Sri Lankan Social Satire

The title comes from a dish that the protagonist, Malik, is fond of ordering from a hole in the wall Chinese takeaway run by Mr Yun, which is the only alternative to Mrs Ha’s more upmarket Chinese restaurant,

where you could actually sit and eat, and enjoy the invigorating ambience of her plastic tablecloths, the sauce bottles clustered in the middle, the fiercely strong white glare of her neon strip lights. Mrs Ha looked down on Mr Yung, considering herself of better stock, so naturally she ran the posher establishment” (p51)

This passage is classic Ashok Ferrey of course, with its dig at class consciousness and snobbishness, which acknowledging it centrality in all aspects of Sri Lankan life.

So the first thing to do in a review of a Sri Lankan novel, is to do as all Sri Lankans do when meeting a fellow Sri Lankan for the first time, that is, to socially place the protagonist. Malik self identifies as a

perfectly innocuous Colpetty person, eking out an existence in a quiet cul-de-sac between the canal under Palm Grove and the mighty swollen river that is Duplication Road” (p3)

He has come to live in the village of Kalabola,

nestled in the armpit of that vast natural lake, the largest in Sri Lanka, which spreads its tentacles like an octopus between the Colombo and Kalutara districts. Do octopuses have armpits? Probably not. If they did you would find Kalabola lodging in there, in the warm, fuzzy humidity of that lakeside location” (p3)

This is also classic Ferrey: the typically Lankan interest in minute detail of the country’s geography, but spiked with some deliberate vulgarity to offset the mystification on the usually much vaunted beauty of Sri Lanka, to make clear the novel is not of the tourist-board ilk. Malik is a personal trainer, who had the misfortune to attend a fashion show where he met Fiona, a model, and was then married to her rapidly; after 2 years,

one day it dawned on her that I was actually the hopeless case she had always said I was, desperately beyond reform” (p21)

so the classic anti-hero, hapless and much put upon. This self-deprecation also establishes him as our reliable narrator, because of course, this willingness to denigrate oneself, and display of painful honesty/self-awareness must surely be a guarantee of reliability. In the divorce, Malik had to sell a small piece of Colpetty land which was the only thing left to him by his father, and give Fiona three quarters of the proceeds. Which is why he is now in Kalabola, with his other half, Fritzi the dog, and offering his services to whichever villagers need a personal trainer. Clearly of course, he is now established for readers as the decent man who was taken advantage of, so the readers are assured of his credibility, at least, on Sri Lankan terms.

Malik’s first client is Arthur de Fonseka, an old man but who is retaining Mailk’s services for his young protégé, 23 year old Chanchala Debare. Malik sees Arthur as something of an old lecher, with his raincoats and tights. Arthur is the last of a line of landowners, the aristocrat in the district:

Arthur was pretty much the only man in the village who had been brought up speaking English. (In that rentier class they spoke English to each other in their homes; Sinhala and Tamil only to the servants.) Arthur was one hundred percent Sri Lankan. But with his pallid skin, he was referred to by most villagers as ‘the suddha,’ the white man. Any and every eccentricity in a suddha was tolerated, even admired. There were things suddhas did that were inexplicable to is locals: they were part of the arcane set of rules these strange creatures lived by, along with socks and shoes and lavatory paper” (p35).

The novel amusingly pokes fun at the colonials as well as the Sri Lankan white-washed mindset, proud legacy of 500 years of Western European colonisation. (Oh dear, I am beginning to sound a bit like Ferrey himself; his brand of humour is infectious!)

“The rest of us lived slightly in fear and rather in awe of this outlandish behaviour. But we also speculated and marvelled at how it might hold the key to our success. We knew only too well how this whitewashing might lead to a glittering life for our children, enabling them to realize their wildest dreams – dreams we ourselves had not been able to achieved. So, parents queued to have their children whitewashed: and ballet was a quintessential part of this whitening process” (p35)

While this is an amusing and accurate description of Sri Lankan attitudes to the British or Europeans in the past, and certainly all the way in the 20th century, one wonders about the extent to which this still holds in the 21st century, and whether this mixture of fascination and awe has worn a little thin by now. Might the white-mystique have worn off a little? South Asia has always had a class system drawn on linguistic lines with English at the top of the tree since the days of Empire, but to what extent has this region – and Sri Lanka in particular – managed to shrug off this double edged legacy?

There are also other troubling legacies Ferrey flags up, for example,

It was embedded in our Sri Lanka lore – though of course never referred to in public – that the white man had a predilection for young Sri Lankan men and boys. The nineteenth century writings of missionaries and colonials are full of oblique references to the androgynous quality of our men – the long hair, the smooths skin, the delicate features – and how difficult it was to distinguish men and from women on this strange island” (p35-36)

This, taken in conjunction with the sex and even child-sex tourism that still happens today in Sri Lanka, momentarily flags a darker underbelly which is largely unspoken about.

Arthur has a shrewish, dominating housekeeper called Kamala, of a much reduced but once prestigious family, who was once a potential bride in a bride-viewing, only to be summarily rejected by Arthur who declared himself not ready to marry. Ten years later, Kamala’s fortunes had so come down in the world that she applies for a job in Arthur’s house as housekeeper and cook and general all round drudge, and incredibly, Arthur and his mother do not recognise her or even know who she is. Kamala who had always been in love with Arthur, now runs his house and his life, especially after Arthur’s mother dies. She even gives out that she is Arthur’s wife, which the village semi-believes and semi-disbelieves, as is characteristic of the fluid Sri Lankan way with reality. Kamala is of course madly jealous of Arthur’s beautiful, nubile, young protégé, Chanchala. All, in fact, as expected and as stereotypically typecast in this, quite charming, comedic farce.

So the story goes on about how Chanchala’s opportunistic mother, Selina Debare, wants to secure her daughter’s marriage to Arthur, whom she believes to be immensely wealthy. When Malik voices his reservations to Arthur and Chanchala, Arthur points out that traditionally women have married young, and to much older men, and that he does not care what villagers say. Malik sprang up in anger,

Couldn’t she see she was being groomed? The worst thing was that the word ‘grooming,’ that concept, did not exist in our Sri Lankan minds. Nobody in Kalabola would have understood its meaning, let alone given it any credence. In Colpetty, perhaps. In Kalabola, with its old ways, it was probably considered completely normal, completely justified for an old man to woo a young woman. The laws in the world outside might have changed; we Sri Kalabolayas were still living in a Jane Austen novel” (p54-55)

It is interesting that in this acerbic frustration voiced by Malik, the reader is made to feel superior by sharing the much more cosmopolitan values of the character from Colpetty; Ferrey sometimes does stoop to less sophisticated humour when he sets up these oversimplified binaries – such as traditional vs modernity – only for the fun of knocking them down. That said, it must be appreciated that Ferrey is not one of those who cling with unthinking pride to all things being part of Sri Lankan’s great and glorious 2500 year history: he mentions, for e.g.

that great traditional invention of kottu, which no Sri Lankan had even heard of forty years ago” (p78)

which has practically become the national dish now, but which almost no one will bother to tell you is a recent invention.

Ferrey most enjoys poking fun at the great and good, and deflating the smug and the hypocritical. There is hilarity at the flaunting of status, for example, of how Biju the minister, despite his vast premises, has his cars brought onto the street daily for hosing down,

That was how it worked. Of what use were you as an MP if you couldn’t block the street you lived on for at least an hour each day? It was the automobile equivalent of flexing your muscles in the gym mirror. People expected it. They loved you or it. They had absolutely no respect for you unless you were something of a tyrant: democracy (it was well known) was for wimps” (p62)

Ferrey’s sly humour is in evidence throughout. For example, when he describes this MP’s house,

There was gold everywhere. The sitting room was triple height and hung about with black-and-gold brocade. The floor was of onyx. An interior desecrator had been let loose with a blank cheque book” (p69)

Occasionally it gets a little over the top, like when Kamala – daughter of a baker – calls her employer a ‘terpsichorean termite’ – how common an insult is this? (In addition to its not making much sense, and therefore, probably included for its alliteration rather than meaning.) However, she has a range of inventive invectives – oh dear, Ferrey’s style really is catching – which are mostly fun.

The side story about Kalabola Water, which in the pandemic is regarded as a miracle cure exposes the Sri Lankan combination of superstition and rationality, which manages to co-exist because the comfortable reconciliation of opposites is one the characteristics of a Sri Lankan mentality, supple in its malleability and agreeable in its fluidity. Kalabola Water, which comes from Achushla’s standpipe,

a sort of water that had the unmistakable smell of drains to it, or bad eggs. (Not too different from the wildly popular egg kottu at the Klassy Kafe)” (p114).  

This water has a

“blue-ribbon pedigree: a real live prophetess [Achushla used to sell shoes] at the well blessing the product; and a minister, no less, to see off any competition. It is well known in our world that ministers have extra-terrestrial powers. The endorsement of any product is nothing less than a Royal Warrant. […] Kalabola Water had it all: the prophetess, the politician, the mango tree” (p114).

While Kamala, jealous as she is, has her own side story with Biju, the minister who supposedly always desired Kamala, but in their youth, had not been good enough for her, socially speaking, although now he has risen to be an MP. Biju wants to gyp Arthur of his lands and property, and the whole village is tied in knots as everyone tries to get an advantage for themselves, while climbing social ladders and looking over their shoulders meanwhile to see whom they can decry as below them. It is the usual menagerie and over the top, light-hearted fun, and although the first half was much stronger than the second half, this was one of the most enjoyable of the Ferrey novels.

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