Missing a perfect host to all her friends

In March this year, we lost our beloved relative and planter’s wife Dayani Mathavan a close relative of Dr Amal Karunaratna, a well-respected resident of Kandy. 

Her husband Aru belongs to a distinguished lineage of highland planters primarily tea, but also coconut, rubber and cardamom. 

Regarded as very attractive in her youth with a fair complexion, she made a perfect union between Sinhalese and Tamil culture through her long and successful marriage, assisting her husband as a senior superintendent, managing estates, bungalows and for the well-being of directors of foreign firms who employed estate workers and their families.

She was a fine cook and gardener and knew how to get the very best from all her loyal servants, workers and assistants and loved engaging in almsgivings and uniting people from a diversity of backgrounds – not least her growing family. 

She and her siblings came from a Burger pedigree but now leave only her younger sister Shanthimala, and a brother from her family, who she was close to.  

For a considerable period, Dayani was well-known in estate circles. Aru was and still is a successful planter, he and his father had both been linked to the careers of many planters including an association with the founders of Dilmah Tea. 

She was the perfect host to all her friends, associates and relatives. One of us, Rajith made a point of spending time with her and her family for wildlife research including a PhD on squirrels. 

We, her relations remember wonderful times in amazing estates that she helped maintain – Wavendon, Rappahannock, and Monte Christo with Aru’s family originally centred around Medetenne Estate. 

She was always so welcoming and never stopped begging us to visit her and enjoy her hospitality. These estates produced not just tea, but fruit and veg, eggs and jaggery. Food and its production came naturally to her.

Dayani was an accomplished and kind communicator – preserving memories for us. We will miss her fond recollections about all our lives and the lives of our parents and grandparents. She had so many more memories and inspirations, now lost to us.

She had perfected the best of Sinhalese and Tamil cooking including giddily/thosai and vade and never tired of running some of her kitchens at an industrial scale. 

She was very spiritual and engaged in almsgivings to monks and kovils – with the help of her sister, Shanti-Mala – also a good cook. Although affected by declining health, Dayani continued to be a planter’s wife to the very end, never retiring from Aru’s maintenance or supervision of several estates at a time – guiding her sons who have also grown to be successful planters. She left us quite suddenly of a heart attack and still looked almost in the bloom of her youth.

Her smile, gracious speech, gratitude for past relationships, memories, cooking, hospitality, resilience, fighting spirit and capacity to bring huge numbers of people together will be missed by ourselves and many others.

We’re sure that through her merit, her path through samsara will be happy. She also leaves behind a wonderful family with much promise and possibilities for both our natural environment and the plantations sector that have maintained and will help maintain the economy of the country. 

Taking this time to thank her for all she has done for us and cherish those memories – We wish her husband Aru, Daughter Niroshini and sons Kaushal and Asela and their families to accrue merit through the power of the good she has done. 
-Dr Rajith Dissanayake and loved ones