Somadevi Pattini

 

photo by Sharni Jayewardene

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Today Somadevi Pattini Kannangara (nee Ranasinha) would have been 97 years old, had she not left this world, much too early, almost four decades ago.   It is difficult to picture what my mother might have looked like or been like  in her 90s… She was beautiful, both inside and out, she was clever, she was fun, she had impeccable taste and she had this great capacity to love.   

Her father, my grandfather, despite his very colonial orientation (he was Sir Arthur after all) gave his children very local names.  His eldest son, DKVB Ranasinha had the names Darshana Kumaru Vijaya Bahu, his younger daughter was Sita Rupawathie, and my mother, his second child born when he was GA Jaffna was Somadevi Pattini.  Goddess Pattini  or Kannaki Amma as she is known to Sri Lankan Hindu community, is venerated by both Buddhists and Hindus – but her feminine energy that made her at once a good wife and a vengeful one, and the respect she engenders,  has meant that few if any parents name their daughters Pattini.  My mother is the only Pattini I know and  possibly the only Pattini in all of Sri Lanka……

But, Somadevi Pattini was never vengeful like Kannaki, even though the patriarchal society to which she was born, constrained her reaching her potential and could have given her many reasons to be.  She was not permitted to go to University by her father and her exceptional looks overshadowed what was also a formidable intellect. She did not live up to the stereotype of a ‘wife’ -  domesticity was not a strength but a love of all things beautiful was and she poured that love into designing our home, which as circumstances had it she only lived in for the briefest time. She was an amazing mother, a friend who not just adored us, her two daughters, but also enveloped in that love, all our friends, boyfriends included, just because they were OUR friends.   She showered her energy into supporting women in the Lanka Mahila Samiti, travelling to different parts of the island and speaking with women in the local samitis in her not very fluent Sinhala.  They loved her.  I believe she also revelled in learning skills like formulating budgets (not ever quite trusting a calculator, checking the machine’s result using long multiplication or division) and typing funding proposals on her little olivetti typewriter. My father once told me that someone had warned him that he was marrying the naughtiest girl in Ladies College and she carried that naughtiness into motherhood. 

my mother (in slacks) playing hopscotch with me while  sister, Sita, looks on

She was game to play hopscotch, ride our bike (“half a century on a bicycle” we chanted rather wickedly) , to take a trip with us in the local CTB bus, have a clever riposte to the comments of the old  ladies at the Maradana Methodist Church, and giggle hopelessly as she shared a joke or a particular funny memory.  She encouraged us to follow our dreams.. Thirty plus years since she left this world, and I miss her still. 

I learned all about the Goddess Kannaki-Pattini through the work of my friends Malathi de Alwis, and  Sharni Jayewardene  who together researched  and photographed the ways in which the goddess was invoked in both Buddhist and Hindu rituals around the country and presented their work in a beautiful photodocumentary.  I believe my mother had much of the feminist strength of the goddess she was named after, though it manifested in a very different way.

Malathi passed away three days ago, about the same age as my mother was when she died. And I would like to pay tribute to both Malathi and my mother by sharing once more  Mala’s and Sharni’s work on invoking the goddess.