A convincing portrayal of the Rural Scene:

Its denizens and their ways

Title: Episodes: 01

Author: Stanley Amunugama

Author Stanley Amunugama (SA) has been writing for some time now: he has, to his credit already, several books, including a Collection of Poetry. Judging from the present Collection, it may be reasonably assumed that he will, if he continues, receive the notice of readers in the years ahead. Here is a Collection of thirteen Short Stories, delightful to read, if only for their surprisingly wide range of interests and styles. Practically every field in the gamut of interests that the Short Story is traditionally meant to cover is represented here.

Vitality

Apparently, two important factors have given authenticity and vitality and, a measure of finesse to SA's stories: his intimate familiarity with the village and its denizens who have largely, been the warp and woof that have gone into the spinning of these engaging tales and the other, his dexterity in using his medium, the language, over which he seems to possess dominance; it needs no saying that these are great advantages that a practising writer can have.

It must be said that as evidenced in these stories, his langauge flows untrammelled, crystal clear and entirely articulate.

Among those stories of rural interest, which form the largest group in the Collection, are, "British of a Devale", "Ratu Banda", "Sunil", "Danture" etc.; in all these, it is the village and its variegated crowd that fill his canvases......... they are largely his stock-in-trade in these tales of absorbing anecdotes. One sees among them farm labourers, traditional artisans, toddy-brewers, petty thieves, and such others, whom SA calls 'the riff-raff. These make a curious yet, enduring gathering of human types with their distinguishing fads, foibles and follies, and he spins out his tales of his with a sure hand for, he intimately knows his 'stock-in-trade' and that lends to them a garb of authenticity and breathes life into them.

Take a character like Sunil of the story by the same title; he gets into one scrape after another, most of the time falling foul with the Police.

Then, there is the village Patriarch, an important government officer of the Colonial times, but now retired, an awesome figure with an ample beard spreading over his chest "like a bib"! Numerous are the menials and family retainers who serve him hand and foot in his sprawling Walauwa; he would smoke nothing but pipe after pipe of 'Three Nuns' tobacco. He features large in the story, "A Chapter from an Unfinished Book"; this ageing Kandyan Nilame still lives in the past and is unable to get off it and is engaged in a futile battle to retrieve and retain it, but the odds are against him: his two wayward sons Punchi and Madduma are engaged in a senseless squandering of the family wealth and its prestige, all that the father cherishes: they live lives of drunkenness and dissipation; when Mediuma asks the old man permission to marry a girl from the South, so alien to the father's ways of thinking and entrenched values, it is the last straw to break the camel's back.

Delicacy

He is unable to realise that inexorable Time, true its form, is sweeping away the driftwood of the past and, together with it, the fond shibboleths of the by-gone era, in its resistless tidal wave!

There are also a few stories that apparently do not belong to the main stream: some of them are, "The Love Story of a Teacher", "The Terminal" and "Illicit Transport". The first mentioned, is a little story of a love affair in a school, between two Teachers ..... a feature not so uncommon in schools for, teachers too, after all, are human beings and are subject to all the frailties that other humans are beset with; in such matters the moves are discreet and the writer refrains from being explicit and preserves its delicacy; the affair is domed right from its start; only seething grief remains, stubbornly refusing to leave. "At the Terminal" is really not a story as such; the writer himself admits it.

What transpires is reminiscent of the scenes that prevailed in those early American Wild West stories of 'Boom Towns' of desperadoes, drunkenness, gambling, crime cheap women and general lawlessness; there, it was gold, here it is gems.

This mushroom colony is Maraka, in Laggala, caught in the maelstrom of the 'Gem-rush' of the 1970s. True, it is not a story in the conventional sense, but the author's masterly handling of his material and its presentation have given a vitality and a new dimension to this document, entirely capturing the reader's imagination. Two other stories, the "Nuptials" and "Illicit Transport" have been designed to serve tow common threshold interests found in some readers namely, Humour as found in the former and Suspense, as found in the latter. In the first, the author pokes fun at his erring and excitable wife; in this unbridled spree of fun, he spares nobody, not even himself! In the other, the suspense is created as a few persons transport some illicit timber in a vehicle and they notice a Police Patrolling motor cycle with two Police men persistently following their vehicle.

Super-normal

As in all such stories, the denouement and, with it, the relief comes at the end, when they discover that the Policemen's motive is entirely different!

The two stories, "A Haunting we will Go" and, "The Call" belong to another category, also quite popular with some readers; they cater to their interest in the super-normal and the psychic: both deal with ghosts and unseen powers. The second, "The Call", is of a well-known, but stereotyped format: distant happenings connecting loved-ones send their echoes in mysterious ways to concerned parents and other loved ones in their homes. This is a perennial theme often used: Maupassant, in his time used it; our own Gunadasa Amarasekera has used it today.

Now, to conclude: here is an entertaining Collection of Stories, cetaring to readers on a wide spectrum of interests.

The author's style and modes of presentation entirely take in the reader. The book is handsomely produced with a glossy cover in easily legible print in thick, strong paper.

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