“ONLY MAN IS VILE...”
Ashok Ferrey’s novel steers its course through England, Italy, the US, and Sri Lanka
Iwas born ugly. That’s what my mother always said.” This startling confession begins a novel which swings across countries and continents – Sri Lanka (the narrator’s homeland), England, Italy, the US, and Sri Lanka again. True to its title, demons weave in and out of the narrative, as does the archetypal Devil himself. A postmodern Devil this, drawn to “Ceylon” one autumn morning as he sits shivering in Oxford’s Christchurch chapel, ruing the state of a world. While in this introspective mood, the Devil hears the words of Bishop Heber’s ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountain’ fall on his ears (What though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle/ Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile…) and is convinced it was time he headed there.
Kandy and the Mahadewala Walauwa, the narrator Sonal/Sonny’s ancestral home, now become the Devil’s preferred stomping ground. The walauwa is queened over by the widowed Clarice, its “Kumarihamy” and Sonny’s mother, Sonny having gone to Oxford where his stay is memorable for entirely non-academic reasons: his eccentric roommate Tom and Luisa Palazzi who teaches English at the Banbury Language School.
Scenarios shift rapidly and Ferrey’s nuanced prose can seize a moment in all its variety. London could be a metaphor for all megacities: it “seems to have so much to offer… So much is written about… The debate rages so strongly in the secondary sources of the media that we the public fondly imagine we have a say in all this moving and shaking…” When Sonny meets Luisa’s parents in the US their talk of the Met Ball and the Opera makes him want to shout his resistance till he realizes they were not trying to impress him. “The money had hardened in their arteries... turning this rigid live performance into a sort of kabuki theatre for the very rich enacted by the very rich.”
Relationships are uniformly dysfunctional. Clarice, an astrologer’s daughter, marries “above” her. Humiliated as a bride by her husband’s family she spends widowhood triumphing over her sherryguzzling sisters-in-law. She is convinced that a demon had possessed Sonny and her ambivalence towards him continues even when he grows up and leaves for Oxford. The maid Sita is forced to steal priceless antiques from Clarice’s home to pay for her diabetic father’s treatment and is raped repeatedly by the gardener-cumchaffeur Pandu who has discovered her secret, while her father conceals the fact that he has a job and that such desperate measures are unnecessary. It is hardly surprising that the Devil is flummoxed by all the goings-on, especially when the tsunami of 2004 takes him unawares and the unaided evil of men and women looting corpses drive home his redundancy.
Entertaining for the most part, Ferrey’s novel steers its course through the diverse worlds it portrays. It is when he goes native that it all begins to come somewhat unstuck and the satire feels iffy. Stereotypes proliferate as just about everything that enhances local colour is bunged in, including a thovil – an exorcism ceremony. The Kumarihamy loses her comic essence, and even the jokey Devil deteriorates into a hoity-toity Western Orientalist who disdainfully recommends nail spas to local demons. While Ferrey’s lighthearted feints hold our interest there is a growing sense of something missing – characterization perhaps? Vrinda Nabar is an author, critic and a former Chair of English, Mumbai University.