Using humour to tackle heavy issues
View(s):The product of many places, Hong Kong, Delhi and Colombo, Chhimi Tenduf-La talks to
Adilah Ismail about his debut novel, The Amazing Racist
Thilak Rupasinghe is the prototypical Sri Lankan father – you can’t live with him and you can’t live without him. We first encounter Thilak issuing a laundry list of instructions to his son. “Don’t enter a girl’s room. Don’t speak to strangers. Don’t drag your feet when you walk. Don’t cross the railway line. Don’t swim in the ocean. Or the pool. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t do drugs. […] Don’t wear short shorts. Don’t buy those silly bangles you did last time you went to Unawatuna. Don’t jump out of a boat. Don’t jump into a boat. Don’t go in anyone else’s car if they have been drinking. Don’t even look at a motorcycle.” The recipient of this sage advice mind you, is a middle-aged man.
Chhimi Tenduf-La: From composing comical schoolboy poems to penning books
The Amazing Racist is Chhimi Tenduf-La’s debut novel. Although the tale is narrated by Eddie Trusted, an English schoolteacher who moves to Colombo, it is Thilak whose persona dominates a chunk of the novel and grows on the reader. Meanwhile, with his book fresh off the press and another one about to go under an editor’s expert knife, the man who wrote Thilak into existence is still settling into his newfound skin as an author and worries out aloud that he may be annoying his friends on Facebook with book updates.
From composing comical schoolboy poems to read on the bus; dispatching photocopied letters to all and sundry (“we didn’t have email in those days”) and surreptitiously writing in-between balancing budgets at work in London – writing, Chhimi Tenduf-La explains, has always been entwined with his life. Half-English and half-Tibetan, growing up between London, Hong Kong, Delhi and Colombo, Chhimi is a product of many places. His family moved to Sri Lanka because his father wanted to retire in a Buddhist country and his mother, the well-known educationist Elizabeth Moir, was setting up some of Colombo’s key international schools.
The Amazing Racist follows the story of Eddie who falls in love with Sri Lanka and a Sri Lankan girl but then has to woo a formidable father-in-law who isn’t thrilled about the imported addition to the family. Told from the perspective of a bemused outsider newly submerged in Sri Lanka’s idiosyncratic brand of hedonism, the book uses humour as a scaffolding to deal with heavy issues. “I’ve always liked dark comedy and messages coming through with a bit of humour,” explains Chhimi. Interspersed with pithy commentary about life and people in Colombo, there’s a vein of seriousness which runs through, with the war and its ripple effects obliquely at the centre of the book.
Chhimi admits that while he had initially intended to write a book without the war, its shadow and influences on people and places was impossible to sidestep. The title, while being a pun on the reality show ‘The Amazing Race’ and is in reference to the main character, is also a gentle nod to the latent (and often unknowing) racism inherent in most Sri Lankans.
We’re meeting in a location frequented by the narrator of the novel and it’s irresistibly tempting to cherry pick other parallels between the author’s own life and events in the novel. Chhimi also doesn’t make the blurring between fact and faction any easier by irreverently transposing flesh and blood people to paper and ink. A well-known event planner, lawyer and the daughter of a leading lifestyle store owner make cameo appearances in the novel while shades of Thilak’s character were partly influenced by real-life scenarios.
Chuckling, he insists that while the story is most definitely not autobiographical he tends to write about things he is familiar with. “One of the dangers of writing comedy is that you can get carried away and that’s why I stuck to characters I knew,” says Chhimi who anchors elements of his novel to reality. The descriptions of a character’s battle with cancer, for instance, were rooted in Chhimi’s own experiences of watching his father combat the disease. Thilak, he assures us, couldn’t be further away from his own father-in-law who is very quiet and very nice.
Graduating from the casual writing of his early years, he slowly began flexing his fiction muscles about five years ago and it’s been a process of learning and unlearning ever since. For Chhimi, writing is a quick process (“I write fast without thinking too much about it”) while it is the re-reading, editing and rewriting which can then make or break the piece. Seeking the services of a literary consultant as well as peer review sites also provided outside perspectives which helped in sharpening the book and cushioning the initial trepidation of putting one’s work out into the public domain. Sites such as http://www.youwriteon.com/ for instance, allow writers to upload sections of their work for fellow writers to review. Explains Chhimi, “There’s a chart at the end of the month and if you get in the top five, a publisher has a look at it just to give you some suggestions. So I did that once and got in the top five and was given feedback.” He adds that one of the harder parts of writing a book was probably the daunting task of putting one’s work out into the world.
The Amazing Racist is available at Vijitha Yapa Bookshop, Trunk – Cinnamon Grand, Odel, Barefoot and takas.lk. Chhimi Tenduf-La will be available for book signings at Barefoot, Colombo on Saturday, February 7 from 11 a.m – 5 p.m.