their tenure they were compared to those in the “last days of Pompeii.”
Paris Vihara
Whether Buddhist, Hindu or Catholic, expatriates tend to congregate in their respective religious centres. The Catholics had many churches in all parts of Paris. The most famous were the Notre Dame and the Sacre Coeur which were both tourist sites as well as functioning churches. The Sacre Coeur for instance was full of lighted candles asking for mundane favours. This practice was well known to me as my first girlfriend in Kandy was a devout Catholic who sought many favours from her church in Aniwatte Kandy, in particular to pass her ‘O’ levels. As I have described in the first volume of my autobiography, unfortunately God did not answer her prayers and she failed the exam and was whisked away to Colombo where there was no church nearby.
Sri Lankan…
For a long time Paris did not have a Sinhala Buddhist Vihara. There were many Thai, Cambodian and Vietnamese Temples which were patronized by the early Sinhalese residents in the city as well as by our embassy. The icon of Theravada Buddhist learning in Paris was Bhikku Walpola Rahula who was the world’s best exponent of Buddhism to the West. He lived in a small flat in Rue Lumosine, researched at the Sorbonne and was paid a stipend as a researcher at the CNRS – The National Centre for Research studies.
He was not interested in pastoral duties and kept away from Buddhist ceremonial. He did not interact with most of his countrymen in Paris. In my earlier visits to Paris in the seventies I would visit him as I was a friend of his nephews –the Hettigodas of Siddhalepa fame. Later I visited Rahula with my friend Wickreme Weerasooria, in London, when the former was convalescing in his nephew’s residence after heart surgery.
When Rahula came back to Paris I visited him to chat and share a cup of tea. I brought him vintage Sri Lankan teas as he loved to drink tea [‘The Sri Lankaise’ in French] which he himself brewed in a pot in his small kitchen. An extremely affable, polite and forthright cleric Rahula was one of my favourite Sri Lankans. Following Rahula’s footsteps was Kosgoda Sobhita, a Ceylon University graduate and Pali scholar.
Before he left for Paris, Sobhita interacted with me in Colombo as he was a university friend of Siri Gunasinghe and Austin Jayawardene, my closest friends at that time. In fact it was Austin and I who drove Sobhita to Katunayake when he emplaned for Paris. During my stay in Paris he was a regular visitor to my home for ‘dane’. He too lived in a small flat near the Sorbonne and worked at the CNRS as a Buddhist scholar.
Also at the CNRS at that time was Jinadasa Liyanaratchi who was my contemporary at Peradeniya. As a Sinhala, Pali and French scholar Jinadasa was translating Sinhala manuscripts into French and English. Since both my wife and I were his contemporaries we would take a train to the suburbs to visit him and his family. He had married a French girl who was an admirer of all things oriental. The conversation among the ladies was mostly about the virtues of vegetarianism.
When my wife was the Charge de Affaires at the Embassy she hired Jinadasa as a translator in her office. All these intellectual Buddhist scholars had nothing to do with the religious rites and rituals that were badly missed by the growing number of Sinhala Buddhist expatriates in Paris and its suburbs. The Sinhala Buddhist expatriates hankered after all those Buddhist ceremonials that were familiar to them in their villages.
Given the culture shock of settling down in Paris the Buddhist temple went a long way in enriching their lives. Led by two of my close associates, Abeyratne, the embassy chauffeur who had been plucked out of his Kegalle village and transplanted in Paris by Tissa Wijeratne who was the Ambassador during Mrs. Bandaranaike’s regime, and Pitigala, a multitasking driver in the Saudi Embassy hailing from Matugama, an effort was made to find a building to house a Buddhist temple to cater to the pastoral needs of the local Buddhist community.
A house was found close to Le Bourgeot airport. The sponsors of the temple had also found a pleasant young priest from the deep south named Parawehera Chandraratna to come over and take residence in the makeshift temple [He is now the Mahanayake of the Malwatte chapter for France]. The first contributions to the temple fund were made by Ananda Guruge and me. But true to form the sponsors began to quarrel among themselves and the monk had to find refuge In a Thai Temple.
After some time other premises close by was donated by a French worshipper and the temple, now reborn as the International Centre for Buddhist studies, reopened with a wider following. When Ananda Guruge became the ambassador the Centre was given official recognition and today it is a popular meeting place for the expatriate Sinhala Buddhists and especially for their wives and children.
UNESCO and CNRS have been havens for Buddhist scholars and with Wesak being officially recognized by the UN, good relations have been established by the Buddhists with these international organizations. Every Wesak our embassy in Paris sponsors a ceremony at UNESCO headquarters which is well attended both by the Buddhists of Paris and the ambassadors of the Buddhist countries in France. Sinhala monks in their yellow robes are now seen wandering along the corridors of UNESCO. But none of them have beenable to match the erudition of Rahula and Sobhita.
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