A book that will always tug at my heartstrings
View(s):Over long years of reading, there is one book that is dearer to my heart than others. It is not a classic by any means; it has not sold a million copies. Yet, to me, it is more than a classic, more than a bestseller. It is a book that has not been sold outside its country of origin; it is not a book that will be read by a foreigner. Yet, to me, it is universally appealing to every emotional aspect of my psyche.
I came across this book quite by accident. I was in Form III at Trinity then, in 1958. The last period on a Wednesday afternoon, if I remember right, was the “library period”. It was the period when we visited the school library as a class. We were expected to choose books to read at home – a minimum of two.
Our school library, a gift of an old boy, was, perhaps, one of the best school libraries in the country at that time. It was certainly better than any other library in our town, Kandy. The library building was more modern than the municipal library, its collection was broader than that of the British Council library and it had no propaganda element as did the posh air-conditioned US Information Service library in the basement of the Bank of Ceylon building. And moreover, the college library had a unique ambience.
Memory, at this distance in Time, can be flawed; Time plays tricks on memory. A child’s mind remembers things larger than what they are. They seem grander. To me, as a 13-year-old boy, Trinity College library seemed huge. It had a mezzanine floor, opening like a balcony to the rest of the library. A broad spiraling red cemented stairway behind the library counter led to the mezzanine floor where some of the rare reference material lay under lock and key in glass shelves and also a few display tables. The main collection was on the ground floor with a two-storey high ceiling; fiction on one side and non-fiction on the other.
That Wednesday long ago, a friend of mine and I were looking at books at random. (How I wonder whatever happened to those friends of yesteryear!) It was a time when boys of our age read Biggles, William, Scarlet Pimpernel and other “boys” books. We were on the threshold of graduating from these to books by Somerset Maugham, P.G. Wodehouse, Thomas Hardy, Graham Greene, and other popular authors of that time. But we were bored that day. Uninterested in books or reading, we were restless. We pulled out books from the shelves, read their titles, and shoved them back. We hid from the stony gaze of Vernon Jansz, the Librarian, who kept a stern watch from behind the counter, looking over his glasses in the direction were even the slightest of sound to emanate. And my friend, with whom I was, picked up J. Vijayatunga’s “Grass for My Feet”, read the title aloud, and pushed it back into the shelf remarking under his breath, “I’d rather have carpet!”
Perhaps it was this comment that intrigued me – preference for carpet instead of grass. Back in those days we had not experienced carpets; it was all red cement floors and coir rope matting. I picked up the thin volume that afternoon and read it to the exclusion of all else. And ever since then, the book, in its various editions and reprints, has been a constant item in every collection of books I had in my itinerant life.
The book is a collection of vignettes of village life remembered by one who was living in a distant country. The child in him sees the village through the eyes of a boy who comes home for holidays, but twice removed – once through social class and once through periodic absences. Although the book described the village life in a different part of the country several decades earlier than the first time I read the book, I could still relate to it with my own limited experiences of my father’s village off Geli-Oya – a village a couple of miles from this little township on the way to Gampola. Vijayatunga’s village had the character and atmosphere, but removed by time and place, of our very own village.
Urala, Vijayatunga’s village, is about 25 kilometres into the interior from Galle. His poignant description of the village and the lyrical form of expression characterizes the book for its timeless appeal to Sri Lankans of many generations ever since it was first published. Although the descriptions of place and people date back to the early years of the twentieth century, even by mid-Fifties, the typical Sri Lankan “village” hadn’t changed much. The village temple, the bathing well by the paddy field, the streams and rivers, the village road, all remained as described by Vijayatunga.
Every aspect of the village Vijayatunga describes resonates with a comparable feature in our village off Geli-Oya. There was the Thelambugala temple, with its whitewashed bell tower and dagaba perched atop a great boulder with flowering frangipani trees lining the path leading to it. There was the bathing well by the paddy fields at Galenda. Then there were the numerous footpaths, the edandas across waterways, and the lush vegetation that grew everywhere. And then there was the narrow road that wound its way through green hedges and terraced paddy fields from our village to that of Eladatta and beyond, to Daskara and Hendeniya. The little kada-mandiya for the surrounding villages was at Perihena, where my uncle who lived in the village had his office as the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths. And there were the houses of relatives scattered around, hidden beneath the flourishing green vegetation. The imagery I have of my father’s village is so like what Vijayatunga evokes in the book, not so much in content but in mood and feeling.
The stories Vijayatunga relates in the book were of the same genre my father related to me of his village, of growing up and his boyhood reminiscences. These were more the descriptions than stories, of a world of tranquility and harmony, a world that once was and vanishing with the encroachment of modernity. It was the “remembered village” in the early parts of the twentieth century.
Later in life, living the life of the émigré like its author, the book had a nostalgic appeal to me. I felt what the author felt for that remembered past. Vijayatunga, as an adult, migrated to England. Yet, he felt deeply for the country he left behind a long time back.
Over the years, I imagined the writer, an old man, writing these words in a damp room in a London suburb during a wet and gloomy winter in the immediate aftermath of the War. It was a longing for warmth, for childhood, innocence, and a mother’s love. It was a lament for a bygone past.
Chitranjan Pethiyagoda
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