Seeking comfort in life’s impermanence

Yes, the life of a writer is a good one, says Shyam Selvadurai. But he admits that as he gets older it gets more scary. Writers are never secure – they rarely have salaries or pensions to fall back on – and Shyam tells me that this can be very tiring.

I ask Shyam if he’s changing as a writer and he says he is. He says the writing of a novel is always a search, even when you’re writing from your experience, ‘what you think you know has to be searched through’. All the same he tells me that the writing of Funny Boy - a personal novel based on his own childhood and leading up to the riots of ’83 – was not personally cathartic. He says the search belonged to the novel itself and in his hard work to complete it he had little time to contemplate his own feelings about the time about which he was writing.

That his how he came to discover his current interest in Buddhism. He tells me that after Funny Boy he continued to feel a lack of understanding of the events of his life that Western psychology couldn’t satisfy. Then a friend of his sent him a ‘new-agey’ book that made reference to Buddhist philosophy and Shyam realised how little he knew about Buddhism despite having grown up in Sri Lanka. He points out that he is not drawn to Buddhism as a religion but that it is a philosophy he can relate to. He says he finds the idea of impermanence very comforting and is drawn to the common sense of the philosophy.

This has led Shyam to take an interest in Buddhist narratives – he is talking not just about the jataka stories but about powerful stories from the Buddha’s own lifetime in the Saddharma Ratnavali. Shyam refers me to the stories of the women which he says are fuller than the stories of the men.

The men’s stories he says are veiled in a respect for the monkhood while the women feel more and anguish more. Shyam is clearly an avid reader as well as a writer and he lights up as he mentions particular books: Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way. He is, believe it or not, into volume 5 of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and recommends it.

I ask Shyam if he writes for a particular reader himself. He says, without hesitation, that he always does but that it is more for a community of readers than a single one. Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens he says were written for the people around us at the Galle Literary Festival, while Swimming in the Monsoon Sea was more particularly for himself and his family. Shyam is interested now to write for the diaspora community of which he is a part – and about them. He explains that the trauma of migration is rarely written about in the context of the place to which the writer has migrated. Often second generation migrants will write about this but first generation migrants, he says, tend to focus on the homeland.

Throughout the Festival people have been asking Shyam about this relationship – between the homeland and the diaspora, and his answers are characteristically reflective and measured. He reminds us that his experience of Sri Lanka is not limited to the period before 1983 as he has travelled back to the island since and even lived here for a year whilst researching Cinnamon Gardens.

When I ask him how things have changed he says the old Colombo he knew has all but disappeared and yet he is delighted and amused by specific things that carry on. He mentions the Inter-School Shakespeare Competition that he once took part in and that the children of his friends now enter. He laughs over the fact it is still as much a way of meeting boys and girls as it is about Shakespeare. Shyam Selvadurai tells me that for him one of the greatest pleasures of the Galle Literary Festival has been running into old friends.