A delectable dish of a tragicomedy
View(s):That’s not a cuttlefish on the cover, that’s an octopus, said the resident marine biologist when I came home clutching Ashok Ferrey’s latest novel a few weeks ago. Preferring far more appropriate platitudes about judging books by their covers to pedantic scientific objectivity, I was soon immersed in this latest offering by Sri Lanka’s bashful bad boy of comic ironic fiction.
Ashok is an entertaining writer more than anything, and this book is no exception. Set in the fictional but still, oh-so-familiar village-like suburban town of Kalabola “in the armpit of a lagoon” south of Colombo, the novel takes us through the adventures of an eccentric cast of characters: a smelly southern aristocrat in a crumbling mudliyar’s walauwa with fabulous views of the lake, his much more than cook with her impressive Radala roots, a self-possessed suburban beauty, her stereotypically greedy but oddly likeable mother, and of course there is a local politician with the kind of business acumen that propels one into parliament. And the story is related by a personal trainer with a “young-old face”, wink-wink, and a heady mix of voyeuristic compassion and envy, forever negotiating his insider-outsider status in Kalabola, possibly the most likeable of them all.
The book is pretty much like its eponymous dish, especially when it’s crisp and fresh and spicy, made with the day’s catch in a small petti-kade by a fisheries harbour. And like the dish, you can chew it slowly while it’s hot hot, or gobble it up with your lion lager or arrack. The irony in Ashok’s comedic writing is the hit of nai miris the sweaty cook has snuck in, the social commentary lurking underneath the hilarity. This is the first time I’m reading a fictionalised account of COVID by a local writer. How the world of Kalabola gets consumed by the pandemic but also manages to resist it brought back some of the buried memories of the desperation, the pathos, the losses, and the brutality of the initial, state-enforced isolations. And yes, its tragicomic elements like the ‘indigenous interventions’ and how we struggled to cope with the mind-numbing boredom of lockdown life.
All this is pretty much forgotten in public discourse now, we are past post-pandemic. Ashok has taken on this issue I wouldn’t have thought was possible with his kind of comic writing. But he’s woven it in with such a light but serious touch, and this alone makes the book outstanding for me.
Of course there are little glitches that caused mild irritation. Malik’s character is impressively nuanced, and his narrative is convincing for the most part, except when a rather annoying outsider perspective creeps in, a voice that we sometimes hear in an annoying expat relative who visits us, then goes back to the UK or Canada and spouts generalisations like “oh you Sri Lankans you are so…. like this and that” without just saying here, YOU are like this or that. This low-key sanctimoniousness didn’t ring true coming out of the pragmatic and (certainly in the surprise ending) rather enigmatic Malik’s mouth. It might appeal to some outdated outsider mindset, but for me, it detracts from the novel’s uniqueness of character and setting, and its social commentary.
But that’s a minor niggle. Overall, HBCF is classic Ferrey and a brilliant read. I like it even more than his Gratiaen Award winning The Unmarriageable Man. Ashok’s writing is tighter and more sophisticated here, his wonderful editors at Penguin probably had a hand in that. The non-Colombo setting is exploited so deftly – Kalabola is close enough to the metropolis to be urbanized with borrowed Colombo aspirations, but far enough for the timeless hierarchies of village life to still dictate pretty much everything Kalabolayas do.
The armpit metaphor is classic. Kalabola existing in mixed states of sweat and stink, perfume and fragrance is an allegory of our lives in the humid Western province, inhabiting those transitory moments of the slippery, smelly, diabolically inky uncooked cuttlefish before it becomes delicious, spicy, hot and buttered.
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