WHEN I FIRST READ Bringing Tony Home three years ago, it felt as if I had come across a book from my childhood, one I already knew well. It was of course my childhood I had come across, found evoked—with that strange, exaggerated sense of description (“as the woman disappeared inside the house I noticed she was frighteningly thin and flat like a steamroller had gone over her”) and enlarged sense of things, such as a too-heavy jug one was supposed to carry a great distance. The book had the delicious sad sense of being a solitary in the world, with a thousand intricacies between you and your closest neighbour or relative.
Bringing Tony Home was written in 1996 and is not a “lost classic,” but I had the sense of having found one. Something about the way it was written, was slipped by accident into my hands, something about its quick disappearance and, in fact, its nonappearance in the West, made it one.
“In the last years of the forties, when I had still not reached ten years of age, my family became desperately poor.”
The author, Tissa Abeysekara, is a contemporary Sri Lankan filmmaker who in midlife wrote this first novella or memoir about a disappearing moment from his childhood. It is a book written by someone roughly my age, about a mutual era of childhood. I had, till reading it, never found a book with such a physical echo of my life in Sri Lanka. Usually, I transpose the location and setting in any novel about childhood that I read so I can fit the events into a familiar place. For instance, as a boy in Sri Lanka I knew only one house with a staircase and so for many years whenever anyone in a novel climbed or descended the stairs, whether a Karamazov or the Count of Monte Cristo, they did so in my Aunt Nedra’s house.
So Tissa Abeysekara’s slim novel about a childhood loss took me right to the place of my youth. Not just to Sri Lanka, not just to Colombo, but specifically to the High Level Road in Boralesgamuwa. And there, in a place I knew and could recognize—and could slip into without translation—I was introduced to the people in his boyhood story, coloured and altered by the forty years of the author’s adult life.
It is a simple story about a family that has to move because of a change in fortune and in doing so, it becomes necessary to leave behind the family dog. The boy, a week later, returns on his own to the village to look for “Tony,” and because of the narrator’s smallness, and because of the “largeness” of the world around him, the journey he makes is mythic. “The glass smelled vaguely of sardine and the water tasted like when it is taken from a galvanized bucket, but I drank it all in one breath and returned the glass to the woman with both hands.…” I feel that already I am simplifying a privately heard tale. It is a book I wish to share only by passing it over to a reader. Funny and tender. Dangerous. Unfair. And of course it is one of the saddest stories.
What is wonderful is the way Tissa Abeysekara can make a whole era hang on a single strand of memory:
Each year during the April season a giant wheel would be constructed in Depanama and it would be there till after Wesak; this year they were constructing it on the little hill overlooking the Pannipitiya Railway Station where, once upon a time there was a tennis court, and every Saturday Father would come in the evening to play tennis with Messrs. Arthur Kotelawela, Bulner, Subasingha, and the Station Master, Mr. Samarasinha, and I would sit perched on the embankment by the cactus bushes with Guneris the servant boy and watch the trains come and go in the station below, and during the Sri Pada season which was from early January to late May, the trains were full of pilgrims and white cloth fluttered like bird feathers from the windows, sheaths of areacanut pods bristled, voices chanted and along with it the iron wheels of the train braked, clanged and screeched all blending together in perfect harmony and held together by the sad melancholy whistle of the train as it left the station and behind was the sound of the tennis ball hitting the racquet the ground or the net in a soft but clear and varying rhythm …
Then one by one they stopped playing; Mr. Subasingha disappeared because—I heard my mother and father whispering to each other—his wife had run away with a Tamil gentleman who was the Apothecary at the local government dispensary; Mr. Kotelawela had a stroke and was ordered complete rest; the Station Master, Mr. Samarasinha started drinking during the day also and was too drunk by evening to play tennis, and old Mr. Bulner simply stopped playing. We moved from the big house to the small one at Depanama and Father had no time to play for he left early in the morning on a bicycle and would return late at night even on Saturdays, and sometimes he would be gone for days. And the tennis court was abandoned and weeds grew all over it and the iron roller that used to level the court was dragged by some village boys to the top of the little hill and rolled down where it ended in a ditch and lay there like a broken animal.
The portrait of the world is farcical and formal in the way the author insists on giving us a torrent of details and names and everyone’s official role, for children know and remember the labels on adults: the Apothecary, the Station Master. Because it is these details of society in his memory, blending together in perfect harmony, that once held his childhood society together. But the habits of parents, the memories of public fights, disappear and are discovered to be mutable—so it is a book not just of a child dealing with the loss of one dear dog but of everything, the whole world that surrounds his life.
Accordingly, the descriptions are detailed and frantic, an aria of lists that tries to hold the past together—in the way that the adult filmmaker in a subliminal subplot continues to make films, now in this region. “Forty-five years later I killed myself trying to capture something of this atmosphere in the opening scene of Pitagamkarayo, and the paddy field on which the final sequence was staged was the very same paddy field.”
The tragedy within the book is not the loss of the animal per se, but the boy’s awareness that he must in the end leave it. He is being forced to turn into an adult, which is the deeper sadness in this story. On a second reading we realize the boy in the story is looking back, so that contemporary opinions and events also flood in within this “slight” story, told in double time with young and with adult eyes:
By eleven o’clock I had finished my assignments: rations from the coop store—the smelly yellowy big grained milchard; six chundus of it at two per coupon, sugar; brown sticky and smelling faintly like stale bees’ honey: three pounds of it, Dhal: the variety referred to as “Mysoor parippu,” fine-grained and pink and mistakenly believed to be coming from Mysore in India and boycotted under the orders of the JVP when the Indian Peace Keeping Force was alleged to be raping girls in Jaffna in the late eighties until someone enlightened us that the dhal had nothing to do with India and was really “Masoor Dhal” which came from Turkey …
We hold on to favourite books for reasons that are not universal. Each word and sentence in this one carried me into arms I’d been in before. No other book brings me as close to my lost self.
It is a lost classic for me, too, because of the book’s quick fate. Published in Sri Lanka by a small press, it has so far not been published anywhere else. It was a story written far from the publishing centres of the West and there it remains, still lost to the rest of the world.
(Sri Lanka, 1988. ISBN 955-96434-0-1. Rupees 200)