The words below were delivered yesterday over Mahen’s remains. There was no PA and quite a bit of unavoidable noise. People told me later they hadn’t been able to hear me properly, and many asked for a printed copy of what I had said. This blog post is for them.The temptation to add here to what I said there has been strong – there’s so much more that I could say – but I’ve avoided it.
Though it feels like I’ve known Mahen all my life, we weren’t boyhood friends. I was in my early twenties when we met; he, of course, was younger. He always will be, now.
I remember our first meeting well. It was in 1982, at the Post Horn Gallop cast party – or, to be more accurate, on the street outside, which happened to be Initium Road, Dehiwela. Mahen hadn’t been invited to the party, but he had an interest in a young lady who was. Being Mahen, he was too shy to steam in anywhere without an invitation, so he waited outside in the hope of catching a glimpse of the adored object. He was, I think I should say, about eighteen at the time.
I was playing guitar at the party. My friend Shiraz Rustomjee was overly impressed by my plunking, so he grabbed me and insisted that I play something for his music-loving buddy who was waiting outside. I followed him out through the front gate with my guitar – and there was Mahen, all alone, perched on the bonnet of somebody else’s car and smoking a cigarette.
I strummed a few chords and asked him inside, though it wasn’t my party. He declined, and would not be persuaded. I had the impression of someone who was a loner, a bit of a maverick – someone who didn’t consider himself respectable enough for polite society. In all the years I knew him, that impression never really left me. I don’t think it ever left him, either, for all that he ended up with a staggering number of friends and professional collaborators and a considerable artistic reputation. There was always something about Mahen that wouldn’t fit the conventional template, however hard he tried to make himself conform.
Mahen, you see, had a difficult youth. His father Maurice, a military officer and a stern disciplinarian, died while he was still a young child, and his mother Carmen had to work very hard, for many years, to care and provide for him and his sister and brothers. His teenage years were wayward – he was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, briefly fell victim, as many Colombo kids from good families did around that time, to drugs, and when he cleaned up for good it was by letting himself be imprisoned in a gaol-like rehab camp run military-style by a ferocious Buddhist monk – an experience that scarred him, I think, more deeply than the drugs did. All this was before I met him; they were things he told me about later.
We didn’t become close friends immediately. It wasn’t till 1984, when he was working with his sister Sharmini, Dominic Sansoni and Tilak Conrad at Babylon, that I began to see more of him – and discovered what an outstanding artist and designer he was. His talent with the airbrush, in particular, was matchless; he remains to this day the finest artist in that medium that Lanka has ever produced.
Our first professional collaboration was in 1988, on a couple of jobs for Access Graphics, where he was working at the time; it was the start of a creative partnership that lasted, intermittently, for the rest of his life. When I went off to Singapore in 1991 I gave him my motorbike; that finally ended its days impounded at Buttala police station, but that wasn’t Mahen’s fault. It’s a long story, though, and not quite suitable for a family audience.
The next time I saw Mahen was just after dawn one morning in Changi, Singapore, where I was living. He wasn’t expected, so it was a bit of a shock to see him at the front door. He told me he’d had to leave Lanka in a hurry after painting a cover for an Asiaweek feature that our president at the time didn’t like. Cast out again, you see. The magazine, very decently, offered him a job at their head office in Hong Kong. He had to change planes in Singapore to get there, though, and had a few hours between flights – hence the unannounced early-morning visit.
Hong Kong, I think, is where Mahen properly grew up. It’s where he met his first wife, Nadia, and really began making a professional name for himself. Unfortunately I can’t tell you much about those years; I finished with Singapore fairly soon and returned to Lanka; he stayed in Hong Kong for a good long while, living on an outlying island and catching the ferry to work on the mainland every weekday morning. He later moved to Singapore to work with a music, art and fashion magazine called M3, of which he was chief art director. You can buy used copies of M3, with Mahen’s covers on them, on eBay for fifty dollars or more these days. Fifty US, that is.
Later he started his own design agency in Singapore, MCN. I used to visit the so-called Lion City on and off in those days, so we reconnected often. Now and then MCN would ask me to do some work for them, but even when I was just passing through I often stayed with him and Nadia at their lovely bungalow out on Seletar Air Base. Singapore showed Mahen to me in a very different frame: devoted father – Leah was just a baby then – family man, successful entrepreneur-manager: a man with dependants, and sizeable responsibilities that he discharged conscientiously without ever losing an iota of his love of a good time. He was also painting away, using an old freight container in the garden as his studio. He had already found the subject – Ganesh, the god of beginnings and endings – that he would devote himself to, artistically speaking, for the rest of his life.
I was impressed, even a little envious. But in the midst of all these changes, there was so much about my friend that remained the same. And this, I must tell you, was marvellous. Despite his worldly success, Mahen remained as humble and self-effacing as he had been the day I met him on Initium Road. He was, of course, fully aware of the excellence of his talent and the superiority of his craft, but neither these, nor the success he was enjoying with them, had turned his head in the least. He had not lost his sense of humour, nor his love for his friends, which was so much at odds with his shyness. He hated big parties and showy events, preferring to have his friends about him in small, familiar circles. His professional image, too, was low-key: MCN was small but it had big, big clients, and it ran like clockwork. When he offered me a full-time job there in late 2003 I jumped at it, abandoning a project in Colombo that was just coming to fruition – and incurring the wrath of one or two of you who are present here today – to do so.
My time at MCN was wonderful but brief; I returned to Colombo just after the Presidential election of 2005 – not quite willingly, but it was a good thing I did, because I was here when, not long afterwards, Mahen found himself cast out – yes, again – from his adopted homeland and was obliged to return to Lanka, looking for things to do and people to reconnect with. He joined Q&E Advertising, where I was creative director at the time; but the urge to be his own man – another thing that never changed about him – was too strong. He set up a new iteration of MCN, working out of his house in Nawala, and I did a great deal of work with him, though only as a freelance. By then I had known for years how good he was, but the reminder was exhilarating; he remains by far the best art director I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a few legends. People who observed us at our craft would be amazed at how fast we came up with stuff, how we kept finishing each other’s doodles and sentences, how much we laughed at ourselves while doing it. It was a high, and no mistake – one I shall never enjoy again.
We were closest, perhaps, in the last years of his life, after he met and married Rachel, and Manu came along. We’d both seen a lot of ups and downs by then, and understood each other, perhaps, better than ever. He remained, to the very last, the same kindly, easygoing, hospitable man he had always been – slow to anger, slow to judge and mild in his judgements, ever quick with ideas and impressions, innately musical yet too shy to sing a note – though he had, in fact, a beautiful singing voice. For all his sense of himself as a maverick and a rebel, his ethics and style were of the oldest and most courtly variety, reflecting his lifelong horror of anything excessive, ostentatious or vulgar.
Courtesy, privacy and a sense of what is fitting also showed in the way he handled his illness. When he received his diagnosis he came over, on his own, to tell Ruveka and me about it. He said he didn’t care to rot away in some hospital but would die with dignity – what little dignity death leaves us at the end – in his own bed. Apart from an absolutely essential course of radiotherapy at one point, he refused all but palliative and analgesic care. He continued to be as sociable and welcoming as ever, seeing his friends in little groups as was his habit. He and I spent some happy hours together in the months after his diagnosis. They were short months, though; the doctors had given him a year to eighteen months, but in the end, he got just six.
I was less brave than he. Sharmini called last Thursday and told me he was fading; but cowardice disguised as a misplaced sense of responsibility made me complete some chores before I drove over, and I reached his front door at just about the moment he took his final leave.
Since then, I’ve been trying very hard not to think, though this last duty that he has laid upon me has forced me to confront the thoughts I had been hiding from. These words are the result.
MAHEN CHANMUGAM
23 vii 1964–30 x 2025
‘My life has been unusually full of beginnings and endings:
good ones that ended badly, bad ones that ended well.’
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