topics: |  fiction | sri-lanka | homosexual

One of the most powerful novels I read this year [2009]. The plot unfolds through five separate narratives stories forming a chronological pastiche, though each narrative can also stand on its own.

Pigs can't Fly

[Childhood, bride-bride game with the girls]

[dressed in sari, imagines himself as female movie stars] Like the Malini Fonsekas and the Geetha Kumarasinghes, I was an icon 5

In the hierarchy of bride-bride, the person with the least importance, less even than the priest and the pageboys, was te groom. It was a role we considered stiff and boring, that held no attraction for any of us. 6

"You're a pansy," she said, her lips curling in disgust.

We looked at her blankly.

"A faggot," she said, her voice rising against our uncomprehending stares.

"A sissy!" she shouted in desperation.

It was clear by now that these were insults. 11

[After he's brought amid the adults, dressed as a bride in a sari] "Ey, Chelva," Cyril Uncle cried out jovially to my father, "looks like you have a funny one here." 14

[parents fighting in their room]
   "How long has this been going on>" my father demanded.
   "I don't know," Amma cried defensively. "It was as new to me as it was to
you."
   "You should have known..."
   "What should I have done?  Stood over him while he was playing?"
   "If he turns out funny like that Rankotwera boy, if he turns out to be the
laughingstock of Colombo, it'll be your fault," my father said... "You always
spoil him and encourage all his nonsense.
   "What do I encourage?" Amma demanded.
   "You are the one who always allows him to come in here while you're
dressing and play with your jewelry."  14-15

Of the three of us, I alone was allowed to enter Amma's bedroom and watch
her get dressed for special occasions.  15
[After this, Amma doesn't allow him in after she had put on her underskirt
and blouse.]

The next morning Amma and I were like two people who had had a terrible fight
the night before.  I found it hard to look her in the eye and she seemed in
an unusually gay mood. 17

"Come here, you vamban," she said to me sharply. 37

The spiked gates were covered w Tarakan so no one could look in or out. -
Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy, 53

Radha Aunty

[about Rajan Nagendra, prospective groom for Radha Aunty]
   "What about his character?"
   "Excellent," Ammachi replied.  "Doesn't drink or womanize.  And we know
for a fact there is no insanity in the family." 41

[Ammachi's father had been hacked by a Sinhalese mob, about "twenty years
ago, in the fifties"] 59

   "If two people love each other, the rest is unimportant."
   "No, it isn't.  Ultimately, you have to live in the real world.  And
without your family you are nothing." 76

[Aunty Doris, a Burgher, had married Paskaran, Tamil]
Paskaran was a lovely man.  Kind and gentle and very handsome in his
youth. ... [Her father and family cut off all contact w her.  Now Paskaran
is dead and I'm alone...  Sometimes I wonder if it was all worth it in the
end. To have made all those sacrifices.  Life is a funny thing, you know.
It goes on, whatever decisions you make.  Whether you married he person you
loved or not seems to become less important as time passes. 79

[Anil]'s friendliness towards me was casual and effortless, unlike the
stiff formality other adults had when they felt compelled to make a gesture
of cordiality towards us children. 82

[Radha Aunty is getting engaged to Rajan Nagendra]
Ultimately I found myself in the back garden, the one in which only a few
months ago I had played bride-bride.  ... I thought of how I had thought
that weddings could not be anything but magical occasions.  How distant
that time seemed, a world I had left far behind.
   Inside the kitchen, Janaki was pounding something with the mol gaha.  ...
I sat on the steps, resting my chin on my hands, and looked out at the
garden.  I stayed like that for a long time, as the mol gaha pounded away
monotonously in the kitchen. 97

See no evil, hear no evil

Though [Neliya Aunty] had never married and my parents felt she should not
be living alone.  Though she wasn't much older than Amma, she seemed to
belong more to my grandparents' generation than my parents... [she] usually
wore ankle-length housecoats at home and saris for going out.  101

[A complex plot interweaving his mother's infidelity with the Sri Lankan
police's underhand tactics in the Tamil north.   Amma'r old flame Darryl
uncle shows up while father is abroad on a business trip.  When Arjie is
down with hepatitis, Amma takes him to the hill country to convalesce.  He
discovers that Daryl uncle is staying at a nearby bungalow and visits them
every day, staying on in the evenings past his bedtime.]

other reviews

A marvelous first novel, about growing up gay in Sri Lanka, that displays a
precociously assured command of structure, pace, and tone. Selvadurai's
protagonist and narrator is Arjun ("Arjie") Chelvaratnam, the second son of
a prosperous Tamil family who cast a common disapproving eye on Arjie's
avoidance of other boys and their games, and on his disturbing preference
for playing "bride-bride" with the neighborhood girls and trying on his
favorite aunt's clothing and makeup.

Arjie's emotional passage--through both a fractious boyhood and a culture
marked by ethnic conflict and recurring violence--is charted in a series of
elaborately developed extended episodes that Selvadurai handles with an
almost casual mastery. Such episodes include Arjie's hilarious
confrontation with a stentorian playmate and rival (whom he mockingly
titles "Her Fatness"); his fascinated observation of a young aunt's
foredoomed flirtation with a young man their family can't accept; his
incipient crush on a handsome young family employee; and eventually his
experiences at a Dickensian boarding school (which, Arjie's father had
proclaimed, "will force you to become a man"), where he discovers both sex
and the courage to defy the abuses practiced by those who wield arbitrary
power ("How was it that some people got to decide what was correct or not,
just or unjust?").

Selvadurai can make family squabbles resonate with almost epic force and
weight, and his beautifully manipulated plot powerfully expresses the
manifold connections among familial, political, and sexual identity and
destiny. Arjie himself is only the most appealing of a dozen or more
generously observed and vividly rendered characters. And, almost as an
incidental bonus, the novel delicately, knowingly records the subtlest
permutations of mistrust and contention among Sri Lanka's Sinhalese
(Buddhist) and Tamil (Hindu) populace. First-rate fiction, from a brilliant
new writer whose next book cannot arrive here quickly enough. The
Toronto-based Selvadurai has already won the Smithbooks/Books in Canada
First Novel Award for 1994.  - Kirkus

Wikipedia

Constructed in the form of six beautifully rendered stories about a boy
growing up within an extended upper-middle-class Tamil family in Colombo
during the seven years leading up to the 1983 riots, when he and his family
sleep in their shoes so they can flee from the Sinhalese mobs. When
Selvadurai's Funny Boy was published in 1994, it was hailed as one of the
most powerful renditions of the trauma of the prevailing ethnic tensions in
contemporary Sri Lanka. Selvadurai brings together the struggles of class,
ethnicity and sexuality. These issues are discussed through the development
of the protagonist, a young boy, Arjie, whose maturation is framed against
the backdrop of ethnic politics.

Arjie is the second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka. He prefers
staging make-believe weddings, and wearing saris with his female cousins,
to playing cricket with his male cousins. When his parents discover the
games he plays he is punished and forced to abandon these "girly" games and
adopt the rigid rules of the adult world. Bewildered by his incipient
sexual awakening, Arjie painfully grows toward manhood and an understanding
of his sexuality.  Funny Boy