Random Muse - Sachitra Mahendra:

On ‘Bringing Tony Home’

Of all the literary contributions by Tissa Abeysekara I think ‘Bringing Tony Home and other stories’ is the best - even surpassing his other works in English such as ‘In My Kingdom of the Sun and the Holy Peak’ and ‘Bringing Tony Home - a story in three movements’.

Those who haven’t read his two books with the titles bearing Tony’s name, will now have a question: what is the difference between ‘Bringing Tony Home and other stories’ and ‘Bringing Tony Home - a story in three movements’?

The latter was a novella - on a dog called Tony - which won the Gratiaen whereas the former title, the last one, has three more stories added to the original novella on Tony.

Abeysekara uses inverted commas sparingly in the last one. That was to indicate his stream of consciousness. His sentence patterns have three lengths: very long, middle and short lengths.

He makes use of situation unlike his other English works to evoke his nostalgia. He has four stories with strong melancholic plots. The first story on Tony is an offshoot version of his previous novella. It’s about a dog who was abandoned by a family because of economic circumstances.

The second story ‘Elsewhere: Something Like a Love Story’ is about ‘bittersweet’ memories of a ‘forbidden’ love between a young couple. It is the best of all four stories that evokes guilt feelings on a forbidden love to the maximum.

“It would have been good to remove my shoes and walk across the sand and then up the steps to gaze briefly at the beautiful statue of the Samadhi Buddha within the shrine room. It was purely for aesthetic pleasure.

“Faith had gone away from me long ago. Yet I felt unclean to go up there. I did not belong to the scent of these pure white flowers cleansing the air and the Samadhi statue casting its serene look around.

I had betrayed, and I had despoiled, and there was in me a deep guilt like in someone who has taken life. Wasn’t I of the herd that sacrificed a calf to the predator to survive and get on?” (‘Elsewhere’; my emphasis)

‘Poor Young Man: A Requiem’ has a young many trying to inject sense into his relationship with his father. The last of the collection is called ‘Hark, The Moaning Pond: A Grandmother’s Tale’, where a much older man revisits the loss of his grandmother and experiences a profound revelation of her place in the history and mythology of her people. Count on me all these four stories are equally interesting, since each of them has a gripping story to tell you.

His language is not that simple and seems old world. It doesn’t have the modern Ken Follett touch, but is adorned with the olden day Charles Dickens style; the sentences of rich complexity evoking a plethora of meanings. More particularly he didn’t seem to be familiar with the common language used by many Sri Lankan writers in English. His language is alien in that sense.

He spoke high of bilinguals because he was one himself. Speaking of bilinguals, he was all over India’s R K Narayan. Abeysekara did not live in such close quarters to Narayan in language though they tended to use complicated sentences at times. Narayan was more a story teller while Abeysekara had the knack to touch his own heart without making the reading bored.

All the stories that come in the last book are his memories. He does not hide it; in fact he brings out his personal information like his full name too in some instances.

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