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BOOKS
Evil
Under the Sun
Two Sri
Lankan storytellers in the twilight zone of existence
By
Mitali
Saran
Mirage
By Bandula Chandraratna
Phoenix
Pages: 214
Price: Rs 250
In the garden
secretly
By Jean
Arasanayagam
Penguin
Pages: 153
Price: Rs 200
The
fine sand that blows into a shanty town hut in the first paragraph of
Bandula Chandraratna's novel Mirage settles upon the contours of
a world as far removed from the lush green of Chandraratna's native Sri
Lanka as possible. With it comes the heat, grit and torpor of the desert
in a tale that carries the flavour of a fable.
Sayeed is
a migrant worker employed as a hospital porter, in an undefined Arab kingdom
peopled by Egyptians, Yemenis and Pakistanis. The rhythms of life are
punctuated by conversations about the religious police and expostulations
about "this burning hell-hole". Sayeed goes about his business
without much question or much happiness. At 40-plus, with broken teeth
and no prospects, he indulges only in the odd daydream about being married
and well-off.
Life takes
a hopeful turn on a visit to his village home: a bride has been found
for him. The woman in question is a widow and a mother of one, whose family
is asking an exorbitant sum; with nothing to offer but a hut made of wooden
boxes salvaged from a rubbish dump, Sayeed is in no position to be choosy.
Latifa and
her daughter thus come to live in Sayeed's urban shanty town. The shock
of city life after the relative comfort of the village tests Latifa considerably,
but she and her husband settle into a modicum of happiness. Too soon,
however, their lives are shattered by suspicion and social pressure in
its most evil form. The minute detail of the narrative belies its weight
until the last pages; to say more would be to say too much.
With a style
ruthlessly spare yet meticulously descriptive, Chandraratna renders the
slightly discordant mood of a sensibility that is only partly self-aware.
When personal interests clash with the public, the shockwaves are that
much more dramatic. Were it not that the novel is dismally top-heavy and
therefore leaves a sense of dissatisfaction in the closing, Mirage might
have been compared to such chilling, jewelled stories as Shirley Jackson's
The Lottery.
Jean Arasanayagam's
seven short stories are a worthy addition to any reading list. In the
Garden Secretly and Other stories is a series of ruminations on division,
desecration, and the weight of history. As a Sri Lankan born to a Dutch
Burgher family and married to a Tamil, Arasanayagam is particularly attuned
to the natural hybridity of individuals, cultures and nations, and to
the wastage of life in the name of order. "I was always searching
for that sanctuary of perfect peace which I could never find," she
writes in "Sanctuary". "I knew that would not happen easily.
There was evil to be faced and destroyed."
Evil wears
many complex faces: the depredations of war in the title story; bloody
revolution in "Search My Mind"; Tamil-Sinhala ethnic hostility
in "Quail's Nest"; the degradation of forest into battlefield
in "Sanctuary"; physical, emotional, and spiritual severance
in "The Crossing"; a boundary between neighbours in "The
Wall"; and the ravages of disinheritance in "Samsara".
Arasanayagam
is as skilled at bringing genial, small-town speculation to life in a
story like "The Wall" as she is at making a contemplative internal
piece like "The Crossing" relevant to any reader from any cultural
context. And though she focuses on all that's wrong with the world, the
things that are right about it are felt as much, by their fragility or
absence.
The thread
unifying the collection could perhaps be identified as the sense of dislocation
and discomfort that accompanies sudden, forced confrontation with a larger
context and history. All the characters, whether they happen to be soldiers
or schoolteachers or mothers or revolutionaries, struggle to make sense
of their lives and themselves in the light of a new awareness, brought
on by an abandoned, war-torn village, or the memory of a conversation,
or a rediscovery of faith.
Arasanayagam
writes thoughtfully and with enormous command, occasionally producing
shades of Flannery O'Connor. Her ability to make the familiar strange,
and the strange familiar, raises the quality of her stories to a level
of eminent re-readability. Phrases, characters and structures linger long
after the reading. In a collection dedicated to the examination of hatred
and strife, she steers clear of both sentimentality and cynicism.
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