An anthology of pleasant and easy-to-read short stories by an accomplished writer

Reviewed by Manik de Silva

afterwards and other stories

by Vijita Fernando. Published by Office World, 282, N.M. Perera Mawatha, Borella. 119 pages.

Vijita Fernando, accomplished writer, journalist and prize-winning translator, perhaps the most senior among those yet alive, has just published afterwards, a collection of charming short storiesin English – 14 in all – she has written over the last 50 years. Winner of both a Gratiaen Prize 2003 for her translation of Gunadasa Amarasekera’s Out of Darkness and a State Literary Award a year later, she was a veteran at Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd. (ANCL) best known as Lake House when I joined the company in the early 1960s and was on the features desk of what was then the Ceylon Daily News (CDN) when I became editor of that paper in the early 1980s.

Viji, as she is to her friends, and I go back a long time. Connected to each other from my maternal side, we were also fairly close neighbours when she lived at her brother, M. (Tissa) Chandasoma’s home on Fifth Lane, Kollupitiya, when she was an undergraduate of the University of Ceylon in its nearby Thurstan Road campus, and thereafter as a young Lake House journalist. I was therefore both flattered and honoured when she telephoned me recently, told me that the book was just out of press and asked me to personally review it. It was couriered to me a few days later.

In a short what she calls “A word” preceding the stories, some of which were published elsewhere over the years, Viji says “they were written off and on through the past fifty years or so.” She had gone through them occasionally, re-edited them, changed them and “improved them as I felt like at moments.”

Most short stories published over time and, I believe these too, have an element of the writer’s life experiences. This together with Viji’s writing skills, amply demonstrated over a very long period of years when she edited the Women’s and Children’s pages of the Daily News are reflected in the crafting of her easy-to-read and compelling stories published in this slim volume.

Many of them, though not autobiographical, reflects a familiarity with for instance the glory days of the Peradeniya Campus which many of her contemporaries savoured to the fullest (though she herself was at Colombo), the experiences of the 1971 insurrection and her growing up at Arachchikanda, a small coastal village near Hikkaduwa. I knew her as a skilled wordsmith and a meticulous sub-editor during the days we were colleagues on the Daily News. Quite recently, her nephew Vijaya Chandrasoma, who regularly contributes to this newspaper, reminded me of this fact.

Vicky, as I know him, who is fond of self-deprecating his proof reading abilities, often phones me shortly before (or after) and article he has written has gone into a page wanting a small mistake corrected if that was at all possible. On one occasion, when it wasn’t, he told me: “never mind, only Viji will catch it!”

One of the stories in the collection was broadcast by the BBC World Service in 1968 and another is included in a Penguin anthology. This, titled “Homecoming,” was for me the best read in the book. It first appeared in Many Roads through Paradise edited by Shyam Selvadurai and published by {enguin in 2014.

The stories in afterwards are a pleasant read. Just like the many Sinhala short stories she translated into English that were published in the Daily News in the sixties and seventies and relished by readers of the newspaper. I’m sure her daughters had a hand in the legwork that must be done before publishing any book and that this book has been published while Viji’s yet around. I for one did not catch any proofing mistake when I read the book. That makes me certain that Viji herself had proof-read the manuscript!