Opening up to controversy?
Dressed in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, Ashok Ferrey walks through his newly redecorated house. The main hall is now a cheery yellow, courtesy the team from Bombay Velvet, who turned the author’s home into a set for their film. Luckily, Ashok does his writing elsewhere – the rooms upstairs come equipped with a comfortable hansiputuwa on which he reclines as he writes.
Confessing that he is only now adopting more modern technologies, Ashok explains his preference has always been to laboriously produce manuscripts with pencil and paper. It’s how he finished his latest book. Shortlisted for the Gratiaen prize, ‘The Professional’ is Ashok’s second novel. While it’s his most personal, it may also be his most controversial – he’s had to begin defending it before it’s even released in Sri Lanka.
With its launch tomorrow, ‘The Professional’ will shed all trace of Saroj Sinnathamby. That was the pseudonym Ashok used when he submitted it for the Gratiaen Prize. The name actually belonged to a dear friend – Sarojini Sinnathamby has received special mention in at least two of his books – and he borrowed it with her consent. A mix of concerns led Ashok to submit under a nom de plume, primary among them being that the announcement of the Gratiaen shortlist was tied to the opening of Colomboscope, a festival he was curating. Now, Ashok reveals that while he was expecting some controversy, he was braced for it from another source – “The contents of the book are, what I think, should have got me into a lot of trouble,” says Ashok.
According to the blurb, ‘The Professional’ opens in London in the 1980s. A young Sri Lankan named Chamath, having recently graduated from Oxford with a degree in Maths, returns home only to take up work on a building site as a casual labourer. He is approached by two strangers with the offer of illicit work that pays better. With that ‘Chamath gets dragged down below the invisible grid that exists in any big city, into a blue-grey twilight world of illegals.’ Part of the book is set abroad, part of it in Sri Lanka. Ashok says the geographical divide is also something of a stylistic one – his first half is “serious”, his characters “caught between the millstones of the Thatcher society” are “ground to a pulp.” In the second he lapses into his favourite medium – satire. Complete with gossiping aunties, “it’s a very Sri Lankan thing, for which I’m known,” says Ashok. Thirty years divides the two sections.
A few biographical similarities, such as Ashok himself having attended Oxford, having lived in the UK during that period and returned to work in building in Sri Lanka, might have readers concluding that the line between fact and fiction is blurry. However, Ashok hastens to clarify that the only thing he’s lent his protagonist are a few personal qualities. “I invest the protagonist with my character and in that way it is a deeply personal book,” he says.
Pic by Indika Handuwala
The book is also, to borrow his term, “racy”. For Ashok, writing about sex presented the challenges that it has to writers before him, mainly how to do it convincingly and tastefully. He says initial feedback from editors and publishers in India has been a clamouring for more.
Yet, he’s stuck to his guns and says the book is how he wants it to be. He chalks it down to the advantages of being an older writer – he says age has allowed him the backbone to stand up for his convictions and for his books. In fact, his years as a writer seem to have been about pushing himself to do more. Ashok readily admits to being terrified of the novel and says the only reason he attempted it in the first place was because he recognised that short stories seldom found enthusiastic publishers.
Despite his two novels he categorises himself “as one of the world’s short story writers”. Still, this book has given him a taste for more. His next book is already stirring in his head.(A physical fitness coach in his spare time he says he catches himself ‘writing’ while doing bicep curls or overseeing a client’s workout).
Having enjoyed the kind of reception from Indian publishers that few other authors based in Sri Lanka have, Ashok has always been vocal about what he considers Sri Lanka’s potential. Will ‘The Professional’ earn Sri Lankan writing a higher profile across the sub-continent? Ashok is not the only one hoping it will.
‘The Professional’ will be launched tomorrow at 5 p.m. at the National Library and Documentation Services Board, No. 14, Independence Avenue, Colombo 7. The book is priced at Rs.900 and is available at all leading bookstores.
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