Urala is a village near Galle in the south of Sri Lanka. Its existence might be fiction, but equally it might have been, or be reality. Everyday life there, just like anywhere, is a mixture of the expected and unexpected, change and tradition, ritual and experiment, received values and new directions. In fact, Urala is pretty much like anywhere in that folk live their lives, set up homes, get married, have children, perhaps, grow up and die, for sure. So what is special about Urala? Well, on the face of it, nothing. But this village does have the distinction of having its day-to-day life described in some detail by J. Vijayatunga in his book, Grass For My Feet.
This
is not a novel. Neither is it a factual account, a social study of a community.
And these cannot easily be called short stories. There are no obvious plots.
Grass For My Feet is rather a collection of occasional or descriptive pieces,
coming near in style to a regular newspaper column, of the “letter from” genre.
Sometimes something typical is featured. Sometimes it’s an event, and sometimes
the focus is merely inter and intra-family relations. But the reader should not
expect drama, or even anything like a linear story to unfold. And perhaps these
pieces are best approached one or two per sitting, rather than as a collection
to be started and finished.
The
tales cover many aspects of village life. There are burglaries, weddings, even
a murder, funerals and births. There’s an argument or two. There are
inheritances, ceremonies, religious festivals and visits to the doctor,
traditional remedies alongside potions from the apothecary. We entertain
Bikkhus and then do it again. We visit temples, prepare food for feast days and
celebrations, and then we eat it. We describe foods, grow them, praise the
family’s cattle, harvest fruits, winnow grain, plant trees, climb them and chop
them. And we also walk through the forest, memorably.
This,
then, is village life in the middle of the last century, writ as small as it
was and as large as it felt. Sri Lanka is Ceylon in much of this text and there
are still English colonials in administrative office. There is a reverence for
things European (at least white and English) alongside an assumption that
anything local is better. But there is also change in the air, despite its
progress being almost imperceptible.
The
style is unconventional in that Mr Vijayatunga’s paragraphs are often long and
meandering, often without focus or point. But again life in Urala is probably
like that, and these pieces are offered as impressionistic record of that life
and the culture that underpins it. By the end we feel that we have been there,
to this village in Sri Lanka, felt its warmth, wandered through its forest,
tasted its food and been grateful for our invitation. But we are also conscious
that this is a past remembered and, to an extent, an ideal reconstructed. The
experience is rich enough to convince us that we can never, as literary
tourists, understand the true significance of these recollections for the
villagers, themselves. We are outsiders and remain so even at the end of the
book. Between the covers of Grass for My Feet, however, we are invited in and
allowed to share the life of a village in Ceylon. So, if this is tourism, it is
of the richest, most enlightening kind.
