A shared journey, a conversation and now a novel
Dilshan Boange met his muse on a bus from Nandyal to Chennai. He and Rachana Prasad Reddy spent hours in conversation, the other passengers around them sleeping as the bus pelted through the night, covering the miles between the two cities. The encounter would become the kernel around which he built his fourth book. In ‘Omunkashyu,’ a Sri Lankan named Jaliya meets a girl named Rachana. He is a backpacker in the midst of his travels; she is a software tester soon to become an immigrant by marriage when she and her husband-to-be move to Germany. As dawn and their destination draws closer, Jaliya and Rachana go from strangers to friends, each having an unexpected yet profound impact on the other.
Despite its beginnings in truth, Omunkashyu is largely a figment of Dilshan’s imagination. “It’s not a book intended to reveal any biographical aspects of either Rachana or myself in the guise of fiction,”he emphasises, explaining that he began to pull the elements of the story together while on holiday in Pondicherry’s French Quarter. While there, the word that would become the title of the book also presented itself. The meaning of omankashyu is defined and redefined by the book’s narrative, says Dilshan. “In one way I suppose the word symbolizes the idea of plurality and how identities aren’t necessarily, fully fixed and unchangeable. Identity itself is a construction – just like the creation and evolution of words and language.”
A onetime student of Wesley College, Dilshan graduated from the University of Colombo with a BA (Hons) having studied English, International Relations and Journalism. (For his dissertation, he focused on Michael Ondaatje’s style of lyricism in novels.) The second year Law College student will also be familiar to fans of the show Bonsoir for which he was the male anchor between the years 2005 and 2008.
His first book, ‘Consciousness: the Writer’s Primary Pen’ was a collection of essays on modernist literature. He followed that with ‘Textual Tapestry,’ a collection of narrative prose, poetry and short stories. His third was ‘Hola El Che!’ whose title story had revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara arrive at Café Che in Colombo. “[He] tries to reignite the struggle against capitalism but ends up a partner of the establishment instead!” Also part of the collection is a novella – ‘The Galle Face Literary Eve’- and the novelette ‘Cannibals in the Corner Room.’ And now there is Omunkashyu. Over the course of the four books, Dilshan has felt his commitment to his craft grow. “I hope that my progress so far shows that I’m not an author who sees fiction writing as something of a hobby but a far more serious engagement,” he says.
With ‘Omankashyu’ he was determined to stretch himself by playing with unconventional literary forms. (The book doesn’t even have chapters.) Inspired by the Czech born French writer Milan Kundera, Dilshan says“Kundera’s style of incorporating ‘the essayistic’ form in a narrative of fiction was an answer to some of my own questions of how to include certain elements of theoretical and philosophical groundings.” In the end, experiments aside, Dilshan believed the story delineated its own form. “Somehow this way seemed the only way that the story I conceived could live up to the vision I had for it.”
As a writer, Dilshan says he’s been disinclined to incorporate “popular themes and topics that resonate with ‘current perspectives’ which characterizes the majority of contemporary Sri Lankan literature written in English.” Instead, with ‘Omankashyu’ he wants to take readers out into a literary hinterland where the space exists to explore the grand themes of our existence –it’s meaning and purpose. Still, to write a whole novel based on one long conversation presented a challenge to the young author. Dilshan admits he’s concerned: “The whole novel just has two characters! A young Sri Lankan man and a young Indian woman. That’s it. How will that work for readers?” Now that the novel is available in bookstores, he’s waiting to find out.
Omunkashyu is priced at Rs.650 and is available at VijithaYapa, Expographics (Pelawatte branch), Sarasavi and Lake House bookshops.
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