DesiLit Daily

was particularly struck by how deeply committed he is to his role as an author, how seriously he works towards advancing Sri Lankan literature in English, and how much he invests into his writings. Ferrey is one of the new wave of exciting new Sri Lankan authors to appear on the global English literary scene since the turn of the century. Regretfully, however, it is still not feasible for these authors to make a living by their writing in Sri Lanka, and it is only to be hoped that these less-than-ideal conditions will not discourage or dishearten the new talent.

Amongst the many things discussed over tea and nibbles and in the amicable company of the author’s dogs, cats and kittens, Ashok Ferrey highlighted that he wished to convey the relatively little-known fact that Sri Lanka contains a huge amount of social diversity, and he would like to make this known more widely. His writing often appears to be intended to expose and undermine societal hypocrisies, although he consciously refrains from using the word ‘hypocrisy’, not wishing to offend.

In The Good Little Ceylonese Girl, (a rather tongue-in-cheek title,) there is a gem of a story, called ‘Maleeshya’. Maleeshya, the protagonist of the story, is the editor of ‘Shuh!! Magazine’, an amusing take-off of a very popular high-society magazine in Sri Lanka. Maleeshya comes up with the radical idea of covering funerals:

“ The fact of the matter was, Maleeshya was bored! bored! bored! She was tired of weddings, she was tired of christenings. She was tired of overdesigned interiors and underdesigned underwear shows. What Colombo actually needed was a damn good funeral. Trouble was, people were so inconsiderate these days: they died and got buried before you should say Shuh!! That old Mrs Ganhewa last week – really it was so selfish – they had buried her first and notified people afterwards. If you were going to be like that, frankly, you were better off dead.”

This passage is quite a representative one of Ferrey’s writing style, frank, conversational, full of hilarious candour. He does take artistic liberties with grammer and punctuation, but in a manner which drives his message home saliently. He also loses no opportunity to poke fun at the elite and their pretences, and combines irony with puns (both good and bad ones!), liberally sprinkled throughout his collection.

Ferrey is deliberately irreverent, and takes delight in shocking and being playfully provocative. He said that “comedy is in Sri Lankan society”, and indeed, seems to see this at all levels, as his stories will testify to. Ferrey’s comedy seldom descends into the darker shades; his good-humoured writing voice invites others to laugh along at themselves and their foibles. Ferrey himself makes an appearance (or two) in this recentest collection, as a character in his stories, and usually in a position of fun: for example, the funeral which Maleeshya proposes to cover in Shuh!! Magazine is apparently his own.

“A grey haired man got out. He saw Maleeshya and immediately sucked in his stomach.
‘Ko hearse?’ she asked him….’And who are you?’ asked Maleeshya switching languages.
The man gave her a charming smile. He had slightly discoloured teeth. ‘I’m the author’ he replied proudly.
‘You can’t be! You’re dead.’
He straightened up. (There was not much straightening to do, he was quite short.)”

This collection contains a good range of topics: from Sri Lankans working abroad in England, to issues of lesbianism, adultery, tourism, movie-making, cronyism, the exercising of status and power, and of course hypocrisy and elitism. There are one or two stories here which left me wondering a little as to their purport, but it is the case with any collection of short stories, that there will be some slight disparity of level between them. Most of the stories in The Good Little Ceylonese Girl were highly engaging, made their points with some impact, and were original and insightful. It seemed to me that the shorter the story, the better constructed it was, and the more concisely Ferrey conveyed his ideas. The one or two longer ones tended to go off at tangents a little, and were less watertight, and consequently, a little less satisfactory.

Some of Ferrey’s comments can be quite pointed, and brutally candid, but they are seldom unfair or unjustified. I for one, would like to see him sharpen his social commentary still further, and play to his considerable writing strengths still more, showcasing his lively brutal candour.

Here are a couple of instances of said ‘brutal candour’:

“In Sri Lanka the people you live amongst, the people you went to school with, the people in whose houses you ate, whose jokes you shared: these were not the people you married…..But if the people you chose to associate with were the very ones you could not marry, then the ones you did marry were quite often people you wouldn’t dream of associating with if you had any choice in the matter.”

“An Asian without a visa was guaranteed trouble-free: he did what he was told, he was at your beck and call. He was your creature.”

One small snag in Ferrey’s writings is that a fair amount of it is locally situated; his witticisms and humour have tremendous and immediate local relevance, insider associations, knowing winks; the outsider to Sri Lankan society, language, and experiences, may not be able to access all of the fun and humour. If one is familiar with Sri Lankan society, then his observations and insinuations are immediately recognisable and hilarious, but if one is entirely a stranger to this culture and country, then much of the fun, some of the amusing associations and innuendoes, may be lost on the poor reader. That said, Ferrey’s humour functions at so many levels, from slap stick to intelligent juxtapositions, that one could find many different elements to enjoy.

One of the elements I personally particularly enjoy in Ferrey’s writing is his turns of phrases, which are distinctively Sri Lankan in flavour, e.g. “…if you were going to be like that…” – immediately recognisable as a very typical manner of expression in Sri Lankan English. A lot of the dialogue is also distinctively typical of Sri Lankan exchanges, and will easily make the reader ‘grin aloud’, so to speak.

Overall, Ferrey’s writing, for all its characteristic light-heartedness, has much depth of concept and social analysis to recommend it, and provides much food for thought. After reading the first two, I am now eagerly awaiting his third book.