A hymn for love and nature

Somewhere on the Green Hills
Author: Aditha Dissanayake
Published by Serenity

Reviewed by Padma Edirisinghe

It is almost amazing how the momentum of a topic wavers with changing times and climes. For example, “The green hills” embedded in the title of the book under review earned abominable status from Peradeniya campus dons who just dabbled in Marxist ideology. Their attitudes generally fashioned the minds of the students who sat at the Arts Theatre desks taking it all in the Gospel truth.

Added to the above servile pattern was the reviewer’s identity as a low lander almost domiciled for years in the periphery of the dry zone. The sequel was that Green hills corresponding to the Nuwara Eliya terrain so far away decimated to a mere tutorial topic in the university.

The essay had no flesh and blood to invigorate it and spelt the optimum in academic dryness and was saturated with bigotism and animosity towards all that savoured of luxury and comfort and trailed from the West.

A good number of those who waxed eloquent on the topic, who for some reason or other, while hinging on Socialist theories, stopped only short of blasphemy when degrading those who turned these green hills to cash crop plantations, mostly tea estates.

It was sermonised that they had the most pernicious effect on the rural economy, eroding the upcountry soil, leading to catastrophic deforestation, drawing the native farmers of their lifeblood indigenous crops and the livestock of their god–given pastures.

Samuel Baker, who was responsible for transforming the Nuwara Eliya terrain into a Little England, was hounded as the devil himself for drawing a white shroud on the landscape. Naturally in such circumstances I grew up with a bitter animosity to those responsible for these evils, that I do not disclaim too.

Anyway can a book do wonders by way of mental somersaults? I will not go so far as to declare that a mental somersault was orchestrated within me via the book, Somewhere on the Green Hills but as an alternate to the much maligned scene it certainly deposited me in a fantastic whirl of beauty, romance and an ambience all its own rising out of the plantation economy itself.

Who got there first? Of course the upcoming author, Aditha.

“Some people have all the luck” is a common aphorism but it fits this young acquaintance of mine that I met under the Lake House canopy years back. She has a father who himself is a SAARC Literary award winner and she is married to a planter who naturally by way of profession is heir to the adulated world.

Aditha herself is born with itchy fingers that once took her to stare at the Reuters office in Manhattan, but only stare she did when she had all the qualifications to enter it. A writer’s unpredictability brought her back to the island,her own desires in the world of scribes driven underground.

I am tempted here to echo the back flap before going on.

“Set against the backdrop of the mist covered mountains of Central Sri Lanka, spanning the last few years of the 19th century when these verdant hills were transformed into lush fields yielding the world renowned brew called Ceylon tea, to the present where the colonial aura of the pioneer planters still lingers...”

Against this background unfolds the lives and loves of three young women amid a mix of events, some sad,some joyous that bespeak the versatility and common nature of human lives, never mind what the skin colour is.

The author belongs to the race who according to the earlier mentioned Socialist writers has been exploited by a group of the white skinned who made money at the expense of the colony in the late 19th century. There is ample scope for the author to be bitter but all what she focuses on are the lives of the women, shall we say, trapped within the plantation economy.

They have left abodes of much more comfortable living to share the joys and sorrows of their life partners, brothers and sons. Now they weld into a strange society.

And here are staged love affairs, trysts, bonds and even eternal departures. A world filled with laughter, yet heartbreaks and misunderstandings as well as those rare unforgettable moments……Aditha, the writer is at her best here, overlooking the racial prejudices, the economic malaise engendered.

She could be accused of even feminism for she almost isolates the female society on which day to day events in the plantation sector impinge on the White women folk.

They seem to take all that in stride with much admirable fortitude. Their men have adventured into strange terrain to find the dough, better say, to dig the gold mines in and around salubrious Nuwara Eliya. Are the women bitter about it? No. In fact they seem to exult in the new life, transposing on to it cameos of their own lives back home.

And the outlying nature complements the idyllic picture.

“Somewhere on the green hills, a gurgling brook...a stone seat, a busy squirrel and a yellow butterfly are waiting...”

It is a story to tell, a unique story that ends not with a theatrical mess of human movements but with the antics of the said “busy squirrel”.

“After Dinu left the glen, Mr. Squirrel returned to his little dwelling on the top most branch of the tuna tree. The water in the brook continued to glide gracefully over the brown pebbles, a yellow butterfly started to whisper sweet secrets to a young marigold.”

Love entwines everything while the book itself is a hymn to love and to a beautiful kingdom of nature that certainly did not get eroded with the tea plantations. The author’s ability has welded it all deftly presenting a charming platter to the reader in the most exquisite English.