Seeking vengeance
Book review
Capt Elmo Jayawardena
A new book is launched and a new author is born. The name Lucky De
Chikera is added to the limited team of people who make their worthy
contributions to Sri Lanka’s contemporary literature.
A Tigress of Kilinochchi is a collection of 10 short stories and one
long story. The contents return the reader to a world of bygone days, to
a life we knew in peaceful amble and slumber and then condemns you to
the blunt and brutal realities of the ethnic conflict, 83’ version,
where the truth stares naked and uncompromised.
The first ten tales relates to “us” and what we “were” and what we
“saw” and how we lived. The bombai-mutai seller, the “goma” vendor plus
a host of walking supermarkets are brought to light on how they strutted
the by-lanes selling their ware. The colliding two worlds of the “haves”
and the “have-nots” sing sad to us in “Dead End Kid” whilst a sprinkle
of romance and fear of the supernatural flows along with drug
trafficking and neighbourly jealousies as we move from page to page.
All this is from the commonality of society, the day to day concerts
we see on a hundred stages as life rolls the Lankan way in its many
pastoral manifestations. To me, the essence was in Chikera’s handling of
the conflict that burned us for three decades and left us scared for
life.
“Where men took leave of their senses and behaved like beasts,”
writes the author in definition of the filthy expectations of racist
rabble rousers who re-wrote our history in shame. It was an equal guilt
from the north and the south whose battle cry was “them or us.”
Hate, the corrosive element between the two races and its clear
vindictive demonstrations are clearly defined by Chikera and he goes on
to detail how the resultant killing continued with reason and without
reason. All this has been tapped from the author’s key board with
factual back grounds that colour his stories with reality.
The main attraction here is the “Tigress,” a young girl burning with
a vendetta against an entire race for things that happened in the Black
July. Kamala’s search for vengeance transforms her from an innocent
orphaned school girl to a cyanide carrying soldier willing to lay down
her life for a cause. Right or wrong? Who knows? Or who among us is
qualified to make the judgement.
Where is the justification? Or who is justified? And wherein lies the
demarcation between the villain and the venerated? Chikera addresses
these questions in subtle story telling which is superimposed on events
that took place when the carnage fragmented a land and its inheritors.
Is there or will there ever be a total and complete substitution for the
mayhem we all suffered? When the grass grows over the graves and time
overgrows the pain, would the whispers of peace be heard? All these
would intercept the thought process of the reader through the Tigress of
Kilinochchi.
As for the author, he sure sits today poised for more books,
exercising his retirement therapy to something wonderful called writing
stories. He has moved up in the Sri Lankan literary world from
inessential spectator to privileged actor and I cheer him on. May there
be more like Lucky de Chikera; we certainly could do with new thoughts,
new faces and a lot more new books dressing the limited book shop
stands.
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