Grass for my feet by J. Vijayatunga
Urala is a town near Galle in southern Sri Lanka. Its existence could be fiction, but it could just as well have been, or be reality. Daily life there, as anywhere, is a mix of the expected and the unexpected, change and tradition, ritual and experimentation, received values and new directions. In fact, Urala is more or less like any place where people live their lives, establish homes, get married, have children, maybe, grow up and die, for sure. So what’s so special about Urala? Well, at first glance, nothing. But this town has the distinction of having its daily life described in some detail by J. Vijayatunga in his book Grass For My Feet.
This is not a novel. Nor is it a factual account, a social study of a community. And these cannot easily be called tales. There are no obvious plots. Grass For My Feet is more of a collection of occasional or descriptive pieces, approaching in style a regular newspaper column, of the “letter from” genre. Sometimes something typical occurs. Sometimes it is an event, and other times the focus is merely inter- and intra-family relationships. But the reader should not expect a drama to unfold, or even something resembling a linear story. And perhaps it’s better to approach these pieces one or two per session, rather than as a collection to begin and end.
The tales cover many aspects of village life. There are robberies, weddings, even a murder, funerals and births. There is an argument or two. There are inheritances, ceremonies, religious festivals and visits to the doctor, traditional remedies alongside apothecary potions. We entertain Bikkhus and then we do it again. We visit temples, prepare food for festivals and celebrations, and then eat it. We describe food, we grow it, we praise the family cattle, we harvest fruit, we winnow grain, we plant trees, we climb and cut them. And we also walked through the woods, memorably.
This, then, is the life of the people in the middle of the last century, he writes as small as he was and as big as he felt. Sri Lanka is Ceylon in much of this text and there are still English settlers in administrative positions. There is a reverence for things European (at least white and English) along with the assumption that anything local is better. But there is also change in the air, even though his progress is almost imperceptible.
The style is unconventional in that Mr. Vijayatunga’s paragraphs are often long and winding, often without focus or point. But then again, life in Urala is probably like that, and these pieces are offered as an impressionistic record of that life and the culture that supports it. In the end, we feel that we have been there, in this Sri Lankan village, we feel its warmth, wander through its forest, taste its food and appreciate our invitation. But we are also aware that it is a remembered past and, to a certain extent, a reconstructed ideal. The experience is rich enough to convince us that we can never, as literary tourists, understand the true meaning of these memories for the villagers themselves. We are strangers and remain so even at the end of the book. However, between the covers of Grass for My Feet, we are invited and allowed to share in the life of a Ceylon village. So if this is tourism, it’s the richest, most enlightening kind.