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Riding
the emotions amid distant thunder of politics As they exchange
a few words inside the lighted booth, the Sinhala envisages the
Tamil's home, Silavatturai, "once a diver's paradise. Now a
landmark for gunrunners in a battle zone of army camps and Tigers."
Then the Tamil boy closes shop, flicking off the lights, and as
the stars appear beyond the window in a London winter, the Sinhala
experiences a long fugue of memory that transports him 30 years
and 6000 miles away to his boyhood on an island off the southwest
coast of India called until 1972, Ceylon. Romesh Gunesekera's
acclaimed first novel, Reef - shortlisted for the Booker Prize in
Gunesekera's adopted country, England - is this Sinhala man's narration
in flashback of his life, from his boyhood to adulthood. It is a
servant's life that he tells us: as a boy, Triton is steered into
the service of Mister Salgado, a bourgeois Sinhala intellectual
from a landowning family. At first he is a houseboy on a staff of
three, but before long, with his cool efficiency, he supplants the
other two, becoming Mister Salgado's cook and caretaker. Over perhaps
ten years Triton becomes indispensable to Mister Salgado and when,
some time in the 70s, mounting Tamil terrorism forces Mister Salgado
into exile, there is no question but that Triton, by now attending
to all of Mister Salgado's domestic needs, will go with him. It
is after twenty years in London that Triton stops at a gas station
in Mister Salgado's car and meets the young Tamil refugee. But those
twenty years in England are only briefly described: Triton is concerned
with narrating, in detail, the ten years or so he lived with Mister
Salgado in Sri Lanka. Mister Salgado,
in '60s Sri Lanka, is a marine biologist, and his tracking of the
island's protective coral reef's slow destruction by pollution and
over-fishing provides the title and central metaphor for this story
- set, as we will very soon understand it to be, in a world heading
for self-destruction. He is a kind man, and while he accepts without
question the social hierarchy of his household - Triton's first
job is to serve Mister Salgado his morning tea in bed - still Triton
is never so much subservient to a master as he is respectful of
a teacher. Triton is a
deeply creative and intelligent boy - the descriptions of his cooking
and quiet command over the houshold are some of the novel's most
satisfying passages - with some education, and he's smart enough
to learn everything Mister Salgado can teach: "...I watched
him, I watched him unendingly, all the time, and learned to become
what I am." He learns his habits, the intimate details of his
tastes for clothes and food; watches his work, listens to his coversations
with his friends. When Mister Salgado travels on his marine studies,
Triton travels with him. When ultimately, Mister Salgado will go
into exile, Triton will go with him. And when Mister Salgado falls
in love with Miss Nili and so undergoes the great - the only - sentimental
education of his life, Triton, never transgressing his observer's
distance, falls in love with her too. So far, it
sounds like we're dealing with an essentially domestic tale, and
that's true. But only to a point: there is another perspective within
the narration that breaks the unity of the very young houseboy's
view; Gunesekera insists on injecting references to the evolving
disaster of Sri Lankan politics in the late '60s and early '70s.
Of course, since independence from Britain in 1948 - and even more
so since the 1956 de-anglicizing of the country by the Sri Lankan
Freedom Party, which so fatally decided on Sinhala as the national
language - these politics are always immediately present in the
story. This is a place on the verge of massive political upheaval,
with social inequities and ideological rifts deep enough to find
expression in terrorism, and then in decades of civil war. And yet
when Gunesekera refers to the historical or political, always within
the narrative point of view of this young boy, the integrity of
the book's voice seems broken. Describing Mister Salgado's cook,
he writes She had served
Mister Salgado's grandfather whisky and coffee during the riots
of 1915. She had seen politicians with handlebar moustaches and
tortoiseshell topknots, morning coats and gold threaded sarongs,
barefoot and church-shod. She had seen monkey suits give way to
Nehru shirts; Sheffield silver replaced by coconut spoons. Instances of
terrorist violence, too, rock the placidity of Mister Salgado's
household, a violence that not only in its occurrence but in its
very nature is a harbinger of change. There were
no death squads then, no thugs so callous in their killing that
they felt no pleasure until they saw someone twitch against a succession
of bullets. In my childhood no one dreamed of leaving a body to
rot where it had been butchered, as people have had to learn to
do more recently. This is no
doubt perfectly true, and a sense of the tragedy, the brute waste
of the violence that will soon tear this island paradise apart,
does inform the text. And yet, Gunesekera never really manages to
make it an organic part of Triton's story. "I was trapped inside
what I could see, what I could hear, what I could walk to without
straying from my undefined boundaries, and in what I could remember
from...my mud-walled school." So centrally important, to the
narrative voice, is this limitation that the political observations
- of the cook's background, of the growth of terrorism - no matter
how beautifully written, feel tendentiously imposed on the text
instead of implicit to it, as if the author, more than the characters,
feels the importance of the march of history on his plot. And it feels
labored, as if, doubting the inherent dramatic interest of Triton's
domestic life, the author were stretching for a Naipaul-esque relevancy
to his story. And in fact there are strong commonalities with Naipaul.
There is the long reach of the British Empire, and there is the
brutal irony of independence leading to violence beyond that which
the British imposed. Gunesekera
captures, like Naipaul, the peculiarly apt blend of British formality
and tropical fecundity, as if the cold cultural eye of the English
made even more movingly colorful the parrots, gekkos, orioles -
the "promise of cinnamon, pepper, clove" in this "jungle
of demons"; the "perpetual embrace of the shore and the
sea, bounded by a fretwork of undulating coconut trees, pure unadorned
forms framing the seascape into a kaleidoscope of bluish jewels"
- of the island paradises they corrupted or, Gunesekera will suggest,
were corrupted by. But the prose
is too original to allow much comparison. The story relies less
on Naipaul-like telling detail than on the nostalgia, the regret
that the prose captures in structure as well as subject, a careful
progression of exactly described venues, like photographs of the
past, a succession of tableaux more than a sequence of dramatic
scenes. It seems forged in the timelessness of the tropical noon,
etched on the eye by the sun. And the sensation is carried down
to the nicest decisions of syntax, when in its subtlest and most
impressive moments the language conjures a temporal suspension in
its rhythms, constantly throwing the reader off guard in his expectation
of lyricism with an unexpected word. This is wholly original, very
ambitious language, and it is often, like the descriptions, exquisite.
Most of all
I missed the closeness of the . . . reservoir. The lapping of the
dark water, flapping lotus leaves, the warm air rippling over it
and the cormorants rising, the silent glide of the hornbill. And
then those very still moments when the world would stop and only
colour move like the blue breath of dawn lightening the sky, or
the darkness of night misting the globe; a colour, a ray of curved
light and nothing else. As the book
progresses, it is the prose rather than the wider political framework
that involves the reader, the power of the descriptions and the
emotional complexity of Triton's world that carry the story, and
the wider perspective begins to seem less relevant. And that's difficult,
to dismiss the central, tragic injustice of the political turmoil
that is engulfing Sri Lanka as less important than a servant's domestic
tale. But emotional
realities are what this book, in its perceptive, quiet voice, is
most convincingly about. Of course the "distant thunder"
of political events is always present, and often foregrounded: when
it becomes loud enough, Triton and Mister Salgado go into exile.
But in the continuum of Triton's consciousness, as it is here narrated,
Gunesekera fails to assign these exterior political events a believable
place. Of course the historic tragedy of Sri Lanka is implicit to
the story - so implicit, perhaps, that Gunesekera's explicit insistence
weakens its importance. History may be a nightmare in which Gunesekera
is struggling to entrap us, and yet no matter how often these political
realities are referred to, they never become as relevant as the
more immediate, more compelling emotional realities of the story.
Nowhere is
this better shown than in Reef's central scene, the Christmas dinner
that Mister Salgado hosts, and which will usher in his love affair
with Miss Nili. The preparation,
serving, and consuming of the meal at Salgado's house - eight to
dine with Miss Nili - compose the most sustained dramatic seqence
of the book. Sitting at the middle of the story, the action of the
dinner scene proceeds with sure logic, rising tension, and entire
believability. And within
its pace Gunesekera is able to make us understand something about
the place he comes from, beyond its meticulously described locales,
and far beyond its distant politics. As Triton listens to Mister
Salgado talking to his guests, he is "spellbound." I could see
the whole of our world come to life when he spoke.... The past resurrected
in a pageant of long-haired princes clutching ebony rods; red-tailed
mermaids; elephants adorned with tasselled canopies and silver bells
raising their sheathed, gilded, curved tusks and circling the bronze
painted cities of ancient warlords. His words conjured up adventurers
from India north and south, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British,
each with their flotillas of disturbed hope and manic wanderlust.
They had come full of the promise of cinnamon, pepper, clove, and
found a refuge in this jungle of demons and vast quiet waters. The tensions
between the characters at the table - all revolving around Miss
Nili - come as dramatically clear as the perfectly-cooked turkey
cleanly parting from the bone under Mister Salgado's knife. Perfume rose
up from her, and when I moved in to spoon the potatoes on to her
plate it seemed the scent was stronger. It rose up from below her
throat down inside her flapping dress. She had her elbows on the
table her body was concave. She must have smeared the perfume with
her fingers, rubbing it in like honey paste to enrich the skin....
My sarong, tight around my hips, brushed her arm. She didn't notice.
She was looking across the table. Robert had caught her eye, he
was smiling, his head shyly cocked to one side. A piece of turkey
tumbled from her fork. She quickly retrieved it and said, 'Jesus.' Everything
is here: the American Robert's attraction to Nili that will later
cause Salgado's fit of jealousy and Nili's flight; Triton's deep
attraction to Nili; the insistence on the British trappings of mashed
potatoes and turkey that, with all it represents, has thrown this
island country into permanent political turmoil; the deeply-felt
background of jungle myths and generations of colonialists. An entire
narrative at this pace, with this sure subtlety of touch, might
sacrifice some of Gunesekera's description, as well as analysis,
but in exchange it would gain a terrific level of intensity, and
the payoff in terms of emotions it could encompass would be huge.
A writer who
would have made this dinner his whole story is Joyce, and the result
would be, like that other story of an evening's entertainment, "The
Dead," both a classic of English language but also cinematic
enough for John Huston to make it a film. Gunesekera is the only
contemporary writer I have encountered good enough to do the same.
The perceptive, thrilling drama of his narration seems to burst
the limits of his framing device, a tribute to the power of his
story. I look forward to reading every word he writes, not only
for the pleasure of following one of the two or three best writers
I've encountered among my contemporaries, but also in the hopes
of seeing his stories escape his rather tendentious narrative bias
toward literary relevance and speak more simply and dramatically
for themselves. Laugh
Zone The guy says,
"Listen, I don't want your money! And I don't want your daughter!
I want the person who pushed me in that WATER!!" Snails alive A wife and her
husband were having a dinner party for some important guests. The
wife was very excited about this and wanted everything to be perfect.
At the very last minute, she realized that she didn't have any snails
for the dinner party, so she asked her husband to run down to the
beach with the bucket to gather some snails. Very grudgingly he
agreed. He took the
bucket, walked out the door, down the steps, and out to the beach.
As he was collecting the snails , he noticed a beautiful woman strolling
alongside the water just a little further down the beach. He kept
thinking to himself, "Wouldn't it be great if she would even
just come down and talk to me?" He went back to gathering the
snails. All of a sudden he looked up, and the beautiful woman was
standing right over him. They started talking and she invited him
back to her place. They ended up spending the night together. At
seven o'clock the next morning he woke up and exclaimed, "Oh
no!!! My wife's dinner party!!!" He gathered all his clothes,
put them on real fast, grabbed his bucket, and ran out the door.
He ran down the beach all the way to his apartment. He ran up the
stairs of his apartment. He was in such a hurry that when he got
to the top of the stairs, he dropped the bucket of snails. There
were snails all down the stairs. The door opened just then, with
a very angry wife standing in the door way wondering where he's
been all this time.He looked at the snails all down the steps, then
he looked at her, then back at the snails and said, "Come on
guys, we're almost there!!" Of engine valves Morris was removing
some engine valves from a car on the lift when he spotted the famous
heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey, who was standing off to the side,
waiting for the service manager. Morris, somewhat of a loud mouth,
shouted across the garage, "Hey DeBakey...Is dat you ? Come
over here a minute." The famous surgeon, a bit surprised, walked
over to where Morris was working on a car. Morris in a loud voice,
all could hear, said argumentatively, "So Mr. fancy doctor,
look at this work. I also take valves out, grind 'em, put in new
parts, and when I finish this baby will purr like a kitten. So how
come you get the big bucks, when you and me are doing basically
the same work?" DeBakey, very embarrassed, walked away, and
said softly, to Morris, "Try doing your work with the engine
running." In this part There were two
rival stores across the main street from each other in a small town
in the U.S.One day one of the stores put up a sign:'The Cheapest
Store in This Street'. 'The Cheapest
Store in This Town', countered the other. |
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Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
