photo by Harith Gunawardana

Leaving Galle

Weary and bleary on Sunday afternoon I went back to my guesthouse to pack. The Festival had rented me a room in at the back of a family home inside the Fort. This afternoon the household was busy with their own event. The furniture was all pushed to the wall and mats laid on the floor and my landlady explained to me that today was the day of the annual almsgiving they gave the community, in the name of her grandmother. The had just finished cooking and there were pots waiting in every alcove.

An uncle had arrived from Colombo and he told me a little more. He said that after the men had prayed they would break fast. Then they would go to the mosque again before coming back for a fuller meal. He said everyone around would come and eat together from large communal platters. He was sad, all the same, that there were fewer families now than there had been, so many of them having sold and left their longstanding homes in the Fort. He was delighted that I'd driven down to Galle with Michael Roberts as they had gone to the same school. We talked about whereabouts in London we each had lived and worked - he as a representative of the Bank of Ceylon, I as a dramaturg.

The family invited me to a cup of kanji and a banana before I set off on my journey back to Colombo. Of course I accepted, while feeling self conscious that I was been given food while they were fasting and that today (though not on other days) I was the only woman in the house not wearing a headscarf. I took my suitcase into the lane so that the arrival of my ride would not interrupt the prayers that were about to start in the front room.

I was perfectly placed now to watch the afternoon and the week fade, while from each front door on Lighthouse Street a best-dressed family appeared and walked across to the house I had just left.

www.galleliteraryfestival.com

I haven't even described the half of it. Here is the list of participants from this year's festival, with links to a little more about them:

Alexander McCall Smith
Alexandra Pringle
Anne Ranasinghe
Ashok Ferrey
Barbara Sansoni
Brian Keenan
Carina Cooper
Carl Muller
Channa Dassanayaka
Channa Daswatte
Channa Wickremesekera
Chiki Sarkar
Deepika Shetty
Delon Weerasinghe
Dominic Sansoni
Elmo Jayawardena
Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne
Gore Vidal
Hilali Noordeen
Indran Amirthanayagam
Indi Samarajiva
Indu Dharmasena
Iresha Dilhani
Ismeth Raheem
Jean Arasanayagam
Jeet Thayil
Jill Macdonald
John-James Ford
John Mateer
John Zubrzycki
Jon Halliday
Julian West
Jung Chang
Kamila Shamsie
Karen Roberts
Kim Kindersley
Kumar Sangakkara
Lal Medawattegedara
Lakmali Gunawardena
Laki Senanayake
Louise Dean
Manuka Wijesinghe
Marc Blanchet
Michael Meyler
Michael Roberts
Nazreen Sansoni
Neil Fernandopulle
Neloufer de Mel
Nury Vittachi
Peter Kuruvita
Punyakante Wijenaike
Rachel Bowden
Rama Mani
Rahul Bhattacharya
Rajiva Wijesinha
Rajpal de Silva
Randy Boyagoda
Ranil Senanayake
Ravana
Richard Boyle
Ronald Lewcock
Rory Spowers
Rukshan Jayawardene
Sam de Silva
Sam Perera
Sandra Fernando
Sandra Hoffmann
Sanjana Hattotuwa
Santhan Ayathurai
Sarah Scarborough
Sashi Mendis Decosta
Seneka Abeyratne
Sharmini Boyle
Shobhaa De
Shyam Selvadurai
Simon Prosser
Simon Winchester
Sophie Grigson
Sophie Hannah
Suman Sridhar
Sunila Galappatti
Susan Elderkin
Tim Severin
Tishani Doshi
Tom Isaacs
Tracy Holsinger
Vijita Fernando
Vikram Seth
Vikrom Mathur
Vivimarie VanderPoorten
William Dalrymple
Yasmine Gooneratne

News

Some links to local press stories - (too many but thankfully not all of these written by me). Please send us more links to news of the festival.

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/080127/Plus/plus000010.html

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/080127/Plus/plus000016.html

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/080127/Plus/plus000017.html

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/080127/Plus/plus000019.html

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/080127/Plus/plus000020.html

http://www.sundaytimes.lk/080127/Plus/plus000018.html

Fool and Flea

Dearly beloved,
we are gathered here
to join together
this fool and this flea
in holy matrimony

Fool will sing,
flea will suck.
Fool will work,
flea will pluck.
Both will learn

the virtue of obedience.
Fool will give up his freedom.
Flea will give up
whatever chance
she may have had

at happiness.
Both will die.
Fool first.
Flea so full
she'll burst.


by JEET THAYIL, from the collection ENGLISH

photo by Harith Gunawardana

Vikram Seth Answers Questions

This question was about the source of his novel AN EQUAL MUSIC, and his knowledge of Western classical music.

'I love music. Of course that’s no qualification for being able to write a novel about it. In fact music, like any other art, seems to be a particularly poor subject for a novel. Because how do you explain one art in terms of another? The second disqualification is that my own training – my original training – was in Indian classical music. North Indian classical music I should say (because we have Karnatik music as well as Hindustani music so to speak). I played the flute for a while – but basically it was gazal singing and a bit of tabla just to get the thal right.

I came to Western music somewhat late. I’d heard a little bit of it when I was young but basically it was when I was in university in England; and largely through a friend who loved Bach. And actually that was a wonderful ingress into Western music because there are aspects of Bach which are very appreciable by people trained in the Indian tradition. So that’s how I got into it; and twenty years or twenty five years later I wrote this novel about Western music, called AN EQUAL MUSIC.

The first question is why or how did the novel come about? That happened because I was walking across Hyde Park on a rainy day with a friend of mine: a musician, in fact the dedicatee of the book.

And I said “Phillipe, I have this sudden feeling that this chap who is staring at the Serpentine is related to my next book. But tell me something about him – I don’t know his nationality, his profession…”

Phillipe says “well, where is this person?”

I said “no, I mean in my mind’s eye”

He says “all I can say is, he’s a musician.”

I said “well that’s special pleading – you’re a musician. But can you go on from there?”

“Well, he’s a violinist”

“Phillipe, I know you’re a violinist, but the violin isn’t my favourite instrument. Can’t he be a cellist?”

“No, he’d have to lug it around.”

And that’s how it began.

But the problem about writing about music was…I had to somehow make the musical bits of it not seem like concert notes...I basically thought that the only way of getting around it would be to write it in the first person: in the voice of a real musician, in whose mouth all this stuff would not seem like jargon but like his own obsessions. But of course the problem with the first person is the first person is an unreliable person – not only vis a vis his own memories, but also his judgement of other people. Whereas someone who writes, say, A SUITABLE BOY is sort of semi-omniscient and can tell you what these people are and who they are and so on, the first person narrator is someone who is intrinsically suspect. So that came in as an unexpected side effect of trying to get around the musical problem.'