Something new from Sybil
“Creating a work of art in words and thoughts is most fascinating. A collage of artistic grandeur, an intermingling of ideas, sequences and a medley of human characters so different to one another. A blending of all these ingredients together as an eloquent whole is indeed a heartening experience in creativity.” This is how Sybil Wettasinghe describes “the beautiful art of short story writing”.
From writing and illustrating children’s stories gaining recognition worldwide, Sybil has released her first collection of English short stories. She has titled it ‘My Giddi Aunt’ the name of one of the stories. She tells the readers: “Short story writing is similar to painting a picture using vivid colours, techniques and an absorbing theme…Beautiful words, thoughts, consequences, vivid characters and the technique of presentation.”
Reading through the short stories (some are, in fact, ‘long’ short stories) these ingredients are all there. Her descriptions of even minor incidents or her observations are so absorbing. “A night fly comes in from the darkness, a most welcome visitor. It keeps circling round and round and finally settles on the amber shade. The fly is knocking on the lampshade. I enjoy the sound. A gecko rushes down the wall. It is staring daggers at the fly. It cannot reach the fly, so in a great fury it keeps wagging its head. There is a distance between them…if only the gecko had wings! But one could grab without wings. I had no wings. But I grabbed him. Or did I? Did I? “ – From ‘The Red Hibiscus’. These are observations of a lonely woman seated in the arm chair in the corner of her sitting room.
Of the ten stories in the book, in all but one the central character is a female. And they are also tragic tales well related. Sybil touches on the vagaries of life faced by numerous individuals. There is the young woman who is discarded by the family for marrying a university mate from a different community. Laura Nona is the lonely octogenarian who had borne eight children – all of whom have gone abroad and with the husband dead, she leads a lonely life. Anna Mari is the unfortunate girl living in a fishing village who is forced into selling her body by her mother to make ends meet. Then there are two mothers who go abroad to earn for the family and pay the penalty of unfortunate happenings to their daughters.
Sybil excels in the narration of village life which has always been her forte in most of her children’s stories. In ‘The Restitution’ she relates the story of a jak tree: “In the garden of the ancestral home was a hardy old jak tree, planted by grandfather himself on the day my mother was born. He must have been overjoyed at the birth of a daughter after four sons that he began planning her life right away. As tradition goes there had to be jak tree in the garden of a home where a young girl lives. For when the time is ripe and she attains age, she must be bathed at the auspicious time under a milk producing tree, and the usual selection is a jak tree.”
In the same story she pictures the pathetic state of a helpless young mother with several children.”Behind us was a shrubbery of assorted wild plants. On the branch of a cashew tree nearby was a little boy of about fourteen. Below him was a fair, comely woman with a baby astride her hip, who seemed too young to mother a brood of children who were all smaller than the boy on the tree. They were greasy brown and naked. One thing made them look a family. They all had large hungry looking eyes. The woman was sobbing. She picked up the end of her cloth and was blowing loudly into it. The baby on her hip with a bulging tummy and the nostrils thickly flowing was howling away.”
Equally captivating is Sybil’s description of an evening in the fishing village. “Outside in the shanty land, the blaring confusion is gathering momentum. Drunkards offing out filth, women swearing, cursing and screaming their guts out.Drums beating on empty buckets.Above all, the muck gushing out of venomous mouths. In this way the night reaches its throbbing orgasm and gradually subsides into quivering slowness eventually simmering down.” – From ‘Anna Mari’
Sybil obviously cannot avoid the temptation of throwing in illustrations to any work she does. She hasn’t overdone it in ‘My Giddi Aunt’. A line illustration appears at the beginning of each story “as a signature tune”, in her own words.
She has realised that women are the major characters in the stories. “It’s pure coincidence,” she says. “Perhaps there must have been a thought lurking in my mind that after all, mostly women are victims of circumstances. However, the prominence is unintentional,” she explains.
It’s no bar to enjoying the stories. You will, I am sure.