He would have been 101 today.

I once knew the master of yarns. His stories entertained us, and scared us as children. For a few days we would look under our camp cots before we went to bed. They next day, however, we would plead for more and he would spin another just like that. He was my father. Born storyteller, he. A troubadour sans guitar who taught me the power of story. Today, which would have been his 101st birthday.

A public school teacher, He taught History, Latin, and English Lit and potentially impacted thousands of students in Sri Lanka. They, like me, had stories to tell about him. Some wrote to me about them on his passing 15 years ago. My cousins, today recounted a few of them. Like the time he would ask them a riddle narrating the first few lines of a strange poem about a motor bus with a Latin phrases (such as “Indicat Motorem Bum”). They had no clue what it meant. Neither did I growing up. I looked it up and Motor Bus turns out to be a poem by an Oxford scholar who made puns out of Latin declensions, probably to make a point of the Latin roots of English. Listen to it here. Was that Dadda’s sneaky way of getting us to pay more attention to the English language we took for granted?

He left me a notebook with my name on the inside page, above which was a quote, “We must row with the oars we have.” This was a time when there were no blank journals, so he used the pages of a 1962 diary. It was filled with quotes like the ones below, and others by George Elliot, Nehru, Aristotle, and from Ecclesiastes.

In a post wrote last year, I explained how so many sat in his ‘class’ — neighbors, nieces and nephews, Catholic and Buddhist priests, and even vendors who had heard of the iskola-mahathaya down the road. They came to him for help with essays, debates, and job applications. I didn’t know until today that he had tutored a cousin’s fiancé in O’Level Sinhala, another on E.M. Forster’s Passage to India, and Shakespeare’s Othello; another won a world history prize with his tutoring. There are probably hundreds more my brother and I will never know about.

Joe Fernando was more than a teacher. A larger-than-life character who played Tennis, was a member of the Cursillo movement, and much, much more. I don’t think he realized what a legacy he left behind. Or how the stories he infected us with live on. Happy Birthday, Dadda.