Grief never really goes away

Ashok Ferrey’s new book is an exploration of the nature and meaning of love, loss, grief, and of time and memory

1

The Unmarriageable Man is the story of a young Sri Lankan, Sanjay de Silva, making his life as a builder in 1980s Thatcher-era London, and, in the parallel narrative, coping with the death of his father. In all your novels, you have mined the personal. How was this one different?

In this, too, I have mined the personal: but to dig up and re-examine that grief, even after 20 years, was more painful than extracting teeth. In the middle of writing this book my mother passed away, so it was a double whammy. Closure is not something you can achieve easily, not when it comes to grief: because grief never really goes away. In contrast, my time on the building sites was a joy to remember and re-create: as with Sanjay, it was a time when I was able to reinvent myself, free of the baggage of previous lives.

2

You are an indefatigable chronicler of the lives of modern Sri Lankans as they navigate worlds between Colpetty and Colombo to the capitals of the West. What is about them that speaks to you as a writer?

I guess I’ve had a fairly peripatetic existence — having lived for fair lengths of time on three continents. What this brought home to me was how the quirks and oddities of one man are simply the norms of another. When I first went to England at the age of eleven, I was the sole Black boy in a school of 450 White ones: I was definitely the quirk and oddity there! It taught me at a young age how easy it is to be judgmental about others when you know nothing about them and are not willing to learn. So, I have always taken care to view different narratives from the bottom up — taking a certain perverse pleasure in being the underdog, never letting on that I might know just a little bit more than I appear to. It is a great way to understand those other worlds, while remaining yourself unobserved. For me, it is the supreme pastime. Chronicling these various narratives subsequently by putting pen to paper is merely a pleasurable secondary occupation!

3

You famously straddle several roles, including that of a builder, and a personal trainer. Would you have been a different writer if you didn’t?

Do you know, I am not even sure I could have been a writer had I not had all those other careers. Writing takes a lot out of me. It is pure pleasure then for me to escape into those other worlds of the gym or the building site.

4

Sri Lanka has seen the emergence of fine storytellers. How do you look at this flowering?

I am amazed at this flowering, and filled with wonder at the sheer variety of its output: each of us seems to play to different strengths. It just goes to prove that Sri Lanka is easily one of the most complex countries in the world, like a fish whose many scales reflect myriad colours, no two the same. What you see is so not what you get. Anyone who fondly imagines that this is India Lite had better beware!