Love, loss and remembrance

Author: Yasmine Gooneratne

Title: The Sweet and Simple Kind

Publisher: Perera Hussein Publishing House

by Sharanya Jayawickrama

Set in Ceylon in the transformative moments immediately before and after Independence in 1948, Yasmine Gooneratne's novel The Sweet and Simple Kind, recently short-listed for the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, presents a narrative trajectory of love, loss and remembrance.

A novel divided into four parts, it presents us with the intertwined stories of Latha and Tsunami Wijesinha, distant cousins and close childhood friends, as they move through formative periods in their lives.

To her various aunts and to the mothers of prospective husbands, Latha appears winningly 'sweet and simple', yet she possesses a clear intellect, a maturity of sense and a keen love of English literature (revelling in particular, like the author, in a partiality to Jane Austen novels).

In some ways, the novel reads as homage to Austen, with its female-centred and socially embedded narrative; like Austen's books, it ends with marriage, yet not before considering what marriage means for intellectually and emotionally independent women, and for inter-community relations in the newly independent island.

It is Latha who provides the organising consciousness of the novel, for it is she who presciently grasps the meaning of her cousin's unusual name, although she is as yet unsure whether Tsunami is 'an earthquake waiting to happen' or 'the one the earthquake hits' (p.53). With this play on names, Gooneratne ties the gentler world of 1950s and 1960s Ceylon to the ruptures of the present day.

Gooneratne writes this novel in an unhurried style, which effectively contributes to the gradual construction of the world of the novel through an accumulation of details and characters, so that a listing of dishes feasted upon at Tsunami's home at Lucas Falls, or a description of everyday life at Peradeniya University adds to the accrued atmosphere of lived moments in time.

The pace of the narrative also reflects the pace of memory as it documents the world of 'a patrician elite in which old money and privilege had frequently joined forces with political power' (p.195). The first part of the novel is set in the main at Lucas Falls, the home of the wealthier branch of the Wijesinha family.

Tsunami's father Rowland Wijesinha had been the A.D.C. in the time of the adulterous British Governor Millbanke, until the mysterious death of Lady Millbanke brings an end to this particular episode of colonial habitation.

The estate is bought by a young British planter whose fortunes thrive on tea cultivation until he eventually sells the property to a wealthy Sinhalese mudaliyar, from whom the present Wijesinha clan descend.

The ghost of Lady Millbanke is said to haunt particular corridors of the historic house, her spectral presence neatly tying together colonial deceit with the intrigues of Independence and the treachery of the post-colonial era.

Lucas Falls, a fallen paradise within which the stories of a family register the traces of colonial history and prefigure the neo-colonial future, is for Latha a life lived in displacement: she spends there the formative moments of her childhood, away from her own genial father and conservative mother, keeping secret the English porcelain baths, rose-patterned quilts, and coloured squares of a Monopoly board that make her dream of far-away London.

Here, Latha attends Sunday services at church with her Christian relatives and participates in the imperialistic renaming of the ayah, chauffeur and other domestic staff as characters from the verse of Longfellow and Pope.

However, Lucas Falls also offers symbols of the plural life of the times, centring around the figure of Helen Ratnam, the Indian-born mother of Tsunami and her siblings.

Helen is an inspired and talented artist who favours vibrant colours and free-flowing lines; as mistress of Lucas Falls she must take on certain domestic duties which require her to channel her energies differently.

While she is unable to tutor the young girls in Sinhala, an increasingly urgent knowledge for the youth of Independence, she instead teaches them to quilt, an unorthodox skill in Ceylon but one learnt by Helen from an English teacher at her Delhi school.

This is her means to 'extend the beauty of her husband's ancestral home' (p.56) and she allows the young girls to tack and hem the bright diamonds and hexagons in place while she reads to them from her own childhood favourites including As You Like It, David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice.

This homespun artist also plants wild flowers in a corner of the Lucas Falls grounds, which comes to be lovingly known to Latha as the 'Indian garden'. Its previous mistress, the tea planter's wife, had directed the laying out of the roses, lilies, hollyhocks, mazes, bowers and avenues which point to the imposition on the tropical land of an obsessive memory of England.

Helen transforms this selected corner into a space for the nurturing of wild flowers, reflecting the way that Lucas Falls during her time is a space that allows the blossoming of open minds.

However the ties that bind this large and unconventional family, whose free opinion first unsettles and then nourishes Latha, soon begin to fray, a process that prefigures the fragility of an open society and the alienation of 'outsiders' and non-conformists within the increasing politicisation of an exclusivist Sinhala Buddhist national identity.

1948 is the year marking Independence, the year of the Citizenship Act that disenfranchises Indian Tamils working on the tea estates, and the year which marks the fracturing of the family, as Gooneratne begins to portray the privately devastating oscillations caused by seismic shifts in public life.

Lucas Falls continues to reflect the transformations taking place in the nation at large, becoming a space that records the rewriting of history through polarised 'race-memory'.

The colonial plantation house takes on another life, renamed as the Wijesinha maha walauwa, the requisite ancestral house tying the claims of an opportunistic family to heritage and land. Helen's artworks are swiftly replaced with images of Sigiriya frescoes, elephants carved from ebony and ivory, and a gilded papier-mache frieze of Prince Dutu Gemunu adorned in full battle regalia.

These overt national markers promote the new identity of Rowland Wijesinha as nationalist politician, who exchanges European dress for national costume, self-indulgently woven from finest silk.

The hypocrisy of such self-serving Sinhala Buddhist nationalism is nicely observed when, following a trip to the US, the new mistress of the house deems it proper that Bibles should be visibly positioned because 'every well-appointed guest room should have one' (p.438).

Latha and Tsunami's sojourn at the new university of Peradeniya occupies the central part of the novel as a significant transformative space for consciousness and identity, experienced by the young women students in a potentially transitional moment for the young nation.

Arriving in Peradeniya in the first class carriage of the train, Latha takes her seat on the campus coach next to a girl from whose hair rises the strong aroma of coconut oil. Gingerly glancing at her new companion in the close atmosphere of the coach, Latha notes that she is wearing a brightly flowered skirt and rubber slippers, and that she holds 'a paper parcel with oil stains on it that smelt of stale masalavadai' (p.210).

However, when the coach enters an avenue of ancient overhanging m'ra trees, from which garlands of golden ehela bestow their blossoms on the lush grass beneath, Latha's misgivings dissolve, for it is this girl who lyrically voices the shared experience of beauty and idealism that will envelop the students in their new world.

Latha looks at her companion with new respect and reflects: '[I]t's true? We are moving together, this stranger and I, and all of us in this coach, through a shower of gold' (p.211).

This moment captures the affectionate and idealistic tone that infuses Gooneratne's narrative as it seeks to recreate spaces of possibility for equality, intellect and love. Like the plump cardamom pod that Latha's father rolls around his tongue near the end of the novel, whose flavour has been distilled and almost dissipated as it cooks slowly in a pot of saffron rice, the novel memorialises what is now 'no more than an exquisite rumour, a mere hint of its own presence', a memory of sweetness and the loss of simplicity.

'Pearls, Spices and Green Gold'

Author: Rohan Pethiyagoda

Title: Pearls, Spices and Green Gold: An illustrated history of biodiversity exploration in Sri Lanka

Publishers: WHT Publications

by Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne

By a happy co-incidence, I received the request to review this book shortly after I had spent many evenings researching a 1,500-word article on the history of natural history exploration in Southeast Asia. I had found this exercise rather time consuming but enjoyable as many of the great names associated with Sri Lanka also figure prominently in significant botanical and zoological discoveries elsewhere in Asia.

When Rohan Pethiyagoda's latest book arrived with over 240 pages of well researched and well written content, I was absolutely gobsmacked. How could anyone with a regular day job and running one of the most significant research programs of biological exploration, and with a family, have time to research and write a book of such sweeping scope?

Then again Rohan Pethiyagoda is no ordinary person. He regularly manages to pack in the work of a clutch of universities, working with just a small team of dedicated researchers. Reflecting on conversations I have had with the author over many years, it was not hard to see how such a book would have come about.

When the Wildlife Heritage Trust (WHT) was founded by Rohan Pethiyagoda in 1990, he began by obtaining copies of almost every book and paper ever published on Sri Lankan natural history, forming arguably the best library on this subject in Sri Lanka.

Pethiyagoda and his colleagues have over the years visited museums and libraries. especially in Europe, to gain access to their historical collections and archives. Without perhaps consciously setting out to research such a book, Pethiyagoda over a period of years had in effect undertaken the ground work for a very wide-ranging compilation of natural history exploration in Sri Lanka.

In his preface, the author himself admits that the book grew out of a shorter project. I am not surprised. Books like this often do. The logistics for such a book would be so daunting that it is unlikely an author would willingly inflict upon themselves the punishment of such a project.

The book is a great success in what it sets out to do. I think there are several reasons why it has been so. One, which I have already discussed, is that the preparatory work of the WHT laid the foundation for the Herculean task of collating the information.

Secondly, Rohan Pethiyagoda has an interest in researching the history of natural history exploration and has honed his art with previous biographical works on Harmanis de Alwis, E. F. Kelaart, J. W. Bennett etc.

Thirdly, the author is one of the most successful biodiversity explorers alive, and has a deep-rooted respect and admiration for those who have preceded him. Without this deep admiration and respect, an endeavour such as this would have read more as a dry and dusty chronicle of events.

Fortunately what we have is an engaging and informative read. Unusually for a book review, I have dwelt at length on the author and the background to the book than the book itself. This is because the book cannot be deconstructed from the background of the author and the work that preceded it.

The book is structured with a preface, acknowledgements and five chapters. The first three are short chapters which mainly chronicle the arrival of the early European explorers.

The two main chapters are the fourth on the 'Exploration of the flora' (pages 36 to 94) and the fifth chapter on 'Exploration of the fauna' (pages 95 to 224). The fourth chapter follows a chronological style and documents the individuals and institutions, which explored the flora of Sri Lanka.

Many of the institutions and the botanists were engaged with the primary focus on the export of cinnamon and other cash crops. However they skilfully managed also to engage in a wider exploration of the flora. This is a fascinating chapter populated with colonial governors, mysterious Frenchmen, artists and directors of botanic gardens.

The chapter has a number of shaded text boxes, some short, some spanning a double-page, providing juicy nuggets from scientific controversies to incidental biographies.

The last chapter is the 'Aha' chapter. Anyone familiar with Sri Lankan wildlife will thumb through this section with frequent exclamations of "Aha, so this is the Loten of Loten's Sunbird, the Layard of Layard's Squirrel", etc.

Just a week before I wrote this review, I was in Sinharaja looking for Yerbury's Elf, a small dragonfly. "I wonder who Yerbury was?" I commented to Hetti and Jon Ashworth, a British business journalist I was with.

Aha, the answer I was delighted to find, is on page 224. Many well-known names such as Woodhouse, Legge, Knox, Tennent, etc are also covered. But the pleasure is in uncovering the biographies of those less well-known, whose names are immortalised in the names of animals we know. Pethiyagoda's second chapter will finally help many of us to put a personality to a name. As for the work that must have gone into this work, phew, I am glad it was not me.

The book is written in a very readable and entertaining manner, something you can dip into or more likely find yourself absorbed into reading in one sitting. It is certainly not a dry, rambling historical account. Furthermore, it is beautifully illustrated with more than 250 pictures of early illustrations of Sri Lankan fauna and flora and portraits of the early biodiversity explorers.

So do you have to have a copy? Well, you will not carry it in the field to name a plant or animal. If you are a struggling student for whom Rs. 500 is too much, and can only stretch as far as absolutely essential material, may be not. But for anyone who can afford it (and there are many) and has an interest in Sri Lankan natural history, you would be insane not to buy it. Given the growth in the Sri Lankan middle class over the last decade and the phenomenal interest in wildlife, I suspect this book will be well received.

The book finishes with a section on the 'Literature Cited' (pages 225 to 234) and an Index (pages 235 to 241). The literature cited will be a very useful section for those with a historical bent who wish to pursue more study in this area. I believe copies of much of the literature cited is in the library of the WHT and the trustees very readily and generously grant access to those who need to refer it.

The author comments in his preface that the book is not intended to be a contribution to the primary literature.

The objectives of the book are admirably met and the author has identified the obvious criticism, of two different styles for the flora and the zoology. I hope he will have the energy at a future date to also compile biographies for the explorers of flora for a handy reference to the who's who of bio-diversity exploration in Sri Lanka. Well at least in the pre-Pethiyagoda era.

The author in his preface notes that the Convention on Biological Diversity places unintended obstacles to the pursuit of research. I could not agree more.

If far thinking administrators of the state agencies such as the Forest Department and Department of Wildlife Conservation don't act, Sri Lanka will suffer from shortsighted Obstructionists who use legislation to obstruct the progress of research and hence the scientific progress of Sri Lanka. 'Dilettantes' (to paraphrase Pethiyagoda) have ushered in a renaissance of bio-diversity exploration after decades of post-Independence neglect.

What is as important is that the leaders of this group, such as Rohan Pethiyagoda, have created an academic lineage (see page 128) which can maintain momentum for several more decades. Will our institutions seize this golden opportunity or let an opportunity for national progress to falter?