Book Review

Memories sweet and sour, in Sinhala Burgher style

Sinhala-Burgher by Malcolm Abayekoon Spindrift Print & Publishing, UK - 100 pp. Reviewed by Carl Muller

The book is charming, quite irascible and there is all the romping mischief of youth, growing up, escapades and ambuscades and an oversize inkwell of memory with that true flashbulb quality that jumps like popping quicksilver from place to place, character to character, a seemingly light-hearted but, as I suspect, quite serious chronicle of a life well spent, patchily mis-spent, full of the derring-do of the younger years as well as the swings and roundabouts of adulthood.

It is appropriate enough that Malcolm begins his memory-chain in Wellawatte (where we were both boys together) and I was quite chuffed to read in Chapter Four that he had remembered me. More so, what with all the havoc around the Sonnaboy of my own books, we have Malcolm saying:

"I have vivid memories of Carl's father Sonna, the tough railway engine driver. it was a beastly hot afternoon, a Hindu festival day. Mother and I were seated in the verandah when we heard the sound of approaching drums and reedy wind instruments. The lavatory coolies were going around with their sakkili band begging for money as they always did on such days, irrespective of which religion was celebrating. These low caste South Indians main occupation when not getting hooched was to repair shoes or clean out toilets. They came around with what were called six-bucket carts into which human waste from houses without flush toilets was tipped.

"The pong was quite nauseating to say the least. Their women were semi topless, some had what it takes to make the centre spread of a girlie magazine. The shoe mending was done seated in the garden. The man came armed with at last, basic tools, waxed thread, some leather and a rusty old can into which we put water so that he could soften the leather before it was cut to shape. They charged a pittance for their work. That afternoon Mr. Muller must have been having his siesta after a heavy lunch and a few drams. When the band reached his gate and opened up their cacophony we heard him tell them to bugger off. His order was ignored, a most dangerous thing to have done.

"The next thing we saw was old Muller leaping over the parapet spilling tin tacks and then letting the musicians, have a dose of the old one two. Instruments went flying, the men began to yell in pain, Mrs. Muller kept screaming, 'Don't hammer them. Sin, no?" Pony, who lived next door to the Mullers poked his bald head over the wall to investigate.

He may have regretted having done so if Sonna had spotted him. Pony was a teacher who got that name due to his nasty habit of kicking pupils. Had he done such a thing in a country like Sweden he would have been locked up."

Life in Wellawatte is a riot of characters, misfits, ghosts, big-eyed servant women, rickshaw men, ratcatchers, perambulating bookmen (mostly Sexton Blakes), a dhoby called Twister, stilt- walking transvestites and beggars with honey-daubed bandages.

It is of much regret that Malcolm did not think of turning this entire flood of memory into a strong, earthy novel, bringing each of his colourful characters to life...but then, I think he would have wished to spare these same characters or their children embarrassment. What we have here, most adroitly written and with a fine mix of the here and now and the then and there, is a case of spot-on recall.

The essentially Burgher flavour comes upon us with his Burgher grandma's many Dutch dishes. This is not a book you can skim because the reader will find that it drips with rare sort of nectar. We are told of his uncles, Bertie and Dunstan and suddenly the flashbulb pops. Yes, Dunstan served in the Ceylon Engineers. Yes, Dunstan was stationed in Trincomalee. And yes, Dunstan was discharged.....because Dunstan was Dunstan. Whence cometh such another? A human skeleton is found when digging trenches at Trinco.

Dunstan tells the sergeant that the bones are that of an Irishman. How could he know? "There is a potato stuck up its rear, " Dunstan says. He's the same uncle Dunny who, tanked to the gills, shelters under a tall tree outside the Kanatte cemetery and swears later that he saw several pigs fly over the cemetery gates!

Malcolm's memories of Colombo bring us face to face with Sooty Banda " who gave us Oo lala Jutehesian, Jimmy Van Getridofthepest and Gerd Secondhandgerman." There's the Lion House crowd of fag bummers and Luke, who carried a part of a human skull in his knapsack because one never knew, there could be some use for it. There was also Paiva's Corner House sign of a thin man going in and a fat man coming out; the Majestic theatre, Green Cabin, Pasgorasa and the Cosmopolitan which, "for some unknown reason, had an illuminated revolving barber's shop pole mounted on the wall behind where the cashier sat. That man was as bald as a coot!"

It is hard to give you a really first-hand peek into the bubbling cauldron of memory this book is; and that, after all, is not the purpose of a review. For many of the now generation it should hold but some interest except.

I suppose, the jucier bits of life in the forties and fifties when the years did a sort of hula-hoop movement, quite whacky, serious in patches, and the funny side always there to split the stoutest ribs. What one finds is the difference! And this can be quite anguished. What has happened to the Ceylon of yesteryear?

What has happened to those airy, free-wheeling days when Malcolm, as a scout, camped in the jungles of Pedro, hiked at Moon Plains...when boys could catch guppies in the canal, canoe to the Wellawatte reef...when barbers plumped for French chalk when they ran out of talcum powder. What happened to Gala Yata Billa, the old codger who lived under a rock on the beach and sold colourful little sea fish to children.

Tell me if you can, because we have seen change so drastic, so unnerving, that nothing could be worse and nobody has the time, patience or application to consider again those glorious, simple, uncluttered years. Many of our writers have gone back, treading memory lane each in his or her own way. Maureen Seneviratne has written much about such days, so has Jean Arsanayagam. There is Grace Mackie with her "Of Jasmines and Jumboos", a book I enjoyed. There is Shyam Selvadurai and Michael Ondaatjie, Goolbai Gunasekera, Kirthie Abayesekera. What is special about "Sinhala-Burgher" is that Malcolm has not skipped. This is why, perhaps, his most compelling chapter deals with his return to Sri Lanka.

"For me, it was a period of rediscovery..... Progress was inevitable but some of what I saw the country could have done without. Mass tourism had given some of the locals an inferiority complex. A Colombo taxi driver told me that his previous fare was a German bus driver, he could not understand how a person in that sort of employment could afford to take a vacation so far from his homeland, when he was struggling to exist.

"Traditional hospitality by all means, but not if that means a nation selling its soul for a fistful of hard currency. Wise guys in the tourist business I found in plenty. One of them said that his dream was to convert Colombo into another Hong Kong - perish the thought. At that time I noticed that locals were given second class treatment where tourists gathered. One of the men who owned a watering hole popular with tourists and who was not at all keen on having locals, was himself active in combating racism when he lived in England. When I mentioned this to him he sheepishly said that locals did not know how to behave. I thought they were far more well behaved than the rowdy beer-swigging foreigners.

"Most of the friends who I hoped to see were missing. Some were pushing up the weeds at Kanatte and other cemeteries...Among those I tracked down was Douglas Robert and his pal Eggerton Tucker, the handsome, tough ex-railway engine driver. Douggie still showed his muscles, Eggie could still sing cowboy songs. He took me to Mount Mary. The old railway dwellings and famous running shed were there, most of the Burgher railroad folk were not... the magic that was the Ceylon Government Railway had gone....

"In the Pettah...I walked from one end of Main Street to the other and took a peep at some of the narrow streets that ran off it...The pavements had been taken over by hawkers who turned nasty if someone accidentally trod on their wares. The once well kept Municipal market was in a state of decay with rotten vegetables lying outside and many cats prowling about the fish stalls."

What a way to switch off. Perhaps it's the best way, when all the lies at the end of memory's road is the present disillusionment, the tinsel, the greed, the drugs, the terrorism, the wheelers and dealers, the corruption, the sleaziness of a country in the grip of a force it cannot really understand. Call it modernity and damn it roundly. Then read of the sunlit days of old, the happy spacious days, days of freedom, of fairplay, of family and friends, of people bold and people gold, of Sinhala-Burgher and no one to point a bigoted finger.

This is why Malcolm's book positively sings, and he sings too as a man of this country, a man who still has his fantasies and who has given us in his recollections, more to dream of - a fantasia, actually of those sweet, sincere days of yore. (I believe that Sharm de Alwis of 82/1, Kandy Road, Kiribathogoda, can get readers copies of "Sinhala- Burgher." (Please contact him.)

More Plus * Kala Corner * Feelings are important to him * Dying art comes alive * Why have we chosento ignore the truth?

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