A collection to treasure

by Prof. Yasmine GOONERATNE

"These are small and intimate tales,' writes Vijitha Fernando in the preface to her translation of these stories originally written in Sinhala. 'They deal with everyday matters of real concern for women. But they are not trivial and almost always they are about the concerns of the human heart.'

Vijitha Fernando

Let us look at the situations that these writers deal with Seetha Mahendra, whose Double Standards leads us into the book, presents as narrator a housewife who has been charged by her husband with the responsibility of finding a 'suitable' tenant for a house they own. He holds progressive views on "The Ethnic Problem", lectures on the subject, and is engaged in writing a book about it. Consequently, when an applicant shows up who seems to her to be an ideal tenant, in that he is pleasantly spoken, 'refined', and shares her husband's educational background, the narrator is only 'slightly perturbed' when, on taking leave, he mentions that his family is Tamil. Her husband returns home in very high spirits from a lecture he has given to a mixed audience of Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese,.on his pet subject. He has been lauded as 'a national treasure' and complimented on his progressive opinions. As he sits down to enjoy the evening meal, his wife tells him about the person who wishes to rent their house. The result is revealing:

When we sat down to dinner I told him: "Today has been a surprising day for me too. I have something to tell you."

"What?"

"Some nice people came to rent out the house. I liked them very much."

"Then there is no problem."

"No problem. They looked very refined people. But there is one … small problem."

"What is that?"

"They are Tamils."

He had mixed his food and was about to eat. For a long time he stayed silent without a word to me and stared ahead as if he had remembered something.

His face was a study in indecision.

In Double Standards (which could have just as well have been titled "The Ethnic Problem"), the narrator's sympathetic response to her husband's elation at the praise that has been showered on him neatly off-sets the three final sentences that expose the artificiality of his 'liberal' views. Here Seetha Mahendra has taken up the major social issue of Sinhalese/Tamil relations and explored it with insight, albeit from a seemingly ordinary domestic point of view.

This appears to be a popular mode of shortstory writing, for several tales in this book adopt it in varying degrees, though not every storyteller has Seetha Mahendra's delicate touch.

Daya de Alwis, Women! Here a well-meaning wife (conscious that she is not very well-educated) devotes herself to maintaining a tranquil environment in her home, in which her husband, a writer, can pursue his creative vocation. It is evident, however, that nothing she does can please or satisfy him His incessant comparisons of her shortcomings with the virtues of the wives of other writers of their acquaintance make her decide, during a week in which her husband will be away, to file his scattered papers in an orderly way that she is certain will delight him. The result of this is disappointing, to say the least:

Anula could not remember a day when he shouted so emotionally, ever. It was not only the house, but Srinath's voice, his expression - everything had changed.

"This is not how these clippings should be preserved, Anula. Not these strips of articles in CR books. I need the whole page where my article is published. Oh God, Anula, you have committed a real crime!"

The unpleasantness in his voice echoed throughout the house.

In Jayanthi Rukmani Siriwardena's A Marriage Certificate? A senior bureaucrat in a Government pensions office faces an administrative 'problem' that forces her to silently compare her own situation in life (separated from a violent husband to whom she had been briefly but legally married) with that of Somawathi, a middle-aged woman who, lacking the certificate of marriage required by the law, humbly seeks payment following the death of the man with whom she has lived happily for forty years.

Malini felt as if she was choking. She thought of her past wedded life. Could she, who had had a huge wedding, speak like this woman? What insults, blame, ugly stories had passed between her and [Palitha] during the less than two years of her wedded life? What hints? What insinuations? Could she speak of her husband engineer Palitha Amarawardena at whose hands she had suffered blows three times like this woman who says that her husband never laid a hand on her?

The law requires that the woman who stands before her without the required document in her hand must be denied payment.

Ascertaining that the birth certificates of the children of this de facto relationship are in order, though their mother's birth certificate is missing, Malini Weerasekera uses her official authority to bring about what she realizes would be a just resolution (if not a strictly legal one). Ignoring the letter of the law, Malini recommends payment.

In Chitra I. Perera's My Daughter Gets a Letter … Or Two!, the gap between the generations becomes evident as a conscientious mother (the story's narrator) and ...

... her fun-loving teenage daughter argue over every matter, from appropriate dress - 'on the days she wears hot pants she notes that my face is sour as a squeezed lime' - to examination grades, from caste to correspondence. A personal letter with a typed address that arrives for her daughter throws the narrator into an agony of foreboding which grips her until her daughter, fully understanding the cause of her mother's anxiety, sets her mind at rest.

"These letters are not for me. They are for Sonari. She has no way of getting her boy friend's letters to her home. Her mother is very strict, it seems …

I will give them to her when I go back to the hostel."

In Jina's Day, Sunila Wijesinghe traces twenty four hours in the typical day of a working wife and mother whose life is blighted by the necessity to please a completely insensitive, selfish husband and placate a couple of thoughtless, uncaring children. Daily life for her has become a ceaseless set of skirmishes, episodes in a never-ending battle with time, lack of money, and her husband's complaints. Jina is only seeking a little time to herself, a word or a gesture from her husband that would indicate to her that she is not alone in her struggle. These are not forthcoming. Wickrama returns from a friend's 'promotion party', and his wife's day ends as it had begun, with an exhibition, on her husband's part, of selfish unconcern:

She hurriedly brought to the table the dhal curry, the fried eggs and the brinjal badun she had cooked. Wickrama did not like eggs. The two children do not eat brinjal. She had prepared them for convenience, and not because she forgot these preferences. Jinadari felt happy when Wickrama sat at the dinner table. On days when he had had a drink he would just fall into bed, without eating.

He served only the brinjal badun onto his plate of rice. He hardly ate even a mouthful.

"Who can eat this muck … no chilli, no salt …"

Wickrama took his plate and went into the kitchen. The rice was strewn [on] to the top of the cat's bowl and scattered all over [the floor].

He banged the plate noisily on the table. Jinadari's mind echoed that sound. She wiped the tears from her eyes with her index finger.

Viola Abeygunawardena's Loku Akka, narrated by the younger sibling of the 'elder sister' who is the centre of the story, is a tale of betrayal and patient endurance as a marriage that had been thought auspicious in every way turns sour and ends in tragedy. Sajeevani Kasthuriarahchi's By the Way explores the feelings of an unmarried mother who has literally lost her way. Rejected by her family, she has given her child to a wealthy family for adoption and finds herself helpless. In Chandani Kumari Mahadivulwewa's story Saara, a household pet (in this case a cat) with winning ways and a distinctive personality becomes her owner's beloved friend and companion, compensating for the shortcomings of her husband and her children.

Piyaseeli Wijenayake's Podi Hamuduruwo would strike its readers in different ways, depending on the depth and strength of their understanding of Buddhist practice. Silma is a committed devotee of a temple in which resides a single monk, for whom she regularly prepares alms.

When she fills the monk's begging bowl to the top and the monk chants the gathas, Silma's heart fills with a faith which sometimes spills over.

When the monk burdens them with requests for expensive items, Silma does her best; even without the co-operation of her husband, until one day, arriving with their regular donation of alms, they find the temple deserted and the monk flown, leaving no address. Local gossips are not slow to think the worst of the absentee monk, but Silma does not join in the exercise of character-assassination. It is only when she goes on pilgrimage to Buddhangala Vihara, a remote shrine in a wild and lonely place, and finds that the monk has taken up residence there to pursue his search for truth, that Silma recognizes with happiness the part she has played, with her gifts of alms, in helping him on his 'sansaric journey'. The tears that flow from her eyes now are allowed to flow unchecked. They are the tears of piety and joy.

In Rupa Amarasekera's story, Stitching Her Life Together, a woman encountered on a train journey describes to the narrator, a journalist, how she supports her ailing mother and a dependent student sister by sewing small items of clothing for sale at the Sunday fair. Thankful for every opportunity that comes her way, uncomplaining and cheerful, she gets on with her life. Dharshana Shammi Wijetilleke's story A Charmed Life? sadly questions the reality of the happy life led by an elderly married couple of the narrator's acquaintance. Nanda Jayakody's heroine in Malini is an open-hearted young woman whose efforts at generosity are misunderstood and ridiculed until she can bear it no longer. She requests a transfer to Anuradhapura :

" …I need a change in my life. Don't you think [she asks a stranger, the staid and

startled narrator] that when the environment changes, I will feel some consolation? … I am going to take all my books of poetry when I go there. I love

Anuradhapura and love to visit the ruins."

In her new environment, Malini refuses, in the national interest, to take part in a trade union's 'token strike', an action that creates around her an atmosphere of active hostility. She returns home, gives up her job, and begins to write poetry.

I went on writing poetry, even on the walls of my room … My two brothers started saying that I was mad and went on scolding me. Mother started doing charms with oil, cutting limes, tying threads, amulets and the older of my two brothers even took me to a doctor almost by force …

It is no surprise that she ends her life by suicide. Is it the author's skill, or her translator's, that traces with such accuracy the stages by which 'Malini' reaches the final point of despair? When, a few years ago, I was invited to undertake a survey of contemporary women's writing since Independence in 1948, I learned in the process of my research, quite a lot about the creative lives of Sri Lanka's women writers, and the difficulties they experience in pursuing any continuous train of thought or artistic creativity in the face of unremitting social and familial pressures. One of these authors wrote with passion about the lack of sympathy and understanding shown by her husband and her children towards her writing endeavours. They accused her, she wrote, of wasting on frivolous self-indulgence time and money that could be more usefully spent on household tasks and caring for their comfort.' Malini', writing verse on her bedroom wall, is thought by her family to be crazy. Given the acute sense of guilt that plagues most creative women who attempt to combine their family life with any kind of artistic activity, her battle is lost before it has even begun.

Lakshmi Bombuwela's story The Bond traces the misery of a loving mother who must give her little son over to the care of her husband's family because she cannot combine motherhood with the demands of her working life. In Indra Kumari Kahalapitiya's complex story Defeated!, a grandmother helplessly observes the fracture of her daughter's family life: initiated by a political situation that robbed the young woman of her husband and her children of their father, it is completed by a dilemma all too human and familiar, as the demands of a second marriage take priority over her duty to the children of the first. In Neela Gunasekera's story The Lady Judge, a compassionate public servant literally 'sets aside' the trappings and insignia of her judicial office in order to help a young woman pay a fine levied by the state for an 'offence' that was not of her making, but in dealing with which she has received no sympathy or assistance from the so-called guardians of the law. Raped by two strangers on her way back from work late at night, she has stumbled into a police station to ask for help: "Oh … a midnight bride. Come, come. Look at her, going on the spree at night,

and coming here to trouble us .." was the response Susima got from the police.

[But] To whom is she to report, if not to the police?

To whom indeed! The phrase recalls a familiar text: "To which god can we relate our troubles?" Through tales narrated in the unvarnished prose of a courtroom deposition, this volume reveals some very grim realities. Behind the façades of family life, 'justice' and gender equality is a world in which to be poor and female appears to be a criminal offence, meriting punishment from gods and men alike.

Sheela Wickramaratne's story One Day at a Time shows the working mother of a very sick child attempting to cope with the insensitivity of the hospital system and the careless contempt for her situation of male loiterers who see her leaving the hospital in the early hours of the morning. In a tale that is reminiscent in its ironic understatement of the late Chitra Fernando's Missie Nona, Malini Govinnage's Redi Nanda explores the callousness with which the caste system continues to operate in villages, even in an 'enlightened' and 'democratic' age. Having spurned the needs of their neighbour, a woman of the dhobi caste, reduced her to penury and shamelessly exploited her, a govigama family duly performs the religious rites that mark the Ridi Nanda's passing:

"Lots of people came to Ridi's funeral," Amma said .. She spoke of Ridi's funeral sadly, but with satisfaction. "Must have a sermon and give alms on the third month after her death."

On a lighter note - but carrying an undertow of the kind of racial prejudice revealed by the husband figure in Seetha Mahendra's story Double Standards - is Vipuli Niroshini Hettiarachchi's tale The Unknown, in which unreasoning fear on the narrator's part of some strangers who have come to reside next door leads to suspicion and rejection. Although sense prevails at the end of the story, and the narrator can smile at the memory of her own prejudice, the reader (like the narrator) does not easily forget it

Shanti Dissanayake's story Pavithra explores the generation gap in a Sinhalese family, and ends on a joyful note of reconciliation. Sepali Mayadunne's The Provident Fund presents the situation of a hardworking woman who finds, on retirement, that 'there was no use living when she could not go to work and she did not have a cent to her name'. In Tharanga Ranasinghe's Room No. 107, we follow the thoughts of Sarada, a young graduate who is preparing to leave the room in the University hostel that she has shared with nine undergraduate friends for four years. Memories both happy and sad fill her mind as she leaves in the knowledge that she has been rejected by her dysfunctional family, and is now, finally and irrevocably, on her own.

The reader who comes to this book with no prior knowledge of Sri Lanka and its people (or very little) , and who might possibly imagine that life in a tropical island paradise must necessarily be idyllic, would be immediately struck by the frequency with which the writers of these stories, most of them winners of national awards, take up themes of emotional isolation. What has happened, they might ask, to love and laughter, to humour and the workings of the mind? Surely such matters are not trivial? Are they not also concerns of the human heart? Is it possible that our finest women authors write best when they are deeply unhappy? Or that women writers have been given an idea - surely erroneous? - that the problems of their everyday lives are the only subjects worthy of literary exploration? If the last possibility happens to be the case, we must all consider ourselves unlucky that such ideas have been permitted to take hold, and to drive the act of literary creation.

Vijita Fernando, one of this country's most skilled and sensitive translators from the Sinhala, wisely selects from among the many 'Englishes' that are available to authors and translators today, an idiom that successfully holds a 'mirror up to nature'. Skilfully avoiding the trap of "English Spoken Our Way", she has permitted the narrators and characters who inhabit these tales of middleclass life to express themselves in an uncluttered, seemingly simple English that reflects, in its grammatical accuracy and its lucidity, the naturally straightforward Sinhala speech of the original. Truly, a collection to treasure.

Emeritus Professor Yasmine Gooneratne, director of "Guardian Angels", an English literary editing service, is currently working on her fourth novel, set in 'post-war' Sri Lanka . Her third novel, The Sweet and Simple Kind, was shortlisted for both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Dublin IMPAC International Prize.