A novel carving

Kaetayam Aiya
Author: Gunarathna Ekanayake
A Nipun Poth Publication

Reviewed by Daya Dissanayake

We can write a story. We can paint a story. We can even carve out a story. Gunarathna Ekanayake has done a wonderful carving, in his new novel, Kaetayam Aiya. The story is about a traditional carpenter who is also a highly talented wood carver.

We have read many stories about village life in our country, and in the Kandyan region. We have also read about our traditional artisans and the gradual commercialisation and degeneration of our traditional arts and crafts. Yet Ekanayake has been able to give us a fresh story.

He has opened a new window through which we could see a Kandyan village from a new angle, even through the cover of his book. It is not often a book cover today could sum up the story contained inside.

Viraj Madhushan Jayasinghe and Nihal Wijayasinghe have achieved it in Kaetayam Aiya. When we have read the book, we see that the cover has already told us the story. Kaetayam Aiya is an odyssey, the odyssey of Sundara Bandara, an artiste with infinite patience, simple needs and less ambitions. He tries to escape the trap of the Kandyan culture of polyandry, when the girl he fancied was proposed as the common wife for both him and his elder brother.

But he falls into another eternal trap, as the younger brother who has to live in the same house. Sundara tries to escape from the conflict and shackles of the family by running away to the city.

He tries to avoid attachments and the resultant pain and suffering. He runs away from the girls he is attracted to, and watch with near indifference as he misses the opportunities to get entrapped. Yet he has to continue to fight his fate.

Imagination

I have often mentioned in my writings that the Sinhala novel always progressed and developed far ahead of the English novel in our country. It is probably because Sinhala writers have enriched their imagination with a vast volume of their experience and memories from their childhood, and sometimes even in their youth about our village life and our culture. It is all their first-hand experience and not what they have heard from their domestic aides, or seen on television.

That is why Ekanayake could tell us about the village carpenter and his carpentry shop, and the conflicts between the generations, and describe the village as he himself had seen.

Ekanayake has been a regular writer, with 20 novels, 10 youth novels, six collections of short stories, and several books for children, and he had received many awards for his books over the past four decades since his first novel was published in 1971. He has still not exhausted his plots for new stories, as we have seen in his novel and the novels he is presently working on.

Sundara Bandara is a total contrast to Sadiris we met in Apema Amma last year, and so is Sundara's mother, the nameless silently suffering woman, while Sumanawathie in Apema Amma is the typical mother figure, always stronger and more resilient that the man or men who always try to dominate her. Sumanawathie fights back, unlike women in most novels written by the men writers where the women accept all suffering in silence, or where the female writers try to impose an artificial, alien mode of feministic behaviour. Apema Amma tells us that the concept of ‘positive thinking’ need not be imported from the west, but it has always been there with us, in our society, as a part of our culture.

Recluse

A dishearting part of the novel and Sundara Bandara's life as a recluse is the cutting down of precious vanaspathi trees in the thick virgin forest to carve out wooden images for the sale to tourists at high profits.

The author tries to justify the action that even the Veddahs exploited the forest resources to earn a living. However, cutting down age old ebony trees to make commercial products by a person who did not need the money does create a disharmony in Sundara's life.

Suddappu did not need to hunt innocent wild animals or sell the meat to earn a living after Sundara came into his life. Yet this does not prevent us from imagining his life in the thick jungles, causing least damage to the environment, and without disturbing the eco-system.

Ekanayake's description of the jungle life gives us an opportunity to spend a few days in the jungle along with Sundara and Suddappu. Kaetayam Aiya is an example of a successful novel, which has raised itself off the slime of recent pornography which has been pushed upon the readers. The novel has to be appreciated because it reminds us that all is not lost in our country, that there are good, decent people among us, that there are people who try to earn a rightful living, and respect the rights or other living beings.

Gunarathna Ekanayake is also an example of a successful author publisher in our country, who could ride against the flow created by the book publishers.