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The illusive world of love and despair

After passing out as a graduate from a local university Damayanthi Weerasuriya, the young girl had been engaged in the mission of job hunting for over three years. At last she hits the target of becoming a trainee journalist in a Sinhala women’s paper under an able elderly lady journalist. She who is already skilled in writing and photography, gradually ascends the difficult and competition ladder of her career. She in the process of her coverage of events encounters a handsome and vigilant army officer, in the intelligence unit of Headquarters.

Damayanthi who was chaperoned by him to the Seva Vanitha Ceremonial event gets to this young man Aravinda Rajakaruna. This starting point triggers off for a series of interpersonal encounters between them where the climax is their love affair, getting to know each other.

Damayanthi too has her only younger sister who is shown as somewhat different in attitude is nevertheless a lass of easy going happy go lucky person. She, named Indunil, has found employment in the banking sector also with a boy friend called Devinda. She who has an inborn talent to evoke witty phrases in conversation keeps the family alive and in the narrative, a down-to-earth contemporary slice of reality.

The love affair of Damayanthi and Aravinda is the focal point in writer Buddhadasa Galappatty’s narrative. The contents of which flow into 19 chapters, highly page moving at times the narrative descriptions paired to the bottom enabling more readable dialogue. These dialogues carry more creative spark than actual descriptions and authorial comments.

The culmination of the affair of Damayanthi and Aravinda, is their trip to Yala, with several others known to Aravinda. The Yala trip and their stay in a circuit bungalow been the turning point in their lives as well as the narrative.

The merry making the hugs and kisses culminate in the grave turning point in the life Damayanthi and Aravinda, for they are shown as spending the first night sleeping together.

Then comes the obvious fear, marital status, family alliances, family bonds, and all the rest of it. They are not only seeking medical advice but also concoct lies that would save from the ethical conditions in with their out world.

But as things happen, they dare not bring about disharmony of any abortions or succumb to the accepted nuances of social events. As such they arrive at a more genial and gentle arrangement of a special licensed marital registration. A common reader would not suspect any other behaviour to occur in other lives.

But the gravest turning point takes place after this registration. To save their souls, Damayanthi and Aravinda in agreement with Indunil had to create a lie before their parents of both sides.

The harmless lie is that Aravinda had to go to Pakistan for further training. When everything is said and done, this narrative line uncovers several other significant so far hidden traits as well. It is not hinted until the climax of the narrative that Aravinda was given several tasks of investigation where one representative function being the real life role play.

As a result, the reader is detoured to another territory. Someone or a group or a unit had been following the tracks of Aravinda who in the end become a victim. This happens after his registration with Damayanthi at the visit to her place for a surprise dinner. As I said earlier the pages move with action. And the actions are not merely of threshold interest. There is the beginning until the last sentence.

This is Galappatty’s maiden novel. But he has exhibited his skill as a short story writer and an award winning poet and a theatre artiste. I would prefer to have seen more complexity in the depiction of Aravinda’s character and how he manages to be so relaxed.

As for me, the intimacy created between the two characters, Aravinda and Damayanthi, in their stay overnight in a circuit bungalow in a room tucked under a bed sheet sounds too open and lusty. But I cannot order the creative flux to be censored for the sake of probable ethical imbalances. May the reader regard it as harmless realistic depiction of the intimacy over and above the pangs of probable censorship.

There were several references in the body of the narrative to a popular Sinhala novel titled Golu Hadawatha which I disliked, for this work can retain its calibre sans the reference. I am not certain whether that’s an intended irony or not, but as for me, it was uncalled for. Since closing the last page of the maiden novel, I felt that there is a complex web of events uncovered beneath the outer layer of narrative which sounds more a tragic love story.

The inner layer carries more weight than the outer one, as it delves with the social structure to which the two sisters and their parents belong to.

As members of urban lower middle class of people they struggle so hard to make their ends meet.

The realization of the two sisters in this direction though treated in a lighter vein, nevertheless is the firm bond that makes the family ties strengthen. The father is a retired CTB driver who has got a sum of money that he invests to hold a respectable wedding ceremony for his eldest daughter.

He is also depicted as a father who has to succumb to certain circumstances to which he is forced to move. The mother on the other hand is an innocent kind-hearted being who always seeks the welfare of her two daughters out of whom the elder is shown as a graduate and the other (Poddi) who is a carefree bank employee.

She is shown so carefree that she belongs to a particular growing class of young girls and boys who are frequently moved by the so called popular cultural patterns and trends, where they use a witty verbal mannerism mixing Sinhala and English as a sub cultural dialect. Perhaps the writer wants to see this attitude rather as a mirror of their mannerisms, where they are untightening a heavy burden of social sorrows, and loosening their uprootedness due to the destiny of their own surroundings.

I am sure the author utilized this pattern with an ironic sense of human pretensions and prejudices. This particular mixed dialect way, I am sure scoffed at by the elderly generation of puritanical scholars and linguists. But I am sure this is the reality in which the portrayed characters exist.

Knowingly or unknowingly the wit and irony does not come out as a general tone. But it is the wish of the creative writer that matters here. Galappatty, I am sure, desires to depict the less serious day to day life style of a particular type of people. There is also the hinting of a sense of transience, which bears more a pragmatic spiritualism that teaches us about the illusive nature of sensory world.

As the Buddha pronounced:

“What laughter What pleasure

When the inner self is burning all the time

why not seek the lamp to dispel the darkness within you”

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