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TIMES POSTCARD
Gentleman’s adventures
On Horseshoe Street, by Tissa Devendra. Published by Vijitha Yapa Publications.Reviewed by Rajpal Abeynayake
Tissa Devendra lived the better part of his times in a spacious era, and he lived a charmed life. I’m glad I am getting to review his book in this column for more reasons than one.

He gave me a copy of his earlier work to review -- and I never got around to doing it. This obviously would not have endeared me to Tissa but what he doesn’t know is that I wasn’t callous about it.

The reason I never finished it was simple. I intended to do a good review of it.
But, time must be seized by the forelock, and my well intentioned procrastination resulted in the book disappearing into a black hole among my collection.

When Tissa reminded me later, I said, truthfully, that I lost the book. He smiled and sent me another one. But by that time, I wanted to do an even better review, and put the review project on hold again. Result: that never got done either, the upshot of which is that Tissa Devendra never asked me to review any of his books again.

Well, I should at least be glad that he is speaking to me. But he is that kind of man: genial, and forgiving of human foibles. His writing is testimony to that. Incidentally, this latest book was sent for review by his publisher.
Tissa Devendra was brought up in Kandy and he went the straight and narrow and always did the proper thing. He schooled at Dharmaraja College -- essentially that is -- walked a girl back from school keeping the obligatory ten paces behind her, and then graduated to University – ate mas paang at Lion house - - and become a Government Agent.

It’s a kind of thing that any father would have wanted a son to do in those days, and whatever Devendra can be accused of, he can hardly be accused of being rebellious. But therein lies the catch.

This man manages to pack into his years of public service so much adventure that it would leave a Che Guvera wondering why he took a gun --- and perished so early in the bargain.

Tissa’s gift is that he seemed to be of the bent that took a narcotic-high from the seemingly mundane. This was from his early ears. His descriptions of Horseshoe Street in Kandy (Cross Street actually but better known as Ladang Veediya for reasons that can be guessed…) are nothing short of magical. This book should be a collector’s item even if it may never fall into short supply.
This was the time that Kandy schoolgirls -- the shy ones that Tissa walked ten paces apart from -- feelingly warbled “There will always be an England’’ to bolster the morale of British troops here, and Tommies awkwardly kept their dates with painted professionals at a place that’s called -- with misplaced fidelity to the colonizer -- Brownrigg Street.Tissa also talks of his female companions without being cloying, and this is in contrast to say U. Karunatilleke who speaks of his wife in uxorious terms in his own book Colombo Diary.

Incidentally, Devendra also writes of Palugama and Vanniyakumnbura off the town of Badulla, and this part of his book is also in diary - - which makes it eerily reminiscent of Karunatilleke’s jottings even though only for a moment.
Devendra coaxes the salt out of the earth with his prose centered around remote outposts such as Gomarankadawela, by recreating them with nostalgia for the physical terrain as well as for the life of the young swain just starting out: intellectually adequate, but inadequately street-smart.

That’s why Devendra was always flummoxed by characters such as Mrs. Ratnayake who we learn is Pablo Neruda’s daughter from his famous liaison with a Tamil ‘coolie’ woman. Neruda feverishly recounted this in one of his latter jottings talking of the dusky statue with whom he shared “the lightning spasms of the flesh.”

The book is full of might have beens such as the ‘ink and paper’ romance in Colombo campus, but after a string of might have beens, Devendra and his reader realize that what might have been would not have been so poignant or bittersweet -- if not for what in fact was.

It might have been that Devendra turned out to be a rebel a la Che Guvera, or, wait a minute, even a la Manusinghe, the JVPer in one of the later chapters who disappears only to reappear abruptly 25 years later -- by chance – in Washington. But eventually it was what he was – a dedicated government Agent -- that made Devendra’s life one hell of a ride.

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