Book Review

Where simple little things shine bright

If those pompous people who "occupy" as they will tell you, the "critic's chair" would only stop this pernicious practice of looking at every book they lay their grubby hands on as "Literature", this writer's world would be a vastly nicer place to live in. Goolbai Gunasekera, will be the first to tell you that her "Sky-High!" is not Literature. It is too charming, too simple, too effervescent and too 'Goolbai-ish' to be anything but a quiver full of silver arrows, each, when winged, winging true. And, thank God I have no "critic's chair" to sit in.

You see, before one rushes to "pan" a writer, one needs to consider the writer herself. As the Principal of the Asian International School, isn't she a sort of "businesswoman" as well? And yet, how does a scholar accept "business" even if teaching and education is part of the game?

Now, the old Athenian Greeks, with a comfortable supply of slave-labour and the adroit services of foreigners and freedmen, could afford to take a low view of business - or what they called that "banausic" way of life of the merchants. But that was surely a deplorable form of intellectual snobbery.... and, thank heavens, Goolbai is no snob. She has this zesty, unstoppable pen and, judging from the way she writes, the way she administrates, the way she teaches, she is the only person I know who can make even George Bernard Shaw sound silly. You remember? Shaw quipped: "Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach!"

Well, there may be some bitter truth in Shaw's epigram, but I think our Goolbai has got that hirsute fellow by the short hairs. She can, and she does, and she teaches, and she administers and does all that committee-sitting and paper work, and yet, "Sky-High!" is "affectionately dedicated to the students of the Asian International School" who, she says, "have brought so much love and laughter into my life."

This is the secret of "Sky-High!" It is a gift of love and laughter and it is also that bridge - a bridge of scented wood that spans the mists of generations, a bridge to make the world of teacher, principal, administrator, mother and grandmother, clasp - with love and laughter, I repeat - the world of the student, the child, the idealism of the young with cock-a-hoop confidence and a box of crayons to colour the sky.

This is Goolbai's gift: to take the very ordinary and cover it with rubies. And what do we have?

* Me and Jane in a plane? A daughter who wishes that her mother were as "sophisticated" as she? A charming clash of wills and dropped passports and the younger's "take-charge" attitude as she wants her mother to be "less of a child".

* The bookshops that are but the caves of Ali Baba and where the "Enquirer" is what every gossip fan holds dear - although "Offspring has this nasty little habit of sneaking them out of her trolley back onto the shelves." And who would believe that Principals read-er-so-widely? Enough to make any bookshop attendant cry!

* Today's attitudes to sex.... even to the violin virtuosity of wee Willie and his winkie. Sex was staple in her day. Sex was Hygiene in her day. Would to God it were so today? If there was more hygiene we wouldn't have had to do with Aids!

* The sympathy spree every patient is on when in hospital. How true this always is. Go to any government hospital today. Patients greet visitors with the hollowest of groans, the wanest of faces, the most long-suffering looks in their eyes.

* The awesome power of the printed word. Again, I could dwell on the Goolbai of the scintillating essay and the Goolbai as Principal and Administrator. And, incidentally, was it Shakespeare who was partly responsible for this fiction that someone who is good at the latter is poor at the former? Iago dismisses Cassio as an arithmetician, a bookish theoric, the master of "mere prattle, without practice." Maybe Shakespeare himself underwent some yawning miseries during his arithmetic periods in the Stratford school-room. Ah, such a pity. He should have been here - at the Asian International School!

* Corporate success is the ability to manage a filing system. There have to be the Scarlett O'Hara files - "Think about this tomorrow" - and the Rhett Butler files - "So who gives a damn anyway?" - and if I may add, those F&F files which are simply "File and Forget". Try Goolbai's Scarlett-Rhett approach.... This is if you have no grandchildren to gum up the works!

The above is just a sampling. This book contains a tempting, titillating, thought-provoking thirty-seven little "essays", each with that faintest touch of D.H. Lawrence - yes, Lawrence - who always had that considerable contempt for mind as opposed to impulse. Not that there is anything of the truly radical, but that Goolbai has this gift of pointing a finger, and it is hard to tell if it is in staccato hee-hee glee or with that penetrating gesture at humanity's middle world between the conscious display and the subconscious "body language".

"Sky-High!" radiates. You see wild fire as well as gem-like flame. Goolbai uses languages as a painter uses paint. This is why her stories can blaze and some also remain quite sulphurous. This is a vivid, volatile book.

Do I catch a breath of Somerset Maugham too? Her essays seem to hold so much of witty and paradoxical content that they glow like cherries on the surface of a cake; and always, that "close to home" feeling we can all relate to - the intimate moments of those power cuts; the neighbourhood in emotional turmoil over Princess Di's death; and whether in 50 years, we will have to drag our children away from reading "Oliver Twist" to work on their computers!

I find in "Sky-High!" the blood of an age, past and present, bottled between covers that are as charming as the tales they hold. I look forward (and I can hope) to yet another collection and if I may be bold enough to suggest, a truly Asian International School collection where she should turn her sparkling mind to school debates, choirs, concerts and plays, prize-givings, PTA meetings, nature excursions, high jinks, the library, the lab.... so much to be treated with her bright, breezy sense of the comic and the chronic.

More Plus  *  Kala Korner - By Dee Cee

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