by Anjana Sharma,
Teaches English Lit. at Lady Sriram College, Delhi
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone. The seventeenth century English poet John Donne memorably captured the uneasy yet ever present coexistence of the principles of life and death, eros and thanatos. And indeed, the rhythms of metaphysical poetry echoed with quiet insistence in the corners of my mind as I read through the slim spare volume of seven short stories by the Sri Lankan writer, Jean Arasanayagam.

Arasanayagam’s stores conjure a seamless world of coalescing images. A power conjunction of limpid, verdant landscape and the horrors of political genocide, tortured and mutilated bodies, scarred and pitted houses emptied of life. The first story that gives the collection its title-quickly establishes this twisted paradigm. Thus we have the unnamed airman, an embodiment of the large state machinery confronting the sad reality that in an empty shattered house nature reasserts itself. Where nothing lives, nature thrives with golden, heavy, nature reasserts itself. Where nothing lives, nature thrives with golden, heavy, ripening mangoes, wild cascades of brilliant bouganvilleas, yellow tamarind flowers, scent-laden white jasmine. And into this world enter unnatural mutations who look like "strange insects created out of this landscape of red earth, white sands and green-black leaves. "None other than soldiers with their camouflage uniforms that are the "colour of the vegetation."

Similarly in the second story Search My Mind, there is the young soldier with his T56 rifle framed by the glory of the "ahela trees" that are "a mass of golden flowers." The images alone speak of the bloody betrayal, the utter miserable futility. The misbegotten nature of war that can never be won because it is fought against oneself. It is a tone and style common to the best of recent Sri Lankan fiction available in English-the war against one’s own shadow; the living, breathing landscape and its dying people. Tamil and Sinhala are only two faces of the same enemy depending where one is. Thus one becomes a "terrorist" and is "killed" while another is a "soldier" who "sacrifices his life". Language itself becomes hostage to categories spawned by a fratricidal war. Even the two flags are symbolic of this fundamental unity-the tiger of the north and the lion of the south. Both predators, both of the jungle, locked in a "perpetual combat."

Caught in this maze of ethnicity and identity are faceless, someless nameless characters, whose common link is their inability to read their world with even a modicum of accuracy. The stories revolve around the heart heavy fears and inarticulate whispers of all those beached on the shores of a life that is crumbling at its core. A life where the known dissolves into the fearful unknown with a mere knock on the door in a dark, brooking night, as in the finely etched Search my Mind.

The voices that speak of this incomprehensible fragmentation are very often those of teachers. Indeed three of the seven stories are narrations by the teachers, women striving to understand their role in a society where there is no space for either reflection or critique. Thus in Search my Mind the teacher wonders: "I began to question my role in teaching English literature to students who left class to tear down the edifices of the past.

Another teacher in the story evocatively titled Quails Nest (fragile and vulnerable) suddenly awakens to comprehened the tropes of dispossession and dislocation that slips off her tongue. "Those metaphors of violence and alienation that I had taught my students in the classroom were now coming true for me, jolting me out of the secure life I had always taken for granted, assumed would never change." However, despite the overwhelming changes, it is only the teacher’s voice that retains a medium of sanity, clings to a few floating strands of humanity. In story after story, only the teachers are spared from the engulfing, anonymous violence, either implicit or otherwise. Like Nature they are not undistrubed but yet survive the violent juggernaut that is Sri Lankan political history. An idea underscored by, for me, the most delicate and haunting story of the entire seven. Samsara moving away from scenes of apparent brutalisation, this last story about a landless daily labourer and the local village idiot, Mudiyanse cast out from the folds of family protection, denied his share of patrilineal property, ostracized by the community as insane (he was committed for eight years by his relatives till he gives up all claim to the land). Mudiyanse, in his last days is adopted by two teachers, themselves social pariahs. The story spins upon the axis of Mudiyanse’s obsession about land, the share that was wrested away; a refrain that punctuates his everyday life. At the end the story he dies, a pauper still, and is buried on the one patch of land that is his-his father’s grave. Samsara then is undoubtedly a symbolic tale and Mudiyanse-rejected as an outcast-is a metaphor for all those who cry out for a portion of their own land, turning their lives into an endless lament. All the tales indeed, speak of the pain of being sundered from one’s origins, a remember a plentiful prelapsarian world where there were borders-invisible or real.

In Arasanayagam’s hands the stories turn into elegiac melodies sung to the memory of songs whose words are faded. Together they give to reader: glimpse of a world with "a heightened sense of danger," that breathes "the closeness to forces that threaten life itself." Quiet and meditative they linger like a bittersweet aftertaste long after the book has been put aside.