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Focus on Books :
An intermix of despair and ecstasy
Prof Sunanda Mahendra
Vekande Gitaya
Author: Karunadasa Suriyaarachchi
207 pages
Dayawansa Jayakody Publication
2007
When I read Suriyaarachchi's Sinhala novel for the second time, in
order to make a serious study on the multi-dimensional intricacies
embedded in it, I gathered that there is much more than a mere narrative
line and a human interest story.
A serious attempt has been made to line up a series of recollections
in the life of a young man named Pemasiri who tries his best to achieve
both the scholarship and strategies that go into the life of a social
changer or a revolutionary where he is shown as a victim of
circumstances beyond his control, and depicts the nature of the mental
agonies undergone by him in the process.
I found that this is a serious creative attempt at making some
sensitive series of experiences connected with an uprising that would
have helped erect a better society or social order, despite narrow
bindings.
The work revolves round the life of this young man who is poverty
stricken and wants to know more about the better social orders and being
inspired by his own father and mother and a young scholarly monk, he
succumbs to the revolutionary frame of mind. Though he shows not the
hard-combat type he is shown as a member of the rank and file of
revolutionaries.
Then he is shown as a victim of circumstances beyond his control
falling into endless pitfalls. Being punished physically and mentally,
he is driven to a hospital ward where he recollects his past followed by
a series of thoughts that centre round a remote village called Vave
Tanne, where he was a mason's hand helping the family members to live a
decent way of life despite the driven forces of poverty and hardships.
He is being looked after by his mother Ukkumanika who was once
instrumental in building a great big pond or tank as they call it with
her husband Siyatu.
This factor he comes to know later and brings back to his mind a sort
of a revolutionary spirit of altruism that could not be measured in
terms of mere political pressure where the dedicated workers are
undermined as against the political figures.
He meets his would be partner Sandalatha, reminiscent of his own
mother, who so becomes dearer trying to share his hopes for a better
future. But as it is revealed, the dream of hope does not come true due
to several material reasons, once again due to unseen factors of the
social order.
He is shown as a victim of a marriage to a woman, Rupika, who does
not leave him, but fails to get any physical satisfaction from him due
to his disabilities caused through the severe physical punishments
imposed on him.
She is made to be known as another victim of physical and mental
circumstances via those who come in the guise of rendering and extending
opportunistic help through their monetary powers and positions of the
society.
Gradually the protagonist Pemasiri is shown as a person driven to his
own world of isolation where he hides from others in order to make his
stance unseen from others in the society at large.
Yet his mind possesses a vibrant current of the need to exist beyond
despair and frustration. One of the finest and the most sensitive areas
that cover this book come from the descriptions of treacherous types of
torture on those victims where the reader is made to share and feel it
sensitively.
Perhaps one could state that these dismal areas are being overused by
sentimental means by bringing tears into the eyes. But I would dare not
pass that judgement for the narrative needs that area uncovered in order
to intensify the strength of the main experience.
The sentimental features have to be rediscovered as basic elements in
a work as it is a fused entity. Perhaps sentimentality at times is a
revelation of realistic facts. The facts revealed in this work, I
presume, does not make one think that this is a false attempt to record
the untruth or overuse the truth.
The major area of the narrative covers the collections of the person
Pemasiri where the reader is made to feel that in the end, 'wherever the
man goes he is bound by chains' some of which are visible and the others
are invisible.
The writer Karunadasa introduces the unsequential jumble of events
that occur in the mind of Pemasiri not in a particular chronological
manner, but as a series of sequences in the life of a man who had
undergone spirits of an admixture of a stream of agonies and ecstasies
that has to be expressed in the best possible manner in order to gauge
the stark nature of that particular individual driven to torture by
circumstances.
They gradually culminate in the structure as circumstances driven by
necessity and not by sheer concoction on the part of the writer. The
manner in which Pemasiri undergoes torture is one of the most striking
areas as depicted in any Sinhala novel so far.
For me it made an indelible impact of nausea and a feeling of utmost
despair regarding the destiny of the humanity where the man cannot
change the treacherous manners of the man himself down the centuries and
the very man becomes the victim of his entrapment, failing to conquer
himself.
From varying points of view the novel Vekande Gitaya is symbolic of
the need to rediscover the ways and means of overcoming the social
malfunctions interlinked.
A word about the creative technique as used by the writer deserves
special mention. He is seen as an experimentalist in the use of his
narrative form and the content.
Perhaps he could have utilized a conventional form of expression
which would have looked more like a story line rather than a series of
isolated fragments of events sensitively uncovering areas of darkness.
The form he has utilized may not be the only mode of expression one
could anticipate. But may it be said in assessment that this form of
expression itself is a challenge to the existing forms of conventional
expressions as seen in most Sinhala novels written today.
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