Down memory lane

Siyawas Dekak Sisara
(Across two centuries)
Author: Padma Edirisinghe

Reviewed by Daya Dissanayake

Padma Edirisinghe, whose name is familiar to many Sunday readers in this Sinhala work decides to walk through a maze, and takes us along with her. This is a maze that passes across time and space. She herself admits at the beginning of her story, that she is lost in this maze. “It was the beginning of the year 2008. I wanted to write a long story”, first, she gets trapped between the two sentences. She says there is no beginning, middle or end to her story. She wants to move in one direction, but ends up in another. It is all one complicated maze.

Villages are often beautiful. But Padma finds a desolate aridity in her village. Even with the smiling white flowers of the coffee plants, the pepper vines wrapped around the trees and the mango, coconut and areca plants in their own garden, she had felt an unexplainable streak of cruelty. Was it caused by the particular period in history, the colonial occupation, shifting cultural values or the frustration of the people? Reading the book provides us with a glimpse of the past, and helps us understand to some extent what the author would have felt as a child.

She said that even in the homes in remote villages, alongside the wedding photograph of family elders, there would be a photo of George VI. This, she states sans any bitterness. It is a fact, a non-erasable fact in the British colonial empire. The author’s sense of history runs throughout.

Edirisinghe in addition to being a historian whose interesting pieces on by–gone days enliven Sunday reading, is also a senior educationalist. The information and knowledge that one could garner in this book entwined in the maze only reflects the skill of a seasoned writer. In a fascinating way it narrates not only her own life but the life and times of two centuries in Sri Lanka. Yet, is it two centuries only? Is the title a misnomer? For often she goes into the beginning of Time and telescopes far into the future, a quaint philosophical element hiding in it all.

Next life

She spent her childhood in the 3rd and 4th decades of the last century. It was the tail end of a period when women prayed to be born as men in their next life, when women believed that men who are sinners in this life will be born as women in their next. The fact that the Buddha, in all his previous Bodhisattva lives even as an animal, at times as lowly animals as even canines, but was never born as a woman adds to the inferior complex of the Sinhala Buddhist woman of which she is a member.

In addition to being born a girl, Padma Edirisinghe also had to suffer the indignity of being dark skinned, when ‘white’ or fair skin was what everyone wanted or saw as beautiful, a concept that had come down from as long ago as the time of the ancient texts.

She had a very mobile childhood, one that, pathetically, would never lead to great scholarship but of course to vivid social exposure that would fashion the observant and much informed writer in her later on.

As a child she had to change schools many times. Every time her father was transferred from one village school to another, the whole family would move, and the children enrolled in a new school, with new friends, new teachers, and new neighbours. And always as the headmaster's daughter, with the privileges and the disadvantages.

Padma seems to be an epitome of courage, to fight all social and cultural discriminations she had to face, and overcome all obstacles. She would have inherited the fighting instincts from her parents. Her father had refused to line up by the Colombo–Kandy railway line to see the visiting Queen Elizabeth in 1952. Siyawas Dekak Sisara is a book that is sure to be of interest to everyone, because of the way she tells her story. All through the book her writing style and her sense of humour prevail, like how she described what she had heard about the visit of Alfred, the second son of Victoria in 1870. The local elite were in full ceremonial dress and Alfred had descended from the ship in a simple shirt and trousers! Here she skips the two centuries and takes us to the early colonial period nobly acknowledging sources too.

Style

Padma Edirisinghe's easy style makes it impossible for the reader to put the book down. Unlike most autobiographies the book reads like a novel, with her sensitive nature and strong feelings coming out on every page. Yet it is a very rare, candid biography, not often seen today. Often books like these either become autobiographical novels with more fiction than fact.

Sometimes the authors omit many memorable incidents for fear of hurting or annoying others, unless, like Mark Twain, the autobiography is to be published one hundred years after the death of the author. That the author is a female enhances the boldness as her love affair with Tikiri Kumaru her historical hero. Fact and fantasy merge easily.

Her national fervour or partiality towards all things national, surface all over at times amusing the narrator-too. There is the essay she had to write in English, at her new school on an unforgettable event. She had titled it ‘Nangi's Funeral’ intentionally in protest against the school policy which prohibited the use of Sinhala. The title caused mocking laughter. but she justified her use of the term Nangi, because there is no specific term in English for a younger sister, just as there are no terms for elder sister, or elder brother.

This incident tells us about the system of education and the culture of the missionary schools, especially on the western coastal belt, and what a Sinhala educated, non-Christian, dark skinned girl had to face in such an environment. It also highlights the shortcomings of the English language in expressing words of our 2000 year old Sinhala language and our kinship terms.

Motivation

Padma studied at a Christian convent from Grade 6 to University Entrance due to the motivation of her broad minded father and she considers it as her beloved alma mater. She affirms that at no time was she persuaded to convert.

And the pleasant period of her life had been spent there. But misfortune falls on her. She had to change school again a few months before the University Entrance examination, and at the new school she had to abandon the subject she loved most, English Literature. She had to study European History all by herself. Here again she had not given up, but won a scholarship as the student with the highest score from her district.

Scattered across the book are many thought provoking statements, especially when she discusses the meaningless divisions by race, caste and creed. She raises the possibility of a courageous Sinhala soldier who died in Jaffna to be reborn as a child of a Tamil mother. A suicide cadre who dies in Colombo could come back as the son of a Sinhala mother. And they would then some day fight for their new identity. Padma Edirisinghe is not a stranger to the world of books in Sri Lanka. She is one of the foremost bilingual writers in the country, with seven books in Sinhala, twelve in English. (four, State award winners) Among her translated works are Brohier's Changing Faces of Colombo into Sinhala, and Dr A.T. Ariyaratne’s autobiography and Ven K. Ananda is He Siddhartha nam Viya into English. She keeps on writing and translating and we look forward to

eading more of her works.
Writers never retire.

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