To those days my friend; from Trinity to Pera and Civil Service

Seyed Mohamed Lebbe Marikar (1939 – 2021), known as Ahmed to family and Mariks to friends, was a retired Sri Lankan civil servant and diplomat. A former Additional Secretary to President J. R. Jayewardene, and a respected scholar of Western Classics, he will be remembered for his inimitable personality; a remarkable ability to never take himself too seriously and relate to all generations and people from all walks of life through a quirky sense of humour. He did not believe that life was a rat race for survival and often quoted from a poem by William Henry Davies: “What is this life if, full of care,/ We have no time to stand and stare.” For such a high achiever he remained incredibly humble through life. He leaves behind sisters, Safiya, Zulaiha and Fareeda and brothers, Abu, Mohideed and Rahman.

We were classmates at Trinity College, contemporaries at Peradeniya University and colleagues in the Ceylon Civil Service. He was a childhood friend and his departure, as in the famous song of our youth “takes a piece of me with you’’.

We were neighbours living in Trincomalee Street in Kandy. My father who was an inveterate litigator would retain Ahamed’s father Proctor Marikar for his cases. During that time Kandy had three famous Muslim lawyers Marikar, Muhsin and Mustapha. Though they had luxurious residencies in the city they retained their links with their native villages nearby like Madawela, Talawinna and Akurana. I was in and out of the Marikar residence as in those days our Muslim school friends would take us to their homes for snacks and sugarlaced pink ‘Saruvaths’.

Ahamed was an outstanding scholar. Right from junior school he invariably won the class prize and many other prizes besides. In senior school he opted to study Latin and Greek much to the relief of our English teachers like Walter, Eliot and Burrows who found that many of us were taking the soft option of studying Botany instead, under the laid back Sinnatamby, who interspersed his teaching with exciting romps in the nearby Udawattekele to study flowers and plants with his long drawn out descriptions of stamens, calyx, cross pollination and the role of birds and bees.

Five of us – Ahamed, Jayantha Dhanapala, Nihal Perera, Ananda Wickremaratne and I entered Peradeniya University in 1957.We were lodged in different halls of residence on campus. Jayantha went to Jayatilleke and I to Arunachalam while the others were lodged in the cavernous Ramanathan Hall where Ahamed joined another Trinity classics scholar Mithra Jacob who had entered Peradeniya the year before. In Peradeniya Ahamed chose to read Western Classics and everyone knew that he was well on his way to a first class in the final examination.

He headed the first classes of the1961 graduands and was eligible for a scholarship to Oxford. But he preferred to sit for the CCS examination. We all travelled down to Colombo for the exam and were not surprised when he easily topped our batch and sailed into the CCS which was in its death throes. I came second in the list and Trinity College, I am told, celebrated the news with a special assembly. Orloff the principal, himself an ex-CCS, wrote to us conveying the good wishes of the school and staff.

Once in the public service Ahamed preferred to serve in Colombo offices because he could plan to spend most weekends in Kandy. He was a much sought after Assistant Secretary of major ministries and later was an Additional Secretary in the President’s Office. He was a favourite of President J.R. Jayewardene who enjoyed his Latin epigrams and ‘cheeky’ retorts. The bulk of administrative work in the President’s Office fell on the senior officials as the Secretary had to attend to political and personal affairs of his boss.

Following his interest in Latin, Ahamed spent a few years in our embassy in Rome. He never sought to exploit his position in the embassy and I found that he would commute to work by public transport. Once after a meeting in Slovenia, in the then Yugoslavia, I spent a few days with him in Rome. I rued the day when he refused official transport because on my way to the embassy in a bus my wallet was stolen. He told me later that this seemed to be a regular occurrence in Rome. I told him that his information came to me too late.

After retirement he moved back to Kandy. He taught Latin and Greek as a visiting lecturer at Peradeniya and at Trinity College. He continued with our old practice of walking in the city - around the lake. He was a man who had silently and modestly made an enormous contribution to the country from ‘behind the scenes’. He was a brilliant scholar and an exemplary public servant. He was a great son of Kandy - that beautiful and cosmopolitan city in which all races, religions, classes and castes lived in harmony and friendship.

We will remember SML (Ahamed) Marikkar and cherish his memory.