Channels: Young voices to the fore
View(s):Volume 27 of Channels, the journal of the English Writers’ Collective Sri Lanka is relatively prodigious in size- a reflection of how COVID-19 has sent us in droves to unburden ourselves to pen and paper.
This volume comes with voices old and new- more of the latter, refreshingly. A crop of young talent, fresh and insightful rather than emulative and self-conscious, they voice many a concern of our times.
Irasara Senarathne in Sounds that Echo in our Hills evokes a house bereft, skilfully weaving in searing memories of a sister who took her own life rather than face the stigma of divorcing an abusive husband.
Two poems on Pettah by Anisha Cuttilan and Piyumi Bhagya Nawarathna capture the bustling commerce of Colombo’s spiciest, gaudiest quarter unchanged since colonial times. Anisha gives it something almost Baghdadian with a Middle Eastern timelessness (or an Indian tang) while Piyumi in ‘When Rain Falls in Pettah…’ in one long breath captures the overcrowded soul of the place admirably- ‘the salty tang of dried fish and crushed onions’ to ‘gentlemen in their business attire- seeking shelter/ under the pavement hawker’s tent roof’ and ‘dusty brown pythons creeping stealthily along the ground’.
Ciara Mandulee Mendis’s short story Sunquick- a satire of the middling sort- has humour while capturing suburban snootiness in tone.
Paba Piyarathne’s short poem celebrates (rather effectively) the joys of ‘Solitude’- the fizzy euphoria of a youth starting to live on her/his own- ‘the happiness in a tiny café / tucked in the warmth of an alleyway’ and trudging on ‘with no destination/ the silence, though engulfing/… sweet’.
“Thou Shall Not” by Tharindu Jayamanne is the story of a young man being teased by neighbours as to when they will get wedding cake (which is also the source of worry for his mother), while he finds it necessary to resort to Grindr (a gay dating app) to allay the loneliness of his small bedsit in Pannipitiya.
The tale sums up being young and gay in Sri Lanka with the pleasure doubled perhaps by being forbidden but inversely also the heavy burden of guilt. Dilantha Gunawardena, forsaking the joys of poetry has written a naturalist’s dirge for our “Missing House Sparrows”- the ge-kurulo that used to chitter merrily as they raised prodigious broods in the clay pots provided in our homes. He opines that “sometimes the National Geographic Channel does not need a TV set or an antenna to transmit, only a clay pot for a house sparrow to nest’.
A soft spot for the chubby little Passer domesticus- these ‘hitchhikers of civilization’- is common to many cultures, reveals Dilantha.
Better known names, the regulars, also entertain. Gamini Akmeemana in The Lucky Charm reminds us that, our love for books is really a great talisman to carry us through cold and fire, and the grim isolation, hostility and uncertainty in a time like ours; that books are companions even when not being read.
Still Burning by Neil Wijeratne is a frankly written, moving love story, full of first-time youthful ardour, set against the ethnic riots of 1983. The Sinhala boy in his Flying pigeon bicycle following the Tamil schoolgirl- a romance that ends with hardly a word exchanged- with repatriation and hearts forever tender.
The Life and Times of Vasanthi Samanmali alias Karunawathi by Sakuntala Sachitanandan entertains with the story of a garrulous working class ‘landlady’ rather attached to her respectability. Her capers such as a romance at sixty and imprisoning her brother who had just won a lottery makes one smile; only at times there is an uneasy feeling that we – the bourgeois – are cocking a snook at too easy a target.
Replete with so much more, what this volume of Channels can take pride in is the amazing variety of voices.
It is a literary banquet.
| Book facts | |
| Channels- Volume 27 Published by the English Writers’ Collective Reviewed by Yomal Senerath-Yapa |
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