Interview

Poetic milestones in life, codifying the milieu

By Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

Question: Your father’s death at 54 years when you were in your early 20s, has profoundly affected your emotional life. It was a terrible shock as it occurred on the eve of the Sinhala Tamil New Year eve. In the poem, ‘The New Year dawns ….’ you have ably captured the contrasting images that flood your mind whenever you celebrate the New Year.

Although it sounds more prose than a poem, the poet in you codifies, in a queer manner, important milestones in your emotional life such as the birth of your son. In ‘de-coding’ the poem and looking back on that tragic event which occurred on the eve of the New Year, how profoundly has the death of your father affected you and what are the dramatic changes it triggered in your emotional life as a young adult ?

The New Year dawns…..
(April 1987 and April 1997)

My father died at 53 yrs.
I was in my very early twenties.
He died on an April 12th morning.
Shops were closing for the New Year.
The Nonagathe was setting in.
The cremation was at (Borella) Kanatte on 13 April at 6.30 pm
My aunts (his sisters) from Ambalangoda were to attend the funeral.
They all came, despite public transport petering out
and rushed back to their homes the same night.

The following morning as Sri Lanka rejoiced
celebrating the Sinhala and Tamil New Year,
dressed in auspicious red,
crackers bursting in the hot April morning’s sun,
and the koha shrieking.........,
dressed in white,
I was at the crematorium
collecting his ashes in a small earthern ware pot
- the burnt bits of bone
mixed with charred wood and mangled wire from the wreaths.

A week later we took his ashes to Ambalangoda.
At a rocky outcrop, where as a child he dived into the sea he loved so much,
(said my oldest aunt),
at that same spot, we threw his ashes into the water
together with handfuls of jasmines.
They twirled and eddied and vanished into the ocean.

Ten Aprils later……………………………
Ten Sinhala & Tamil New Years later
on 14 April 1997
Rahul, my elder child is born.
He came as the first light streaked the sky,
and the New Year dawned.
He arrived to the bursting of crackers,
and the pealing of temple bells.
Friends and relatives came with sweetmeats.
We rejoiced. We celebrated.

Egodage - our family name.
We cremated with my father a decade ago.
It lives in me, and a decade later,
was bequeathed on Rahul.

We are all visitors in Samsara.
We just log in and log out under various names and in various guises.
The aathmer (soul / spirit / consciousness) lives on.

(April 2007)

Answer: Ha ha , I like the way you describe it – “the poet codifying in queer manner some important milestones …” Yes that’s precisely what it is. I had been through the whole nonagathe / new year / burial ritual twenty years ago. And then exactly twenty years later, almost to the date when I found myself in the nonagathe / new year ritual. This time there was a birth - the birth of my son. It struck a chord. I couldn’t help but compare and contrast both situations consciously and unconsciously. It was eerie how the same nonagathe and New Year touched my life in two different ways and in the span of ten years – with a death and a birth. There a family name died and here ten years later the same family name springs to life.

Q: ‘Autumn in Paris’ is a poem which can be broadly considered as snap shots of autumn in Paris. You are fluent in French and conversant with French culture. How do you perceive the vital role that nightlife plays in Paris ? Can you elaborate on the scene that you described in the poem?

This poem actually represents a composite image which traces back to a range of different associations. The predominant source of inspiration behind this was T.S. Eliot’s Preludes. I’ve been in love with them ever since I discovered them at University. I love their sense of tangibility, their realness and their sheer starkness. Nos 02 and 03 I like most.

Autumn in Paris

I sit by my window and watch
the leaves
beige – russet – brown
decadent, drifting downwards
stung by angry raindrops
to wallow in mud and shit.
The wind howls … hungrily,
rabidly, chasing whores
down deserted alleys,
as stars lick the Eiffel Tower
piercing, phallic,
a glowering torch in the night sky
gloating over darkened rooms
where hired bodies writhe
under wollen covers.
The Wap moon jeers … knowingly …

(Paris. Oct 1989)

A: I don’t claim to be an Eliot but I tried to situationalise the predominant idea in a French setting. Paris is a city that never sleeps. Life in Paris by day or by night is multi-dimensional and multi-hued. I was once at an autumn dinner party near the Eiffel Tower and chanced to look out of the sixth floor window. There was brilliant moon, bathing the entire cityscape pure silver brilliance and down below was the wind chasing dead dried leaves and the occasional whore. The montage of that scene was so surrealistic that it stuck in my mind for a long time. Wished I was a painter …..

Q: ‘Birthday Party’ is a poem in which you have epitomised the principle ethos of Sri Lankan middle class life and the pretentious behaviour of its members. In the last stanza of the poem, you skilfully depict the harsh reality of the birthday party in the lines ‘gaude crepe still screams defiantly ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’. How do you look at the pretentious behaviour of the many invitees to the ‘Birthday Party’ considering such an event as an important social gathering?

A:This goes back nearly 20 years. That little girl is now about 25 years old and might be having birthday parties for her own children and I believe nothing has changed since then. This was a typical middle class birthday party experience with the sexes neatly segregated and indulging in their predictable conversation. I find the sexes segregated even today at certain gatherings and this is quite hilarious – mouthing the same inanities and the same profanities. Conversation was impossible – not that I was an intellectual. No. No. It was just that I found that I did not fit into that equation and had to seek refuge under the mango tree. Ah and there I was attacked by mosquitoes. I was in a dilemma, seriously wondering what the lesser evil might be. I’m still wondering.

Q:. ‘Burying Granny’ is a poem which deals with the theme of putting up faces. It is obvious that most of them who attended the burial had absolutely no feeling for her. For them, it is functional. Death is an important event that enables one to reflect on the quality of the emotional life of a community and of individuals. How do you perceive the death of a person who no longer plays an active role in community life such as Granny?

Burying Granny

No tears.
No pain.

Just sorrow
and a childhood memory.

The brown clay pot
with your soft gray ash
tied at the mouth
was still numbered.

The sun beat down
the priest prayed
and we bricked you
in the family vault.

“Praise be to God”, he said
“Amen”, we replied.

(September 1986)

A: She was a very old lady who lived her life to the full. I think I had just returned from Paris that morning and was in time to make it to the RC Section at Kanatte. She was just Granny … not a glam society dame, nor a famous face.

You’ve read this poem wrong. It was a very functional funeral with no trimmings at all. Of course we all had emotions of varying degrees. No, we were not putting up a face. It was just that the emotions were controlled. One normally doesn’t beat ones’ breast and wail over an 85 year old. I saw them dig up the vault.

I saw the other pots of ashes of those who had predeceased her. And now we were there to put her in. It was very matter-of-fact funeral – quick and quiet – under a scorching 12 noon sun. I thought to myself, “Wow isn’t this how funerals should be ?” without the wailing and fainting and all the drama in between.

Q: ‘Dejeuner a l’ Indien’ is a poem which deals with a life in University. How do you conceive the poem? How do you reflect on the hard university life?

déjeuner à I’indien

kishna looks down upon us
benighly
from his comfy perch up on the wall.
ganesh greet visitors
from his flower-bedecked altar

and we,
we regale in our kadu-fac days
of undergrad dreams
cucumber sandwiches
and mayonnaise
woodsmoke-flavoured plain tea,
stringhoppers and yesterday’s gravy
when we wanted to be
one with the herd !

the indian stewards
wait on us
with indian patience

campus chatter
chettinaad fish
polwatte canteen
prawn masala
gamini hatha
gobi manchurian

the wicker basket overflows
with leprosy-struck, blistered
yet heavenly naans

her sari pota
falls off her shoulder
and sits cradled in her outstretched arms
scene from a grecian tale.

the indian stewards smile
their white indian smiles.
the hostess hasn’t changed in 30 years

the woman by her side
flaunts her new Indian kurtha >
“trés à la mode”, she claims, hysterically

incessant chatter, she keeps us entertained
i stifle a burp lest she hears
and pick my teeth aimlessly

unashamedly we pose for photographs
with ganesh
his stony silence surveying
our rainbow garb

the indian stewards
return to their srilankan homes
change into their srilankan clothes
and finger their srilankan rice and curry
while I go back home and crawl into bed.

(February 2011)

A: This happened a few months ago when we met up for lunch with one of my seniors and one of our favourite lecturers. It was one long trip down memory lane interspersed with an Indian gastronomic binge. For a moment I got out of myself and watched the three of us at table – and that’s what went into this poem. I like alliteration and juxtaposing contrasting situations like ‘campus chatter’ alongside ‘chettinaad fish’, reminiscing Kelaniya’s village ‘polwatte canteen’ with ‘prawn masala’ etc. You may call it codifying – but there’s poetry in this kind of codification.

We recalled our undergrad dreams, the days we pooled our money and ate at the canteen, our dreams of becoming intellectuals and writers and poets and famous. Three decades have passed but it felt like yesterday. Well so much so that my friend and I were making quite a scene at table laughing (at our own campus frivolities and foolishnesses) that our venerable lecturer had to shoo us down quite a few times.

Q: ‘Memoirs of a Parisian Spring’ deals with the perennial issue of identity - the ‘dark skinned stranger’, any Asian who finds himself or herself amidst an alien crowd. How do you look at the issue of identity particularly in a diaspora or a foreign land?

Memoirs of a Parisian Spring

The rain beats down
monotonously
in dull, drab, drops
dribbling from grey clouds
stretched across the skies.

Weak, insipid, a sun feebly peers
tremulously fighting snowflakes
bathing the city in sick pallid light.

I walk along the boulevards
past quaint, cosy cafés
clutching at an unyielding, unfamiliar
landscape,
side stepping the dog shit
‘mousse au chocolat’ on the sidewalks.

Human traffic surges thunderously
through the Metro,
vommiting out into the streets
cold, impersonal, indifferent beings
wrapped up in their ‘écharpes’ and coats
lost in their own little worlds,
as I, dark skinned stranger in an alien crowd
search for identity.

(‘écharpe’ – scarf, muffler)

(Paris. April 1986)

A: My very first visit to Paris at 23+. To add to the depression (yes strangely) of having to leave home, here was I in a cold and wet and gloomy spring in Paree.

Although everything I had learnt in my French books came alive before my eyes and was very familiar, it was still very alien too. It took some time to thaw and become “one with the crowd” which is what I did. And then, since I also spoke the language (fairly well) it was easy getting a first-hand experience of French life and living and culture.

Q: In ‘Midnight in the Parlour’, you have brilliantly created a wretched and eerie atmosphere in a lonely night in a funeral parlour. How do you recall those agonising moments in the parlour which led to the birth of the poem? And how profoundly did you feel the sense of death at the parlour?

Midnight in the Parlour

The lamp plays hide and seek
with the shadows,
ominous, on the wall.
Not a fly.
Not a mosquito.
Just the monotonous drone
of a ceiling fan

All is quiet
save out muffled chatter,
the toot of a lone horn
the bark of a distant dog
and the smell of morning’s formalin
still viscous in my bowels.

The boys smoke.
The girls play cards.
And I, numb
gaze at death.

Did I ever bridge that chasm ?
I wonder – it’s now too late.
Inviolable. Mute.
Only you can tell.

(April 1987)

A: Yes wretched and eerie indeed as I watched over the body of my 54 year old dead father through the night. We had our differences and it was too late for me to make peace with him. I could not make peace with a dead body. I was full of remorse and guilt.

A few of my friends stayed over with me at AF Raymond’s parlour. I let them smoke and play cards. What else could they do throughout the night ? They left me alone as I wanted to be. I carry shards of that guilt even to this day and realize that I myself will be 54 in a few years time. So much for the passage of time !

Q: ‘Death of Six Sailors-27 August 1985’ deals with the conflict which lasted for over thirty years. How do you look back on those crucial days that led to the full blown conflict in Sri Lanka?

A: This was that excruciatingly infinite period of peace talks and pseudo ceasefires which enabled the LTTE to stock up arms. It was also a time of governmental vacillation and the whole circus went on. In a sense at that time the Sri Lankan psyche became immune to the destruction around because life had to go on and it did. Deaths did make headlines but numbers didn’t matter.

It was commonplace as browsing through advertisements. That was the pathos that we Sri Lankans knew but perhaps didn’t quite want to realize at that time.

Q: ‘The Koha shrieks…’ deals with the issues of identity and cultural otherness as the narrator recalls the New Year he spends in his motherland. How did conceive the idea which germinated into a poem? How would you describe ‘cultural otherness’ particularly in the case of person of mix parentage?

the koha shrieks ….

ominously
piercing my ears
vying valiantly with the crackers
that burst under a harsh april sun

my blood races
thunderously,
the mixed blood
of an ethnic hybrid
wedged between two cultures

erabudu blooms hang sad and limp
dry, like yellow rags
mournfully tossed in the breeze
quite unlike the crisp rustling robes
of the bhikkhu
whose feet I washed at ‘bana’ last night

i touch but cannot feel.
i still feel strange
indifferent to the raucous knell of drums
sickly, oily sweetmeats,
new clothes –starchy – ill fitting
and sheaves of betel for mock obeisance
at duly prescribed times.

i’m smug instead
listening the chopin
munching cheese toasties
as people gaze at me
in disbelief,
scrupulously, sneeringly
while I faithfully jog,
alien creature along the deserted highway
during ‘nonagathe’.

will there ever come a time
when the koha sings sweetly,
drums reverberate joyously
erabudu scents the air
and I feel one with either culture ?

(April 1989)

This “cultural otherness” as you term it, is something I’ve felt throughout my life. I’m supposed to be a Sinhalese from Ambalangoda. Mixed parentage Ok. English medium educated throughout at school. Shakespeare. Mozart. Wordsworth. I lived a childhood coloured with Sunday school at St. Paul’s Church, Milagiriya and successive Christmasses with Santa Claus and the works. At 13 years I (voluntarily) convert to Buddhism. Then comes ‘Aluth Avurudhu’ and the works. It IS a funny feeling indeed. And I believe the poem encapsulates it all.

Q: ‘Tight rope’ describes the made-in-Sri Lanka tragedy which is, by and large, created by myriads of socio-economic divisions and divisive policies. The poem codifies a turbulent and rather violent chapter in the contemporary political history of Sri Lanka. Although now there is peace and no such worries of would-be human bombs in Colombo, how do you revisit this bloody period and what are lessons that we, as a nation, have yet to learn from the period?

tight rope

we're tightrope walking
between life and death,
survival and the cost of living
that's the tragedy of our lives

they've known it for years....
- the tamils up north
- the border village sinhalese

it's been coming and going
for us in the capital,
but now it's here to stay
with bloody vengeance.

charred flesh on the streets
blood seeping into macadam
and the whole bloody circus
of people fleeing amid screaming sirens

we’re pathetically split
blues – green - red - saffron
each outsmarting the other
and the party continues...............

that's the tragedy of us – srilankans

(August 2006)

I believe that we Sri Lankans, as a nation, are a totally dis-united lot. Let’s go back to pre- colonial times. How did the white man conquer us? We betrayed each other. It happened over the centuries and still happens, sadly. The poem says it all. This is now an old story but not until we all unite as Sri Lankans, as a nation, that we can go forward. The poem says it all ….

Q: In ‘Miss Universe 1985’, you have juxtaposed two contrasting events; one, a Miss Universe contest and another, a mass burial. Among other things, the contrasting events suggest that the world would move on despite all gory incidents such as mass killings and burials. How do you analyse these scenarios from a broader perspective?

A:This was a real situation. TV news one night, as was the expected norm at that time (in 1985), showed a horrific LTTE massacre and the ensuring mass burial. The new bulletin was followed by the Miss Universe pageant. We Sri Lankan audiences seamlessly switched from one to the other with ease. There was indifference. We were, in a sense, lulled into apathy, some realizing it, and others not wanting to.

That was out tragedy. I was stuck by the commonalities and the contrasts – the flowers, the tears, the laughter (jubilant + hysterical as per the case), the sceptre, the shovel. That’s what’s portrayed here. Yes the world moves on but one needs to be sensitive to one’s surroundings and the world around. I remember there was a time when numbers mattered. If a few soldiers and civilians were killed by the LTTE – it wasn’t shocking. If the number was above 50, people then reacted. Disgusting wasn’t it ?

Q: The short autobiographical fiction entitled ‘Oiling Palms: From hospital bed to Kanatte’ deals with an important sociological aspect in a decadent society. That is how corruption and bribery become organic to the system. It is a money-motivated society that we have to deal with. People have been insensitised so much so that the prime motive of their lives is nothing but earning money. How do you look at these ethos and what are the long-term repercussions of such attitudes to life?

A: This spans the few days my Father was in hospital until I collected his ashes from the crematorium. It was bribing from the very beginning. ‘Oiling palms’ I shall say to be more polite. And that was 24 years ago. It’s got worse now. At that time I always had change money in my pocket to make MY life easier. Today I bribe my garbage men to collect the dirt. Or shall I say I “look after them”. If I don’t “look after them” the garbage rots at my doorstep. So what do I do ? I “look after” them. Not much of a choice left. A sucker is not born every minute, a sucker is spawned every sizzling split second.