THERE are moments in The Road from Elephant Pass when
the reader might wonder if this story is about Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict or
its birds. The answer is: both. The pied kingfishers, hawk eagles, eagle-owls,
blue-faced malkohas, paradise flycatchers, hornbills, brown-headed barbets,
hanging parrots, rose-ringed parakeets, lapwings that wing in and out of this
edge-of-the-seat narrative are as important to the plot as the army officer and
the woman cadre of the LTTE, forced to flee northern Sri Lanka together.
Naturally, Nihal de Silva has been a bird-watcher longer than he
can remember. He took to writing only three years ago, bursting on the Sri
Lankan scene with his debut novel about the relationship between Captain
Wasantha Ratnayake and LTTE cadre Kamala Velaithan as together they trek across
the bird-rich Wilpattu forest in northern Sri Lanka.
Remarkable launch
The book won the Gratiaen Prize — Sri Lanka's top literary award —
in 2003 and the State Literary Award the same year, a remarkable launch for the
63-year-old de Silva who says he began writing only to stave off the boredom of
retirement — he stepped aside from his water purification business to make way
for his two sons in 2002.
Modest to the point of sounding embarrassed by the success of his
first book, de Silva even asks if the birds were "a bit much" and,
almost shyly, says they were his way of showing common ground between the
Sinhalese and the Tamil.
"When we talk of the conflict, we always seem to focus on the
differences between the Sinhalese and Tamils, which is mainly the language. But
we also have a lot of things in common. In my case, I know birds, so I chose
birds," he says.
The passionate bird man in de Silva surfaces at some of the most
important points in the story, breaking the tension with a purple heron here, a
stork-billed kingfisher there or just plain babblers. But the book, de Silva says,
is really about "contact" between Sri Lanka's two main communities,
without which there is little possibility of exploring even the commonalities.
De Silva grew up in pre-conflict Sri Lanka, when people still had
friends across communities. The places in Northern Sri Lanka that he describes
in the book are those that he explored with his buddies, Sinhalese and Tamil.
"Before the war, Mannar and Wilpattu [in northern Sri Lanka]
were God's own country. We could go anywhere, sleep on the beach and gaze at
the stars, do anything we wanted," he said.
He rues that his two sons grew up in virtual ethnic isolation
right through school, without getting to know any Tamils, except his friends'
children.
"I feel strongly that the road to settling our problem is for
people to interact, and that their humanity has to do the rest," he says.
The novel came out of that conviction. He had never written
anything before except reminders to customers that their bills were three
months overdue. But the force of his beliefs combined with years of watching
birds and observing the escalating conflict, plus a personal experience of the
July 1983 anti-Tamil riots, obviously swept away the inexperience.
The feel of real life
The fast-paced plot, its contemporary setting, the twist at the
end, and most crucially, the unselfconscious dialogue between the army captain
and the woman LTTE cadre, which completely eliminates the need for any laboured
explanations about the conflict, make this the work of a first-rate
storyteller. In the simplicity of its style and the way in which it handles
context, the book is in the same class as The No.1 Ladies' Detective
Agency, Alexander McCall Smith's series about a woman detective in
Botswana.
The judges of the Gratiaen Prize commended it for its "constant
feel of real life", "descriptive power", its "convincing
demonstration that resolution of conflict and reconciliation of differences are
feasible through mutual experience and regard".
Encouraged by the reception to the book — it has sold nearly 3,000
copies in Sri Lanka and publisher Vijitha Yapa has done two reprints — de Silva
has written one more novel, The Far Spent Day. Once again set in
contemporary Sri Lanka, this one is about political corruption, as current a
theme as the country's conflict.
As in The Road from Elephant Pass, the action begins
straightaway and yes, plenty of birds in this one too.
De Silva is now working on his third novel. He drops only the
tiniest hint about it. "It's about the JVP... "
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