Many Roads Through Paradise: Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature

It’s difficult to believe that an entire nation can be contained within one book. But Many Roads to Paradise is just that: an encapsulation of the essence of Sri Lanka; with its history, its social fabric, its heart-wrenching tragedies, slow-healing wounds, rising hopes … it’s all there. This book absolutely teems with life.

This an anthology of Sri Lankan literature, compiled by Shyam Selvadurai , who has many awards in the US and Canada, his works translated in seven different languages.  When you read the introduction you get a sense of its direction and purpose: the compiler has carefully pieced together the entire broken heart of the nation. The book contains works of Sri Lankan writers in English, and others translated from Tamil and Sinhala. As Selvadurai says, “In a post-war situation, this anthology provides an opportunity to build bridges across the divided communities…of which they have remained largely ignorant due to linguistic differences.”

It’s divided into four sections, but “To promote this ethos of unity, I have not, as many previous anthologies… divided the work by the three language streams.” The sections have separate themes:  social structure and classes under The Chariot and The Moon; wounds of displacement in No State, No Dog ; passions of differing natures under Love in the Tsunami and Healing the Forest “devoted exclusively to the ethnic war from 1983 onward,” in the form of quiet yet piercing poetry.

The first section gives you a bird’s eye view of the class-divisions in Sri Lanka. The opening poem, from which the section draws its name, is the perfect introduction. The translated poems, in fact, read much better than the translated excerpts from novels. Even though this reader isn’t familiar with either Tamil or Sinhala, it isn’t too difficult to pin down the stiffness in narration to the loss of flow in moving from one language to another.

‘The Perfection of Giving’ is a poignant story about a servant girl, employed and brought up by a self-righteous spinster. It touches you deep down with its echoing refrain of ‘karma’.

‘No State No Dog’ gives you a glimpse into the lives of the poor Tamil estate workers unceremoniously packed off to India… uprooted from their soil, feeling the ground slip from beneath their feet. The image of the dog waiting tirelessly at the edge of the road is one that stays with you long after.

‘Hole-in –the-Heart’, an excerpt from ‘Love Marriage’ is a beautifully written story that describes love and conflict with equal ease. But then, conflict is a recurrent theme in Lankan literature, where the war and the Tsunami provide the background to most of the stories. But the displacement depicted in ‘The Homecoming’ certainly catches you unawares: a woman who goes to work in the Arab states for two years with dreams of creating joys for her family, upon her return finds her dream in splinters and herself looked upon as no more than a “whore”.

But the biggest punch is reserved for the last: poems—each spilling out like a once-beautiful scarred body… one whose poet disappeared in the war in 2009, another whose poet—editor of a major paper—assassinated for speaking out, a third a German Jew who lost her family in the holocaust… here a poem that speaks of dead, young bodies floating up on the rivers… there a mother who faces her son returned from war.. “His heart had turned to stone”… and wonders “Won’t he one day/Believe me to be his enemy/And bury me too?”

The book ends with the spectacularly vivid poem The Moon at Seenukgala as Epilogue, posing as balm for wounds too deep to heal…but with an extension of hope that “This, is the way home.”

Despite having so much to offer, for the non-native this is but a prelude that whets the appetite for more offerings Sri-Lankan. It makes you want to reach out to your neighbor, and share the pain captured so singularly.

It's only words... Poetry of Love

Here we are, face to face on the day of love. I’m going to play cupid this time and give you something for your valentine: Handpicked poems of love— a timeless gift never outdone.

We could begin with this stanza from Shelley’s Love’s Philosophy – an ode to the presence of love in nature, and a plea for the meeting of hearts. It speaks of the winds and waters of the earth all mingling to become one:

Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle - 
Why not I with thine?

Then there’s Keats’s Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast As Thou Art, sensual lines that weave images and lay bare the eternal desire of the heart. It alludes to a star watching over the earth, “like Nature’ sleepless Ermite,” gazing forever over oceans doing their “priestlike task” of cleansing the earth’s shores. But that’s where love is ever more steadfast; for all it wants is each breath spent in love’s embrace:

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever --or else swoon to death

Closer home, Tagore love poems are an act of complete submission; the offering of heart and soul in entirety and without restraint. There is a fragile quality to the emotion, which never asks, only gives. He often compares the offerings of love to flowers or songs— both objects that create the feeling of an act of worship. This one is taken from Lover’s Gift:

I filled my tray with whatever I had, and gave it to you. What shall I bring to your feet tomorrow, I wonder. I am like the tree that, at the end of the flowering summer, gazes at the sky with its lifted branches bare of their blossoms.

But in all my past offerings is there not a single flower made fadeless by the eternity of tears?

Will you remember it and thank me with your eyes when I stand before you with empty hands at the leave-taking of my summer days?

In contrast with the vulnerable, quiet nature of these lines, Oscar Wilde’s We Are Made One With What We Touch And See is a joyous celebration of love, with image upon image bursting forth. In the last stanza he talks of them as notes of the universe’s symphony, their love merging with Nature itself. 

And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!

But none can speak on immortality like Amir Khusrau, with his lines drenched in mystic love:

Man tu shudam, tu man shudi/Man tan shudam, tu jaan shudi/

Ta kas na goya bad azan/Man deegaram too deegari

I have become you, you have become me

I have become body, you have become soul

So that no one can ever say

I am other than you, you other than me. 

This, then, is the utmost offering of love: the longing to be fanaa — to be destroyed… lose yourself within your lover…the union beyond earthly realm. At the end, isn’t that what we really seek?

Life After Life: Spinning in Confused Circles?

Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life is a book much written-about. Winner of the UK’s Costa Novel Award, it has been the focus of attention for its intriguing technique that lies somewhere between reincarnation and time travel.  A tale where there is one life after another, where the protagonist Ursula, a Briton from a comfortably wealthy family, is born again and again and again, but in the very same life, living it differently every time.

Everyone who’s talked about this book has obviously dwelt on the novelty of the entire schema. However, I was struck by much more than this. Yes, Atkinson gives her protagonist many different lives, but in doing so, doesn’t she give the others different lives, too? How about the people Ursula saves along with herself? Her sister Pamela, first, and then her brother Teddy, and their maid Bridget from the epidemic of Spanish influenza? Ursula makes numerous failed attempts, ultimately succeeding by pushing Bridget from the stairs so that she is unable to attend the festivities in London where she’d catch the flu in the first place.

But then, this poses a question, too. Is Ursula consciously saving herself? Or is it just destiny? For instance, the second time she drowns in childhood, she is saved by a stranger. That is obviously not an effort on Ursula’s part. Or, when she has started living with Crighton, the army man, why does she go back to the place where she died in a bomb raid? Why does she just not stay away? The author doesn’t seem very clear about whether her protagonist has conscious control, or is it just fate. Then again, the part where the end catches up with the beginning—her shooting of Hitler to prevent the war from taking place— since she dies again, the universe starts all over again and nothing really changes. It’s a confusing and a rather silly kind of paradox….. it’s not Ursula being born again and again, the entire universe is caught in a time warp.

However, I believe this is just a foil to what Atkinson has really written about, and that is life coupled with war. War features throughout the novel, resplendent in its horror. Atkinson shows you myriad views of misery, from every angle possible—the ground, the air, the savior, the saved and the unsaved. There is no getting away from it. In fact, one of the most brilliant parts of the narrative—and ironically, the part that most of her British readers have found “unnecessary” is the life of Ursula in Nazi Germany, after her marriage to a man who becomes a Nazi officer later. That is truly the view from the other side, and hats off to Atkins for bringing that to us. Rather than just focus on the grief of the British, she turns the focus to the other side, showing the greater tragedy, the much greater disaster that befell the ordinary German caught in the war. 

In fact, she shows you how a different route might change the place of people in your life. Such as the change in her mother’s behaviour, from loving to downright acidic, when Ursula gets pregnant as a teenager, even though it was the result of rape. And the capricious aunt Izzie, forever the ‘bad fairy’ but somehow always the one Ursula turns to in peril. It does, in the end, make you think of what would have happened if your own life had unfurled this way or the other… which suddenly destabilizes the world as you know it. I suspect that was the plan all along.

The Scatter Here Is Too Great: Through The Cracked Windscreen

Every now and then comes along a book that needs to be savoured in detail, a book whose language flows like fine poetry and whose metaphors create a world unseen. Bilal Tanweer’s literary debut The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a book of this kind.  

Tanweer begins by creating an image before you, that of a bullet-smashed windscreen , where “the hole at the centre throws a sharp clean web around itself and becomes crowded with tiny crystals.” This is how he will show you his city—Karachi, “broken, beautiful and born of tremendous violence.” And when he says to you “Listen,” you do, spell-bound.

The narration is done by different voices, speaking of the experiences of different people which make the book seem like a collection of short stories, but with all of them converging at a single event: a bomb blast at a station in the heart of the city. Tanweer keeps the poetic but combines it with the grotesque, creating a shocking mixture.

A little boy who gets teased for his teeth and who spews abuses that he cannot recall later; Comrade Sukhansaz,  an old communist poet who’s harassed on a bus; Sadeq, the man whose job is to snatch cars from people that have defaulted on their bank loans; Asma, the young girl who spins tales for her little brother to conceal her own heartbreak; Akbar, the ambulance driver who has seen two men at the blast site that nobody else noticed—men that he is sure are Gog and Magog, the two fiends mentioned in the Quran who will appear on the Judgement Day.

There are stories within stories, and they bring a certain ethereal quality to the writing. It hangs like a cloud—seemingly surreal but the keeper of promises to the earth. The promise that Tanweer upholds here is of making the reader see the violence in Karachi—indeed, the violence for which Pakistan is so in the news—from an angle that the newspapers and headlines wouldn’t ever be able to show.

“One way to give you this account is to ‘name the streets and number the dead’.  Another is to give you this scatter I have gathered… read the crystal design on the broken screen.” That’s Tanweer’s promise to you and that is what he does. He takes you beyond the blast of a bomb going off, into the silences in the crevices around it—“These stories, I realised, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city but as a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city.”

Not if he has his way. This book is Tanweer’s ode to Karachi, a love letter signed in blood. It is his ode to the people, their folklore, their beliefs, their struggles, their sufferings, their loves and their joys. Stories, he says, “were reasons that allowed us to connect ourselves to the world, to compose ourselves in ways that others could read.”

You are listening, he says. Yes, we are.

Stuck in traffic-- Mental traffic.

A recent post I saw on Facebook went thus:  “You are not stuck in traffic—you are traffic.”

There’s not a single one of us who has not experienced the phenomenon of being ‘stuck in traffic’. But how many times do we realize that we are, in fact, part of the traffic that seems to make our lives miserable? This simple statement of fact puts our place in the world into perspective. We tend to view the world from a “spotlight” angle, making ourselves the focus and centre of the universe. To each of the billions and billions of Homo sapiens roaming the earth, the spotlight is always on them. Hence the appropriateness of the traffic example—every person honking away in that jam is ‘stuck in traffic’ and every other person is the cause of the hold-up.

That’s a microcosmic representation of the entire story of our lives—there’s always something bad ‘happening to us’; pumping up our frustration levels and making us desperate for ways to get out of the situation. But when we zoom out and see the larger picture, we get an aerial view of the truth: we are an integral part of the problem. It’s not just ‘happening to us’, we are part of the reason it’s happening at all. The Facebook post was, on the face of it, a pro-environment one, and had a very simple solution to being stuck in traffic: get a bike, break free!  Applied to other facets of our life, it simply means: can we stop banging our head against the problem hoping for it to break down, and look for a way around it instead?  Can we, for once, imagine that it’s not just happening ‘to us’; it’s happening ‘because of us’—so maybe if we could change the way WE think, or the way WE behave, we might be able to change entirely what we’re going through?

Zooming out to get an aerial view shows you things you never saw before: the simple truth that what’s happening to you is happening to everyone else, too. That’s the part which is hardest to accept: every incident in your life is not about you. People with a high need for achievement—the winners and the go-getters—find this the bitterest pill to swallow. Sometimes when we fail, or even when we miss the top spot (for some people, second is worse than last!), the depression is overwhelming. But just for once, we could step back and see the larger picture. Maybe this wasn’t our moment of triumph at all. Maybe, in the vast, complex scheme of the cosmos, this was another person’s moment of truth. It wasn’t something bad happening to us; it was something good that just happened to someone else.  Of course, that doesn’t mean we must stop searching for our own moment of glory; it just means being able to accept and appreciate when that moment belongs to another.

Each one of us is the hero/heroine of his/her own life’s story. And that’s the way it ought to be too. (How could you go around playing a supporting role in your own story? Definitely not acceptable.) But sometimes, without knowing it, we become a part of someone else’s life story, and at that point we are no longer the leading man or lady. Playing a supporting role can be frustrating to our spotlight sense of existence. But that’s the secret to living life gracefully: knowing which moment is yours, and which is just yours to applaud.

Pain is a proof of love

Pain. The countless hues that make up the universe and all that is within it are encapsulated in this singular, all-encompassing emotion. Despite the fact that above all human desires is the wish to be free of it, pain is an inseparable part of our existence. The very act of giving birth is one of unspeakable pain. Not just for the mother, but also for the baby—hence the use of the phrase ‘birth trauma’—even without any actual damage or injury. We can trace our very origins to this least desirable of all feelings. The truth is: there is no life without pain.

Most people identify the idea of pain with mostly that which is physical: a gunshot wound, an accident injury, a malfunctioning of any of the body’s constituents, and the most dreaded among the ordinary ones: a visit to the dentist. But pain, like any other feeling, is all in the mind. It is not the intensity of the assault but our capacity to tolerate it that defines the pain we experience. That’s why different people have different ‘pain thresholds’—the point where you begin to feel pain. And that is also the reason why our mind—and therefore our body—can be trained to expand its ability to absorb pain. Soldiers are the perfect embodiment of this. And so are stoics—unflinching in the face of whatever life brings their way.

Acceptance of pain is considered to be a step towards higher spiritual elevation. And it does not merely refer to pains of the physical variety. The pain of loss is a bigger, more enduring injury than anything that can be inflicted upon the body: loss of love, loss of a home, loss of dreams, loss of a vision and sometimes even the loss of an illusion. The stoic philosophy teaches the mind and heart to take loss with calmness.

However, perfect acceptance of pain is perhaps possible only in ascetics that have renounced the world along with the joys it extends. Just as we need to be acquainted with darkness to appreciate the radiance of light, it is when we expose ourselves to extreme pain that we can truly experience the burning ecstasy of extreme joy, extreme delight. Agony of the heart has been known to produce some of the finest poetry, literature and music compositions in the world.  In fact, pain itself can be a cherished emotion sometimes; as Julian Barnes says in Levels of Life, there is a point when you just wouldn’t let go of the throbbing in your heart: “If the pain is not exactly relished, it no longer seems futile. Pain shows that you have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavor of memory; pain is a proof of love.”

But then, there is something beyond a person’s individual pain—reaching a state where we feel the pain of another. When we can feel that which we have not experienced, when we can work for those we have neither known nor loved, when we can move out of the shell of our own misery and expose ourselves to the agony of the universe; that is the moment of the spirit’s triumph. People who are remembered for treating humanity as their own—and people who could not be remembered for they let no one know about what they did—became one with the universe because they shared the pain.

Yes, the pursuit of happiness is, and forever will be, the crux of all human desires. But, as Kahlil Gibran says, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”.

Self Actualisation: not just better than others

What’s new about this? How is it unique? What makes it different?

These questions float around in our ether, sizing up, cutting down and sealing the fate of ideas, concepts, things and people. The world is driven by the desire to stand out and to excel. From the very beginning of life, we feel the pressure to be faster, stronger, sharper—better in some way than the rest.

Ah, there’s the key phrase—‘the rest’. The need to be something special seldom stems out of an aspiration to rise to our fullest potential. In a world that thrives on looking down upon others, most often it is just a desire to remain a rung higher than others on the ladder. It is not about what makes you shine best; it’s just about shining better than others. To move or even to imagine beyond those borders is to risk leaving the security of the herd.

Humans probably picked up from animals the assuring safety of being in the herd. Because the world is an unpredictable place, there is security in large numbers and in belonging to a group. Belonging, of course, is an indispensable need of the human heart—to have some place and someone to call your own, because nothing comforts us like the familiar. However, beyond the intimate circle of belonging, there are larger concentric circles that do not so much invite us to belong as they squeeze us to fit in. Beginning from the peer group at school to colleagues at work, or members of the religious/cultural group we belong to, everyone is constantly pulling to remould us to the structure of the herd. Even the choices we make—our goals, our loves, our destinations—are shaped by the forces of fitting in.

And then comes the pull to stand out. Because we possess the need for achievement as much as we possess the need to belong, the human heart—and the human will—is forever torn between fitting in and striking out. Bestselling author Stephanie Meyer’s phenomenally popular creation—the benign, brooding, intense ‘vampire’ Edward, observes, in a moment of reflection, the irony of humans’ deep, clawing desire to outshine others, even as they scuttle desperately to blend in.

The true meaning of the human longing to be unique, however, is what Abraham Maslow defines in his Pyramid of Needs as ‘self-actualisation’.  It is to realise the true purpose of yourself and to explore the horizon of your capabilities. It is when we stop taking the success of others as a parameter, and try to chart an unexplored path, a path that is not merely ‘different from others’ but one that is our very own.

It is to break through the boundaries of our own fear; the fear that keeps us within the protection of the herd. Todd Skinner, the mountaineer, said it well: “If you are not afraid, you have probably chosen too easy a mountain. To be worth the expedition, it had better be intimidating.”

Can we stand out without succumbing to the pressure of fitting in? Can we move our goals beyond being shinier, bulkier, speedier than the rest of the herd? The point is not to say: I will do this better than it’s been done before—no matter how great the ‘doer’ was. The point of Self-actualisation, of being truly unique is: If it’s the true fulfilment of my potential, I’ll do what’s never been done before.

This, then, is the answer to those questions floating on the ether—I’m not just different, I am who I was meant to be.

The Sense of An Ending: An old column I wrote and forgot

Memory is a strange thing. It’s perhaps the only basis for your construction of life as you’ve lived it. Apart from the actual physical records — the diaries, the letters or photographs, now also emails, blog posts and Facebook updates, most of the sense that you make of your life is based on your memory — and that of others who shared bits of it with you.
So when Julian Barnes talks about memory being like “the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash”, you can’t help but smile in agreement. “If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it’s obvious why you did; if you don’t, then the log of your journey is much less clear."
That’s where every person can, in some measure, relate to The Sense of an Ending — we all know that the ‘crash’ parts of life are often much clearer in our heads than the safe landings. Of course, being more human and less machine, our brain might decide to go into defence mode and erase the crash part altogether. But that’s a completely different scenario.
Barnes’s Booker prize winning book essentially explores memory and the chinks in it, and how, when old episodes resurface, you might have to change the way you looked at your life. The book begins with intriguing, unexplained images from the memory of Tony Webster, the narrator and protagonist, followed by his more intriguing observation that “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed”. The story, though, begins with Tony’s description of his school days and his troika of friends to which is added the serious and scholarly Adrian Finn. Part one of the book follows the ups and downs of Tony’s life and loves, with reflections on history and its making and, among other things, on the philosophy of suicide. Most importantly, it introduces us to Veronica, Tony’s first girlfriend, the woman that he could never ‘figure out’ till the very end.
But it’s part two of the book that holds the real surprises; part one is just the stage being set. The twist in Tony’s life occurs when he gets a letter containing a message from Veronica’s mother. That episode sparks off a series of events that lead Tony back into his past, making him rewrite some pages of his life’s history, as constructed from his memory.
When you come to the end of the story, one of the things you’ll wonder about is the title. There can, in my opinion, be two ways to look at it. One — that it’s the endeavour of an ordinary man to create a satisfactory ‘ending’ to his life fast approaching conclusion, a man whose final sense of the ending of life is very different from what he had imagined.
The other way is in what you feel at the end of the story. There is, actually, no real ‘sense of ending’. It leaves you with a feeling of unquenched thirst, unanswered questions, of things you still want to know. But that’s how life is — you might never get the answers, even at the end.