Spinning fast-paced short stories

Reviewed by N. P. Wanasundera

Deirdre Jonklaas Cadiramen's book of short stories titled Jigsaw is a fast paced, easy and interesting read. She writes at speed and so we read at speed. That for light fiction is a blessing.

Many a busy housewife or career woman despairs at large books - she just does not have the time to bury her nose in one. Deirdre's book is the answer to such readers. Jigsaw is the third work of fiction by Deirdre J Cadiramen. It is a slim volume of 104 pages with 15 stories, some like Black Friday running through only 2 1/2 pages while the longest is ten pages.

But into these pages the author compacts plenty. Deirdre's style, I would say, is minus adornment. She has a story to tell and she tells it straight without much description and no introduction and building character through extensive detailing.

We need to round off the characters ourselves by the incidents she relates about them and their speech she reports. A plethora of characters parade through her pages: Ruth the day-dreaming only child; Bempy Singho the long standing driver of a Colombo 7 household who gets invited to a wedding of theirs and ends up behind bars for failing the breathalyzer test; Naomi who goes to London and ends earning mints as a hostess in Soho; the characters of a typical upcounty tea estate from the dorai to the tappal coolie and thalavar.

Style

I said there are no detailed descriptions which often implicitly carry the suspicion of stretching the narrative or attempting at style.

These Deirdre does not do. However, her writing is adequate. For instance in the story 'War Widow' she elucidates the background of the story and introduces the characters in two short paragraphs. "The meeting between families, one from up north, the other from down south, was on neutral territory.

Seated by the promenade on the Galle Face Green at twilight, with Yamuna and Yoga in their midst, they were the only ones within that multitude who were not there to view the ocean and sunset, or enjoy the sea breeze.

Barely concealing their antipathy, with prejudices too deeply ingrained to bridge difference in dialect, accent, religion, customs, cuisine, costume and attitudes, they were coldly polite. One thing they agreed on was that neither family would attend the wedding.

While I praise that aspect of her short story 'War Widow', I fault her for compacting so much into such a short story (seven pages). She breathlessly runs through so many major happenings: "Yamuna and Yoga got married the next day.

... "Yoga departed with his unit for the battlefront.... "_ until the day the despatch riders arrived with the telegram." The young widow goes to Jaffna to live with her in-laws; is ill-treated and then befriended and rescued by a prostitute. All this in seven short pages.OK, that's her style of writing.

One cannot fault that since she writes as her skill and inclination dictate. Her style points out she is deliberately not labouring to write great literature. More important to her is to tell her story. But I do fault her for leaving her reader with huge questions in mind.

Valid questions

It's good not to spell out everything but leave the reader to figure out some. This story, however, pushes forward valid questions : Which army is Yoga in? Did the Sri Lankan Army recruit Tamils? He surely cannot be an LTTEr. Why on earth did Yamuna move to live with her in-laws in restrictive Jaffna? Of course her parents rejected her, but ...In A friend Indeed: the discerning reader will find it difficult to believe the charity of the mudalali and more so the instant easy relationship forged with the distraught wife whose husband is in remand for non-payment of a traffic fine.

"Nona, you have problem? Nedra relates her woe and the stranger, just met in the street, replies: "No problem, Madam. How much you need?"

The fine is paid, the husband released, and the mudalali is invited home and tosses down his throat wine glasses full of Amaretto. He returns with a bigger glass for more.

Easy reading, humour included, but implausible incidents. Or did such an incident occur in the balmy days of yesteryear when people trusted each other, even strangers just met, and magnanimity was more the norm than crooked cheating.

Diverse characters

As I said earlier, there are diverse characters passing through her stories, all valid and believable. The incidents too are plausible, except for a few like those mentioned above. Much of her plots and characters appeal to the middle and upper classes of the English reading public; which classes more or less constitute the local English fiction reading population.

There's jiving and cha cha-ing; a wedding in a five star hotel on Valentine's Day with chairs draped in gold tissue with silver hearts and blue roses; the Coconut Grove at the GFH; Elvis, the Beatles, Twiggy.Very succinctly Deirdre makes her point. Black Friday - the day there was murder and mayhem in Colombo with shouts of "koti", ends thus: "Violence has no community; terrorism no barriers.

Deirdre changes her style of writing in 'Friendship, Flowers and a Funeral'. The story unfolds as the characters think thoughts about each other.

In all the stories the third person is used; but one suspects many an incident has happened in Deirdre's life or to known people who related the incident to her. She admits as much in the story that backgrounds the naming of a spot in a tea estate - thakkaali wanguwa in her equally unambiguous title: 'The True Story of the Heist'.Deirdre may not be a Somerset Maugham nor an Alice Munro but as a Sri Lankan author of short stories she is adequate and spins a good tale, fast paced, in impeccable English. Readers are ensured reading pleasure in this third book of stories by Deirdre Jonklaas Cadiramen.