A picture from the past and the memories come alive
View(s):“The events go back 82 years, but I remember them as if they had taken place only yesterday,” says Anne Ranasinghe, talking about the story that inspired the title of her most recent book: “the small chapel built of rough-hewn grey stone, the ice-cold uncarpeted floor and the huge glass window, rising from floor to ceiling. Beyond it an enormous, darkening, snow heavy sky.”
She had searched for many months for the right photograph to recapture that winter evening and use it as the cover of the book. “The year was 1931. The place: Germany. An avenue of tall, leafless trees is bathed in stark winter light and the light is breathtaking. A path winds into an indeterminate distance. Not a soul is in sight. One would not like to be alone in such a place, at such a time,” says Anne.
Snow, the book, however, does not begin in the winters of Germany where Anne was born. Part 1 “Our Beginnings Never Know Our Ends” is autobiographical, and is based on a series of discussions with Le Roy Robinson which were published in 1990 in Japan. The collective title was “An Interview with Anne Ranasinghe on Aspects of Culture in Sri Lanka.”
Anne had travelled for three weeks with her four month old son in a ship (this was in 1951) from Southampton in England to Colombo. “And so I arrived”, writes Anne, “one glorious morning. After the prolonged throbbing of the ship’s engine, Colombo appeared very quiet, very peaceful and unhurried, almost slow-motion, as its saronged and sari-clad population geared itself towards another sunny, hot and rather dusty day. And apart from the silence there was the almost physical impact of the colours – I had come from England, a country of gentle shadings. Here there were no half-tones. The cloudless blue sky. The rich golden sun. The riotous luxuriance of flowers, especially the bougainvillea – I was quite overwhelmed….”
Anne’s life story as the sole survivor in her family of the holocaust and her “escape” via Holland on her own as a 13 year old is quite well known. I asked her how she managed subsequently: “Well, it wasn’t always easy. As a teenager you need role-models to help you make decisions: after all, you have no experience; and I was an only child, very spoilt by both my father’s and mother’s family. But my parents, in their infinite wisdom, had inculcated some basic principles which stood me in good stead. When I arrived at my new school in England I knew practically no English; I enjoyed the teaching, worked hard and here a bit of boasting – at the final exam for the Oxford metric I topped the whole region. It was war time and I was considered a German student. This apparently caused quite a problem”.
The second part of the book has a selection of 16 of her short stories and ends with “Snow”: snow falling on the grave of a six year old child, Anne’s friend and her first intimation of the meaning of death. Another story, “The Castle”, is based on her experience at the Burden Neurological Research Institute as “Matron” (at 24 years). And she says: “That is another story, working with a team of well-known medical researchers!” She continues: “The institute was situated in a magnificent park belonging to an ancient castle, and admitted patients who had a high IQ, had mental problems which they hoped to cure. One of the scientists was a famous woman who had ‘invented’ the Prefrontal Lobotomy Operation, a procedure that is still used today. As for the Castle,” Anne asks me, “can you guess its function?” I guess but stay silent. “Well,” she says, “I won’t tell you. Read the book.”
Dr. Lakshmi de Silva, in her introduction to the book, writes, “Anne Ranasinghe’s work is marked by its uncompromising honesty of vision and sureness of touch that seems to spring less from technique than from a tireless persistence in capturing the truth of an event or experience…”
The “truth” Anne speaks is neither comforting nor evasive. She speaks a truth that is brutal in its honesty, and is therefore one that most of us live our lives trying to ignore. In her poem, “Well I am Sorry” she writes:
Well I am sorry
I have no answer to your questions.
There is injustice, hatred and war
And equality is only a slogan.
I have no vision. It was obscured
By the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima
And the smoke that drifted from Auschwitz chimneys…
…I know
No safety or haven – gold fluctuates
And so do diamonds and houses
Books can be burnt and loves divided.
The title of the 1st part of the book is a line from T.S. Eliot: “Our Beginnings Never Know Our Ends.” In a postscript to that section, written in 2013, she says, “Looking back at my beginnings and the strange turns that my life has taken, I wonder to what extent anyone is really ever in control. There are events that present us with pivotal options, and we make choices – often casually, because they do not seem important and the consequences also do not seem important – only later to realize that they were final choices, and we are swept along without being able to alter course. It is a moot question what one would do given a second chance.”
Anne suffered a near fatal heart attack in 2013. She says, “I was thoroughly surprised that I survived, but I am very pleased that I had that extra year. We all have a life span. I know that many people don’t want to accept that, but that’s the way it is.”
In one of her short stories, “Destiny”, the narrator saves a rainfly from an ant, but it dies in the end: “The rain fly, now my companion, had fulfilled its one-day destiny. One-day or 80 years – the end has to come and perhaps it is an identical journey in time. I could save the rainfly from the ant. But I could not save it from death.” Anne is a vociferous advocate for banning the death penalty.
“Remember,” she tells me, “life is very, very precious. Once it is over, it’s over.”
| Book facts
Snow by Anne Ranasinghe. Reviewed by Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe |