Short stories of a diplomat
 

by Professor Sunanda Mahendra

"From the banks of the Rhine and the Spree" is the title of the collection of short stories by a diplomat with a long career Satharatilake Banda Atugoda, who is introduced in the book by the Deputy Foreign Minister Prof. Wisva Warnapala as, "a contemporary of mine at Peradeniya in the early sixties and he, as all enterprising undergraduates of the period, displayed a flair for writing".

Having read the ten short stories in the collection I felt that the long standing experience at home and abroad of the writer had helped him to recreate some of the sensitive memoirs into edifying narratives of much value. The protagonist of each story is a person alienated for most of the time from the hometown.

However he is sensitive to the local soil in which he was born and bred amidst his kith and kin. This fact is well expressed in the two stories titled 'The sweetness of labour lost' (p70) and 'A saga of the exploited' (p76) .

In the former narrative the protagonist Ruwan, a young boy, sees that the villager Dure (who is also called Duraya by others in the village) is not only hampered by the rich people but also looked down upon as an unwanted humans (in this instance a trader called Saibo, who gets Dure to pluck his coconuts and pays a paltry sum allowing him to stay in the estate) for which he wants to know the latent factor behind.

Young Ruwan (who is known to Dure as Punchi Nilame, as he too belongs to a rich class) can only help the poor man by observing the events around him and by learning and understanding the social stigma in order to eradicate the evils behind the social forces. But as a temporary measure he can only hand over a certain amount of money he had got from his elders.

Message of good will

Thus the narrative the reader unfolds carries a message of good will of a birth of a better social climate for humans enabling to live together - perhaps a dream. This theme is extended in the next story which I deem as the best in the collection.

The protagonist this time is a diplomat named Senarath who is getting ready to leave his place of work Berlin to come to Colombo. But he has a lot of papers that record a history of his nostalgic reminiscences. The wife of the officer concerned wants to destroy some of the accumulated old papers while he insists that they have various types of events within them and one of them comes to the forefront which is the narrative, the reader is involved.

The forbearance on the part of the protagonist in retaining the yellowish old paper which is a letter that eventually takes him down the memory lane where he too is featured as a revolutionary. He who happened to be groomed and influenced episodically by a sort of a poverty stricken, though a stern revolutionary who lived with him during his schooling days. He happened to be a person known as Wijehamy who had ups and downs in his life ending behind the bars.

Then accidentally they meet each other when the latter as a budding revolutionary cum undergraduate addresses an anti-imperialist mass rally in Kandy over the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the president of Congo. All these creep into the mind of Senarath in a series of flashbacks intermixing time and space.

I felt that much more of innerness via monologue would have enlivened the past situations to the modern day reader enhancing a better narrative instead of a series of simple brush strokes. This obviously would have resulted in a novella. Yet the intrinsic quality of the narrative remains as a good complex narrative of the time blending history and the humanism.

Family stories

There are quite a number of family stories which revolve round sons, daughters, pets (dogs and cats) , wives and husbands. One of the finest qualities that the reader envisages is the opposing nature of characters at home as well as abroad.

This factor is well illustrated in the story titled 'Diplomacy in practice' (p37). The story rests on a sarcastic layer of narration where one university don professor Parakrama is appointed as an ambassador in an embassy abroad where he is both new to his work structure as well as alien to his conventional academic outlook.

In this climate of opinion one can always either cheat him or degrade his status by making his work look more 'administrative' than 'academic' disallowing him in various manners to implement the message of human relations over the bureaucratic outlook traditionally framed though expected from such a person (a thing that happens all over the world when narrow minded administrators are made to be superior decision-makers above the academic decisions of value) .

In this narrative the main theme lies on the conflict between a lady administrator or an officer nicknamed as 'minister' ( Gowrie by name) , who is rather unpopular among the staffers is seen trying to make the professor's ambassadorial and diplomatic functions tedious to him to the point that she tries to thrust a dictatorial voice over him.

The writer who is an observer of all these says 'in any event Gowrie was not an officer who deserved the compassion of the others, he thought, considering her behavioural patterns and attitudes' (p47) . But the professor disregarding trivial matters goes on functioning in the manner he is accustomed to decisions as a scholar who has commonsense, while the lady concerned attempts to be a communication barrier to his work.

Climax

This reaches a climax when the lady gets a transfer to Colombo which she is reluctant to accept perhaps seen as a punishment. But the professor who feels that it is a vital issue in an officer's career decides to be more religious than administrative the sense of which is laid down as follows.

"As an academic I feel that the problem with this officer (Gowrie) is her 'ego' the solution to this problem could be found by herself. She could be asked to read the 'Dhammapada' a few times and absorb the contents. May be Attavagga (stanzas on self) for a start" (p47) .

Then having laid down two stanzas which carry the message, professor Parakrama passes a verdict 'Please postpone the decision to transfer her to Colombo'. The narrator or the observer says 'the response was shown to Gowrie before it was despatched'. The narrative concludes in a fabulous mood where the 'evildoer or good-for-nothing character' realises her folly by saying 'Sir. Thank you so much... I am so grateful'.

One of the remarkable points in the structures and themes of Atugoda is the underlying 'religious conscience', which is often uncovered by a symbolic layer of meaning as a point of realization. This in fact is a literary cum creative factor that needs in depth study a long lost legacy of the Orient. This writer diplomat has not wasted his time living in foreign strands.

As such this collection of stories in itself is ample testimony to the fact that a good humane administrator matters much to better governance the cry of the day. I request all my good administrator friends to read this as a supplementary text before embarking on their lofty administrative projects in their respective ministries and /or embassies.

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