The Chief Inspector’s Daughter - A Short Story by Hasantika Sirisena - 2016

You May Read Today’s Story Here

Website of Hasanthika Sirisena -Beautifully Done

A Very Good Background Article on the causes of ethnic violence in Sri Lanka

I found this article very helpful in understanding The historical basis for the conlict in Sri Lanka between those of Singalese heritage and Tamils which has resulted in over 100,000 deaths.  This is the legacy of British Colonialism, 
going back over 200 years. Today's story arises from this history.

“Sri Lanka is a paranoid country. Twenty years of civil war makes us jump at our own shadows. Everyone has stories like Siva’s. Stories of cars and vans that come in the day or in the middle of the night." - from The Chief Inspector's Daughter

Today's story is set in the capital city of Sri Lanka, Columbo.  Narrated by a nineteen year old Singalese woman, a medical student and the only child of the chief inspector of the police department.  He was a widower who has seemingly no interest in remarrying.  They are very close and it expected she will take care of him in his old age.  Her boyfriend, also a medical student is from a wealthy Tamil family, a relationship unacceptable to both their families.

“We speak English to each other because I do not know Tamil, and he does not speak Sinhala unless he must. There are other things that divide us—different gods, different history—but Siva and I also have at least one thing in common. I want to urge him to find somewhere else we can drive to. I want nothing more than to ease the burning I feel whenever I am near him. The pure physical need that overcomes me too often these days

One night they are parked in a secluded area. Four Tamil men and a prostitute are found the next morning murdered execution style near the spot where they parked.  The woman asks her father if this could be the work of the Singalese Army or the police. She knows people have been tortured at the station where her father has an important job.  Her boyfriend begins to fear his family will be targeted, maybe murdered.  The daughter leaves the house one night, just walking around.  Two of her father's police officers find her and bring her home.

Things go terribly wrong between her and her father.  

I will leave the rest of the plot untold.  Hasanthika Sirisena brings out the impact of the ethnic hatred on a personal level.  A family is badly damaged.  Maybe the two medical students could have made a good marriage, bringing grandchildren for the widower.  His daughter tells him she hopes he dies alone.

This story appears in the debut collection of Sirisena, The Other One. This is a powerful story and for sure more of her work will be featured on The Reading Life.

Hasanthika Sirisena’s essays and stories have appeared in The Globe and Mail, WSQ, Narrative, The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Narrative and other magazines. Her work has been anthologized in Best New American Voices, and named a distinguished story by Best American Short Stories in 2011 and 2012. She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. In 2008 she received a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. She is currently an associate fiction editor at West Branch magazine and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Susquehanna University...from her website

This story is part of The Short Stories by South Asian Women Project.

From the author's Website

"Set in Sri Lanka and America, the ten short stories in this debut collection feature characters struggling to contend with the brutality of a decades-long civil war while also seeking security, love, and hope. The characters are students, accountants, soldiers, servants. They are immigrants and strivers. They are each forced to make sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, choices. What they share, despite what they’ve endured, is the sustaining power of human connection."

Oleander Bousweau

Outside - A Short Story by Amanthi Harris - published in Lighthouse - A Journal of New Writing - Issue 18, Winter 2018 to 2019

Outside - A Short Story by Amanthi Harris - published in Lighthouse - A Journal of New Writing - Issue 18, Winter 2018 to 2019

I have been reading  Amanthi Harris for sometime now.  I am always happy to have the opportunity to expand my reading of her work.  Of the two short stories and a novella I have read, two are about a young woman of Sri Lankan heritage living now in London with her very traditional parents while adjusting to English life.  One story is set in Sri Lanka.  The relationships of the young women  with their parents, especially their mothers, are strained  by the English men they are involved with.  Their parents want strictly Sri Lankan grandchildren!

In today's delightful story a young college woman, Maya, has come in from the outside, back home from college.

I loved the very sensory rich opening lines:

"Outside disappeared when the door closed, as you were taking off your coat in the hallway in the warmth, with the smell of fried curry-leaves and roasting black pepper and the scent of cloves; and the steam from the kitchen misted the windows with their sagging nets of lace flowers, the petals just prickled with mildew. Outside was where Maya lived now. They had sent her - sent her where they could never go, to pry behind old stone walls, to pass through ancient oak doors into panelled halls to reap the rewards of their labours and bring back what she learned.

She had returned with nothing, only altered, full of stories of new friends, of new vistas glimpsed and opening for her. She had grown loud-voiced and giant, her shyness gone, talking on the phone with her new friends, laughing without restraint, revelling in her brazenness. Her parents listened pained to the mention of men - one in particular whose call each day she waited for. He had invited her to a party in a city far away, a party they had forbidden her to attend.

‘Let’s have a dinner party,’ she told her mother, Lila. ‘What for?’

‘It’s weird doing nothing on a Saturday night.’"

Maya has new friends now, she "sees their wealth, comfort, and rootedness,the calm of their entitlement and wanted this"

Dan, the boy Maya likes, is having a party the same night but her parents will not allow her to go.  Maya makes a radical suggestion:

"there was no reason to eat in different rooms, the men sitting down all over the house talking cricket and the women in the kitchen stirring pots, eating between serving the men. Lila didn’t reply, reading over the shopping list.

‘Wine? You drink wine now?’ she demanded. ‘You’re drinking alcohol and running around with men? Very nice. We sent you to University to study."

Maya's mother tells her men will think she is easy.

The family member guests begin to arrive, about ten people.  Chief among them is Uncle Bobby her father's brother.   Bobby had a reputation as a "Playboy" before he finally settled down and married.  A debate breaks out over  whether or not University life has been a bad influence on Maya.  Uncle Bobby tells everyone he thinks she needs and deserves to expand her world.  

I as shocked by the ending, though not as much as Maya was!  

I really liked "Outside", lots of marvelous descriptions of food.  (The very last thing an immigrant will give up willingly is their food, clothes, religion, language all go first in the acculturation process.) 

As I read this story about generational tensions  yesterday, my 76 year old mother in law, 25 year old daughter and wife were at the kitchen table enjoying very traditional foods brought back from a visit to family property in way rural northern Philippines.  The family is intensely close but far from drama free.  The conversations and relationships depicted in "Outside" rang very true for me.

Amanthi Harris was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and has degrees in Law and Chemistry from Bristol University.

Her novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE will be published by Salt (September 2019). LANTERN EVENING, a novella, won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 and was published by Gatehouse Press (2017). Her short stories have been published by Serpent’s Tail and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as Afternoon Readings. She also runs StoryHug, an ACE funded storytelling, art and writing project.

www.amanthiharris.com

www.saltpublishing.com/products/beautiful-place-9781784631932

www.gatehousepress.com/shop/new-fictions/lantern-evening/

Outside - A Short Story by Amanthi Harris - published in Lighthouse - A Journal of New Writing - Issue 18, Winter 2018 to 2019

This issue of Lighthouse- A Journal of New Writing has a very interesting mix of short stories, poetry, artwork, and commentary from a diverse group of writers.  

I am very much looking forward to her debut novel, Beautiful Place coming in September this year.  I hope to follow her work for a long time.

Be sure to check out her website to see her enchanted  art work.  

This story is included in our Stories by South Asian  Women project.

Mel u

Oleander  Bousweau

“The Office of Missing Persons” - A Short Story by Akil Kumarasamy- from her collection Half Gods

You can read “The Office of Missing Persons” here

Website of Akil Kumarasamy


Post in The New Yorker on Half Gods


Gateway to works by Amanthi Harris focusing on Sri Lanka

I first became aware of the near overwhelming stories of Akil Kumarasamy in a news letter from PEN.  It was announced that she, along with four other writers, was shorted  listed for their annual award for Best Debut Short Story Collection. On her website I learned of numerous awards and looked through the glowing reviews.  I am very interested in fiction dealing with the interface between south  Asian culture and that of the Anglophone west.  I knew I wanted to learn more about her work.  (I have posted on works related to the civil war and social unrest in Sri Lanka before, occasioned by a reading of short stories by Amanthi Harris.)

“The Office of Missing Persons” shows us what happens when the seventeen year old son of one of Sri Lanka’s leading entomologists goes missing.  The man’s discoveries of new insect species has raised the prestige of Sri Lanka in entomological circles to such a degree that he is sometimes referred to as “The President’s insect man”.

Kumarasamy does a wonderful life in her vividly cinematic presentation of the man’s visit to the office of missing persons.  The officer in charge at first tries to suggest the boy may have just run off on a lark:

“Jeganathan paused. “He did not return home after his studies.”

“These young Tamil boys always getting into trouble. They don’t know how to be proper citizens,” the officer said and scratched something on the paper in blue ink. Jeganathan remembered his younger boy, Prem, shaking on the floor as they questioned him, his eyes flushed with tears as he cut through the bond of the womb and revealed the trip Jeevan had planned that night with Amutha to the local Shiva shrine, and before then all their meetings under the neem trees by the abandoned pharmacy, the way his brother unraveled her braid, tied her hair around his hand like a bandage.

His wife has often urged him to leave Sri Lanka, taking a teaching job outside the country.  Things begin to turn badly for Jeganthan.  People assume his son was “disappeared” for unacceptable to the anti-Tamil forces political actions or speech.  People begin to shun him and his wife.  Their household helper quits.  He eventually loses his university position.  I will leave the rest of the story untold.

I do what to share enough of her beautiful prose to let you see why this story is so marvelous.

“Jeganathan worked as an entomologist. He was not prone to chatting except in the lecture halls in front of his students, talking of what he loved best. He was fastidious with what he could control, his ironed suits and finely trimmed mustache, the way he recorded his work in his notebook, the column for wingspan blank until he measured the specimen three times.

He had never been militant. He joked about dueling other entomologists like William de Alwis, the Sri Lankan butterfly man, because they seemed harmless. In keeping company with insects, he had avoided addressing the war altogether, though his wife disagreed on that matter. In her eyes, he was a man so dedicated to his work that he was willing to get both his legs blown off for some dung-eating insects.

“Weren’t you almost killed by a mob in Colombo? And look, we’re still here in this country,” his wife said after hearing of his job transfer from the capital to up north. “I thought by marrying a professor we’d end up in Toronto, Sydney, London, anywhere better, and now you want to take me to Jaffna. Do you want to get us deeper into this war?”

Jeganathan had decided to transfer to Jaffna not because of politics but because of a discovery. While praying in the Murugan temple in Nallur, he saw a blue beetle skitter across the floor. The strange wings and streaks along its abdomen forced him to his knees, and he crawled after the specimen. He carried the beetle in a jar all the way back to his office in the capital. After his examinations, he suspected he had discovered a new species. He named the insect—Nicrophorus m. kumaratunga—after the president at the time, and when questioned by officials what the m stood for, he said, Madame, not the Hindu deity Lord Muruga. While officials hassled other Tamil intellectuals at the university, they did not bother with him, the professor whose blue-winged insect talisman granted him a level of immunity.”

The characters are all rendered with great verisimilitude, you can almost feel the shimmering heat of a tropical mega-City.

From the publisher’s website 

A startlingly beautiful debut, Half Gods brings together the exiled, the disappeared, the seekers. Following the fractured origins and destines of two brothers named after demigods from the ancient epic the Mahabharata, we meet a family struggling with the reverberations of the past in their lives. These ten interlinked stories redraw the map of our world in surprising ways: following an act of violence, a baby girl is renamed after a Hindu goddess but raised as a Muslim; a lonely butcher from Angola finds solace in a family of refugees in New Jersey; a gentle entomologist, in Sri Lanka, discovers unexpected reserves of courage while searching for his missing son.

By turns heartbreaking and fiercely inventive, Half Gods reveals with sharp clarity the ways that parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the book Half Gods (Farrar Straus & Giroux, forthcoming). Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, Guernica, Harper’s Magazine, and the Massachusetts Review, among others. She has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and San Diego Writers’ Ink. She holds a BA from Barnard College and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan.

I greatly look forward to reading the full collection and following the work of Akil Kumarasamy for a long time.  We know all his life Jeganathan, his wife and younger son will wish they had long ago left Sri Lanka.

Mel u

Years ago when I first began posting on short story collections I followed standard procedures, post briefly on a few of the stories then conclude with metaphor laden concluding remarks and issue a recommendation.  Sometime ago I moved toward focusing on individual stories.  If I like a writer as much as I do Chaya Bhuvaneswar I post on numerours of the stories.  This seems more respectful of the writer, better for serious readers and for me also.  Writing about a work seems to increase my understanding and helps me recall the story.

"Road Kill" by Romesh Gunesekera (December 2, 2013, from The New Yorker)

Romesh Gunesekera writers primarily about life in contemporary Sri Lanka in the years after the long civil war.  He has written a number of well regarded short stories told from the point of view of a driver of a van for tourists and wealthier residents on long cross country journeys.  You can get a good feel for the atmosphere of the country and the excellant prose style of Gunesekera in the opening lines of the story:

"TThe first night I stayed in Kilinochchi I was a little apprehensive. Most of us living in the south of Sri Lanka had come to think of this town as the nerve center of terror. As Mr. Wahid, my first Malaysian client, said, in English even the name sounded brutal—like the kind of town where you could imagine a Clint Eastwood character striding in and notching the stock of his rifle with yet another senseless killing"

As the story opens the driver is on a long trip, taking a recently married couple, the wife is seven months pregnant, to see property the husband plans to buy to set up a family home.  In a subtle touch, the wife refers to the driver as "Mr. Van Driver".  The roads are rough and they stop half way overnight.  There are special quarters for drivers.  The driver meets and converses with the young woman who mangages the hotel.  She has been to hotel management school.  Many of their clients are European tourists, called "E Ts".  The woman seems the epitome of refined well raised gentility but we quickly begin to wonder if this is just a mask for the tourists.  

Suddenly a waiter yells out "Rat" and what happens next is really just a marvelous set piece

"The waiter, who had moved to the back of the room, started. “Rat,” he yelped.

Miss Saraswati spun around. A big brown rodent was scurrying across the floor toward the tallboy in the far corner. She hissed loudly and sharply, and it froze for a moment. As it began to edge forward again, she grasped my beer bottle by the neck and flung it. The bottle hit the rat with such force that the creature thudded against the wall. The bottle rolled along, unbroken. Its base had smashed the animal’s small skull.

“Burn it,” she instructed the waiter. “Use a plastic bag. Wash your hands afterward.” She turned to me. “Sorry about that. I’ll bring you another bottle.”

I stared at Miss Saraswati. “You learn to do that at Jaffna hotel school?”

I really enjoyed this story, it is perceptive and the characters are all very well drawn. 

There are links to this and other stories by the author on his webpage.

http://romeshg2.wordpress.com/

I hope for sure to read more of his work.

Mel u

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje (2011, 289 pages)

Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, 1943, and is a Canadian citizen.  In 1992 he won the Booker Prize for The English Patient, which was made into an Academy Award winning film.   The first time I heard of this movie it was in an episode of the Jerry Seinfeld show where Elaine screams out in the theater that she hates the movie. I have not seen the movie but after reading The Cat's Table, I feel her pain!

  The novel begins in the 1950s in Colombo Sri Lanka where a young boy sets out on an ocean voyage on a cruise liner to join his relatives in London.   He is assigned to eat at what is know as the "Cat's Table".  It is the the lowest prestige table in the dining room, the furthest from the Captain's table.   Also assigned to the table are two other young boys traveling alone, our narrator has a relative in first class who sort of looks out for him, and a collection of passengers of the lowest status.  Part of the book, the most interesting part by far, was about the adventures of the young man and the two other boys while on the cruise.   The novel also flashes forward in the life of the narrator, who has become a successful writer.  One of the other boys becomes a well known artist.

  I found the off ship portions of the book disappointing, the adult lives of the boys seemed almost like cliches and did not interest me very much.   There are parts of the book that are brilliant but over all I found it disappointing.    The book started great and if it would have stayed on the ship or flash backs to Sri Lanka I would have liked it a lot more.  I also found the adults on the ship to be stock characters out of a Grand Hotel type movie.

If are you crazy for the author and like Mr Peterman a lot of people are then give this book a try.   Otherwise unless you can get a free copy I do not endorse buying it.

Please share your experience with Ondaatje with us.  Do you side with Elaine or Mr. Peterman?

Mel u

"The Street" by Pradeep Jeganathan

"The Street" by Pradeep Jeganathan (2004)

Short Stories from The Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life Event
Sri Lanka

The Reading Life Guide to The Indian Short Story

 "The Street" by Pradeep Jeganatha (Sri Lanka)

This is my second post for a  new permanent event on The Reading Life.   This event will be devoted to short stories of the Indian subcontinent.   There is no literary culture with roots older than that of India.   I will always admire Edmund Burke for telling the English that they had no right to govern a region whose culture is much older than theirs.  Many of the geographic boundaries that created these countries were created by the British or are consequences of their misrule.    Most of the stories I post on in this event will be from India but I have plans now to post on stories by authors from every country in the region with the exception as of now of Tibet for which I can so far locate no short stories translated into English.   Some of the writers featured will be internationally famous, such as Salmon Rushdie, Sadat Manto,  and R. K. Narayan but most of the writers I post on will be authors on whom there are no prior book blog posts.    There are numerous books and academic conferences devoted to exploring the colonial experiences of India and Ireland and I will look these stories partially as post colonial literature.   My main purpose here is just to open myself up to a lot more new to me writers and in this case most will be new to anyone outside of serious literary circles in the region.  Where I can I will provide links to the stories I post on but this will not always be possible.

"The Street" is, like the first story I posted on for the event, about a very impoverished woman at the mercy of her husband and from the despised bottom of society.   In most big Asian cities, I live in one, there are men and women who stand at the edge of the road, or sometimes in the middle, who try to make a living for themselves by selling things to passers by in their cars.   Often they will have their children with them, sometimes sleeping beside the road.    It is a terribly dangerous and very unhealthy life, one that offers no future for their children.   If a woman is lucky she has a husband to help her share the burden but most times in the long run it is the woman who is the main support of the family.

"The Street" is about the wife of a man who used to sell things on the road in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka.   His customers are in air conditioned cars (just to have a car means you are pretty rich), normally with drivers and with heavily shaded windows to prevent the lower classes from looking in their cars.    One day her husband was hit by a car and he decided after that to not work any more.    She took up the work.   This story lets us see what her life is like.   You offer fruit for sale to a passenger in a car worth more than you could make in a 1000 life times and they have their driver offer you half the fair price just to beat you down.   She has some kind of friends.    She used to work offshore in the middle east and sent all her pay back home to support her family but she cannot do it now as she has no one to take care of her children.   One of her friends tells her about a child care place where she can put her kids for a price she can afford.    She is assured that they will be taken care of and this would allow her to work as a live in maid, a much better work for her.    Her friend from the streets arranges everything for her.    At the appointed time a big car picks up the children and they are dropped off at the home.   Then the woman is herself dropped off at a brothel and told she must work there to pay for the care of her children, who are now the captive of the brothel owners.  I wondered how much her friend was paid for doing this to her.  

"The Street" takes us deeply into its milieu.   When the woman told her friend how her husband abused her she was told that he probably could not even stand up to a Tamil.   Looking a bit deeper we see how sectarian divides are used to control societies and keep people from seeing who their real enemies are.  

"The Street " is a very good, very much worth reading story about purely voiceless people.

I read this story in a collection of short stories from the region, The Lotus Singers:  Short Stories from Contemporary South Asia (2011) edited and introduced by Trevor Carolan with various translators.

Author Bio

Pradeep Jeganathan's major research interests include subaltern nationalism and the perpetration of violence and its survival. Minor interests range from archaeological practice, distributed electronic networks and cyberspace to post colonial English literatures.

He has contributed to a number of important international conferences, and his work has been published in the ensuring collections, that have been widely reviewed in scholarly journals.

At the Water's Edge, his first work of fiction, was internationally aclaimed, and short listed for Sri Lanka's Gratiaen Prize.

He has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan is a Senior Consultant Social Anthropologist, at the Consortium for Humanitarian Agencies, in Colombo, and his political column SouthPaw appears monthly in Spectrum, a socio-political review magazine.

He is also an accomplished cook, and photographer, who has authored internationally and nationally published food columns, illustrated with his own photographs. His food-photoblog, www.my-halflife.com, is updated regularly, and his food column, achcharu, apears monthly also in Spectrum.

His wild life photographs are part of the permanent exhibition at the visitor center of the Ruhunu National Park, Yala, Sri Lanka.

You can learn more about his work at his webpage

Mel u