Ripe for an exotic plucking
As all exotic novels about Sri Lanka do, this one too gets off to its real start abroad rather than at home. By the time it reaches a conclusion in its strikingly tropical destination, the plot has reconnoitred some strange territory – from suburban wastelands of the imagination to beautiful and bizarre southern locales that exist in another country, another age. But perhaps, unlike the author, I had better begin at the beginning and go on till I reach the end before I stop…
Author Afdhel Aziz
If you were to require a synopsis of this story in a sentence, gentle reader, perhaps this would meet your need: Boy meets girl, Boy falls in love with girl, Girl falls in love with boy’s country, Boy falls out of love with his own country and with being in love. A further deconstruction would suffice to outline the contours of this kaleidoscopic exploration of a place and time that has all but disappeared from the face of the earth. Boy and Girl and Gang of Friends have fun in the sun until man on the run with gun puts a spoke in the cycle of their near-Nirvana. Oh do go out and get your own copy, would you?
But I do Afdhel Aziz a slight disservice by attempting to package his Strange Fruit in icy cling film like this and storing it neatly on a back shelf of the fridge. His maiden novel resists such trite slicing and containing, eluding the pedantic reviewer’s penchant to put the book in a box. This is part romance, part adventure story; half true and half imagined; quite realistic in the emotions it attempts to recollect in tranquillity, yet stretching credulity so far at points that it hurts a little to have some resolutions revolve upon the pivot of blind chance, circumstance, happenstance, and the author’s refusal to be reasonable about our shared history. This is very strange fruit indeed, and ripe for the plucking by bold but sceptical readers who can willingly suspend disbelief to savour the experience of a descent into the deepest darkest seas Sri Lanka has ever sailed in. The light that there is often hurts, serene yet stark.
Also did I mention that it is a serendipitous love story? Aziz appears more interested in the romance of unexpected relationships than reconstructing a slice of Sri Lankan life that has crumbled at the edges. His male protagonist is vaguely autobiographical – a cultured and thoroughly decent chap who knows his music, literature, and haute cuisine as much as he enjoys the occasional slumming with hot, hot koththu. (That’s all I’m saying, Afdhel; and if you decide to sue, I’ll really spill the beans, old fruit.) Malik’s love interest Maya is a lovely illusion to die for, an epileptic with an appetite for adventure, for whom her lover almost gives his life and who more than once in the story is the engine of excitement and even ecstasy that her interlocutors taste.
Other exotic characters populate this hybrid tale like creepy but fascinating worms at the core of an overripe kiwi. There’s Kiran, the mixed-up spoilt-brat of an experience junkie who is equally out of place in high society as he is in low dives. There’s Soldier Boy, the supposedly PTSD’ed military lout who functions as an éminence grise and a nemesis in one fell swoop. There’s mercifully normal Grace, and deceptively charming Fish who acts as a counterfoil to Malik and Kiran, and a supporting cast of sundry gangsters and cowboys like VJ and the Colonel who lend this narrative’s landscape a larger-than-life flavour.
There’s more to the tale than a plethora of outré characters, though. Topics and themes that most historians and too many novelists would shy away from, Aziz approaches with élan and éclat. Slices of life from Sri Lanka’s chequered recent past are inserted episodically, challenging would-be escapist readers to revisit the shady places that mother and the nanny state warned us to stay away from. Heavy and traumatizing though the atmosphere of our own local holocaust is, the author skips nimbly over the terrain of ’83, ’87-89, and the terror of the 2000s, too. He is equally at home in the nightclubs of the nineties as he is among Colombo’s denizens’ doings as at a drag ball on Count de Mauny’s island (of all places) in the Deep South.
If there’s one criticism one could level at Afdhel Aziz’s playing field is that it is evidently tilted towards a Western readership, or at least an English-speaking upper-echelon Sri Lankan audience that would be familiar with the classier establishments of Hikka, Colombo’s once famous Supper Club, and the cocktail-swilling NGO-centric café society. Perhaps this is being a tad unfair by our erstwhile Chunky Monkey and the original Culture Vulture (there: I’ve kinda outed you again, haven’t I?). Because not only is there nothing in the rule book about eschewing the Lowest Common Denominator when it comes to picking plotlines and selecting audiences, there’s also no rule book on this aspect of writing a novel at all. One of the necessary accompaniments to plucking and eating this exotic offering is that the Sri Lankan reader will have to bear with running commentaries on which food is what, and why it goes well with this and not that in all its teeth-pulling painfulness. But stop complaining, dears; something about the title should have given the game away early, shouldn’t it have?
Which reminds me to cease and desist from being facetious, and to appreciate Strange Fruit for its strengths. For one thing it is well-structured, allowing eaters – I mean, readers – to peel away the skin and see clearly where the nub of the narrative is. The story is told lightly and with a great deal of esprit de corps that invites punters to come and taste and see. This! Now! Here! Try! The froth and the foam on the surface are nicely counterpointed by a deep vein of subterranean menace and evil and violence that come to a head intermittently, in-between, and in the end. (Do I mix my metaphors, mates? But bet I do not do it as concretely as Afdhel Aziz does!)
Not unputdownable (in fact, Strange Fruit is perhaps best ingested in bite-sized chunks), this story had me in turns interested, incredulous, and inebriated by its rich mix of love, lore, and lyrical exploration of a land that <maybe> exists only in our own memories, now. At the outset, the intro reminded me of the staccato rhythms of Segal’s Love Story. But deeper into the narrative, a more nautical cadence arose like a latter-day Venus; and on the high seas of adventure and romance, Aziz moves us into a more oceanic flow, a gentle rising and falling of word-waves and thought-breakers that could grow viler and more violent at any moment.
In the final analysis, I enjoyed the book most because – like his protagonist – “perhaps it was simply that he [the author and the antagonist] knew where he fit in this particular universe, knew his longitude and latitude, his specific coordinates, the vicissitudes of the tides. And he was content with his triangulation, at peace with the course he was taking”. As the hauntingly evocative cover invites us to imagine, this is a love story not so much about agape or friendship or eros, but the charity of spirit that will enable natives and strangers alike to fall a little bit in love with “the immense scintillation of light” that is, was, and never again will be an island in the slipstream of some strangely fruitful romantic’s imagination.
| Book facts
Strange Fruit, by Afdhel Aziz |