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At The Water’s Edge: A Review Fiction writing Salman Rushdie argues is part confessional, part social inquiry and part imagination. In Jeganathan’s first collection of short fiction, in his new avatar as a fiction writer, one sees such a trajectory at work. The seven interconnected stories are embedded in spaces traversed and produced in that trajectory. Jeganathan maps a realistic canvas for us. In the realism one finds a tapestry stained with human distress. In his visual cartography the nitty gritty sense of place, its social moralities, its mundane cruelties are skewered by a pitiless realism, a naturalistic exactitude. Against a scrupulously observed social and historical background this “young literature” attempts to reckon with Lanka’s fractured selves; ethnic, religious, gender and class. The miniaturised portraits of the nation. In delving into spaces of the world’s precious localness, the very Lankanness of Sri Lanka, Jaganathan’s fictional universe, spaces lived and remembered, extraordinary and universal, he offers a moving snapshot of the contemporary Sri Lankan condition, the human condition itself. The two most dominant themes that flow through the stories are the quintessentially Sri Lankan issues of Sinhalaness and Tamilness. His choice of characters and milieus is suggestive of the fraught terrain on which he dwells. Not all seven stories compel and fascinate the reader with equal ferocity. A few retain the imaginative power, the emotional appeal and the visual pleasure of good fiction writing. Two stories, The Watch and The Street, in particular, stand out. They are full of sparkle and ambition and written in a highly wrought and utterly personal style. The book invites the reader into the world of the familiar, that metaphoric edge of marginality, only to appear strange where lives, loves and labors, seems estranged. Most of the stories contained in At The Water’s Edge evoke the tragic sense of life. Jeganathan labors painstakingly to strive for narrative rupture in each fragment of his literary conversation with the world. Literature enables him to engage with the life world he writes about intimately and passionately. One comes across a tenuous, troubling desire to cherish that, which is lived, to nestle that which is remembered. As unnerving as the tropic image in the book’s title may seem, there is a greater urge to unsettle the reader page after page, achieved with meticulous finesse. At the end of each story anguish heightens, struggles begin anew, despair looms on the horizon, history incites and impedes so that the very impossibility of even the slightest pretension for closure or resolution lurks as the only possibility. As a writer, Jeganathan is profoundly engaged with the place he is most familiar with, the space of Sri Lanka. Few writers enter the domain of the unforgotten. Jeganathan certainly has and his finely nuanced stories have been pounded out of that abyss of darkness. Positioning himself at the water’s edge, Jeganathan is able to dip into the ghetto of privilege of the preening elites, represented by the transnational world of the Sundars, the local bourgeoisie represented by the Wickramasinghes and the Nadesans, as well as the trampled earth, the muddy waters and the narrow enclosures which engulf the lives of the hapless, nameless cripple, the wistful Valli and the hopelessly vulnerable Karuna. And he does so in an emphatic, unafraid way, wading through the whiff of the familiar in nabbing as many realities as possible that appear at once Sri Lankan and strange. A place as bursting with devotion, in all its polysemy, as Sri Lanka. In the first story, The Front Row, Anura and Rohana vie for dominance brandishing their Sinhalaness as big bullies in the classroom whose god is symbolised by the iconic mythic Sinhala Buddhist hero, Dutugemunu. Cantankerously they surveil frontiers signified by the rows of desk, as border guards would national borders. Partition of mind begins in the classroom. The noisy room is the metonym for the battleground to follow. Krishna, who embraced Buddhism in the hope of banishing his sense of being a “minor”, is still slighted for his ethnicity. His command of the Sinhala language does not make the boisterous Sinhala boys recoil in shame. But Krishna displays a stubborn, obdurate instinct to be his own self against the surging waves of shame and humiliation in the majority Sinhala classroom. The Krishnas of the world are not to lead but to be led by the brash Sinhalese. There is class complicity across the urban rural divide with Anura and Rohana - worlds apart in class terms - ganging up against their ethnic Other, Krishna, their common bogey, in the interest of a “hawkish patriotism”. Krishna’s class privilege does not circumvent ethnic hostility even though it is startlingly evident that both Anura and Krishna represent a particular layer of the social class who perceives naturally fit to be in charge. But what is obscure in the story is why it is hurtful for Krishna to be inscribed the offensive epithet “demalaya” and what it means to him and the anger it provokes, prompting retaliation. What residue makes that hailing possible for him to act upon it is unclear. The Front Row is a fine evocation of the tensions of growing up in the post independent Sri Lanka. The wonky, waspish Piyasena in the story The Street worships money, curses his wife, Karuna, for his misery. In the story A Man from Jaffna, supercilious, sedulous Sundar in Boston keeps himself busy trolling for “educated boys from good families” to flirt with his god, the Tamil Eelam Association, with its walled in provincialism and narrowly defined nationalism. In The Train from Batticaloa, the aptly named Kodituwakku, the symbolic gun totting, flag bearer/body guard of his god, that spurious scoundrel, the bigoted, chillingly cold Sinhala nation. His hubris is derived from his sacrifices for Sinhala gods. In the last story after which the book takes its title, At the Water’s Edge, our gaze inevitably turns on Iqbal, Krishna and Sidda; the Althusserian Marxist, anthropologist and feminist. Both Krishna and Iqbal profess a radicalism which betrays a certain elitism as they merrily indulge in high theory, far removed from the gritty verities of life in the real world, the actual lives of the riffraff and the hoi polloi who battle to survive in the hurly burly of the streets below. We see a tragic disconnect between what they theorise and their actual social practice. What one is presented with here is a carefully crafted, controlled reflection on the conditions of unbelonging, marginality and alieNation. The stories force the reader to shift her gaze constantly while they intersect, conflict and slide against each other. Desire and despair ebb and flow in the intertwining webs and routes that run through the book. Nowhere does the heat of this double, worked through the class gender nexus, achieve greater salience and resonance as in The Street. Class consciousness and female solidarity emerge as fragile forms of sociality, as precarious as the desires of Karuna trapped in the oppressive institution of marriage and reeling under the scornful weight of the venal Wickramasinghes for daring to threaten the “building block of our society.” The viciously puritanical sexual morality that masquerades as culture in Sinhala society is powerfully rendered through the images of urban working class life. Jeganathan is scornful of the duplicity of the upper classes represented by the Wickramasinghes and infuses the world of whining Piyasena, the “incapacitated” working class male with a biting sardonic tinge. The characters of Rosalin and Kaluamma are striking for their gutter level bitchiness and are treated with a touch of sensitivity. Rosalin’s drudgery induced malice towards Karuna, her daughter in law, which often transmutes into violence at the hands of her boozer son Piyasena, is emblematic of the pervasive abuse of women in Sri Lankan society. One is hard pressed to feel a lived melancholy in Karuna’s voice. The traffic light junction where Karuna stands symbolises the frontier she must cross. The juxtaposition entailing sacrifices and the illusory promise of freedom. The poignant signifier of Karuna’s predicament. The long, bumpy, uncertain road to her own “liberation”. The character of Karuna assumes a tragic dignity. In a society where so many tragedies of women slide into oblivion, where women feel twists of humiliation heap around their heart and demeaned everyday, her courage to fight her corner, to desire freedom only heightens the very absurdity of her pathetic situation. She is vilified and ridiculed for merely desiring a measure of dignity in a life of prolonged agony. Karuna runs away from the undignified horror of a brutalised life with a revoltingly foul mouthed Piyasena, the victim-turned oppressor who loses all his moral innocence, only to be confronted by a cruel choice; to be afloat interminably on a life raft of uncertainty. The power of the story lies in the tension that grips Karuna as it does the reader, the utter futility of her survivalist stance, a tension at once free of redemptive pathos. In each story Jeganathan appears to strive towards the condition of tragedy with a consistency in a Kafkaesque, darker sense; the consistency of Karuna in search of her freedom, something which always eludes her and the consistency of Valli who smothered her dreams in crushing the watch to pieces. The Watch is a deeply moving story. In the character of Valli, blends an extraordinary bundle of power relations; colonial, modern, feudal and patriarchal. Her conditions of possibility are deeply bound to the signifying network of the local cultural social contexts, which produce them. The watch is symbolic of the divisions, the metaphoric walls that imprison women of her class and ethnicity. It is the Nadesans who maintain her dignity for her, in her place, as she struggles to maintain a sense of self through the Other. As for the power relations, nothing really changes. The Nadesans carry on being what they are. The wrenching story of Valli captures the very fabric of the Sri Lankan middle class. Valli belongs to an “inferior” class, an “inferiority” justified by history. All ethnic groups have historically oppressed women of Valli’s class. Valli mingles with great grief as the crushingly indifferent nation looks on. As woman and Tamil of Indian origin, Valli is unable to fit in, unlike Krishna who makes it to the U.S. Did Krishna work out a compromise? But whatever became of Valli who must groan under the tyrannical rule of history? The Watch can be read as a metaphor for the greater insanity of history. The story makes of its insanity a sort of metaphorical insight. Valli is wistful, ambitious, desiring only to be doomed by narrow convention and class inequality. The dashing of the watch signifies her revenge of history. Whether or not from Valli’s wounds will flow her sweetest, most startling dreams, is difficult to discern. What Jeganathan seems to ironise, whichever way we as readers metaphorise The Watch, is how aggressively and assertively the likes of the Nadesans hasten to imprison themselves in narrower definitions of identity. Self definitions seem so rooted in ethnic, religious and regional identities held as sacred icons. Jaganathan shows how agony comes from within. Yet the simplicity of his prose hides the Lankan complexity. At times it even downplays the intensity of imagery. The characters help to unlock other unknown selves in them. They emerge as composites, contradictory, even internally incompatible. The Watch is a lush, intensely imagined story. The final scene is so evocative in conjuring up a Benjaminian sense of despair, as the world of Valli lay in smithereens, `unable to make whole what has been smashed.’ The story is insistent in its desire to wrestle with the world. Both in The Watch and The Street, the lower classes do not articulate class but do class. Vali’s father brooks no `uppity ideas from the trade union people’ foreclosing any possibility of his wife’s further opposition to Valli being put in the service of the upper class. In A Man from Jaffna we meet the professionally opinionated, sentimental Tamil in the figure of Mr. Sundar, hooked on his long distance nationalism, with its crass romanticism, recurring, bilious nostalgia for the `Great Tamil Family, Our People.’ He represents the new Tamil nationalist who is deeply suspicious and furiously dismissive of wishy washy Marxism and class struggle. He is the hyphenated American, the diasporic Tamil cultural ideologue, senator Kennedy flirting, Tamil Eelam Association frequenting, US Congress lobbying, clannish, classist, transnational procurer of educated Tamil boys for the Eelam cause. The map in his head is a hideously nationalist one. He authorises the nation to be presided by the educated Tamil elite, while the wretched of the earth, the poor Tamils who become the fodder, engage in a bloody liberation struggle. His obtuse teenage daughter Devi, whose “authentic” Hindu name belies her American slang-peppered, couldn’t-give-a-damn, I’m-beat kind of cold urban decorum, is a perfect counterpoise to the traditional Tamil femininity of docility and submissiveness, relegated to second class status in the lived Tamil nation. Suresh, the jaded, unobtrusive Sri Lankan Tamil has no appetite for either Eelam or revolution. He finds them arcane, abstruse trivia. His interests are different. Devi and Suresh in their unrepentantly unfunny, unorthodox kind of way, represent a Tamilness that will continue to haunt the world of Sundar, despite his stirring ideological ranting, unmaking his utopian nation while and as it is being imagined. Unmaking of worlds, minute and risible is a theme that runs across this book. Just as we are made to laugh relentlessly at the ludicrously sublime sounding Sundar, we laugh a raucous laughter deriding the absurd nation, the ridiculous nationalism. Jeganathan here focuses on a particular class/racial formation of Tamilness in North America. Sundar’s discourse is not imbued with mythology unlike the racist discourse of Anura and Rohana in the story The Front Row. It is in the last story of the book, At the Water’s Edge, that Jeganathan attempts to insert a radical break in people’s historical and political consciousness by pointing to a new epistemological field, by way of a combination of Althusserian Marxism, - with a pressing need to return to the scientific objective situation – anthropology and feminism. This new impetus is however, marked by ambiguity and tension. Feminism, as articulated by Sidda, is unable to engage with class or ethnic violence, narrowing its analytical richness to a still narrower notion of gender that sits uncomfortably with difference in its multiplicity of meaning. Sidda, for instance, finds particular forms of male dress appalling and grotesque, that of the Sri Lankan gays. This is untenable to her brand of feminism. There is no meeting point, fusion or synthesis between feminism and Marxism as enunciated by Iqbal, a staunch Sri Lankan Marxist. It is also not clear where anthropology stands as everyday practice and how it may intervene in the cacophony of ethnic chauvinism and class oppression. We see Krishna avidly speaking of his seminar on the anthropology of violence. However, the knee deep intellectual engagement is confined to the exclusive discursive space Krishna and Iqbal inhabit, marked curiously by Sidda’s absence or silence. Both Krishna and Iqbal, who we are told, `always started off with Lenin’, fail to ground their discussion in any analysis of the Lankan situation. Their portentous academic talk smells of intellectual excess and conceit; Krishna taking pride in the awkward fact that he made Rhumi’s dinner list and Iqbal in his command of Balibar. The subtlest criticism is reserved for Iqbal who does not walk the revolutionary walk, an allegation fiercely made by Vasi, Sidda’s friend, herself a disillusioned Marxist. It is Vasi’s feminist critique that deconstructs leftist platitudes and questions Iqbal’s claims to Marxist discursive practice by calling him a bastard. But the greatest irony is this; Vasi slashes Iqbal, a member of her community, for his uncritical, hypocritical exploitation of Sidda. For Vasi the feminist critique must begin with the upper class urban male. In him is embodied the idea of class tension and domination. In the figure of the bastard is personified the leftist male elite and hence “bastard” is a larger allusion to left politics in Sri Lanka, reminiscent of the history of acrimony between Sri Lankan feminism and the condescending, patriarchal left. Through Vasi feminism implicates Iqbal and Krishna, the disingenuous Sri Lankan Left, in the history of domination and oppression of women. Does Jeganathan mock at the failure of the Sri Lankan left? The tragedy of the Lankan situation is rooted in the failure of imagination. At the end of the book, Jaganathan moves us away from the hopelessly infantilised landscape strewn with mythic heroes pervasive in The Front Row, to a contingent present in the final story where complex issues of class, gender, sexuality and violence animate the discussion. He persuasively compels us to acknowledge the brute fact that the harsh reality of Lanka is more complicated than abstract theoretical categories. But the story feels less well developed and one gasps wondering what the point is. The dominant trope of the woman continues to be tragic and bathetic in most of the stories. The story Sri Lanka lacks the kind of lusty promise and pictorial lustre evident in other stories. The Train from Batticaloa resonates with the war inflicted cruelties and forcefully reminds us how we often underestimate the human capacity for the atrocious, how we revel in the glorification of war, how we remain impervious to everyday spectacles of violence. The water’s edge for Jeganathan serves as a space of imagination, a place as fragile and transient as love, as ephemeral as our presence, as precarious and unstable as the lives of the cripple, Karuna and Valli. Jeganthan writes in a prose that is neither dazzling nor leaping but has an uncanny charm to it. There are no savagely funny stories in the book. At the Water’s Edge is Jeganathan’s interesting first attempt but a far cry from his dexterity as an anthropologist, still a welcome voice in the field of Sri Lankan literature currently going through a cultural winter.
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