Stories written with a clear insight

Professor Sunanda Mahendra

FICTION: The short story comes as the most ancient, as well as the most modern day literary genre, with experimentations to the use of the narrative techniques for the use of human experience in its manifold ways beginning from the parable to the stream of consciousness and symbolism.

The short story can be a genre, which is both simple and complex, as many writers utilise techniques that change from time to time in keeping with the trends of living manners, and its impact on them. Sometimes it so happens that a short story writer may utilise the age-old parable to convey a modern idea or experience in the manner expressed by the well-known American writer James Thurber.

When I read the ten English short stories created by Indra Wijenayaka Chandraratne “To begin again” [Godage International, 2006], I felt the pulse of a writer, who utilises her years of experience at home and abroad both in the capacity of a school teacher and a university English instructor. The central theme in each story conveys a sense of the remembrance of the past, which for the reader, comes in the form of a rounded story or narrative linked with a humane message.

This is one side of her approach. Then comes some experience of many a middle class parent, linked to their children, with the former in either separation or living apart and the latter, which is mostly a lost parentage or a painful memory of a childhood albeit riches and material comforts sans a loving spirit.

Lost childhood

The first story “Why oh why?” is one of the best examples of the expression of the lost childhood of a very young school girl Sonali, where the father and the mother are depicted as gradually separating from each other leaving her in a world of examinations and social climbing matter over and above the humane side of events.

Chandraratne expresses this view in a series of complex experience, where the school girl Sonali observes the behaviour patterns of her father, who drives her to the school and back as a routine duty, and the mother, who is mostly a domesticated character with all the kindness devoid of any complaints centred in this world of the young girl. The inevitable question is framed in the following words, when she senses a certain degree of an oncoming disturbance in the parents lives.

“Yet there was one nagging question that cropped up off and on in her mind. She would never ask it again for fear of being slapped [by her father] but it needed an answer. How is it possible for a person to live with another as husband and wife exchanging all the love in the world ,and then to rend asunder the bond of marriage ,and thereafter show no love or disaffection and the seeds of bitterness?”[p12]

This story, to me, depicts a sense of gloominess in a visible ‘happy family’, a saga that had been expressed from various points of view. The writer underlines, with a tinge of painful insight, the need to humanise the human groups.

The story “The Final Deed” depicts the modes of the traditional family lineages of varying degrees of property ownership, and the disaster that it could bring about in the end.

This is one of the stock themes of many writers with the central character as the real inheritor of the ancestral house or the Maha Gedera, versus the unreal fraudulent inheritors, where aunts and uncles abound to own their spice from the forefathers, or the grandfather and the grandmother, and the ultimate ownership creeps in stealthily on the part of a cunning person with all tricks of the trade possible.

This experience is expressed sensitively from the point of view of a young girl studying to achieve the needed academic discipline to reach a higher plane far from the common bonds of the ancestral properties and the rest of the paraphernalia. This is another story in nostalgia where the theme of the anticipation of the human touch matters over and above other material relationships.

Gloomy outlook

The story “The Transfer” centres round another aspect of a ‘good’ woman, a good wife, and good mother in her gloomy outlook, when her husband changes his mind to make advances to another woman, known as the caretaker of their daughter, who was entrusted to look after, during her absence.

I felt that the story “That Other Boy” is one of the most uncommon psychological narratives written to impart a sensitive experience in the life of a schoolboy, who so feels to lead a double life, creating a ruse before his father and mother, pretending that there is a boy [a friend quite different to him] in the class named Sigera, whose behaviour is reported day after day to the point that his parents are shown as desirous of seeing Sigera, but to the grave disillusion they discover that Sigera is no other than their own son.

What is stressed in the creation is the need to have a close understanding and a scrutiny of the children in their various behaviour patterns. Once again the need to have a close link between the parents and children is emphasised.

Several narratives of the writer centre round the experiences in foreign countries, where the events expressed, though seem alien on the upper surface, are nevertheless linked to the native soil of the narrator. Two examples are the stories “Plucked too early” [p44-55] and “To Begin Again” [p90-104].

The image of the women in distress and agony merge with those humane aspects that one ought to inculcate in order to possess a saner frame of life in the world. One fine day these two stories will be anthologised in various foreign collections.

The story “Transience” [p56-67], where the protagonist Nirodha, a little girl is shown as a bright little star, one which gradually fades and becomes a victim to a sickness in the brain which inevitably results in the loss of her life bearing a sense of religious overtone. The moment of illumination is the gradual contemplation on the part of the adults on the transience of life as laid down in the Buddhist texts.

The stories are well written with a clear insight, as to the nature of the human frailties and foibles. Perhaps a new reader may find the use of language at times rather remote from the contemporary usages as regards the use of the more traditional idiomatic expressions.

But this is not a point to be raised as a barrier to the creative communication skills of the writer. Indra Wijenayaka Chandraratne has, beyond doubt, proved her ability to narrate some of the most sensitive human events at home and abroad regardless of the geographical barriers.

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