Writing: Her way of staying close

It was probably the single most frightening thing that happened to her. Having to walk alone from the advertising agency in Kollupitiya where she worked part-time to her home in Dehiwela, through the streets aflame. Those terrible scenes stayed imprinted in her mind though it was many years before she would think of putting them down.

“On twenty-third of July 1983, the day the world went mad, was how Karen Roberts would later write about the ethnic violence in her book ‘July’. Her world changed that day, she says sombrely. “Until then my life was great…..my only concern was what to wear on Saturday night!” Her father was abroad, her mother had to fetch her younger sister home from school and her brother was stuck somewhere and the 17-year-old Karen had to fend for herself amidst the mayhem and madness that saw the familiar Colombo landscape turn into killing streets.

In the years that followed, she put aside those painful memories, but when invited by her publishers, to write a sequel to The Flower Boy, her first and instantly successful novel, her thoughts turned, not to plantation life (the nostalgic setting for Flower Boy) but to this more recent episode in our history. “I felt maybe it was time to use this ‘voice’ that I seemed to have, to do something. I felt that with July ’83 it was as if somebody had lifted a carpet and swept everything under, and just said everything’s fine now. And you can’t,” she says. “I knew it (writing the book) was not going to change anything but at least I felt that somebody captured it. At least acknowledge it for the poor people who suffered as a result.”

Writing it wasn’t difficult, but publishing it took some courage - Karen wondered how her family still living in Colombo would feel about all the things she said, the scenes so graphically described. Her father, she recalls then, was unequivocal in his support, insistent that she should go ahead.

Sharing these and other memories in between sessions at the Literary Festival last week, Karen Roberts is relaxed and disarmingly candid, talking of her writing and her childhood, of growing up in Colombo, schooldays at St. Lawrence’s, Wellawatte. Her family is obviously, a key influence in her life. Her mother she describes as having been extremely articulate and practical, her father, the one for the big picture, ever urging her to conquer the world. “So I had a dose of what had to be done and an equal dose of what might be.”

Contrary to what many believe she is Sinhalese, and not Burgher as her name may sound. Her great grandfather, Acharage Ratna Jinendra Rabel Ratnaweera it was who decided to change it to the more anglicized Roberts, more’s the pity, she says wryly. Completing her schooling, she worked in advertising, then “bummed around in London for a bit”, got a job offer in advertising in Dubai, which was where she wrote ‘The Flower Boy’ “very quickly”. She claims no great literary inspiration - it all came about quite by accident, when a close friend who having seen her reading voraciously and spending inordinate amounts on books, asked her why she never thought of writing a book herself. “At the time, I laughed, thought that’s never going to happen but then I thought why not give it a shot. And it just kept flowing.” The book took a mere ten months to write.

Set in colonial Ceylon, ‘The Flower Boy’ is the tender story of a little boy’s friendship with the British planter’s daughter and the love that blossoms between his mother, the housekeeper and her father, the ‘Sudu Mahattaya’. Probing the problems of class and social barriers, the story is nevertheless all about relationships, lyrically written yet penetratingly insightful.

‘July’ was written after she moved to the US. Published in 2001, its immediate success gave her, she says, a measure of confidence that this was what she ought to be doing. “I will never write non-fiction, I would be horrible at it,” she says emphatically but feels her strength lies in terms of being able to take perhaps controversial or unlikely subjects and turn them into fiction, thereby bringing them to a wider audience. “I have a lot of things I am very passionate about that I need to do,” she says, articulating perhaps a promise of more to come.

One of them, is the subject of her next book, which will be released this year, good news for her fans, again a subject, very close to her heart (“there are like 20 of them tucked away”). “It deals with relationships about the issues of domestics, or ‘servants’ as we used to call them. We had a very special relationship with our ‘servants’ but I think growing up I realised it could be different. So the new book is also about relationships, conflict,” she says.

How special her own relationship is with her old nanny from Malwana who looked after Karen when she was little and even came to care for Karen’s son when he was born, emerges when she explains how she and her siblings spent every one of the April holidays growing up, in this little mud house, slept on the floor, drew water from the well, went out looking for firewood. “She had six kids and we were not treated any different.”

That was one of the most amazing things her mother did for them, allowing that experience of going from the comforts of a middle-class Colombo upbringing to see the extreme poverty of ‘the village’, she says. “We handled both equally well and if I were to go to Malwana tomorrow, I can draw water from the well, I know how to tie a diya redde like a pro.”

Though now settled in California with her American husband and 12-year-old son, when it comes to writing, her material is quite naturally drawn from this country. Her husband she fondly says is “very indulgent of my eccentricities and of my ethnicity”. “I am extremely Sri Lankan. If there’s rice and curry, I don’t care who’s there, I just dive in with my fingers. I walk around in kaftans. I’m not going to change just because I’m living in a different place.”

She tried writing a novel set in California, but found it leading nowhere. It’s like meeting a distant relative, she elaborates, you like them but you don’t really know them, - that real intimacy born of personal experience is lacking. “It’s very hard to write about something that you’re not that intimate with…I don’t.”

She works part-time now, writes and reads as widely as she did before, she says, adding that she is a great proponent of reading for all her knowledge is from the books. The teenage Karen got into ‘tremendous trouble’ with her father when he found her reading ‘Lolita’ when she was 14. These days it’s the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( Chronicle of a Death Foretold) and Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns) that absorb her. At the Galle festival, she’s found Yasmine Gooneratne’s The Sweet and Simple Kind, and is reading it “really slowly” to savour it.

Her writing, she describes simply, as “my way of staying close to that which I love. My way of keeping in touch. I’d love to say that I write for an audience but that would be an absolute untruth. I write for myself..it’s an absolute indulgence.”

The fact that people want to read it is an absolute bonus, she says, with some humility, adding that she never writes outlines, but just turns the page and lets the story unfold. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, any more than the reader does, I just write the start and then it feels like this ought to happen …And we go from there.” With Karen Roberts, it’s a journey, the reader is all too glad to take.