‘Markedly Sri Lankan’
Fifth time lucky: Ashok Ferrey receives the award from Neloufer de Mel, Chairperson of the Gratiaen Trust while judge Keshini Jayawardena is seen in the background
It was the bridesmaid’s night! As Ashok Ferrey, in his fifth shortlisting, won the Gratiaen Prize, there was a tremendous cheer from the gathering around the giant, bell-hung tree at Barefoot. He was, of course, the celebrity among the shortlisted four–the chronicler of Colpetty People and so many questioning, soul searching Sri Lankans whether living in London, Mogadisico, Flower Road or Pannipitiya,
As Ashok quipped however, he would no longer be able to use that pretty tagline, “always the bridesmaid and never the bride.”
Hosting a physical award ceremony after a two-year hiatus, the Gratiaen Trust had decided to make things ‘informal’ in Barefoot’s starlit garden cafe down to the ginger beer and kadala gotu, post-party. Attended by Gillian Ondaatje (elder sister of Michael Ondaatje who established the Gratiaen Prize with the money he won for the 1992 Booker Prize for The English Patient), it was a vibrant evening.
Ashok Ferrey whose nom de plume is the mix of a name often popping up in his books (Asoka) and the maiden name of the mother of a Nicaraguan friend from London. had somewhat of an exotic childhood. Having schooled in Nairobi then Somalia and Worth Abbey in the countryside of England, he was to graduate in Pure Mathematics from Christ Church, Oxford and work in various jobs – among them builder, personal trainer and barman. Colpetty People was his damascene moment– some short stories that had long reclined in a drawer, published and then shortlisted for the Gratiaen in 2003. They were stories of Colombo’s middle and upper classes, true to life.
Maduranga Kalugampitiya
In the years that followed, his books regularly made it to the Gratiaen shortlist: The Good Little Ceylonese Girl, The Professional, The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons and this year’s winner, The Unmarriageable Man.
Published by Penguin India, the last book is an autobiographical mishmash of Ferrey’s happy youth in London overlaid with more sombre periods, including his father’s passing away – a sometimes heady tale of living in that exciting melting pot.
In their citation the judges commended a novel that “displays the advanced craft of a writer working at his peak;… a craft that has allowed for a writing style and tone that is supple enough to encompass both the comic and the tragic as well as pathos and irony.”
Of the supernatural element the judges said, “of particular note was the seamless incorporation of the otherworldly elements into the novel making them feel as real as everyday realism in the story. The father’s ghost was particularly powerful and poignantly captured and the way this ghost has been woven into the story seems markedly Sri Lankan, drawing upon the Sri Lankan idea of fluid boundaries between this world and the next.”
Streaming in live was the Chair of the Jury, well-known author Shyam Selvadurai who had ‘long evaded’ the responsibility of judging the Gratiaen. Shyam, with his almost academic economy of words, said he was “glad to do it because (he) was homesick for Sri Lanka” and added that “taking in the books I read this year for the prize, I have to say that Sri Lankan literature in English seems to be in a very good position.”
Informal vibrant evening: Audience at the Barefoot event. Pix by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
Fellow judges Keshini Jayawardena and Maduranga Kalugampitiya (Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of English, University of Peradeniya) spoke about ‘Sri Lankan-ness’ in writing. Keshini talked of her own view growing up in the West, where her mother’s obdurate saree-wearing in Rome or London and her father swathing himself in a sarong at home connoted a distant eastern ‘home’.
Maduranga regaled the audience with how sampling the entries, reading them in petrol queues and during rainy university protests and afterwards drying the soaked manuscripts by the dara-lipa, gave great immediacy and glow to the Sri Lankan stories he was savouring.
In his speech, Ashok toasted wife Mandy and children Francesca and Rehan, and said “thank you judges for putting an old man out of his misery” adding that he has been writing for a quarter of a century and been nominated for ‘various things’ in South Asia, but “never won a thing till just now!”
As he repeated to me over the flush of hugs and kisses and accolades surrounding him at the closing of yet another Gratiaen year: “This victory is for all you bridesmaids out there.”
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