A discussion on Parvathi Solomons Arasanayagam’s Contrapuntal:

Narrative landscapes created from memories and reflections

By Dilshan BOANGE

Contrapuntal by its definition means ‘polyphony’ which denotes having many voices or tones. From a point of musicology the word polyphony speaks of two or more melodies independent of each other coexisting harmoniously in a single composition. Parvathi Solomons Arasanayagam’s collection of fiction titled Contrapuntal and other stories speaks of persons who would generally be at the fringes of society and those who from a more empowered stratum, would be able to speak of them and make an account of their existence.

This article looks at the central title piece of the book Contrapuntal which runs the length of a novelette coursing the reader through 52 pages of solid prose writing which does not in any way seem pretentious of the world of experience sought to be conveyed to the reader from the rather subjectively observed narrator.

The narrative contains more than one stream of focus and fuses through tonally harmonised prose different aspects of the narrator’s world of experience which never the less finds cohesion through subtle links and interweaving. What Parvathi offers the reader is not a work which drives the reader on a race of excitement and thrills. It is more a call to become meditative and empathise with the central character Sonali and the world she observes very sensitively. The narrative gives much detail of the wayside sights and people that fill the picture that is Kandy, but not from the central mainstream image of its cultural grandeur and abundant heritage of hallowed antiquities.

What Parvathi offers her readers is what goes unnoticed or lays hidden from the eyes of the visitor or casual passerby. It is an account of an observer whose keen eye and receptive senses collects and ponders on images and experiences that weave the text as a storehouse of emotions and information that run the common course of a readable story.

Sociological values

The story captures a slice of life of the less privileged, whose life is interpretable through the labour they perform, and in certain cases the hopes they carry of becoming something more than their given station in life. The characters of the servant Bisso Menike, the washerwoman Ukku amma, and Peter, the boy who helps Sonali’s parents with work in the house and acts as a trusted escort to the protagonist and her sister show portraits of the underprivileged within the context of society and the conditions that shape them.

Parvathi’s narrative also gives a perspective on the ethnological layering that underscores the plight of some segments in society such as those who lived on embankments of rivers and were very obviously not part of the ‘majorities’ in Kandy, the prime example being the bastardised progeny of westerners and local women.

The daily ways and means of labourers and how they manage to momentarily escape the great exhaustions their bodies and minds are battered with by gulping down toddy by the side of wayside food kiosks, in the safety of shadows in the night time are narrated with details that paint a very potent and vivid picture in the mind of the reader.

The varieties of food and the kinds of recreation people indulge in like the Kafferinjha and baila songs sung to the sound of violin music amongst Peter’s families, show the authoress has been sensitive to capture these threading existent in that social milieu. And while the protagonist Sonali were not amongst the cream of society and had their share of financial concerns they were certainly better off than the orphans of ‘cottage house’ about whom the authoress gives glimpses for the reader to understand the strata which formed the social fabric.

Perhaps these were what the writer documented in her own observations being transferred to the world of the protagonist, or perhaps Parvathi has improvised what she encountered to make them more intriguing to the reader. However, it may be treated as very much a glimpse into a world that is not far removed from conceivable realities in landscapes found in Sri Lanka. Although the genre of the work would be creative writing the verisimilitude in this work may very well offer ground for scholarly analysis from vantages of sociological investigations.

Document of topography

The scenic beauties of Kandy and the lush Kandyan hill country flows out mesmeric and mystically to the reader through the well crafted prose. Anyone who has travelled to Kandy and appreciates the climatic appeal it has to an exhausted body will surely feel an immediate lull descend as the calmness that is Kandy (compared to Colombo) comes alive with the words the authoress puts together to weave images of the topography that has shaped her being. Watapuluwa, Sirimalwatte, Mawilmada, are locales the writer mentions along this journey of creating a topological narrative which would be easily relatable to a reader who would be familiar with these places in Kandy.

What seems rather true to the spirit of recollection is how the narrative gives an account of the areas in and around Kandy is not as if they were places revisited by an outsider but relived in the mind of the inhabitant who is distanced from the original observations by chronology and not memory.

Describing life from a point of topography gives a firm grounding to establish time and space of a story. Being firmly rooted in the mode of realist fiction Parvathi gives the reader the documented Kandy of her observations, capturing not only the images of the habitations of the people of more or less in proximity to Sonali’s stratum but also of the marginalised.

The geography of how the Mahaweli river may mark a locale’s character by being within seeing range of a bus that meanders along the hilly road are details the narrative brings to the attention of the reader sometimes as an authorial tone and sometimes blending with the observational input through the protagonist.

The cruxes of the story

What strikes as rather notable in this piece of fiction is that the centrality of what seems the primary ground on which the narrative builds itself may be disputed as not being the only foundation for the story to be told. The protagonist Sonali’s experience of being part of a dance class and the efforts put in by the whole class and the dance teachers in working towards the much awaited concert becomes key to understand the purpose of the narrative which comes as a journey into the interior of the protagonist whose contemplations become a window to the reader to look both inwards at Sonali and the world outside her, through her vision’s scope.

The beginning of the narrative is an account from the first person of how (presumably) the authoress reviews part of her childhood. The start is about a train journey to Colombo to visit the grandparents of whom the reader is made to know sufficient details to develop a clear picture of how the familial environment would have been.

The switch in focus to the character of Sonali begins as the authorial voice describes her waiting for the bus at a night time. From there onwards one cannot help but feel the idea of travel and journeying is meant to take on a central theme throughout the story.

The family life and the lives of those who are connected to Sonali’s family become interwoven along with the unfolding of the central character’s own world of emotions. Life at school, the dance class and the perceptions of Colombo and its horrors during the time of the second leftist insurgency are woven around Sonali’s fears, anxieties and doubts. Yet there is also the tranquillity of her home and family and those connected to this environment which becomes positivisms.

Nuances of taboos

The style and outlook of Parvathi’s writing seems to call for a sense of conservatism which appears characteristic to her writing. Matters of a sexual nature become rather inferred rather than described directly as a certain incident while riding the bus where it is made to understand, a man indulges in some self-stimulating act with some exhibitionism also being involved. But one of the more obvious instances of an evasion of directness is when two gentleman of an academic background visit Sonali’s house as dinner guests.

The narrative tells the reader that the closeness between the two males was one that was bound in emotions and a made to see as a special kind, whereby the authoress refrains from addressing the scenario as a homosexual relationship. Perhaps the authoress felt it unsound to be too direct with certain matters that are taboo in the mainstream. Or perhaps she thought the nuanced and inferred descriptive seemed to carry more room for the imagination of the reader to decide on his own.

The story begins with a narrative of a train journey and ends with one as well. The bus travel of Sonali and the space if creates for a ‘journeying’ into the world outside observed by her as well as her interiority.

There appears a very marked symbolism adopted by the authoress in expressing her vision of this story as one where ‘travel’ is central to understand the larger metaphor of ‘contrapuntal’.

One could suggest that the idea of different journeys crisscrossing and coalescing could be meant to be seen as ‘contrapuntal’.

However, the authoress stresses through her narrative that people who are on a perpetual traversing called life are certainly meant to keep journeying until their final destination is found. However there is that very unfortunate possibility that all journeys may not take the traveller to his desired destination since not every man can successfully become master of his own fate.