Sonali Deraniyagala: Taken by the Wave

Floating on her back, for a moment all Sonali Deraniyagala could see was a perfectly blue sky. Overhead, a flock of storks flew in formation. Later she would write, ‘Painted storks, I thought. A flight of painted storks across a Yala sky, I’d seen this thousands of times.’ A beat and then Sonali was swept back into the nightmare, caught in the maw of a charging tsunami that devoured everything in its path. Before the day was done it had taken from her all those she loved most in the world: her two young sons, her husband, her parents. She was found caked in blood and black mud. Her rescuers later reported that she could not stand – instead she was spinning and spinning as if still in the grip of churning water. It would be years before she really found her feet again.

When Sonali began writing ‘Wave’ the first thing she wrote about was being carried by the wave itself – “how utterly bewildering an experience it was, as well as being terrifying and mostly being extremely painful physically. That’s when I remembered things like watching a flock of painted storks fly above me. The strangest things,” she muses, “and when you just write it down they seem even stranger.” Sonali is speaking to me on Skype from New York City where she works at Columbia University. The whole of the book was written there, Sonali curled up in a corner of a bed in an apartment she found on Craigslist five years ago, typing for hours. Writing had emerged as a way for her to make sense of what had happened. “Maybe that’s what allowed me to be so honest…Here was the unfathomable and I was trying to kind of make it comprehensible to myself.”

Sonali: Finding comfort in the written word. Author pic by Ann Billingsley.

The memoir has found immediate acclaim, has been reviewed widely and bears on its cover praise from Joan Didion and Michael Ondaatje, both people Sonali considers her literary heroes. Ondaatje’s encouragement in particular was key in her decision to publish such a personal account. “It was gradual, coming around to the notion that I should publish. I was pretty self-conscious of course but then it happened so fast, the publication, that I didn’t have time to dither…” In fact the book was barely edited, and made ready for bookstores in just over a year’s time.

The place they loved: Steve, Vikram and Malli at Yala in August 2004, a few months before the tsunami

It was released on the 5th of March – a month of birthdays. Her elder son, Vikram would have turned 16 on the 3rd and Sonali herself marked her 50th year. Birthdays and anniversaries are difficult for her, she usually chooses to travel with a friend, picking places that are wild and open. In facing an Artic landscape for instance, Sonali had discovered that there was room for her grief there. That nothing got in the way of remembering. “In a city, a part of you is always ducking and diving from reminders, whereas I think the vastness allowed me to hold it so that the grief could breathe and somehow it worked. I realised quite early on, that I always felt relief there…relief not in forgetting but relief in remembering.”

This time, instead of escaping, she saw ‘Wave’ launched with little hoopla. She had already decided against any kind of a formal event and her publishers supported her decision to largely eschew interviews, T.V appearances, readings and signings. Still, she’s unlikely to ever regain the anonymity that allowed her to work and live beside people who didn’t know her story. Someone who once found herself cringing ‘to be bereft in a way that cannot be imagined,’ now has strangers approaching her in public. “It’s a relief that people know and I don’t have this false identity,” she says. “On the other hand I’m not at ease with the details that people do know. I don’t know how I feel about it. I have to work that one out.”

Most people assume the experience of writing was intended to be cathartic, originating as it did in a suggestion made in a therapist’s office. Instead Sonali found it allowed her to simply be with her family. “By writing I was able to open up memory and to open up my heart really, to be back to who I was with them, and to keep them close.” Much of the time, it was her children she thought about. She writes: ‘Mum. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I was their mum. Even as I recalled fragments of their birth or recall how I reassured Malli as he peeked from behind a tree, the truth that I was their mother is veiled in confusion. Was it really me who could predict a looming earache from the colour of their snot, who surfed the internet looking for great white sharks and who cuddled them in blue towels when they stepped out of the tub?’ There seems barely room enough to add her grief for her husband and her parents, but add them she must. ‘How hideous,’ she writes, ‘that there should be a pecking order in my grief.’

Though it was what she now wanted above all things, memory hadn’t always been her ally. In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, Sonali shuddered away from it. The sight of a flower, a blade of grass, of bats taking to the air on a Colombo evening, were unbearable reminders of her family. Like thousands of other Sri Lankan families, she waited for news, unable to entirely deny the possibility that they were alive. It took them four months to identify her husband Steve and younger son Malli’s bodies. They had been buried in a mass grave.

She struggled with a sense of profound shame, of being cursed. She had no answer when one woman wondered what she had done in a previous life to deserve this. She planned her suicide and for a spell became hopelessly alcoholic. “If your whole life vanishes in an instant, at that point you can’t even really feel the grief, the main thing is just terror. If I was alone in a room for two seconds I felt like I was going to pass out. I needed something to numb the terror.” Really, Sonali will tell you, drinking herself into a stupor seemed a reasonable thing to do.

As friends and family became increasingly concerned, a part of her enjoyed letting go so utterly, becoming a crazy person like the one in the poem Vik wrote in class: ‘Craziness is like jellybeans jumping in your head. Craziness is bonkers and bonkers is the best.’ Determined to protect her from herself, her friends stood outside her bathroom door, sat by her bedside as she slept, counted her stash of pills and went walking with her in to Yala without guides. Her friend Lester trailed her as she went out late at night looking for a turtle laying eggs out on the beach. Having known him since they were 18 and being beyond any pretence of civility, she remembers screaming at him. “When he came back to England, a lot of my female friends went to see him and they were all crying and saying ‘How is she? How is she?’ and he goes, ‘Stroppy as ever.’ We do laugh about it now.”

That there is laughter and joy in this book comes as a surprise to those who choose not to read it for fear that even second hand, the sorrow will prove unbearable. But there is, and over the course of this interview Sonali laughs more than once, in a warm, deep burble that’s infectious. (“While I was writing it, I thought it was quite funny in lots of bits,” she says.) Her ability to reconcile her loss with a life that goes on is a balancing act, and therapy remains vital. What Sonali cannot do is turn her back on any of it. “We were gloriously happy as a family and that makes the loss even more devastating…It is intolerable, but to feel intolerable pain is worthy of what I lost. That’s the way I look at it. They deserve that, that I feel every bit of their loss,” she says, adding, “It’s actually very enriching in that it opens you to joy and it keeps you alight.”

She faces it head on with every trip to Sri Lanka, making it a point to visit both the site of the hotel and the Yala museum re-furbished to honour her boys. The latter is where her rescuers first took her and a place Vik and Malli often visited. “I think it’s a lovely museum,” she says. “It’s great when you see kids there, pressing their noses against the glass cabinets. It’s so sweet.” The building work overseen by friends and funded by schoolchildren in England has resulted in a memorial that celebrates some of the things Vik and Malli loved best in all the world.

‘Wave’ is a memorial too, in its own way. Only this one is constructed out of words and memories, constructed out of the way Vikram, whispering a reverent ‘malli’ gave a newborn Nikhil his nickname, out of the onion peel and the single eyelash Steve left in their house in Friern Barnet, out of the taste of her mother’s cooking and the smell of her father’s cigar. In reading it you grieve with her, you survive the unimaginable beside her and in the end you are comforted, elevated, made stronger by the knowledge that love endures. It’s what she knows and what she hopes you will see. “That’s what my big learning has been,” says Sonali. “Love doesn’t die. That’s what made me who I was then and that’s what makes me who I am now.”

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on 12 May, 2013. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Sonali Deraniyagala.

Lal Medawattegedara: Playing Pillow Politics at MGK

When Lal Medawattegedara asks me for a pen and paper, it isn’t to write. Instead, the winner of the Gratiaen Prize for 2012 intends to try his hand at drawing. Outlined on my pad is the MGK of his title, a mountain known as the Maha Geeni Kanda for how its silhouette resembles the shape of a woman’s body. In his roughly sketched introduction to the geography of his fictional universe Lal points out the location of the shrine that Sujatha meniyo had built; the dense cluster of buildings where World Bank, the money lender was holed up, the house where golf course employee and part time voyeur Victoria malli kept an eye on things and the plot where humble parking lot attendant Toyota nanda plied her trade. Then he tells me that, as of the first page of his book, they’re all gone. “The story is who these people were, how they lived and then how they vanished,” says Lal.

Three years in the making: Lal Medawattegedera receiving the Gratiaen Award 2012 from Dr. Walter Perera of the Gratiaen Trust. 

The fate of their homes is made clear in an advertisement that runs in the New Yorker magazine, inviting guests to come and sample the delights of The Cassia Palace, a luxury boutique hotel (the star attraction is the shrine that has now been made into a sky bar). For Lal, the advertisement was the starting point of ‘Playing Pillow Politics at MGK’. “I deconstructed the ad,” says Lal, “and from there I took it backwards.”

The book’s chapters span a week in the life of a young invalid and are labelled Saturday through to the next Sunday, with an epilogue that follows nine months later. Each section focuses on an individual member of the doomed community on MGK, as told by the boy to a CFL bulb. The narrator is convinced he will die by the end of the week, and feels compelled to unburden himself to the only listener available. Lal, who sits under such a bulb himself when working at home, says he got the idea when he noticed how the bulb’s “snake head” spiralled up to the base of the fixture.

“I thought the story would be in the mercury. As you know anyone who touches mercury gets a rash, and stories are like rashes.” By honouring a vanished community, Lal was making a point. “Everyone has a story to tell, that’s what drives me,” he says. “Certain people would want us to forget certain things but these things and people are part of us anyway. If we repress them we pay a big price.” Commending the work, Jayantha Dhanapala, chairman of the Gratiaen panel of judges said “The novel succeeds best at the level of allegory. It is therefore an extended metaphor of our community with all its political, economic and social complexities treated with supreme irony – witty at times and at other moments with deep sympathy.”

As a writer, Lal had found humour an invaluable way of “telling the truth” in a form that was both palatable and encouraged introspection. Lal’s sense of humour had guests chuckling when his excerpt was read at the shortlist announcement. When people came up to him after the event to tell him they were rooting for him, Lal allowed himself to consider that he might win for the first time. Some of his doubts about his first novel lay in the fact that he had not been able to show it to anyone before submitting it to the Gratiaen Trust, that he had found flaws and spelling errors in the manuscript and that he half suspected the panel of judges would say to him ‘Lal, this isn’t a novel, it’s another collection of short stories.’ Now, he’s reassured. “I think they saw that the novel was held together by contention, rather than linear time because this boy wanted to tell the story of all those who had lived.”

Lal, who was nominated for the Gratiaen in 2002 for ‘The Window Cleaner’s Soul’ (he made his debut with another short story collection – ‘Can You Hear Me Running?’), says this novel has been on his mind for three years now. He just never found the time to bring together the odds and ends including the opening paragraph, which he had jotted down on notebooks. It wasn’t until the Federation of University Teachers’ Association (FUTA) began their 100 day strike that Lal began writing every morning from 9 to 11. The book is dedicated to FUTA and Lal remains proud of the protests he participated in, in Galle, Kandy and Colombo that asked the state do more for education in Sri Lanka.

A lecturer in English Literature at the Open University, Lal was also studying for his Masters at the time. His research interest was in masculinity. Both published/presented in 2012, ‘Pumping Iron: The Question of Masculinity in Blue Stories for Adults’ and ‘Blowing up the Cover: A gendered re-reading of the glossy sexual/textual trap of the cover stories of Guys Only (GO) magazine’ hinted at his willingness to tangle with popular culture. In fact, Lal’s career includes a stint in advertising and a spell as rock musician, and his interests remain diverse. In his acceptance speech, he sampled Pink Floyd lyrics and quoted theoretical physicist Richard Feynman between references to Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Galileo, Darwin and Julian Assange. (Rather endearingly, he also thanked the librarians and book sellers who supply him with his reading material.)

Despite his Gratiaen success, Lal says his priority is still his students. “I love teaching literature,” he says. “Right now I prefer to be a teacher, an academic and then a novelist. In another life I would like to be a musician.” His book is being put through a language edit and he’s still waiting to design a cover but it will be out well before the next Gratiaen winner is announced. Both as a writer and as a teacher he seems determined to subvert snobbery: “Just because you read Shakespeare, don’t think E.J. James can’t write,” he says, explaining that his personal challenge is always to create a multiplicity of perspectives within his work. “You must be able to see the world through many different glasses.”

 Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on 12 May, 2013. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Indika Handuwala

Michelle de Kretser: Questions of Travel

Michelle de Kretser

Before she ever puts pen to paper, Michelle de Krester knows how her book will end. What she’s more uncertain off is whether there will be a book at all. If ‘Questions of Travel’ were her last novel, it would be a pity, for its clear that here is an author at the height of her powers, but it’s a possibility she won’t rule out. “I think writers have only a few books in them – some have more and some have fewer. Some keep on writing and publishing even after they run out of things to say and I don’t want to be that person,” she says, her articulate, pleasingly accented voice coming through over a Skype call. Her next novel is already in the “hunting, gathering stage” but she is used to questioning its vitality. This, Michelle concedes, might have other causes: “It’s possible that the feeling I have at the moment is just pure exhaustion from ‘Questions of Travel.’

You can see how that would be possible with the 500 page novel being hailed by critics as the most ambitious of the multi-award winning author’s four books. It is also in some ways her most personal. “It brings together disparate strands of my interests and my experience,” she says. “The other books have tended to keep those things separate.” Sprawling over two continents and claiming 4 decades for its epic account, ‘Questions of Travel’ introduces Ravi Mendes and Laura Fraser. Their lives are shaped by the same forces that have moulded the modern world – travel on a scale never before imagined, the dizzying acceleration of technology, the connections and isolations made possible by an expanding world wide web, politics that cross borders and make one country’s problems another country’s concerns and the ever thickening line that separates the experiences of those who have money from those who do not.  More political than her previous work, the novel is nevertheless built on its intimate portraits of characters both major and minor.

Though Ravi and Laura are both travellers, they could not be more unalike. One’s displacement is literal and physical, the other’s internal and emotional. Ravi is forced to flee the country after tragedy befalls his family, Laura is propelled onto planes and buses by another kind of fear, that of never finding meaning in her life or a place where she belongs.  Laura comes from an unhappy family but is left the buffer of an inheritance which she uses to travel the world. Ravi, deeply damaged, finds technological marvels and alternate existences online. (Confessing to an “archival impulse,” Michelle says she wanted to capture the awe and magic the web first inspired.) Their stories become entangled as each claim, if only briefly, the experience of living in the other’s country.

Much of the action is set in Sydney, where Michelle moved to with her partner (and their dogs) a few years ago. Having placed her previous novel, 2008’s ‘The Lost Dog’ in Melbourne, she decided to relocate the action in ‘Questions of Travel’ to Sydney without ever having lived there. “In retrospect, it’s extraordinary that I thought I could do that,” she says, admitting that she couldn’t possibly have gotten the details right. As a resident of the city she now understands the slow turn of the seasons, has taken in the incomparable view from Platform 2 of the train station and read the names on the gravestones planted amid the wild beauty of Waverly Cemetery.  She knew Ravi would marvel at the sight of people’s boats parked outside their houses on suburban streets. (“You really don’t see that in Melbourne.”)

For Michelle, the move to Sydney is simply the latest in a life marked by travel, making some of the questions in the title her own. Growing up as the young daughter of a judge, Michelle saw more of Sri Lanka than many other children.  Michelle and her family migrated to Australia in 1972. She has travelled for pleasure, for work and for study as well; and has lived on 3 continents in the process. Some might also count her stint as a writer and editor for Lonely Planet. They all add up. Says Michelle: “Different aspects of travel have played quite a role in my life. But the questions that continue to haunt me are questions of social justice.”

She was keenly aware of this while writing about Sri Lanka. “Sri Lanka attracts many more tourists than it produces,” she points out. When confronted with the glib assertion that ‘everyone travels these days’ Michelle felt compelled to contest it – not everyone does and those who do sometimes understand little of the country they are in. In the person of Ravi, Michelle chose to challenge stereotypes of refugees (to begin with she made him Sinhalese, not Tamil) and Ravi is always himself – deeply conflicted, determinedly solitary, prone to contrariness. Michelle recognizes something of Ravi in herself. At a critical juncture in the novel, he declares: ‘I do not want to be a tourist in my own country.’ It’s a stand Michelle has made herself. “It is painful to be back in a place where you once belonged unthinkingly and now you do not and never will belong in the same way,” she says quietly.  By making Ravi’s path different from that of the boat people covered so extensively in the media, she also made a case for every refugee as an individual with their own story. “I suppose, it was a plea for the individuality of suffering.”

That Michelle succeeds in establishing this is in no small measure a tribute to her skill as a writer. The novel’s structure is true to the nature of memory, imitating life in how it speeds through the first 3 ½ decades of the character’s lives and slows as it nears the present. Minor characters like Freda and Theo are distinctive and memorable; lingering long after their pages are past.  Her epigrammatic prose is always lyrical but never overwrought. Her sentences, by turns witty and meditative, encapsulate little revelations (She says she reads her sentences out loud to test for rhythm). “I just try and describe things as accurately as possible and that’s all that anyone can do really, to try to tell the truth in the face of stereotypes on the one hand and lies on the other.”

Everywhere are motifs that fans will recognize: the compulsive collectors, the horticultural enthusiasts and of course the dogs. Fair Play is surely one of the most delightful canines to ever grace a literary work. Michelle says Fair Play’s real life counterpart is her dog Minnie, who along with Oliver keeps her company as she works from home. It’s been 15 years since Michelle drummed up the courage to turn to writing full time and she can in all honesty say she doesn’t miss the meetings. Her life is built around small pleasures – the company of her dogs, a cup of tea on the stoop, a walk in the garden. In the peace and quiet, some of her questions are answered. “I feel lucky that I have been able to live my life between two or three different places, because it shows you, if you’re open minded, that there is always more than one way of looking at the world.”

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on 5 May, 2013. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Michelle de Kretser