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| Sunday, 12 June 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Book Reviews On Horseshoe Street : Window to a bygone era Reviewed by Rohan Canagasabey
On Horseshoe Street is a collection of several short stories authored by Tissa Devendra based on his recollections when Sri Lanka was Ceylon. These stories were, over the years, previously published in local English language newspapers, beginning in 1990. The book was launched by its publisher Vijitha Yapa at the BMICH, with the honoured guest being Dr Sarath Amunugama, the present Minister of Finance and one-time colleague of Devendra at the Galle Kachcheri. Also in attendance was Tissa Abeysekera, author of Bringing Tony Home, who spoke at length about On Horseshoe Street, commenting that unlike some other Sri Lankan writings in English, this book amply 'fuses language with the human feelings it seeks to convey and therefore there in no gap between the two'. Tissa Devendra has had a forty-year career in public service and UN Agencies and presently, at the age of seventy six, is Chairman, National Council for Administration. He has previously contributed the text to a photo-essay book on Sri Lanka, titled Sri Lanka: The Emerald Isle and also published a shorter collection of short stories in 1998, titled Tales from the Provinces.
However one is left wondering whether it's a case of fact spiced up with a little fiction, not unlike a curry needing some spice to make it a Sri Lankan (or Ceylonese in this case) curry. They are, as Devendra clarifies, '... only a wryly reminiscent look at life in little towns, old Kachcheries and distant villages now transformed beyond recognition or recall. The past is truly, another country'. 'Another country' that is brought to life in 33 short stories on about 230 pages of On Horseshoe Street. The first short story has the same title as the book and is Devendra's recollections of his Buddhist family's new home on 'Ladan Veediya' - Horseshoe Street - officially known as Cross Street. The reader is given a child's view of the various - now non-existent - vendors that plied their trade by trundling past homes. Devendra reveals his retrospective awareness of propaganda in the next story titled Rockfist Rogan, Please Step Forward! which refers to the hero in a British wartime literary cartoon called Champion. Devendra's short stories set in Kandy capture his childhood to adolescent years prior to, during and just after WW2. The one story set in Badulla is appropriately titled A look into the future. The 'future' in the title refers to his place of accommodation there, coincidentally a bachelor home of government staff officers. A prelude to the beginning of his own working life six years later. This is followed by two stories set in Colombo, of which the first is A Requiem for Lion House, set mostly in the cafe frequented by Ceylon's undergraduates and their socialising within and outside of its confines. This story also has funny elements such as Devendra's recollection of a worn-out wartime poster that read "Looting will be punishable by DEATH". Devendra comments that this warning was in English, 'under the fond assumption that these law breakers could read their ruler's language!'. Another funny element is the account of a character named 'Kukul Charlie' at the University cafe who apparently imitated the cry of rooster at each table to get money from students. Stories from Trincomalee, where Devendra began his initial working career as a District Land Officer, are followed by ones from Nuwara Eliya and Anuradhapura. 'I was only a government servant and my job was to follow the policy laid down by the government of the day' said Devendra, in briefly commenting on his public life. Devendra was to end his initial career in public service, back in Trincomalee, now as Government Agent for both Jaffna and Trincomalee, when the beginnings of the ethnic conflict were emerging and with it the end of that peaceful era depicted in On Horseshoe Street. Of the 19 short stories in these four sections, three that involve unusual stories of others, captivated me. The first was The U boat Adventure where a local ferry owner tells of his adventurous experience in the British merchant navy during WW2. The other was the mysterious colleague named Imelda Ratnayake, a tri-lingual speaker whose origins and the exotic love behind it, were revealed to Devendra in a far-off country in the story titled Brumpy's Daughter. The story of a descendent of an English nobleman and his unusual role in independent Ceylon is told in The Count of Monte Misto Other notable stories, from my personal perspective, are The House of Buddhist Curtains, which relates the uncovering of a scandalous and tragic love story, The Mermaid's Bracelet", begins with Devendra's grandfather's seafaring life and ends with the latter's account of meeting a mermaid, while The Curious Hunt for Marusinghe is about the hunt for a Marxist revolutionary during the first JVP insurrection in 1971. 'All these stories are based on real people but spruced up fictionally' said Devendra. On Horseshoe Street does not keep one in suspense like a thriller, but its short stories are interesting and different from each other. However, I needed to reach for the dictionary in rare instances, for words such as 'mendicants', 'savant' and 'bacchanalian'. Words that are rarely used today but are perhaps appropriate for a book that otherwise lucidly offers a window into a part of the bygone era of Ceylon. Author: Tissa Devendra Colpetty People : Impertinent, irreverent and completely irresistible Reviewed by Dilini Algama I was thoroughly interested in the introduction to the author printed on the inside flap of the front cover. "He lives in Colombo with his wife, two kids and his cholesterol" had to be some kind of signal as to the readability of the book. Also intriguing were the little sketches of houses and palaces at the beginning of every chapter. I do not know if that's the way the author wanted it to be, but there you go. Intrigued and interested I read the first chapter The Perfect House (after having had stared at the sketch for some time). Here the narrator is a landlord who having rented his house to a German lady has to work hard to get the rent, but some time later ends up endeavouring to chase her out. Now if you are looking for a book with characters to break down and study as you would do in microbiology or neuroscience this is not exactly the book I would recommend. It's about basic human relationships. Ferrey's characters have their eccentricities. They love their pigs' knuckles, prefer sweet potatoes to their wives and servants dressed in Rolph Lorensz shirts, Bandara Nike Air trainers and Dolce and Gampaha tee-shirts who cook pet dogs for dinner and then disappear. The repetition of such absurdities add immensely to the originality of the book and also to the humour (which starts for me, at the introduction to the author on the inner flap of the front cover). These people scheme to get their daughters married (with disastrous results), they scheme to acquire land and lead double lives in up-country Walauvas. But they aren't acquired eccentricities. Mrs. Sarath in Ice Cream Karma dresses in designerwear and makes sure to let the fact be known. Aren't characters not so fortunate to be crafted by Ferry like that too? The servant boy whose ultimate peak of coolness is to say Aney nangi api cool ekak bomu the? in some tea room (Matara Tea Rooms if you are fussy about details) - Don't we always see people like this? So his characters are not so unconnectable afterall... The eighteen stories are placed in London, Colombo 7, Hilton, Africa, Pannipitiya and Kandy and in a myriad of other places. The places vary as much as the characters. (Did I mention Loelia who wears emeralds to Sansburys?) This is certainly a very interesting book to read. Ashok Ferry has taken a lot of extremities, absurdities and craftily outlined the very hyperbole of life. This collection of stories is as colourful and bright as is the cover. (Colpetty People courtesy of Lake House Bookshop - Sir Chittampalam Gardiner Mawatha). Author: Ashok Ferry Perera - Hussein Publishing House. Suvimalee and her fiction by Prof. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke Suvimalee Gunaratna, later Karunaratna, was born in Colombo in 1939, and travelled a great deal in her early years with her parents (her father served Sri Lanka as Ambassador to Burma and Thailand, and as High Commissioner to Australia). She worked as a free lance journalist and then joined the English Service of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation in 1972 as a producer of Feature Programmes. She resigned from this post in 1976. She proceeded to earn the M.A. and M.Phil. degrees from the Postgraduate Institute of Pali and Buddhist Studies of the University of Kelaniya. She is now working towards a Ph.D. Being well versed in Buddhist Studies, she has followed the development of her thought and entered higher realms. She has published fiction under both her surnames. Her erudition has been absorbed into her literary sensibility and her trained mind is evident in the conception of her stories and novels. As a writer, she began modestly by publishing a volume of short stories, Bili Pooja ('Human Sacrifice', 1973) and her potential was obvious from the start. Ediriweera Sarachchandra in his Foreword to the book wrote: Suvimalee Karunaratna "is not looking at life in Ceylon through the eyes of someone alien to the soil, as most writers writing in English do, but as someone who has lived the experience she is recording, and is part and parcel of the society she is describing". Sarachchandra has identified the source of Suvimalee Karunaratna's strength as a writer. She does not suffer from the alienation to which most of our writers in English have been prone. In 1993, Suvimalee Karunaratna published a notable protest novel, Lake-Marsh. She wrote in an afterward: "The main theme has to do with lethargy, corruption and ethnic strife which bedevil Sri Lankan society today, laying wide open the doors to exploitation and which threatens to clog up the arteries of national life. What takes place in the novel is analogous to the marsh which threatens to choke up the whole lake". The Lake in Kandy is, indeed, a wonderful symbol: Sri Lanka still seems in the Lake-Marsh. In her next novel, The Vine (2001), she proceeds to write well on terrorism, socio-economic, spiritual and feminist issues. Her examination of LTTE terrorism is particularly valuable at the present time because she creates space for views regarding the 'ethnic' problem which are precluded by the agendas of most Sri Lankan writers in English. Suvimalee's second volume of short stories, Mandara Flower Salon and Other Stories, published in 2004, is rewarding not only because her narrative skills hold the reader's curiosity but also because she depicts the present social and economic crisis that confronts us. She exposes its origins in the story 'Mr. and Mrs. Baby', which is set right back in time, during the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial period. The story is a perceptive picture of the security and the security in standards of the earlier age and the cracks appearing in the succeeding period. The writer plays off the two periods and the contrast is not simple but complex. The British colonisers maintained a system but did so in their interest. Their successors were locals and they should have been acting in the national interest, but corruption had crept in. This is dramatised via Mr. Baby's predicament. His old-style integrity begets enemies and these corrupt enemies try to frame him. The writer suggests that they succeed but, by a clever twist, she later shows that they fail and that Mr. Baby is smarter. The writer places her weight behind Mr. Baby's integrity but also instills a doubt as to the survival of such qualities. The story, 'When Fire, Poison and Sword Cannot Touch', is set in Kandy during the second JVP insurgency, 1988-89. It is about different ways and changing values. It vividly juxtaposes Buddhist ideals with the brutality of the insurgency, most strikingly at the conclusion, when the woman who sought refuge from the insurgency in piety, finds the insurgents entering her home and intercepts the bullet meant for her son. The juxtaposition reveals much of the underlying factors of the insurgency, the violence stemming from the urge to reform and the resentment of the 'have-nots' against the 'haves'. 'The Festival Stall' is also set in Kandy, but at a time of peace. Its central character is Nandasiri, a municipal labourer who supports his parents and sister, including a sister married to a ne'er-do-well and with children, and the focus is on his efforts to mount a pavement stall during the Esala Perahera Festival to earn much needed extra cash. The story celebrates his vitality and cheerful resourcefulness despite the economic and emotional trap that binds him. Like Balzac's work in The Human Comedy, one of the virtues of Suvimalee 's writing is her perceptive delineation of human need both financial and emotional. This is clearly shown in a number of stories such as The Outsider', The Funeral Show and The Day of the Full Moon. In The Funeral Show and The Day of the Full Moon her acute observation of the way religion can serve social as well as spiritual aspiration, is enlightening as well as entertaining. The title story,The Mandara Flower Salon, is not only seemingly light-weight and enjoyable at surface level for the sheer skill with which it conveys sensuous pleasure - all the delights of sight, scent and caressing touch - but is also notable for the aura of irony that plays around a thoughtful, religious-minded woman's visit to a beauty salon. The sharpness and irony of the story comes from a mind fully aware of the vanity and impermanence of life, on the one hand, and the sensuous pleasure of beauty care, on the other. Suvimalee's stories are significant not only as individual tales. The collection as a whole possesses a thematic coherence as reflecting Sri Lanka's changing and multi-faceted social fabric. In my recent book, Sri Lankan English Literature and the Sri Lankan People 1917-2003, I examined all our writers of fiction and came to the conclusion that Punyakantie Wijenaike was an important writer but that the best writers were Ediriweera Sarachchandra and Suvimalee Karunaratna. Sarachchandra, unfortunately, has passed away. Survimalee Karunaratna's latest collection of stories confirms her standing as our best writer of fiction at the present time.
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The latter was short-listed for the Gratiaen award. Devendra has also
written two books of Sinhala folk tales for children. 'They begin with My
schooldays in Kandy and meander through My career as a Government Field
Officer in Trincomalee, Nuwara Eliya and Anuradhapura' states part of the
note to the reader at the beginning of On Horseshoe Street. Tissa Devendra's
note further adds that; 'All the characters in these stories are based on
real people and real happenings - but then roam into the realms of
imagination'. 
