Bandara in a pensive mood protected against unusual Toronto Spring chill
By Somasiri Munasinghe
Pinkam Pola (Temple Fair) by Chandrarathne Bandara
Publisher: Santhawa, Sri Lanka, 2017
Toronto-based poet Chandrarathne Bandara’s latest collection of Sinhala poetry, Pinkam Pola (Temple Fair), is a mosaic of 36 poems permeating with life’s incomprehensible suffering, pain and sense of irrevocable loss, with faith offering little solace.
Referring to his sixth poetry collection, in addition to four works of fiction, the poet says in the introduction to the book that he has no established style of writing poems. “Therefore my poems are not suitable to be followed as guidelines or inspiration…These poems are the tiresome experiences of my life’s journey. They are soaked in blood and tears. Having spent three-fourth of my life’s journey I look back at them through the eyes of a child who gazes at a distant cluster of stars through the clouds.”
He mentions Ajith Thillekasena’s poetic style as his inspiration but I cannot help notice also the influence of Parakrama Kodithuwakku when going through Bandara’s poems. His creations reek of the same spiritual bareness, same brutal reality, and pain caused by helplessness to be only passive witnesses to pain and suffering, and Bandara stops short of calling to arms.
A predominant theme in Pinkam Pola is the gap widening between the temple and the village, a connection surviving even during worst turbulent times of the island’s history. In his poem titled Walakulu Bemma (Wall of Clouds), a decorative bulwark like what we see around the Kandy Lake, has been built around the temple. The poem portrays how this symbolic wall has isolated the clergy from the masses. In a modern sense it is meant as a protection against “splashing mud when farmers work the field,” also blocking the gossips villagers talking “about a woman pregnant with an illegitimate child”. The wall is also seen as protecting the pure white pagoda “from chaff that float in the air when farmers separate the husk from paddy” and as a protection from the “smell of dung dropped by buffaloes ploughing the fields”. The temple is immune to sweat and tears of the villagers and their earthly struggle to survive.
The poem titled Pinkam Pola is about a decaying temple forgotten by devotees. The annual procession is led by junior school students, not the traditional drummers and dancers who may have either been dead or found better jobs while the only spectators being ‘upasaka ammas’ (ageing women devotees) doing good things in this life to be born trouble-free next birth. “Twelve-month oil lamp is dry/ Becoming the home of a tarantula.”
In Ve Ira (Path of the Termites) an ancient temple fresco is being destroyed by termites. In Bimata Gilihunu Koth Vahanse (Fallen Pinnacle), the crumbled pinnacle was gilded with “gold dissolved from poor village women’s tiny ear rings.”
The poet’s stark images of life caught in the ugly, politically incorrect, seedy underbelly of life is accentuated by bare-bones style of prose that also includes slang and terms rooted in village parlance, giving the verses a raw, bitter-sweet vibrancy.
The imagery is potent and dazzling. An actress trying to enter politics: “I will tell the world how you abused my body/I have shed my cloth to wake your phallus/So cast your vote for me”. A newly-arrived swan to holy Kandy Lake: “Looking for a gulp of fresh air to breathe without the smell of piss”; a woman whose ancestral home was submerged by Mahaveli river project “Swimming in a concrete tank like a mermaid/Pointing to the direction of Teldeniya where her home was”; a hereditary land caught in a legal dispute: “A playground for black magic men/Becoming a desert”; drought-hit farmers are only left with “wild yams to offer for temple gods”; a drummer who dedicated his whole life for the temple procession hoping to sit comfortably in his retirement years and “view a ‘perahera’ before his death”; a down and out man sees his former lover with “Gold jewellery wrapped around her neck/Crossing the road with her grand daughter”; a Buddhist nun visiting her former husband who is ill and lonely, “Feeds him and goes back meditating on his smile”; undecided lover asking her beau to stay with her if he likes the drought adding that “The rains these days have no moisture”; a woman drowning in the same water in an urban stream “Where she bathed and cleaned her intimate parts”; an ageing, toothless hare running towards a Banyan tree “Where gods and devils live/ A little distance away from my father’s grave”; the body of a woman killed by the sea floats back: “Her dress and wave of hair is untouched/Her familiar smell is robbed by the cruel waves”.
One of my favourite refers to a character in Gam Peraliya, an iconic work of fiction by the great Sri Lankan writer Martin Wickremasinghe. Jinadasa Awith and Gihin (Jindasaa Come and Gone) provides a new interpretation of the fallen hero. He distanced himself from his wife Nanda not because he did not know how to write letters or his love for her has waned by the long absence. “It is because he was shy to let her know that he was bankrupt.”
I hope this collection can revive the interest in poetry lovers though this rich art from has descended to a new low due to the popularity of the social media which provides people with more engaging pastimes. (Pictures: www.newstrails.com)
