Focus on Books
Insights into the family interactions of a growing child
Prof. Sunanda Mahendra
Piyadasa Walikannage is remembered well by his readers for his award
winning novel Sudu sevanali (The White Shadows) which was also made into
a Sinhala film by Prof. Sunil Ariyaratne.
This novel not only brought him fame but also paved the way for more
experiments of various other forms of narratives, winning him two more
awards: one for his juvenile novel Pun Sanda Van Putu (The Son like the
Full Moon) and his children's story Devlova Aa singannek (A Beggar who
came to Heaven).
Walikannage is more akin to a form of narrative which is more family
based events and revolves round various aspects of traditional family
life patterns facing challenges of varying kinds, attempting to weave a
certain form which is sensitive and sharp in observation.
This novel, his latest to come out recently titled Nagaha Langa
Gedara (The House near the Na tree - Godage 2007) revolves round the
life of a family interlinked with various conflicts both physical and
mental, culminating in the death of one of the dearest in the family
circle - the mother.
It is basically a narrative from the point of view of a child of five
years, Hasitha, about to enter a school, getting matured gradually with
the influence of the mother and the father and opens up with a long
journey from one place to another, where the child for the first time
encounters the sight of the wild elephants and gets to know for himself
the fears and the challenges of life.
This is also the first occasion where the family is introduced. The
other subsidiary features are interlinked like the upheavals in
domesticated places, the life of the traditional father head and the
traditional mother head and the features that are integral to it as seen
sensitively by a growing up boy.
The boy Hasitha sees that he has a lot to discover by way of
investigation into nature and human relations where he peeps into the
realms of life and death, fear and sorrow, competition in the game of
the winner and the loser.
From his childhood he sees how the family pattern is gradually
changing with the life structures around him. He hears the dialogues
that ensue between his mother and the father and the sportive spirits of
his friends and relatives of the same age, where he sometimes falls into
pitfalls unknowingly in new adventures and gets to know more about them.
All these events culminate in the narrative where the death of his
mother suddenly occurs, which is the apex of the narrative and which is
also the moment of illumination of his maturity.
The writer Walikannage captures sensitively the nuances in the life
of a husband and a wife who so wish to foster a family life for their
son who is shown as torn between two worlds: the world of his own and
the mother, Sujatha, the well disciplined teacher and the ailing woman
and the world of his father, Tikiri, with a lesser degree of a
disciplinarian but perhaps indicated as a social climber of a type and a
stern person who makes decisions at the right time.
They belong to the middle class and their speech mannerisms are
closer to that class of behaviour.
The father also happens to be a tele-play writer, a theatre man, and
an administrator in a government office, of a type which is not focused
as an adverse factor of effect for the child. But the influence of his
mother is more effective to the child to the extent that the child wants
to see that he is nurtured more on the effects of the mother rather than
those of his father.
Though more is said by way of flashbacks, the story line is a simple
narrative where a child observes many a factor dealing with the grips of
the sensitivity of living conditions where the writer brings to the
forefront various experiences of the mother and father making the child
to think more of the present conditions in which he lives.
In this manner, the entire work rests on a certain level of growing
up of a child, where he encounters the experiences of his father and the
mother as their experiences of the past containing a series of episodes
from the war torn worlds, the hunger and the struggle to live, plus the
political conditions intertwined, making a mix of two generations.
The story teller Walikannage, the author, is visibly over shadowed
sometimes by the commentator author or the persona he creates, where the
latter sometimes take an upper layer of expression which to my mind is
not a satisfactory perspective for a modern creative writer.
This is by no means a gross generalisation. But as the writer has a
lot to express the focus of attention to a central point may perhaps
tend to deviate giving vent to a more documentation of facts pertaining
to the life as a struggle, than a mirror of complex experiences in a
self-referential manner.
Though the writer carefully lays down the episodes in the struggle of
a family to achieve the main objective of a generally sustained life,
perhaps the material that goes into the making of it tend to be long
drawn and the readability is sometimes hard, as description of minute
details are piled up as fused entities.
In this manner the reader has to be absorbed in order to get to know
all what the writer intends to express. I dare not say that this is not
required, for it is the wish of the particular writer concerned.
All I want to say is that this narrative is long drawn with these
materials which could have been pared to a level more relevance. In
approach, the work of Walikannage is voluminous like 'remembering of
things past', reminding to the present reader some of the aspects of the
glory of the past as well as nostalgia and the gradual vanishing of
sociological factors.
One plus point of the writer Walikannage is that though he tries to
express situations of the various clashes and episodes of people in a
parochial social milieu, he never presses to pass judgments on any of
them or hold opinions on the manner in which one ought to live. Instead
he presents the humane situations as if holding a candle light to the
dark spots of the same experiences.
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