Gopal Gandhi's saga of Tamil tea labourers in Sri Lanka opens with a siren. Velu, an estate worker, has risen early to blow on his conch, sounding the 6 a.m. alarm. The clarion call (to resume their tired lives each new day) is taken up by more signals until the entire estate comes alive. Performing an inherited duty, Velu is a one-note Beethoven, deaf to his own output.
This mechanical but earnest adherence to duty, despite personal problems, is the humble hallmark of all the Tamil estate workers. The story travels to and from the labourers' shacks, the clubs and stately houses of estate administrators and superintendents, the church and hospital.
Realities
Gopal Gandhi culls from the experiences and encounters of four years in Kandy. The people he met as he involved himself in their repatriation and rehabilitation, and the stories they were leaving behind made an impression that resulted in a work the author is reluctant to fix as fiction.
Like Kerala's Thakazhi (the author of Chemmeen) who conjured up many of his stories from the case files he dealt with in his government job, Gandhi's characters reflect the people who filed into his office to get away from their troubled country, seeking a homeland, of which they know only from the miasmic nostalgia of another generation. Refuge is a mystery land, a getting away, an escape to the unknown.
In a sense, these characters and their relationships are representative of a unique moment in a country's history. Their antagonisms and vulnerabilities are indicative of the collective characteristics that define these labourers, their masters and sympathisers.
It's interesting to see what Gopal Gandhi makes of this. He works at the narrative like a sympathetic observer; a recorder with a sense of detail, statistics and order; a historian who often retreats to give us perspective; an outsider as he shows us the scenario from a foreigner's point of view; and often seems to indulge us with a ringside view as he takes time off to watch birds, describe flora and fauna, or pulls up his breeches and wades into music, medicine and literature, or reaches out to explore the frontiers of Buddhism.
We are set flush in the midst of events from the late fifties onwards that finally erupted in an “organised emigration”— an unfortunate consequence of the Indo-Ceylon Agreement of 1964. Valliamma is the teenaged bread-winner of a family living in a shanty in the Craigavon estate. Her father Kandan is still dazed with guilt and the memory of his wife who died in childbirth. It is left to Valli to look after him, her grandparents and her sister Theiva.
Young Valli, who bears her burdens with grace, emerges as the glimmer of hope that will continue to animate a broken people. The novel glows with her light as it glistens through darkness and heartbreak. The young Tamil girl's love for Soma, the Sinhala fish-vendor, is perhaps doomed from the outset. Their trysts happen in conch-blower Velu's house. But a pregnant Valli is raped by one of the supervisors. Soma kills the man and is thrown in jail.
In the wake of these travails, her father and grandmother die. Valli agrees to marry Sannasi, a much older man with children, so that Soma's child will find a father. The child is born, but then comes the order that Tamils are to leave Ceylon and be repatriated to India, a country they've never known. Communal violence breaks out. Valli has to leave behind her son — a symbol of Tamil-Sinhala bonding — with her sister Theiva. She leaves for India with Sannasi and his children. It is disruption all the way.
Wide-ranging
There are interesting characters that animate the novel on either side of the social divide — the caring, musical Dr Paul Baptist and his wife, the bird-watching Constance, Father Gio, who attempts to work for the spiritual and educational upliftment of the labourers, Kandan, Valli's tippling father, the Venerable Seevali, the Buddhist priest, and Nimal Rupasinghe, the young planter who strides in to change things in the estates but falls victim to the waves of a changing destiny.
Gopal Gandhi's novel, first published in 1987, is a steady, sometimes staid, compassionately handled vehicle to tell of a people and their plight. He does so with gentleness, a sense of horror and a vision of history, and with the knowledge of someone who has seen and touched his characters. Refuge deserves much of the glowing praise given to it in Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay's foreword.
Refuge; Gopal Gandhi; Penguin; Rs.250 203 pages.
