‘You just have to tell your story’
He’s a breath of fresh air to the local literary scene, with his bizarre stories like the Oedipal tale where the bridegroom’s mother is taken on tow on honeymoon and an aphrodisiac unwittingly given her causes havoc or the saga of a Leyland bus, which meets with an accident and people bleed purple and green …
Savin Edirisinghe whom we meet at the busy Java Lounge in Jawatte, is an unassuming young man. Little has changed since just two days back when he was in all anonymity, a copywriter ticking away in an ad office, nursed by coffee and football bulletins, with the thought of his impending dissertation eating away at a corner of his mind.
Savin Edirisinghe. Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
As the 25-year-old has become this year’s literary lion, there’s much to toast. The smiling, tousle-headed youth with owlish glasses has lots of charm, and he is one of the youngest to win the Gratiaen Prize, established in 1992 by Michael Ondaatje and awarded to the best work of creative writing in English by a Sri Lankan.
Savin’s collection of short stories, titled Kata Katha: Gossip, Rumours and Idle Talk, chair of the jury Gregory Pardlo enthused, was the ‘North Star’ they had been looking for all along. He called the short stories “specifically located, approachably vernacular, contentious, and, despite its disclaimers, wholly magical”.
Even amid the warm applause and jubilation, the chicken satay and prawn canapés at that Gratiaen ceremony at Cinnamon Life- his night- Savin remembered his late father Sunil Edirisinghe (‘the one who can’t sing’ as Savin perennially introduces him) who had passed away six months ago. He was Savin’s mentor, moral compass, “essence” and literary hero”.
For Savin was born in rural Imaduwa in Galle, in a lush village where the people are “happy to just live”. His parents spoke and knew no English but they wanted their son to learn the all-important lingua franca.
He was entered into Sussex College Galle- ‘a different universe’- where at first he had a major crisis, for he was dyslexic and the words just danced – “exactly like in Taare Zameen Par”- the famous Hindi film about a dyslexic boy and Savin was relegated to what in Sussex parlance was ‘weak student classes’. Savin’s mother would cry as she could not help with his homework. However he was then entered into “Roopa Teacher’s” care where she promised she would help little Savin read and write, and “come to grips with what’s happening inside his head”.
So it was The Radiant Way for Savin, learnt all phonetically. He learned the sounds and how to untangle ‘b’ from ‘d’, and slowly got better at that hostile language which he came to love. He says he is thankful to all his English teachers, from Miss Roopa to Miss Samanthi at Sussex College and Indunil Warnakulasooriya and his lecturers at CINEC Maritime Campus Lasantha Basnayake and Saranananda Gamage.
Savin’s father Sunil – journalist, writer, dabbler in politics, dramatist, poet, he says, was remarkable for wanting to make Savin a writer and not a doctor or lawyer. So before Savin was nourished with George Orwell and Aldous Huxley he was familiar with Sinhala writers like Mahagama Sekara. Mahagama Sekara’s poetry collection Prabuddha was read to him when he was barely seven.
Also a master of the bon mot, Sunil could come up with quick Sinhala couplets. One Vesak day little Savin would make a small thorana and Sunil would come and lean a broom against it. In response to Savin’s protests Sunil came out with the following kavi: Budu himiyani oba langa den etha kossa; athugaa damanu mena apage keles kuna (Lord Buddha, you have the broom now; so sweep away all our sins).
As for being a melange of Sinhala and English literatures and cultures, Savin says it is not “50-50 or 60-40” but “varies according to different situations and settings”.
Orwell who is an obvious literary hero after his father Savin says “makes you see things with your soul”. Oscar Wilde is another favourite whom Savin says makes every word sing like poetry, just like “Amaradeva sang every word in his songs”. Sinhala and Tamil literature, are he thinks much underrated and should be taken to the world.
After Sussex College, Savin did his ‘A’ Levels at Mahinda College, Galle and is currently researching for his BA.
The stories in Kata Katha are stories of “family, friends, colleagues, people I see on daily commutes”… These are extraordinary stories of very ordinary people - stories their own owners did not want to tell; eavesdropped and borrowed ones (so in a way it’s “illegal” of him, laughs Savin). He sees the stories as welling from a “community spring”.
At a relatively young age he realized that literature was not just stories but something more. But there was the perennial existential question all writers ask- “language was invented 30-40 thousand years ago - so how do I say things that haven’t been said yet?” The answer he came up with was that being ordinary is really the most extraordinary thing – you just have to tell your story.
Ironically however only one story in the collection is “his own”. Called My Story it is “verbal vomit- and stream of consciousness” and he has also slipped in a love letter written to his girlfriend for their fourth anniversary which however “reflects her character rather than mine”.
Michael Ondaatje’s memoirs of childhood in Ceylon, Running in the Family, inspired Kata Katha a lot and Savin thinks Ondaatje has a very Sri Lankan cadence to his writing.
He is thankful to the Gratiaen for all the recognition which comes at a very young age. A bumper treat for someone who submitted thinking “at least three people”- i.e. the three judges- would read his stories.
Asked about the future, Savin says he’s a bad planner but he wants to go on being “refreshing” – the word everyone from judges to former Gratiaen winners Ashok Ferrey, Shehan Karunathilaka and Madhubashini Ratnayake and the press – has been plying him with. He frankly admits with laughter to loving that word. “So, yeah, I’m hoping for a journey which will be ‘refreshing’, and also I suppose, a journey which will take me to a ‘refreshing’ end…”
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