Savour all that’s sweet and simple

Yasmine Gooneratne has a fine sense of drama. The opening sentence of her latest novel is riveting: “Loyalty (and the damnable lack of it in his wife) was the thought uppermost in the mind of Sir Andrew Millbanks as he looked down at Lady Alexandra’s dead body, spread-eagled on the paved pathway of the Residency.”

The relevance of this tragedy to the rest of the saga which deals with the fortunes of the Wijesinha clan, is that the `native’ ADC to the said Governor at the time of his wife’s suicide, happened to be the story’s central character, Rowland Wijesinha.

The Crown subsequently sold the former upcountry Residency to a British planter named James Armitage Lucas who “bestowed his own name on his magnificent hill country estate”, calling it `Lucas Falls,’ and who in course of time sold it to “a wealthy Sinhalese mudaliyar named Don Jeronis Wijesinha”, from whom it passed to Rowland.

He, Rowland, considered himself the scion of an old family accustomed to wealth and privilege. An Anglican Christian whose first language was English, Rowland belonged to that branch of the family which considered themselves `pukka sahibs’ or, in the local parlance, `walauwa hamuduruwos.’

Herbert Wijesinha, father of our heroine, Latha Wijesinha, however, came from humbler stock and, athough he too belonged to the same bloodline and was a cousin of the high and mighty Rowland, the eminently likeable and thoroughly decent Herbert made no pretensions to being of the same mould as Rowland and had no desire to do so, either.

His wife, Soma, a Government school teacher, was from a Buddhist, Sinhala-speaking background and as an ardent upholder of Sinhala culture, she scorned what she thought of as Western affectations.

The exotically-named Tsunami was the youngest child of Rowland and his beautiful, gifted Indian wife, Helen.

Tsunami, forthright and direct in speech and manner, was quite different from the apparently “sweet and simple” Latha, but they were of the same age, both shared a passion for reading, and an instant bonding took place between them when a family wedding brought the two 8-year-olds together for the first time. Soma, early on, explained to Tsunami the meaning of her cousin’s sound Sinhala name: “A girl who is named Latha will grow up to be like a clinging vine. Not just because she will be graceful and lovely, but because she will be a perfect wife. She will cling to her husband as a creeper clings to a tree. His strength will support her and her beauty will decorate his sturdy branches.”

This near-poetic outburst from her aunt, drew from Tsunami the laconic response, “I understand, Auntie. A kind of parasite,” which left Soma speechless with shock and indignation.

I wish I could give a proper synopsis of Yasmin’s fascinating story, if only to whet the appetite of any readers who might hesitate to plunge into a book of 645 pages, but it’s difficult to summarise so long and involved a saga. Against her better judgement, Soma yielded to Tsunami’s entreaties and allowed Latha to spend the school holidays with Tsunami at Lucas Falls and this became customary.

Latha was entranced by the beauty of the place and by a houseful of friendly cousins (for Tsunami had an elder sister plus 3 older brothers) who readily included Latha in all their pastimes.

She liked the rather pompous Uncle Rowland who treated her with great courtesy, and she became devoted to her artistic young Aunt Helen. Latha secretly adored Tsunami’s eldest brother, Ranil.

The girl was fascinated, though not overpowered, by the luxury of her surroundings and the affluent lifestyle of the family. She was also exposed to visitors, the likes of whom she would have never have met in her own home – the courtly German-Australian Visiting Agent, Franz Goldman, and the highly-reputed but utterly unconventional artist, Gerard van Kuyk.

The days at Lucas Falls seemed idyllic and none of the children foresaw that the carefree times would come to an abrupt end. But they did – when the quiet Helen who had gradually been made to feel redundant in her husband’s palatial home, vanished from the scene in the company of the elderly Franz Goldman who had been a friend to the whole family, with no word of farewell even to her children.

Rowland bore the shock and the humiliation with commendable restraint. The children tried to make sense of their mother’s outrageous and to them wholly incomprehensible action and came to terms with it, each in her/his own way, to a greater or lesser degree.

In course of time, Rowland Wijesinha married his cousin Moira whose hopes of being his first wife had been dashed when he married Helen, and who suited the up-and-coming politican in a way that Helen could never have done.

In fact, Rowland seemed to have come to believe that his choice of that first wife had been a youthful indiscretion.

He evolved into a typical politician, and later on in the story he changes his political loyalty, his religion and his Western attire. He dons the national costume, but fastidiously dressed in white satin to distinguish himself from the hoi polloi who, in his private opinion, made up the bulk of his colleagues in Parliament. “Lucas Falls” was re-named the Wijesinha Maha Walauwa. Moira threw herself wholeheartedly into her role of a M.P’s wife, starred in the fashion pages of newspapers, and became a patron of art and culture, in addition to performing ostentatious good works in her husband’s electorate and making her voice heard on innumerable committees.

The camaraderie of holidays spent together ceased. Latha was loath to visit the house she remembered as Helen’s domain, but the two girls corresponded regularly for some time. Latha, from early childhood, had been an avid reader, like Tsunami. A bright student, she had never considered the possibility of higher studies and was thinking more along the lines of a career in domestic science. But the unexpected happened and her discerning English teacher at Amarapali Maha Vidyalaya, Paula Phillips, was the agent of change who was responsible for Latha’s abandoning culinary skills and ending up as an English Hons. student at Peradeniya University. By the strangest coincidence, Tsunami, who had started at Oxford, opts for Peradeniya instead, to read for History Hons. and the joyfully reunited cousins have rooms on the same floor in Sanghamitta Hall.

The sweet but not so simple Latha has developed into an attractive young woman with a quiet depth of character that stays outwardly calm and collected through the ups and downs of university life. Tsunami, an equally promising student, has a more tempestuous passage, with her academic hopes being almost blighted by her outraged father who takes her forcibly home when an anonymous letter-writer informs him that Tsunami is in love with a Tamil lecturer. Eventually, the days at Peradeniya come to an end.

Latha fulfils Paula Phillips’s expectations and earns a first class in English, while Tsunami emerges with a second upper in History. Their paths cross and re-cross.

Latha seems immune to Cupid’s darts while Tsunami estranges her father and her elder brother and sister completely by deciding to marry an Indian boat-builder.

There is one poignant meeting between Tsunami and her mother, arranged by her brother, Chris, who had been happy to renew his relationship with his mother when he ran her to earth in Australia.

Chris, not over-confidently, has set his heart on Latha – but the reader had better be left to find out the ending to that story.
All this is, necessarily, a very sketchy summary of a long and involved family saga. It is a rich tapestry of memorable characters and many startling – even shocking –incidents.

There is a skilful blend of fact and fiction, with the author’s creativity sometimes embroidering real happenings in an imaginative yet wholly plausible way.

As, for instance, the almost comic touch she subtly gives, in the opening chapter, to the the suicide of the Governor’s wife – a tragic event that really happened here within living memory.

Yasmine’s genius reveals itself in her rendering of the Governor’s unemotional and affronted attitude and in the thoughts she puts into the head of the young British ADC who stands by, expecting an anguished cry from H.E. and hearing quite the reverse.

The way she writes it, the horror is mitigated by the typically British view of “natives” that makes the reader smile.

Remembering her book, “Relative Merits” (about the Bandaranaike clan to which she belongs), one cannot doubt that Yasmine has known at first-hand the authentic touches that give credibility to life as lived by the Rowland Wijesinha family.

There are very perceptible autobiographical traces in the creation of the heroine, Latha, and even in the other central character, Tsunami.

I’m not sure how Yasmine decided when to use people’s real names – e.g. Mrs. Clara Motwani, Sir Ivor Jennings, Prof. E.O.E. Pereira , Kenneth Fernando (later Bishop of Colombo), Lady de Soysa, Lady Obeyesekere, Mr. Ephraums, the respected blind piano tuner - and when to give pseudonyms that hardly serve to shield the identity of the real people depicted – George Keyt, Prof. Lyn Ludowyke, Doric de Souza, Prof. Passe, the Warden of Sir James Peries Hall, who masquerades under the guise of `Lobelia Raptor’, Pauline & Dick Hensman, are among those who can be recognized at a glance despite the fictitious names they bear.

I don’t know whether the fact that real people have been grist to her mill in writing this book serves to make it all the more convincing to the reader that here is a true story about flesh-and-blood people, most of them Sri Lankan, characters who come alive and remain in the reader’s mind, so that in discussing the book with a friend, I found we were talking as of real people!

When a story has that effect on readers, it’s a tribute to the author’s mastery as a story-teller.

I did not respond in quite this way to Yasmine’s two earlier novels, “A Change of Skies” and “The Pleasures of Conquest”, much as I admired them, but this book, “The Sweet & Simple Kind”, is something else.

I also salute the author for the courage she shows in revealing things as they are – or were.

Peradeniya, for instance. While she conveys the special ambience it held, especially for English students of the 1950s, we have a glimpse of its less pleasing aspects.

I reproduce a snippet of conversation between Latha and her friend Swarna who is a sports enthusiast:

Latha: `What could they possibly have against you?’

Swarna: `I play tennis – a Western sport – and they don’t. I read the English newspapers and they don’t. I go hiking with the Geography Hons. lads and they think that’s immoral. I love dancing and they disapprove of that, too: they think ballroom dancing’s a sign of Western decadence. They probably can’t stand you, Latha, with your English Literature fixation, and I’ll bet they loathe Tsunami too.

It’s the O-Fac mentality. We are Kultur, you see.’
`O-Fac? Kultur? What are you talking about?”
“O_Fac’s campus-speak for Oriental Faculty. We’re too Western-educated………..”
“But Latha could not accept it. Where was the unity and wholeness she had expected to find in University life? The world seemed suddenly to have grown narrower and colder

( I feel I must point out here that today, nearly 50 years after the time of which Yasmine writes, Peradeniya University is still divided into two not dissimilar camps – “Raggers” and “Anti-Raggers”. Those forming the small minority who study in the English medium are automatically dubbed “Anti-Raggers” from day one and they are not permitted to participate in Student Union functions or activities).

Lobelia Raptor almost seems like a caricature, but a contemporary of Yasmine’s assured me she was not a figment of Yasmine’s imagination. So we have the story of how Lobelia Raptor dealt with a student who became pregnant and this again is a true incident.

We are shown how Latha and Tsunami desperately wire Latha’s father to come posthaste to Peradeniya. Herbert comes at once and when apprised of the dire situation, he goes to the Vice-Chancellor who happens to be Prof. E.O.E. Pereira, with whom he had played cricket back in school. In sharp contrast to the bulldozing Lobelia Raptor, Prof. Pereira is shown as humane and kind and he takes charge of the unhappy student with exquisite courtesy and compassion. “Herbert paused to reflect for a moment on the frequency with which bullies like Lobelia Raptor seemed to pop up in public life these days, and the rarity in it of Eustace Pereiras.”

This fact is reinforced later on in the book when events pertaining to “Emergency ‘58” are described in all their stark reality, with the bullies riding supreme for a time. The two young men, Chris Wijesinha who loves Latha, and Sujit Roy who loves Tsunami, go at Latha’s bidding to take her much-loved mentors, Paula & Rajan Phillips, to safety.

They have a hard time persuading the couple to leave their modest home which, as idealistic newly-weds, they had established in a slummy lane in Dehiwela, amidst a small community of poor working men and women to whom they had proved good neighbours and friends, without any hint of patronage. It was a bitter pill to these two who thought they were helping to build a brave, new, classless world, to discover that the wiser course was to take refuge elsewhere because, in times of crisis, human nature with its inborn prejudices, was unpredictable.

There are so many unexpected incidents and memorable characters I am tempted to dwell on but dare not, for lack of space.

The book enthralled me. I doubt that any reader will be able to resist the temptation, once started, to keep from turning page after page until she is surprised and sorry to find she has reached the end. It isn’t a book to be rushed through, but to be savoured at leisure if one is to absorb all it has to offer.

The publishers are to be congratulated on an excellently produced volume and its aesthetically appealing cover design. At the launch, publisher Sam Perera spoke of this novel being Yasmine’s `magnum opus’. Perhaps, but I certainly hope that she will give us more of the same.