Book Musings: A Disobedient Girl

Alexander Books is one of my favorite bookstores in the city. That it is lovingly independently owned is evident in the purposeful haphazardness of its layout and the cursive charm of staff recommendations that punctuate its shelves.

When I worked South of Market, this store was my Corporate American Refuge, where I logged hours upon hours browsing shelves and clutching discount paperbacks. And what discounts they were! From shiny self-help books to shaky fiction debuts; from obscure biographies to pulp-filled mysteries - and, if I was lucky, the occasional lesser-known Oates or Lessing novel - I culled and amassed until I found them spilling off shelves and creeping their way into my kitchen cabinets. Some moderately thought-provoking, a few magical, most utterly mundane - but each an experience, in and of itself.

It was in this mess of discounted paperbacks that I found Ru Freeman's "A Disobedient Girl," which oscillates between the stories of Latha, a young servant with a charming sense of entitlement, and Biso, a mother who flees her abusive husband for the refuge of the Sri Lankan coast. As all respectable contemporary books do, the novel explores "issues": the institution of family, socio-cultural and gender politics, love, and violence - political, domestic, and symbolic. Said issues were mostly unremarkable - after all, most novels have them. What piqued my interest were the teasing glimpses of war-torn Sri Lanka and the further investigation those glimpses demanded.

Latha's story takes place in Colombo, a trade hub well-known to the Ancient Romans, Arabs and Chinese for its position along Asia's silk passage. Along with the rest of Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was known until 1972, Colombo was tossed between Portugese, Dutch and British rule until the country achieved independence in 1948. For Latha, Colombo is a place of oppressive convention, explored through the relationships between mother and child, servant and master, and male and female. Whom one may or may not marry; what one may or may not do; to whom one may or may not belong are vitally important distinctions within her world and Colombo's boundaries. For Latha, opportunities to escape her caste come only intermittently - and always demand of her both sex and pregnancy.

Ptolemy's map of Caylon, 1st Century AD
Source: http://www.bergbook.com/

Biso's story Freeman punctuates with warfare. Arising from ethnic tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil populations, Sri Lanka's civil war lasted 26 years as the Tamil Tigers fought for independence. Their assasinations and suicide bombings prompted 32 countries to denounce them as a terrorist organization, while many condemned the Sri Lankan government's defense methods as civil rights violations. War's brutal violence killed over 70,000, devestated the country's economy, and all but destroyed what might have been one of Asia's most prosperous tourism industries. Biso's journey to the coast, set against a backdrop of political unrest and domestic abuse, is itself punctured by 3 acts of violence, all of which destroy only the weak and vulnerable: young children, subservient women, fractured families, and the elderly and impoverished. Biso's greatest threat, however, lies not in the violence of civil war, but in the symbolic West with its disposable wealth and hypnotizing power.

The novel and its protagonists are undeniably charming, and almost as intriguing as those snippets of country, war-torn and West-infected as it appears in stolen glimpses. Intriguing enough, one might suggest, to add Sri Lanka to one's list of countries to visit.