Somewhere: Looking back on an evolving village
This week, we sit down with the award winning author and translator Vijita Fernando to talk about her new novella ‘Somewhere’. Though slender, the book is a meticulous study of village life as seen through the eyes of our narrator, a young girl growing up in 1930s Sri Lanka. In the decades that follow a rising nationalism begins to make its presence felt, as does the pull of a better life offered by a burgeoning tourism industry. Scrambling to adapt to their rapidly changing context, the previously insular, tightly knit community must embrace or be swept away by forces that continue to shape modern Sri Lanka.
Below are excerpts from our interview.
- There’s this wonderful diversity of characters in your book – have you had them jostling around in your head for a while? There are some like Chutti and Podi that you treat with particular tenderness…
When I started writing, some were already there in my head.
Vijita: A look back. Pic by Indika Handuwala
When I gave the book to my sister, who grew up next to me, she reminded me of people I had forgotten. Podi, the servant girl, was my favourite and I admired many of them very much like the little boy that was the dhobi’s son [he grows up to become a doctor in the book]. That family did well.
- So some of them are based on people you knew?
Almost all the characters are true. I have however, fictionalised the situations. I have built them around a germ of truth.
- The book catalogues some of the rituals and traditions of Sri Lanka, laying them down in quite a bit of detail. Did you want to create a record of these things?
No, not a record. I was thinking of modern weddings and the way they jazz up the Poruwa ceremony. Sometimes it is quite comic! But I actually didn’t think very seriously about it, it just happened. These are all things I have experienced.
- Reading this book also made me curious about your childhood. Where did you grow up?
In Hikkaduwa our house is in a small village about three km in the interior. It was a hilly land and ours was the biggest hillock. Till about age eight, I studied in the Sinhala school and did very well, they say. My parents had some grandaunts who used to make a big fuss of me. We had great fun. We were involved in entertaining village people and absorbing all the customs during the New Year and other festivals.
I remember my father’s laugh. He was a man well before his time. He sent us all to school – education was for girls as well as for boys. Many of my family – both girls and boys – had unconventional marriages. My father used to say ‘I would like my children to marry Sinhala Buddhists but whoever they marry are part of my family.’ He may have had his ideas about who we should be with, but he loved us and so we were fine.
- Your narrator loses the things she grew up with to encroaching modernisation. Was that a loss you felt too?
The house on the cover is the house I grew up in. The house is broken down now. The property has been blocked out and sold in bits. I feel bad – it’s a house where our huge family grew up – but I’m not resentful about that.
What I really wanted to write about was not only how the values changed but how everything changes; the milieu changes. You would have heard of Martin Wickramasinghe’s ‘Gamperaliya’ where he writes about the revolution in the village. Where he writes about people and how their lives changed. For me there is more to it than that. It’s true they changed, but there was another side, there was development as well.
- The book is a novella, really, with an unusual structure. You are known as a short story writer– how does this read as a series of vignettes strung together by the voice of the narrator.
Actually some of those I have written as short stories. The one about the insurgent is one of my favourite stories. I called it April 1971. But I have changed them and expanded the stories looking at them now and also looking at them as part of the novella.
- The book chronicles an idyllic life in a tightly knit community but also portrays incidents of startling violence and abuse. Were you wary of idealising the village life?
Yes, very much. You can’t romanticise the village. Especially in the way some writers romanticise everything rural. As in every situation, there is the good and the bad.
- As the area around the village develops, your characters’ ambitions grow and evolve in response. You take a categorical stance that it’s not a change for the better.
As a person, I look at it and I see more of the bad. I see the deterioration of traditional values. That is my feeling but I also see the development. As a person it affects me very much. That’s what I am trying to say when I begin with standing on the bridge – my mind dwells on the present as my thoughts go back to the past.
- Has your translation work influenced your writing?
My gut reason for doing the novel was that I wanted to write something of my own, instead of being a translator. While translating Sinhala into English however, I have learnt a lot. I have perceived things I never even thought of because of those writings. So my translation work has influenced me as a person. I am currently translating a book and I keep thinking how true they are…..I also feel that if I write in Sinhala I may be a stranger to that culture and may not be able to identify myself so well with it. I think I keep learning from them all the time.
‘Somewhere’ by Vijita Fernando is priced at Rs.500.
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