A collection to treasure
REVIEW: Prof Yasmine Gooneratne:
Women Writing 2: Twenty One Short Stories translated from Sinhala
Vijita Fernando Publisher: Voice of Women. 2009
"These are small and intimate tales," writes Vijita Fernando in the
preface to her translation of these stories originally written in
Sinhala. 'They deal with everyday matters of real concern for women. But
they are not trivial and almost always they are about the concerns of
the human heart."
Situations
Let us look at the situations with which these writers deal. Seetha
Mahendra, whose Double Standards leads us into the book, presents as
narrator a housewife who has been charged by her husband with the
responsibility of finding a 'suitable' tenant for a house they own. He
holds progressive views on "The Ethnic
Problem",
lectures on the subject, and is engaged in writing a book about it.
Consequently, when an applicant shows up who seems to her to be an ideal
tenant, in that he is pleasantly spoken, 'refined', and shares her
husband's educational background, the narrator is only 'slightly
perturbed' when, on taking leave, he mentions that his family is Tamil.
Her husband returns home in very high spirits from a lecture he has
given to a mixed audience of Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese, on his pet
subject. He has been lauded as 'a national treasure' and complimented on
his progressive opinions. As he sits down to enjoy the evening meal, his
wife tells him about the person who wishes to rent their house. The
result is revealing:
'When we sat down to dinner I told him: 'Today has been a surprising
day for me too. I have something to tell you.'
'What?'
Some nice people came to rent out the house. I liked them very much.'
'Then there is no problem.'
'No problem. They looked very refined people. But there is one -
small problem.'
'What is that?'
'They are Tamils.'
"He had mixed his food and was about to eat. For a long time he
stayed silent without a word to me and stared ahead as if he had
remembered something.
His face was a study in indecision."
In Double Standards (which could have just as well have been titled
"The Ethnic Problem"), the narrator's sympathetic response to her
husband's elation at the praise that has been showered on him neatly
off-sets the three final sentences that expose the artificiality of his
'liberal' views. Here Seetha Mahendra has taken up the major social
issue of Sinhalese/Tamil relations and explored it with insight, albeit
from a seemingly ordinary domestic point of view.
This appears to be a popular mode of short story writing, for several
tales in this book adopt it in varying degrees, though not every
storyteller has Seetha Mahendra's delicate touch.
Unpleasantness
Daya de Alwis, Women! Here a well-meaning wife (conscious that she is
not very well-educated) devotes herself to maintaining a tranquil
environment in her home, in which her husband, a writer, can pursue his
creative vocation. It is evident, however, that nothing she does can
please or satisfy him. His is incessant comparisons of her shortcomings
with the virtues of the wives of other writers of their acquaintance
make her decide, during a week in which her husband will be away, to
file his scattered papers in an orderly way that she is certain will
delight him. The result of this is disappointing, to say the least:
Anula could not remember a day when he shouted so emotionally, ever.
It was not only the house, but Srinath's voice, his expression -
everything had changed.
"This is not how these clippings should be preserved, Anula. Not
these strips of articles in CR books. I need the whole page where my
article is published. Oh God, Anula, you have committed a real crime!"
The unpleasantness in his voice echoed throughout the house.
Just Resolution
In Jayanthi Rukmani Siriwardena's A Marriage Certificate? A senior
bureaucrat in a Government pensions office faces an administrative
'problem' that forces her to silently compare her own situation in life
(separated from a violent husband to whom she had been briefly but
legally married) with that of Somawathi, a middle-aged woman who,
lacking the certificate of marriage required by the law, humbly seeks
payment following the death of the man with whom she has lived happily
for forty years.
Malini felt as if she was choking. She thought of her past wedded
life. Could she, who had had a huge wedding, speak like this woman? What
insults, blame, ugly stories had passed between her and [Palitha] during
the less than two years of her wedded life? What hints? What
insinuations? Could she speak of her husband engineer Palitha
Amarawardena at whose hands she had suffered blows three times like this
woman who says that her husband never laid a hand on her?
The law requires that the woman who stands before her without the
required document in her hand must be denied payment. Ascertaining that
the birth certificates of the children of this de facto relationship are
in order, though their mother's birth certificate is missing, Malini
Weerasekera uses her official authority to bring about what she realizes
would be a just resolution (if not a strictly legal one). Ignoring the
letter of the law, Malini recommends payment.
Battle lost
In Chitra I. Perera's My Daughter Gets a Letter - Or Two!, the gap
between the generations becomes evident as a conscientious mother (the
story's narrator) and her fun-loving teenage daughter argue over every
matter, from appropriate dress - on the days she wears hot pants she
notes that my face is sour as a squeezed lime' - to examination grades,
from caste to correspondence. A personal letter with a typed address
that arrives for her daughter throws the narrator into an agony of
foreboding which grips her until her daughter, fully understanding the
cause of her mother's anxiety, sets her mind at rest.
"These letters are not for me. They are for Sonari. She has no way of
getting her boy friend's letters to her home. Her mother is very strict,
it seems.
I will give them to her when I go back to the hostel."
In Jina's Day, Sunila Wijesinghe traces twenty four hours in the
typical day of a working wife and mother whose life is blighted by the
necessity to please a completely insensitive, selfish husband and
placate a couple of thoughtless, uncaring children. Daily life for her
has become a ceaseless set of skirmishes, episodes in a never-ending
battle with time, lack of money, and her husband's complaints. Jina is
only seeking a little time to herself, a word or a gesture from her
husband that would indicate to her that she is not alone in her
struggle. These are not forthcoming. Wickrama returns from a friend's
promotion party', and his wife's day ends as it had begun, with an
exhibition, on her husband's part, of selfish unconcern:
She hurriedly brought to the table the dhal curry, the fried eggs and
the brinjal badun she had cooked. Wickrama did not like eggs.
The two children do not eat brinjal. She had prepared them for
convenience, and not because she forgot these preferences. Jinadari felt
happy when Wickrama sat at the dinner table. On days when he had had a
drink he would just fall into bed, without eating.
He served only the brinjal badun onto his plate of rice. He hardly
ate even a mouthful.
"Who can eat this muck - no chilli, no salt." Wickrama took his plate
and went into the kitchen. The rice was strewn [on] to the top of the
cat's bowl and scattered all over [the floor].
He banged the plate noisily on the table. Jinadari's mind echoed that
sound. She wiped the tears from her eyes with her index finger.
Viola Abeygunawardena's Loku Akka, narrated by the younger sibling of
the elder sister who is the centre of the story, is a tale of betrayal
and patient endurance as a marriage that had been thought auspicious in
every way turns sour and ends in tragedy. Sajeevani Kasthuriarahchi's By
the Way explores the feelings of an unmarried mother who has literally
lost her way. Rejected by her family, she has given her child to a
wealthy family for adoption and finds herself helpless. In Chandani
Kumari Mahadivulwewa's story Saara, a household pet (in this case a cat)
with winning ways and a distinctive personality becomes her owner's
beloved friend and companion, compensating for the shortcomings of her
husband and her children.
Piyaseeli Wijenayake's Podi Hamuduruwo would strike its readers in
different ways, depending on the depth and strength of their
understanding of Buddhist practice. Silma is a committed devotee of a
temple in which resides a single monk, for whom she regularly prepares
alms.
When she fills the monk's begging bowl to the top and the monk chants
the gathas, Silma's heart fills with a faith which sometimes spills
over.
When the monk burdens them with requests for expensive items, Silma
does her best; even without the co-operation of her husband, until one
day, arriving with their regular donation of alms, they find the temple
deserted and the monk flown, leaving no address.
Local gossips are not slow to think the worst of the absentee monk,
but Silma does not join in the exercise of character-assassination.
It is only when she goes on pilgrimage to Buddhangala Vihara, a
remote shrine in a wild and lonely place, and finds that the monk has
taken up residence there to pursue his search for truth, that Silma
recognizes with happiness the part she has played, with her gifts of
alms, in helping him on his sansaric journey.
The tears that flow from her eyes now are allowed to flow unchecked.
They are the tears of piety and joy.
In Rupa Amarasekera's story, Stitching Her Life Together, a woman
encountered on a train journey describes to the narrator, a journalist,
how she supports her ailing mother and a dependent student sister by
sewing small items of clothing for sale at the Sunday fair. Thankful for
every opportunity that comes her way, uncomplaining and cheerful, she
gets on with her life. Dharshana Shammi Wijetilleke's story A Charmed
Life? sadly questions the reality of the happy life led by an elderly
married couple of the narrator's acquaintance.
Nanda Jayakody's heroine in Malini is an open-hearted young woman
whose efforts at generosity are misunderstood and ridiculed until she
can bear it no longer.
She requests a transfer to Anuradhapura:
"I need a change in my life. Don't you think [she asks a stranger,
the staid and startled narrator] that when the environment changes, I
will feel some consolation? - I am going to take all my books of poetry
when I go there.
I love Anuradhapura and love to visit the ruins."
In her new environment, Malini refuses, in the national interest, to
take part in a trade union's token strike, an action that creates around
her an atmosphere of active hostility. She returns home, gives up her
job, and begins to write poetry.
I went on writing poetry, even on the walls of my room - My two
brothers started saying that I was mad and went on scolding me. Mother
started doing charms with oil, cutting limes, tying threads, amulets and
the older of my two brothers even took me to a doctor almost by force -
It is no surprise that she ends her life by suicide. Is it the
author's skill, or her translator's, that traces with such accuracy the
stages by which Malini reaches the final point of despair? When, a few
years ago, I was invited to undertake a survey of contemporary women's
writing since Independence in 1948, I learned in the process of my
research, quite a lot about the creative lives of Sri Lanka's women
writers, and the difficulties they experience in pursuing any continuous
train of thought or artistic creativity in the face of unremitting
social and familial pressures. One of these authors wrote with passion
about the lack of sympathy and understanding shown by her husband and
her children towards her writing endeavours.
They accused her, she wrote, of wasting on frivolous self-indulgence
time and money that could be more usefully spent on household tasks and
caring for their comfort.' Malini', writing verse on her bedroom wall,
is thought by her family to be crazy. Given the acute sense of guilt
that plagues most creative women who attempt to combine their family
life with any kind of artistic activity, her battle is lost before it
has even begun.
Other stories
Lakshmi Bombuwela's story The Bond traces the misery of a loving
mother who must give her little son over to the care of her husband's
family because she cannot combine motherhood with the demands of her
working life. In Indra Kumari Kahalapitiya's complex story Defeated!, a
grandmother helplessly observes the fracture of her daughter's family
life: initiated by a political situation that robbed the young woman of
her husband and her children of their father, it is completed by a
dilemma all too human and familiar, as the demands of a second marriage
take priority over her duty to the children of the first.
In Neela Gunasekera's story The Lady Judge, a compassionate public
servant literally sets aside the trappings and insignia of her judicial
office in order to help a young woman pay a fine levied by the state for
an offence that was not of her making, but in dealing with which she has
received no sympathy or assistance from the so-called guardians of the
law. Raped by two strangers on her way back from work late at night, she
has stumbled into a police station to ask for help:
"Oh - a midnight bride. Come, come. Look at her, going on the spree
at night, and coming here to trouble us ." was the response Susima got
from the police.
[But] To whom is she to report, if not to the police?
To whom indeed! The phrase recalls a familiar text: "To which god can
we relate our troubles?" Through tales narrated in the unvarnished prose
of a courtroom deposition, this volume reveals some very grim realities.
Behind the façades of family life, justice and gender equality is a
world in which to be poor and female appears to be a criminal offence,
meriting punishment from gods and men alike.
Ironic Understatement
Sheela Wickramaratne's story One Day at a Time shows the working
mother of a very sick child attempting to cope with the insensitivity of
the hospital system and the careless contempt for her situation of male
loiterers who see her leaving the hospital in the early hours of the
morning. In a tale that is reminiscent in its ironic understatement of
the late Chitra Fernando's Missie Nona, Malini Govinnage's Redi Nanda
explores the callousness with which the caste system continues to
operate in villages, even in an enlightened and democratic age. Having
spurned the needs of their neighbour, a woman of the dhobi caste,
reduced her to penury and shamelessly exploited her, a govigama family
duly performs the religious rites that mark the Ridi Nanda's passing:
"Lots of people came to Ridi's funeral," Amma said .. She spoke of
Ridi's funeral sadly, but with satisfaction. "Must have a sermon and
give alms on the third month after her death."
On a lighter note - but carrying an undertow of the kind of racial
prejudice revealed by the husband figure in Seetha Mahendra's story
Double Standards - is Vipuli Niroshini Hettiarachchi's tale The Unknown,
in which unreasoning fear on the narrator's part of some strangers who
have come to reside next door leads to suspicion and rejection. Although
sense prevails at the end of the story, and the narrator can smile at
the memory of her own prejudice, the reader (like the narrator) does not
easily forget it Shanti Dissanayake's story Pavithra explores the
generation gap in a Sinhalese family, and ends on a joyful note of
reconciliation. Sepali Mayadunne's The Provident Fund presents the
situation of a hardworking woman who finds, on retirement, that there
was no use living when she could not go to work and she did not have a
cent to her name'.
In Tharanga Ranasinghe's Room No. 107, we follow the thoughts of
Sarada, a young graduate who is preparing to leave the room in the
University hostel that she has shared with nine undergraduate friends
for four years.
Memories both happy and sad fill her mind as she leaves in the
knowledge that she has been rejected by her dysfunctional family, and is
now, finally and irrevocably, on her own.
Emotional Isolation
The reader who comes to this book with no prior knowledge of Sri
Lanka and its people (or very little) , and who might possibly imagine
that life in a tropical island paradise must necessarily be idyllic,
would be immediately struck by the frequency with which the writers of
these stories, most of them winners of national awards, take up themes
of emotional isolation.
What has happened, they might ask, to love and laughter, to humour
and the workings of the mind? Surely such matters are not trivial? Are
they not also concerns of the human heart? Is it possible that our
finest women authors write best when they are deeply unhappy? Or that
women writers have been given an idea - surely erroneous? - that the
problems of their everyday lives are the only subjects worthy of
literary exploration? If the last possibility happens to be the case, we
must all consider ourselves unlucky that such ideas have been permitted
to take hold, and to drive the act of literary creation.
Vijita Fernando, one of this country's most skilled and sensitive
translators from the Sinhala, wisely selects from among the many 'Englishes'
that are available to authors and translators today, an idiom that
successfully holds a 'mirror up to nature'. Skilfully avoiding the trap
of "English Spoken Our Way", she has permitted the narrators and
characters who inhabit these tales of middleclass life to express
themselves in an uncluttered, seemingly simple English that reflects, in
its grammatical accuracy and its lucidity, the naturally straightforward
Sinhala speech of the original.
Truly, a collection to treasure. |