Remebering Rusiru
A Tribute To a Teacher
By Justin Agluba
He was a large, rotund man behind the frosted glass. He wore a three-piece suit and a fedora on a hot school day. He stood patiently before the lectern while students trickled in. Mozart’s piano concerto played from the mounted speakers. He leaned into the microphone on the left side of the room and sounded his baritone: “Welcome, class.” That is how I remember Rusiru from our Thursday’s first class.
On other days, he panted as he hurried to our room from another lecture, traipsing the hallways, toting two sheaves of bond paper, the marked essays from his two classes. “I’m not the most athletic person, you see,” he said teasingly, heaving enormous breaths after lumbering away from the closing elevator door. He sprinted to our room from the other side of Symonds Street. He died on a Sunday.
When the long sunny days of March percolate, the subject of Rusiru swelling in my head, I think of him in the coffin’s glass, of how briefly our lives had overlapped, of how a fire that ignited others would burn so brightly and be smothered in a sudden. I lost a father and friend.
I kept the pain to myself for the long black months he vanished, and only once did I speak my total grief to a lone cypress on the slopes of Maungarei, weeping on its trunk with only the wire-vines, lilies, and matted grass to mourn beside. He could have taught me more of life, of music, and of art, kneading my head against the coarse bark. I learned of his death on a Thursday.
I searched for him online. His University of Auckland profile page had been erased, as if he had never existed. I reached out to his parents, hoping that by offering my sympathies to those who knew him first, I might begin to make sense of the void he had left behind.
He was my tutor in English; on Thursdays and Fridays, we met. I was the class representative. After that first meeting, he gestured with his hand (outside) and postured behind a sliding glass door. There, we were formally introduced. Shaking my hand, he said, “Glad you’re in my class. You’re bold to volunteer. Admirable quality. I looked you up online.”
We immediately became friends. I would solicit feedback from the class and pass it on to him. Each class was filled with the wonder and animation that students often praised. Their reviews, as recorded in my surveys, include: “I like the tutor, his teaching method, engaging materials; active class participation; Not too embarrassing to speak up; Timely and constructive feedback; I can learn English deeply.” He was always there, prompt and eager, instantly melting into the role of a mentor.
“You write like Charles Dickens,” he told me. “That is unacceptable. Reduce your adjectives and adverbs,” he admonished. “Let nouns and verbs speak. Avoid archaic words.”
Some weeks later, he told me, he saw the drive in me. “I lost that after coming to NZ,” he said. And then: “If you choose academia, I am sure you will do much better than I… you will write more papers… You are a star.”
On a Monday, when my classmates clamoured for his lecture slides after our Friday meetings, he refused. “No,” he said. “It is how I encourage them to attend. Writing is a practical skill… They must listen and take notes. That is training for life.” He viewed learning as a slow, physical process. “We cannot walk straight,” he would say. “We crawl, toddle, then learn to walk properly.” While some chafed at his methods, I found his rigorous approach rarely appreciated by those seeking a shorter path. His reason was, “I just want you guys to be confident as writers.”
Months before his death, Rusiru uploaded a video centred on Joseph Conrad. It stressed that if the novelist could learn English in his twenties and reach such heights, his students could do the same. Rusiru’s father reflected this about him, stating that Rusiru maintained, “True success comes from perseverance and honesty.”
He spoke Sinhalese and French but devoted himself most zealously to English, professing his Anglophilia openly while dressing as an Oxbridge don for lectures. “At breakfast,” he told me, sitting on a blue-upholstered banquette, “my taste is Full English: eggs, beans, bacon and blood pudding…”
“We were Silva,” he told me one time. The family once bore the Portuguese surname of Ceylon, but they had long since abandoned it for their native appellation. “My mom uses hers. Mendis... I wish my grandparents had kept [Silva]… Their names were all English.”
By the time we met, he had amassed several degrees: a BA in English Literature from Kelaniya, a Bachelor of Laws from London, a CELTA certificate from Cambridge, a Master’s in TESOL from Exeter with the Dean’s Commendation, and a Higher Diploma in French. He had published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at numerous symposia. But he never mentioned any of these in class.
On a Tuesday in Sri Lanka, Rusiru Kalpagee was born. His mother, Priyanthi, had been admitted two days earlier. But the labour was delayed. At 5 pm, the attending nurse urged his father, Chitrasena, to find the doctor immediately.
He ran through the hospital quarters, breathless and terrified, until he found the surgeon’s wife (herself a doctor). The obstetrician looked to his wife, assessed the situation, and told Chitrasena, “She is fine, we just need to do a Cesarean section.” She went under the knife.
By nightfall, Chitrasena paced the halls, the outer breeze blew in, and the smell of alcohol and bleach permeated the air. Obscured behind the leaden clouds, a sliver of waxing moon. I pictured him running to the delivery room the moment the surgeon emerged. He shook Chitrasena’s hand and said, “Congratulations! It’s a boy.” A nurse followed, cradling the newborn. The child’s first cry rang through the ward at 8:37 in the evening.
He was their only child.
Rusiru would grow up a curious, effervescent child among the fronds of tall coconuts and areca palms, the low red brambles, and the high canopies of mangoes and rambutan. Their house, white walls and fluted columns; balustrades of mahogany and oxblood doors; gabled roofs of clay Calicut tiles.
His father told me, “Our home was a beautiful and peaceful place, and it shaped much of his early life. From the upper floor of the house, we could clearly see Sri Pada (Adam’s Peak) on calm, clear mornings. At night, the ring of lights that surrounds the mountain during the pilgrimage season was also visible.”
In the vicinity, along the banks of the Kalu Ganga, an Edwardian manor proudly stands: the Richmond Castle, built by a certain Mudaliar, Don Arthur de Silva. He later bequeathed his stately house as a shelter and school for destitute children.
Rusiru attended two rival schools: Ananda and Nalanda College, the pinnacle of Buddhist secondary education in Colombo, producing many prime ministers, presidents, military commanders, titans of industry, and a NASA physicist who tinkered with the rovers on Mars.
From what his father has told me, he never dropped below second in his class. “Whatever he did, he always gave his best.” He laments, “Now all that remains are those beautiful memories. Only Memories.”
He performed Kandyan folk dances in Nalanda College. His father showed photos of him in ornate headdress, evocative hand signs and percussive footwork, just before Ves Mangalya, a sacred tradition in the southern lowlands. He rehearses Saramba under the shades of the green jak trees, the temple bells tolling from a distance, his bare feet tracing the old patterns on cool stone floors as drumbeats sound across the compound.
“One reason I became a teacher is the space it allows me to be creative and original… I usually get very creative and add my own things to my teaching. But in admin things, I usually and almost always follow protocol.”
He always sat in the front row. His teachers japed that he “sounded like a mad professor” because he asked too many questions. “But I was a nice child,” Rusiru told me, “they all loved me.”
His father recounts: “A very important part of his childhood was the time he spent with his grandmother (his father’s mother). Whenever his mother and I went to work, he stayed with her. The two of them had an exceptionally close and loving relationship, and he always treated her with great respect. She passed away in August 2008, at a time when Rusiru had just completed the second year of his first degree.”
He had grown up in a Buddhist household, but over the years, he had found his way to Christianity. His parents did not share this faith, but they did not oppose it either. “Only God and our Lady are there for me,” Rusiru once wrote.
At 11, he walked through the doors of the British Council in Colombo and never really left, first as a student, then as a teacher (and IELTS examiner), returning to the same institution at every stage of his career. “He was drawn to everything related to the British Council,” his father said.
Apart from British culture and cuisine, his main hobby was reading, stacking Shakespeare beside Milton, Faulkner beside Joyce, and Dickinson beside them all. “Reading and collecting books was one of his greatest pleasures,” said Chitrasena. At the University of Kelaniya, the broader English department had a long tradition of scholarship in Victorian and European literature, including Balzac, Chekhov, Conrad, and Flaubert. Rusiru explored the modernists in his undergrad before decisively pivoting toward applied linguistics and the science of teaching. He never lost sight of this lodestar.
His private hours were filled with immersive sessions on enthralling arias, the stirring sonatas and rhymes, along with deep conversations about the secrets of immortal sonnets, the philosophy of language, and the marrowed bones of the vast English corpus. He covered classical Sinhalese folk songs in soulful vibrato. Dedicating every bit of his waking life to the service of knowledge and the creative arts.
Wednesdays were the days I picture him in full stride, in his grey herringbone attire. “I would shop at this and that, but there’s rarely anything for my size.” He carried himself with sartorial grace, but finding clothes that fit was a perennial ordeal. He once messaged me about Dress Smart in Onehunga, sharing where Johnny Bigg’s had given him a 70 percent discount. “They have good plus-size clothes,” he wrote, and then, in the same breath, mentioned Hallensteins’ expanded sweaters for that winter. I still shop there.
He told me he had been a barrister in London sometime in 2011. “I loved criminal law. I scored well in murder, manslaughter, theft, assault, battery and sexual offences.”
But before he could settle a year into legal practice, he resigned. “My first six months in a law firm were awful,” he said. The theatre of the Bar was never his first love: “Law was the fallback option,” he confessed. In a message bubble that felt candid, he said, “I don’t know much about NZ or Sri Lankan legal systems… even my dad blames me.”
His father later told me he had a “strong sense of fairness and justice,” but his true calling has always been teaching. What he wanted were the classrooms and chalk dust: “I wanted to join academia, become a professor all the time. I quit and decided to do a second degree in English literature, which was my lifelong passion.”
“I would have made a better barrister, yes,” Rusiru said, “but I made that choice.” So, he quit, returned to English, and won a Commonwealth Scholarship that took him to the University of Exeter for his Master of Education in TESOL.
Before any university would offer him a permanent post, he spent five years (from 2008 to 2013) as a freelance English language trainer, teaching whoever needed teaching, wherever the work was: the British Council, guest lectureships at the University of Colombo, and a World Bank-funded functional English programme. He pieced together a career from whatever was close at hand, in whatever niche was vacant. He was, in sum, a pedagogue entire.
When the University of Kelaniya finally appointed him as a permanent lecturer in the Department of English Language Teaching, he became the youngest member of that faculty. Dave Walker, his former colleague in Auckland, wrote to me with an image he carries. Rusiru would arrive a few minutes late to their weekly meetings because he had paused en route to help students. He would remove his hat as he entered, before diving into the discussion. “He always had the best interests of the students at heart,” Dave said.
His research interests crystallised around the questions that would define his working life: how teachers learn to teach, how technology changes that, and how the English language, with all its imperial baggage, can be taught as a practical, liberating tool rather than a monument to a foreign culture.
Where others found cause for pessimism, Rusiru sought to be pragmatic and adapt. He had ways of looking at the very things that made others uneasy (the rise of AI in our classrooms, for instance) and seeing not a threat, but a tool to be mastered. “Exploit the technology, but don’t be exploited yourself,” he said in one of our classes.
When his parents were quietly looking for a life partner for him. He resisted. “There is still time,” he said. “There is plenty of time.” They let it go. His mother, Priyanthi, found small receipts in his shirts. Each one read Chocolate Box, tucked into his breast pocket. He was 27 by then, back in Colombo, teaching at the British Council. The receipts kept coming, always a whole box, never just a bar. They wondered whether they were gifts for a girl, but neither said anything. They did not want to embarrass their boy.
On a holiday, they finally asked. Rusiru blushed and chortled, a familiar wide grin he makes in class. In his classes, he explained, he always awarded a box of chocolates to the first student who solved the problem correctly. After the bell, though, he would always divide the prize among his students. “You can’t really do that kind of thing at a university, can you?” he said, still smiling.
His students and colleagues at Colombo adored him for the same reason we did at Auckland. Dave described Rusiru as “undoubtedly popular in CLL and beyond, and a passionate professional.”
But not everyone welcomed him there. A handful of senior associates (a male and a female), perhaps bristled by the speed of his rise and the affection his students had given him, made his position untenable. The harassment, his father said, was continuous and relentless. He confided in me one Saturday, “Everyone at school called me ‘he’s so snobbish and pedantic’ because of how I talk, and I was absent-minded. I am all alone on the bus.”
He could have fought back; he had the training for it: the lawyerly instinct for righteous combat. But instead, he walked soundlessly away and looked for steadier ground abroad. “Rusiru valued integrity and patience. Even when he faced unfair treatment or professional challenges, he chose dignity and calmness rather than conflict,” his father said.
It was a senior academic, aware of what Rusiru had endured, who advised him to pursue a PhD rather than seek a transfer. In hindsight, Chitrasena reflects, it proved the better path. The University of Auckland had drawn him in, its vaunted halls and filigreed tower. His father would later write of universities that present themselves “through glossy brochures and glowing promises” like “heaven on earth.” Rusiru believed them. He had always trusted the transformative powers of the academe. And so, he left the teardrop of India, the araliya trees along the Kandy Road to Kelaniya, and boarded the flight south to Aotearoa.
In January 2020, Rusiru arrived in New Zealand to pursue a PhD in Applied Linguistics and TESOL at the University of Auckland. But then the world shut down. The pandemic disrupted his studies. His planned data-collection trip to Sri Lanka was cancelled when the island nation closed its borders. He spent his first year in Auckland unemployed, isolated, and depressed. But “things have changed since then,” he told me. “I’m getting better slowly. Mental health is so complex.”
He pushed on. In those years, Rusiru co-authored a study with Professor Chamindi Senaratne on how Sri Lankan student-teachers adapted to online English teaching practicums, the very mode of instruction that the crisis had forced upon them. The research, published in 2023, found that initial doubts about distance teaching ebb as unfamiliarity is addressed, students acclimatise, and their confidence improves.
He turned his own anxiety into wisdom that might help other teachers weather theirs. That same year, November, he presented at the ALANZ Symposium at the University of Auckland on what he called “flipped learning… during a period of fractured instruction.” How education endures even when daily life has halted. By 2024, he was in his final year of the PhD programme. As far as we knew, he was almost done.
It was a Friday, and Rusiru announced he was moving to Waikato College, where he had secured a permanent full-time role. He declared it in class, “This is our last meeting together, next week you’ll have a new teacher,” and I felt the room tilt slightly.
“But I’ll still mark your final essays, so don’t count me out yet,” he assured us. Privately, though, in our conference by the water cooler, he said, “I wish they had offered me a PTF post or something, I wouldn’t have left Auckland.”
As our final activity, he made us present at the lectern: “For once, you’ll be the teacher, and I’m your student.” We were to discuss and argue about the flensing of whales, the tryworks and blubber oils, the hunt for ambergris, and the ethics and crude logic of the trade.
But our last meeting was mundane, devoid of any send-off ceremony; the lecture had elapsed, and that was that. The opportunity for a group photo was snapped shut by the casual hurry of the hour. We moved on to our separate lives with no grand valediction. No final glance at a great man. I regret not taking pictures.
But he had already captured the moment on my behalf. “This is the photo I clicked during your presentation,” he sent later. I studied the image. I recognised my drab overalls, the drape of the midnight cardigan, and the glint of half-rimmed glasses. The person holding the exact space he had once occupied was me.
On the day he left, he shared, “Though you did not see me crying, I really did. I will miss you guys so dearly.”
We had spoken the day after, on May 4, he said, “I believe you will end up in academia.” On May 18, he wrote again: “Never think back if you want to pursue an academic path. You will flourish.”
His father recalls how Rusiru would extol his students’ abilities at home, championing their growth, affirming their promise and grit: “He believed strongly in encouraging young people and recognising their potential... He had a natural ability to recognise his students’ strengths and motivate them to pursue their ambitions.”
Even after his tenure as our tutor ended, he never truly let us go. He checked in on us, asking simply, “How is your teacher?” He felt responsible for us even when he did not have to, while asking nothing in return. “If the students are happy,” he wrote to me, “I would feel less guilty.”
In the weeks and months following Rusiru’s departure from Auckland, he regularly posted updates on his travels from Hamilton to the South Island. In Waikato, Rusiru was formally welcomed by the staff at a function held within the ribbed halls of the Pā. In the commemorative photos, he stands out in a deep petrol-blue blazer and plaid trousers, distinguishing him from the surrounding group. The beeches and the maples shed their leaves, like confetti of copper and rust, on the rain-soaked grass.
In Taitua Arboretum, Rusiru beheld the prehistoric pines and the colonnades of redwoods and poplars, while the limpid streams threaded their way through the understorey, a patchwork of neon-green moss and wet, dark earth. The passing fantails pealed their affable cheet cheet. One could almost smell, with eyes closed, the aroma of nature, the resinous scent of conifers, the organic tang of damp ferns, and hear the rhythmic heave of Rusiru’s breathing.
In the deep south, Rusiru held still against the jagged, glacial backdrop of Queenstown, donning his huge overcoat and tartan scarf, appearing small before the horizontal vastness of Lake Wakatipu and the snow-dusted Southern Alps. Later, at the foot of Stirling Falls in Milford Sound, he stood on the boat’s deck enveloped in the cold, aqueous spray of mistwater. Immovable and daring. A silhouette of permanence against the thunderous force of the geologic fiord.
He seemed unperturbed, jubilant even, at the zenith of his life and career. In a public post on LinkedIn, he looked back on the year from strength to strength: “2024 has been an incredible journey of growth, achievement, and gratitude.” In the last photographs he left, Rusiru projects an armour of vitality so impervious that even mortality itself dares not graze. They seem to depict the fragile stasis of which Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory: “Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”
Yet I failed to see, from these frozen frames, the sorrow he was under.
It was a Saturday, and I had reviewed the few final exchanges we had. He would message me about his struggles there: how the students were different, how teaching was “no longer a walk in the park.” One evening, he wrote: “This job is very difficult at the moment, Justin. I often feel like giving up, but I need to keep going. So, do pray for me.”
I told him to push through. Alongside his lectureship at Kelaniya, he served as a teacher in Colombo for a good many years; then, again, in Auckland. Surely, he could do it again in gentler Waikato.
“I wish I had a few students like you,” he replied. And then: “I am so happy I met you in my final term as a tutor at UoA.” I told him I hoped he’d come back to Auckland, that we’d see each other again on campus. He didn’t respond to that.
But he wrote, “I know your whole life is your academic pursuit. You are like me.” And then: “We don’t have a life outside our work. But do have a good time. Travel. Read good books. Enjoy good food. Otherwise, you will regret it when you grow old.”
That September, he called me one evening. But I missed it. He asked if I knew someone who tutored law students in statutory law for a friend’s daughter at a Wellington university. I replied to him later in brief sentences. That was the last time we ever spoke. I could’ve heard his voice, his sonorous baritone, one last time.
Since February 16, six weeks before he perished, Rusiru had been renting a downstairs room in a terraced house, about 20 minutes to Waikato College by bus. Before that, he had lived closer to the university; the move placed him farther from the campus grounds.
At work, his colleagues saw him as “passionate about his students” and put enormous pressure on himself “to make sure his students passed the course.” But most of the time, he kept the rest of himself private. His colleague, who runs the programme, described him as someone who was “not overly social, had no real close friends at work, because he was relatively new” to the workplace, and “struggled physically to walk distances around the University.”
She told the Coroner, “He had a lot of stresses in his life during the latter part of 2024.” He would disclose his low mood to another female colleague, questioning the purpose of it all. The programme head offered to arrange counselling, but he declined. Later, I learned he had serious obstacles with his studies at Auckland. His data collection, conducted remotely during the pandemic lockdowns, yielded unreliable results. He needed to redo the procedure he had done some four years ago, placing his entire thesis in peril. The delays forced him to find a new supervisor barely a month before his death. This hampered his PhD and compounded the encircling woes. Still, he pushed on, alone, as he did on the bus ride home.
He could’ve asked for help from the network of contacts he had amassed over the years, but for whatever reason, it seems he did not. None of us was close enough to see what was happening in those final weeks. With the support he received after he died, we could have come up with something. I guess he did not want to trouble anyone with his impediments. He wilfully gave most of himself to others, but left very little for himself.
On 20 March 2025, Rusiru submitted his latest student visa renewal to Immigration New Zealand—a routine process he had completed without incident every year since 2023. He held a permanent, full-time lecturing position at the University of Waikato College, earning $74,000 per annum, he said. He was a fifth-year PhD candidate at Auckland, near what he had believed was the culmination of a doctorate degree he had spent half a decade building. According to his father, his parents held funds on his behalf. Everything was in order, and everything had always been in order.
Eight days later, on March 28, he received a letter informing him that they needed evidence of sufficient funds for “maintenance and outward travel.” Dominic Forde, an Operations Director of Immigration NZ, told me it was “to request further information… to confirm that the funds were readily available.” The Coroner noted the evidence would not have been difficult to supply. But within the message, they said he could not work full-time on an interim Student Visa alone, unless he was under special conditions.
They gave him until April 4 to address the deficiencies, but his visa expires by March 29, six days prior. In his father’s account, Rusiru was shocked and devastated. He immediately responded to Immigration NZ on that Friday, explaining his employment and his parents’ financial support. But on the eve of his visa’s expiration, the weight of what that meant settled in.
Sunday came by. Rusiru, his father writes, was confronting an “unimaginable emotional distress” due to the letter and the prospect of losing his visa and his future. On the night of a Sunday, Rusiru passed away at almost 8 pm in Sri Lankan time. I heard from Dave that Rusiru succumbed to a medical condition “from which he could not recover.” On January 28 this year, the Coroner’s Court ruled it was a suicide. He was 36.
On April 1, three days after Rusiru died, Immigration NZ granted him an interim visa “to ensure he remained lawful while his visa application was being assessed.” But it was too late. That same day, the Department of Internal Affairs informed them of Rusiru’s passing. His response on March 28 was not declined but “withdrawn and cancelled before any assessment was completed.” No formal internal review of the application has been undertaken, Immigration NZ confirmed.
A couple of weeks later, I learned of his death. I was browsing the University of Waikato website, their creative writing programmes and prizes. I thought of my mentor in English. I thought of Rusiru. I reached out. But I waited for hours. He usually replied within minutes. It took almost a whole day. Probably busy, I thought. Later, I skimmed through his Instagram and then Facebook, his jolly pictures, the ones I had seen before. In one, he sat on a park bench, and in another, he was on a flat-bottomed boat punting on the Avon while the boatman, in Edwardian costume, glided the group through the pellucid waters of central Christchurch. Rusiru is in his element, living.
But then, that was it. His Facebook wall was lined with friends, relatives, and well-wishers commiserating with the bereaved family. Rusiru is in a Hawaiian shirt beside a large plush teddy bear, with the caption asking for donations: “Help Bring Rusiru Home to Sri Lanka.”
The Givealittle campaign, organised by his friend, Lahiru Gunasekara, raised $12,660 from 312 donors within 9 days to bring him home. His remains were repatriated on April 7. That same day, several teachers and PhD students attended a memorial lunch at the University of Auckland’s CLL Building. Dave described it to me as “very moving.” The mood was sombre, he said, but also celebratory. Several brief speeches paid fitting tribute. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t know in time. I could have delivered a eulogy fit for a Raja.
There was a tightening in my chest, and a knot in my conscience began to strain. It took me some days to fully process the impossible math of his demise. When he had been as lively as his pictures, he was gone like the fumes of incense on the funereal portrait. Had I previewed the months that ensued, I would have checked in more. I would have settled the debt of time we let slip away. I let some stranger’s plight be the last thing we ever discussed, and six months of silence followed. His remains were interred on 11 April in Kalutara, south of Colombo.
Rusiru left a two-page note describing the pressures Immigration New Zealand and the University of Auckland had placed on him.
But the Coroner found that neither Immigration NZ nor the University of Auckland could be held to blame. They followed their protocols, and that was that. On paper, he may be right in satisfying the letter of the law. He “cannot make an adverse comment” against the university “for imposing standards expected” of doctorate programmes, and is “uncertain what more Immigration NZ could have done.” But the rules, written for general cases, rarely accounted for the tormented Rusiru. He was buckling under the weight of isolation, mental and physical illness, a stalled degree, and a job in a city where he knew no one. He needed more help than these systems were built to provide.
The Coroner says Rusiru “could not work full time on his Student Visa alone.” But Immigration NZ’s own published rules state PhD students have “no limit on the hours you can work if you are enrolled in a doctoral degree (PhD)... at a New Zealand tertiary institution.”
Nevertheless, Immigration NZ had not approved his visa renewal by March 28, and his visa expired the next day. Rusiru, already isolated and depressed, had a week to respond formally, but the psychological toll of such a letter the day before expiry was catastrophic. He had to navigate a complicated life-altering task within a short timeframe, without legal counsel. Even as a trained lawyer, his multiple concerns were simply too much to bear.
As for the University of Auckland, nothing in the findings addresses what they knew about how Rusiru was struggling mentally, or whether the enrolling university has extended pastoral or psychiatric support to Rusiru at this crucial juncture. He alone braced against the silence and the storm.
Even so, Rusiru’s profile page on the University of Auckland website was removed after his death. No public acknowledgement was made. The University of Kelaniya published a full obituary in the national press. Auckland published nothing.
In my view, the Coroner’s report was inadequate. One of the principal roles of a sitting Coroner is to make recommendations that may reduce the chances of similar deaths occurring. The reasoning, placing the burden on Rusiru for not seeking professional immigration advice, is particularly problematic in this context.
Nobody contends that PhD candidates should not meet academic standards. The question is whether the University of Auckland met its duty under the Pastoral Care Code to support a student struggling with depression who had just lost his supervisor and moved to another city. Further, Immigration NZ has no published obligation to redirect applicants to a more appropriate visa category. These were structural gaps that the Coroner did not address.
His father lamented, “Because of the failures within the legal systems of certain institutions in New Zealand, I lost my only son… our child… our dreams and the future we built everything around. And with his passing, both New Zealand and Sri Lanka lost a remarkable educator—a guiding light who dedicated his life to shaping the futures of countless children.”
I managed to contact a former classmate, herself an international student, who was “overwhelmed” with her mental health and the accruing deadlines at that time. She told me, “I was struggling during my course with [Rusiru], and he helped me access resources.” Rusiru graciously extended the deadline for her and went out of his way to interact with her during our sessions. I noticed he kept an eye on her after that, recognising her promise, tracking her progress from the third table to our right. “She writes beautifully,” he told me one time. She completed the class with a First in Course award.
While writing this, news broke that New Zealand is to expand international students’ work rights. RNZ used a banner image capturing the pylon sign of the CLL Building, where Rusiru used to work. I stared at it for a long time, thinking of Rusiru again. The reforms are welcome, but they would not have saved Rusiru. What he needed was someone to guide him through the paperwork, to pick up the phone, to tell him it could be resolved. But the man who had given his students the very patience and consideration that went far beyond his duties had received little of either in the end. International students like him deserve better.
After his death, Chitrasena and Priyanthi gathered Rusiru’s collection of books. An assortment of English literature, language-teaching methodology, and classical and modern texts, valued at over one million Sri Lankan rupees. On 13 October 2025, in a ceremony attended by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kelaniya, they donated every volume to the Department of English Language Teaching and the university’s Main Library. The gift, the faculty noted, ensures “that generations of students and educators continue to benefit from Mr Rusiru’s passion for language and learning.”
One time, Rusiru revealed to me, speaking about his legal training in London: “One mistake I made was collecting too many books and articles I never read.” But I suppose his unread trove might find willing learners to leaf its pages once more. Nothing goes to waste; everything is simply transformed. Even in death, Rusiru gave fragments of his being to educate others.
His father mused, “When I look at the world today and observe how children behave, I often feel that my son was not just an ordinary human being. He carried a kind of purity and compassion that made him feel more like a gift from above—a divine presence.”
It is a reflection that echoes the English translation of another song from the film Patāchārā (1964), which Rusiru loved: In this world, joy and pain stand together like father and son—inseparable, never apart. For Chitrasena, the profound joy of his son’s life and the deep pain of his absence are now bound together forever.
His parents may have lost their only child, but there are hundreds of us, Rusiru’s children, reared in his teaching and shaped by his beliefs. We are all his legacy. On 3 February 2025, weeks before his death, Rusiru composed a poem titled The Fire and the Flood. It stands now as his final, defiant swansong:
I am a wildfire in the morning,
But a flood at night.
…
They love my fire when it warms them,
curse it when it rages,
They love my flood when it feeds them,
fear it when it swallows the streets.
I am too much and never enough…
…
I will burn and drown and shine.
I am not to be tamed and ashamed.
…
But still, I die to be born again
Like a river carving its own path,
A star that will not die quietly.
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