The car in the driveway turned off its blinding headlights and in the early morning light, Nala could see the man help another older man out. It was indeed the former Prime Minister of Ceylon, John Kotelawala, Ceylon’s third Prime Minister: the nephew of the country’s first Prime Minister, DS Senanayake, and cousin to the country’s second, Dudley Senanayake. None of them had any blood relationship with the current Prime Minister, SWRD Bandaranaike, that they would acknowledge.

Rajan opened the gate quickly and helped the Prime Minister and his driver into the house. As Nala liked to tell it, Rajan had already saved the Prime Minister’s life once, years before, when he was suffering from an unstoppable and potentially fatal nosebleed. Despite the ministrations of a team of doctors, ayurvedic physicians, astrologers, and a host of bhikkus, Kotelawala had bled for days. He was eventually brought to Colombo’s youngest and finest general surgeon, Rajan, who dismissed his entourage. Using only his attractive and excited young wife as his nurse, he cauterised the Prime Minister’s nose, stopped the bleeding, saved him from certain death and raised Nala’s social standing in Colombo considerably.

Of course, Rajan’s cousins up north felt he should have plunged the cauterising iron into the Prime Minister’s eye or a vital organ—that might have stopped Kotelawala from betraying the Tamil people. At the last election he had caved in to pressure from Bandaranaike’s then opposition party and adopted his own Sinhala Only policy. He had lost the election anyway.

Nala laughed at Rajan’s typical rejoinder to his cousins—firstly, he said, assassinating anyone could only lead to bloody retribution; secondly, assassinating the only politician who could marginally pass for a moderate, instead of a raving, frothing-at-the-mouth Sinhala nationalist, was simply stupid; and thirdly, assassination as a surgical technique was a violation of his Hippocratic oath and bad for future business.

And so when Sir John Lionel Kotelawala was ushered once more into Rajan’s surgery, he greeted him as kindly and politely as he would any other patient. Only this patient had recently represented Ceylon at the United Nations and now had a small cockroach stuck in his ear.

On the road back from Kandy to Colombo, Kotelawala had stopped at a rest house for tea and a short nap. While sleeping, a cockroach had flown into his ear and become trapped in the esteemed canal, somewhere between the outer ear and the tympanic membrane. Unnerved and off-balance, Kotelawala had insisted that his driver take him to Dr Rajan immediately.

Months later, Rajan received his second letter of thanks from Kotelawala, handwritten on official paper, emblazoned with the family-crest. Rajan threw the letter away, saying the family-crest may as well be adopted as the official state-crest; leadership in Ceylon was more a dynastic struggle than a democratic process.