There are four characters in Ashok Ferrey’s novel whose voices the reader hears directly: Sonny, his mother Clarice, his childhood servant-playmate Sita, and the Devil.
The first three are Sri Lankan and the last is a foreigner — the Old Testament Devil — first met in an Oxford church and not to be confused with the demons that ceaselessly chatter in the tropical island. Of the Sri Lankan characters, Sonny has supposedly newly entered the West, but his perspectives are already European. In that church where he doesn’t quite meet the Devil, the congregation sings a hymn that resonates later in Ferrey’s tale, when Sonny returns home. The hymn urges missionaries to show the heathen what’s what.
What though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle
Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.
In vain with lavish kindness the gifts of God are strewn;
The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.
Inspired by the hymn, the Devil heads to Ceylon in search of high temperatures and old-fashioned evil. He will find both in Clarice, who now rules over the impoverished estate of the former treasurers of the Kandy kings.
Clarice, like many colonial Catholics, wears her Christian professions while living by her old beliefs in demons, curses and charms. To her, the dark-skinned Sonny is riddled with demons, and she is glad to send him away to study. Even stronger than her superstition is her greed. In Sonny’s absence she excavates under his room, positive that Kandy treasures lie buried there.
Clarice is the daughter of the family’s astrologer, and she worries that her marriage into the treasurers’ family transgressed the “natural laws” that keep the various classes in their respective places. But for now she is boss, keeping her high-born sisters-in-law at bay and screeching at the servants.
Young Sonny, who leaves at 19 to study in Oxford, meets a girl, marries her, and brings her home to meet Mother. He is the unreliable narrator, hiding as much as he reveals about his childhood and the two years leading up to the Christmas of 2004. Sonny’s name is not accidental. Like a character in a fairy tale, he is one-dimensional, the son of a hostile mother, but also heir to the family estate, though he says little of his allegiance to his father’s family. He hints at a treasure when he first spots a jewelled arm band in a London shop window, but not to his mother.
Sonny is also a man-boy, afraid of his girlfriend’s pregnancy, unable to keep up in Oxford, later unemployed and unable to write his novel, and finally tries to balance one irresponsible act by committing another. Even when he legitimately fathers a child, he only plays a role, making the gestures he ought to make, afraid of offending his rich wife and afraid of losing her.
Sita in Sri Lanka is surrounded by demons — her father, her employer Clarice, her rapist and her poverty. Her rash dream of an easy way out tips her into a hellish pit. She looks to Sonny for deliverance, but the man-boy proves to be only a politer demon than the others.
Ferrey writes a fairy tale rather than build a novelistic universe. In a story set between the 1980s and 2004, he makes one generic reference to “a war” being fought in the jungles. He sketches life in sparse lines, whether in the Kandy estate, in undergrad rooms in Oxford, or in a council flat in Putney.
His writing is occasionally good enough to make us stop and retrace the sentences, but it stops short of evoking an atmosphere. Ferrey often leads the reader toward a confrontation and then deflects us with the Devil’s ruminations or academic lectures by Clarice on the history of Kandy. The thovil or exorcism ceremony, which he has set us up to expect from the start, evaporates in generalities, as if the writer has only heard a description. Yet, the puzzles he sets ultimately slide into place. Some demons are routed, and Sita finds treasure and liberation.
The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons; Ashok Ferrey, Penguin India, ₹399.
Latha Anantharaman is the author of Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year.
