A Vois Memorial

Of Tissa Devendra's remembrance of things past in "ON HORSESHOE STREET"

by Tissa Abeysekara

Few can write quite like Tissa Devendra, not with the same ease and sincerity, where the prose sings like Tennyson's brook; no frills, no fat, no obesity in the phrasing; the writing is lean and elegant, and comes straight from the senses unadulterated by affected commentary. I could only think of Chaucer's wonderful expression, vois memorial, to sum up the charm and the purity of his book of memoirs, On Horseshoe Street, one of the finest pieces of creative writing in English, by a Sri Lankan, I have read recently.

What makes Tissa's book good to read is not only the easy flow of the language and the easy mind with which it is written, but also the level of observation. Very much like in the tradition of oral story telling, the narrator establishes his location and the point-of-view, in his overture. "Our verandah had two half-walls, punctured by oval apertures, and topped by trellis screens. A wide strip between wall and trellis was good for people-watching, a fascinating introduction to the verandah way of life," There, unmistakably is where he positions himself both in time and space. This writer himself belongs to the closing decades of that time when the verandah was where the public and the private domains met, and where unseen and unheard, if you wish, you watched the world go by.

One has the impression that Devendra's worldview is fashioned by this space so central to life in those days, a time not too far to make it 'history' nor too close to make one lose the perspective. This angled view defines the dramaturgy and the narrative form of the series of vignettes culled from childhood memory. However this shape and form continues in the book as an overarching sensibility even when the narrative strays far beyond childhood and moves constantly in an ever-changing time and space. Over the hill, and looking back upon times and places traversed in a life rich with experience, the narrator remains a child with its capacity to observe the simple things in life and wonder at them.

Everyone loves Kandy. For the Sinhalese it is a point in their ancestral memory, and for Sri Lankans in general, a point of reference to anchor one's sense of belonging, and for all, a space to redefine themselves. That is where Tissa's memory begins and it opens like a John Ford movie, "every morning to the clattering bullock cart of the seller of coconut husks with his high decibel yodel of 'Pol leli! Pol leli! Pol-laiee', 'Horseshoe Street' or 'Ladan Veediya', becomes a stage across which move a fascinating parade of iconic figures, each performing an act and adding an element or a stand to a rich mosaic. From the bakery down the street and run by 'the capacious Mrs. Sproule' comes the bakery carrying on his head ' a large basket covered with shiny oil cloth and topped with a conical tin lid' and he carries within that basket, 'a tray of mouth watering crisp and gingery bread fingers, sponge cakes, sugar cakes and occasionally, hot-cross buns' and beneath that lid in the belly of the basket, 'soft loaves of white bread and curly crusted seeni paan.

A 'walking stall' was the 'lady who carried a wobbling tower of vegetables on her head'. Then comes the 'wizened old thamby with a handkerchief deftly knotted round his head' and a 'sawdust basket full of eggs' and 'on his bike with bottles clinking in khaki pouches slung from the crossbar and pillion' comes the milkman. 'Barely tolerated' says Tissa, 'though much desired, was Bombai-Mutai - that sticky sweet candy floss mysteriously spun in a glass box by yet another thamby'. He brings another exotic character, now extinct, on stage, the Chinaman, peddling what Tissa calls 'real luxury' and with his 'twangy cry of Chaina Seelk!' With a child's sense of wonder, the writer speaks of, 'hazy recollections of brilliant kimonos printed with prancing dragons and swirling Chrysanthemums, beautifully hand embroidered linen and swatches of lustrous silks of incredible softness.' I can't help quoting. How else can I convey the texture of this prose, as rich and sensuous as the 'Chainaa Seelk' itself?

Good writing has integrity of style and content, where one is of the other. The sheen and texture of Tissa's prose is part of that integrity. There is another element here, and that is humility. Most memoirs betray a certain vanity where the author appropriates to himself a mantle of heroism. Humility, when it occurs, is almost always affected, an attempt to claim for oneself, a virtuousness. Tissa Devendra has the strength to laugh at himself. In 'Ladang Veediya' he is almost always the loser. Talking of his schooldays at, what he calls 'The School in the Palace Square' - to get even with the superciliousness of 'The School on the Hill' - he says 'I left my heart behind at Dharmaraja.' But he adds 'Family lore has it that I left behind my brains as well... in the stone drain into which I plunged head first, from an overgrown tennis court.....'

Tissa claims no heroic status. He is no Tom Brown, but just another average schoolboy, and he makes the mundane circumstances of his school days look and sound so colourful, that the subtext certifies he would have been an outstanding student. In these pages he comes across as that kind of kid who would have infuriated teachers broke the rules, yet led such an inventive and rich life, that in later life he would have surfaced far ahead of those 'who toiled upwards in the night.'

Adolescence is a strange period, a sometimes painful twilight, where your feelings are ripening ahead of your capabilities. You want certain things which you cannot reach for, or hasn't the guts to try. One of the most delicately realized stories of adolescence is in this book. 'Walking Wathsala Home' has a Chekovian grace in its reflections of a lost love, and a gentle ebb and flow of narrative thereby achieving a fine balance between emotion and intellect. Sentiment is never allowed to lose itself in the mush of sentimentality. This balancing act, is the most difficult to achieve, especially when the story is located in the soft ground of calf love. Ordered by parental decree to escort a girl in her early teens home, from school, our hero, perhaps a little younger, is in a most excruciatingly difficult situation.

To be caught walking with a girl by his 'macho' friends would mean unimaginable disaster. He could not possibly say no to a parental command, especially when the young lady happens to be the daughter of his father's office colleague. There's not to reason why. But wasn't there a half felt longing for the experience, some delicious uprush of feeling whenever he walked Wathsala home? This is where the level of observation is so delicately poised between the seen and the unseen, a manner so vital to good story telling. Our hero walks with her but on the other side of the road; 'We progressed in uneasy tandem like the two parallel lines that never met, which I had just learnt about in Geometry'.

The one school year he had to walk Wathsala home, Tissa calls 'The Long March'. It was a period of transition for him as for the rest of the world. The Japanese had bombed Colombo. English refugees had come from Malaya, and Mountbatten was directing his Far-Eastern Operations from the Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya. Kandy changed appearance, and so did the little boys. They were growing up. Suddenly they began to look at the girls. 'War time austerity meant goodbye to school uniforms. After the pleated and belted sobriety Wathsala's now lissome figure looked very good indeed in her well cut coloured frocks and her thick plaits in matching ribbons'. But then comes the coda. One year had passed since the parallel walk - 'The Long March' - had begun.

One memorable day, Mother declares that he is freed from his duty. Wathsala's father has been transferred and they were leaving Kandy. As he leaves her at the gate on their last walk, she unexpectedly turns around and looks at him for the first time. 'At last the parallels met. For the first and the last time my eyes took in her heart-shaped face, dimpled chin and downward smile. Bright and brimming eyes looked straight at me with shy boldness. A gentle wave and she was gone. I could not mumble a farewell as my heart had taken a wild leap into my throat.

'Childhood had ended for the boy I once had been'. Not many can capture that curve of emotion, with such clarity, simplicity, and innuendo. Tissa is at his best here, where he spins a wondrous prose poem mysteriously out of nothing like the old thamby down Horseshoe Street drawing the rosy skeins of candy floss out of a glass box. The strength here is that it is the normal, the commonplace, the natural, which transforms into rare beauty, the worm becoming a butterfly. It is when Tissa attempts to craft, to plot, and to schematize, like in the stories, Encounter in the Park, Brumpy's Daughter, and in the melodramatic twist given in a post-script to an otherwise perfectly sculptured story, A Letter Too Late, that he strays out of depth. Missed-timings, coincidences, the sudden arrivals and equally sudden departures, where temporal hiatuses govern the narrative progress, belongs to the world of romantic fiction.

Life, as Tissa tries to capture in its normal and routine flow, is a plotless, linear narrative, without artifice. Like the early moving images which does nothing more than capture the time and space in a moment, of a train arriving at a station, workers leaving the factory, or a child being fed, memoirs move us by their transparent truthfulness. What makes them unique is the process of selectivity, where certain things are retained, and others left out by which, the impressions are customized. Memory is the frame. That is all there is. Any other intrusion is almost toxic.

Mercifully, the attempts at 'plotting' in On Horseshoe Street, are few and far between. The greater part of the landscape, filtered though with a fine-honed poetic sensibility, is inspired reproduction of things as they would have been. It is, and it is also, not. Memory, almost always makes things more attractive, than they would have been. If the past gets rearranged, colourwashed, and soft-focused, it is not poetic licence, which is something deliberate. It is in the evanescent nature of life itself. When everything grows older, memories get younger by the day. It is our eternal quest to transcend change, and thereby, decay.

Hence the value of bleached and faded old snapshots in our family albums. (P)hantom horses whose hooves, were once shod on 'Horseshoe Street' says Tissa. In that beautiful line lies the essence of this book. It is in the perfect synthesis between language and what it tries to articulate. Very few Sri Lankan writers of English have achieved this harmony. Herein is the central dilemma of the South Asian writer writing in English. Despite, Salman Rushdie's claim that English has become an Indian language (Introduction to: 'The Vintage Book on Indian Writing; Page XIII) and the proliferation of South Asians writing in English in the post Rushdie phase, we are yet to appropriate the language of our masters the way the African-Americans and the Caribbeans have done. But reading Tissa Devendra's marvellous book, I am convinced we are closer now to the target, than we have ever been. Thank you Tissa, my friend and fellow traveller, not only for that technical achievement, but for a memorable read. I have not covered all of your books in this brief comment. I have skipped from contour to contour, seeking to focus on what I considered the distinguishing vein of your writing; its seamless bonding with the essentially Sri Lankan texture of the experiences recounted. Here you are very much on the same road with R. K. Narayan, in whose hands the English langauge went down on its knees in the heat and dust of an Indian Yoknapatawpha. There are other aspects of this book which deserve to be spoken about at length, and I hope the English literary establishment of this country would perform that duty in the days to come.

May the road be kind to you.