Sachintha Pilapitiya’s wanderlust

‘Farren the Wanderer’, written by Sachintha Pilapitiya and published by Neptune Publications, will hit the shelves at the Book Fair from September 19

By Uditha Devapriya

At S. Thomas’ Prep, Kollupitiya, Sachintha Pilapitiya had trouble speaking in English. The problem hadn’t been his articulation or pronunciation; it had been his grammar. “Every time I opened my mouth,” he remembers, “I knew I’d trip somewhere.”

Ordinarily, this would have discomfited someone, draining his or her confidence, preventing him or her from talking ever again. For Sachintha, though, the way forward seemed clear. “I resolved to speak no matter how many mistakes I made.” Having wound up as Head Prefect, he knew he had to brush up quickly. “I invariably had to speak at official functions, especially at the Assembly. So I’d go through the speeches I had written many times before I walked to the podium and delivered them.” For a while, he says, it worked.

But such a temporary solution couldn’t last forever, and Sachintha knew that only too well. So when two of his friends – twins and batch mates – ‘introduced’ him to the Prep School Library, he was thrilled. They would have been in Grade Three or Four then. “We discovered Enid Blyton: Famous Five, Secret Seven, and so on.”

From there they graduated to Hardy Boys, “though we didn’t move on to Nancy Drew.” When in Grade 10, he was indulging in Dan Brown, and when he offered English Literature for his O Levels, his tastes had considerably widened. By then he was poring over ‘serious’ writers: Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and of course Shakespeare.

The Local O Level English Language paper lasts three hours, but can be completed in less than 30 minutes. At a term test, Sachintha had written it in 10. That left well more than two hours to do anything he wanted in the classroom. So he reflected on the books he had read, the speeches he had made, and wrote down a story. The story was about an adventurer, an explorer, or as its author put it, a ‘wanderer’. It incorporated the genres he’d grown up on and grown up with, especially fantasy, sci-fi, and adventure. “I finished the basic structure in two hours. When I came back to it, I fleshed it out even more.”

That was years later. By then he had completed his A Levels, finished school, and entered university. Having added other characters and subplots, he felt ready to publish it. Through an uncle, Chamikara Pilapitiya, he met a publisher, and did just that.

‘Farren the Wanderer’ will hit the Book Fair at the BMICH on September 19, 2020. While I have read the book, pored over its illustrations, and let it take me back to a childhood spent dreaming of fantastic beasts, unrelenting explorers, charming princes, and beautiful princesses, I am less interested in its story, and how it will captivate young readers, than I am in its author, and how he grew up.

Sachintha Pilapitiya was born in Kelaniya in 2000. His father had found employment in the medical industry, while his mother worked in the IT Department at Brandix; after his sister was born two years later, she quit her job to look after them.

His parents fuelled his love for writing. From an early age his mother would tell him bedtime stories: of beasts, explorers, princes, and princesses. His father, a more practical and hands-down person, would take him and his sister out exploring, “from the north to the south and virtually everywhere in-between.” This soon brought him into contact with the immense diversity and richness of the land of his birth, a theme he has woven into all his written work thereafter. “My father put wanderlust in my blood. My mother, on the other hand, instilled a love for imagining things, for writing them down.”

These two interests met later on, but as Sachintha tells me, “while my parents inspired me, they didn’t overly influence me.” The distinction, he emphasises, is important.

All that had been long, long before his education began. His first school, S. Thomas’ Prep, had contained a close-knit community, where, he remembers, differences of race and faith just melted away. “Even today, I can remember the names of almost everyone three years my junior there, and practically all the teachers and staff.”

Soon enough he bonded with this community, and while they weren’t ignorant of what was happening outside the four walls of their classrooms – like the war – they relished the little things that brought them together. “We ended up becoming brothers.” It was against this backdrop that Asher and Dan Abeysinghe, the twins from his batch, introduced him to the library. “We’ve remained close friends ever since.”

A whole flurry of extra- and co-curricular activities, of sports and clubs, followed. In Grade Three he joined the school rugby team, and in Grade Eight he joined cadetting, two activities at which his father had also excelled.

While indulging in these, he straddled other pursuits as well: Cub Scouting until Grade Five (though he didn’t take up Scouting afterwards), Badminton from Grade Six (winding up as the Captain), and the Interact Club from Grade Eight. Of these Cadetting had occupied him the most, and he climbed up to the post of Cadet Sergeant.

The schedule he had to endure was, to say the least, gruelling. “I had to be at school by 5.00 every day for Cadetting practices, and stay there until about 7.15 or 7.20. Rugby took three to four days a week, and unlike Cadetting which came up only seasonally, it lasted the whole year. Interact got me and my friends out into the world, to visit communities I’d normally not have encountered. I’d say these broadened my horizons, and helped me in my writing. What became more important to me were the contacts I forged through them.” Knowing people, he adds here, is absolutely essential to any writer.

School concerts had also taken up his time. “I was always a girl: Goldilocks, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, you name it,” he chortles. (I tell him that he could have fared worse; after all some of us were flowers, trees, and bushes!) “I pursued Kandyan dancing and underwent an ada ves ceremony, short of a complete ves mangalya. Given my deficiency in grammar, I began attending St Theresa’s School of Speech and Drama in Kelaniya as well.

Having done both Trinity and LAMDA, obtaining a Diploma in the latter, Sachintha feels that elocution is more than just a colonial spill-over we’re still having hangovers over. “It’s easy to denigrate it, but as someone who started out with a rudimentary grasp of grammar, it helped me weave words from my thoughts. I can never forget that.”

For his O Levels, as I pointed out earlier, Sachintha had offered English Literature. “Not that the books we did were that interesting, though they were – R. K. Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets, plus an anthology of poems – but I personally found the stories I discovered at the library much more fascinating.” Nevertheless he came to like his subjects, and having passed them secured a placement at S. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia.

Sachintha entered S. Thomas’ Mount in 2017. At first, he didn’t see any difference. “It was the College version of Prep, or so I thought.” Later, however, those differences came to light, especially after he was sent to the College hostel. “At Prep we had been a tight and close-knit community: everyone knew everyone else. Here, on the other hand, it was difficult to establish contact with everyone you met.” This issue had been heightened by his parents’ decision to enrol him at the hostel, “a necessity, given that otherwise I’d have to travel to and from Kelaniya every day.”

One of the most frequent themes and motifs that run through ‘Farren the Wanderer’ is the importance of understanding other communities and collectives. This came to Sachintha in his hostel years, particularly due to the people he befriended there. According to Sachintha, most of them were even less equipped with English than him. That had underlined a more glaring division: not just of language, but also of class.

“Most of those in the hostel hailed from far-off places, and nearly all of them had attended S. Thomas’ Gurutalawa or Bandarawela. They were encountering English for the first time here, in Mount. The first few days at the boarding became hard to adjust to. Once I got to befriend them well though, they taught me about life and taught me certain important life skills. In turn I endeavoured to teach them English. I believe, and I hope, that I succeeded, because it was my way of repaying my debt to them.”

The crowning moment of these encounters had been an Inter-House Drama Competition in 2018. Accordingly, the boarding students who belonged to Sachintha’s House – Sachintha being the House Captain – had to somehow jump over their linguistic handicap, since they were competing against ordinary College students. “All or most of whom hailed from English speaking backgrounds and could muster only broken Sinhala.” The odds were not in their favour, clearly; everything seemed to favour their competitors.

And yet, they emerged runners-up. That had shocked everyone. For some time thereafter, the feeling persisted that, somehow, the ‘bounders’ had triumphed.

Sachintha found the experience refreshing. “It showed not only that we could prevail, but also that we could rebel against the stereotype of us being rasthiyadukarayo, which is how the ordinary students viewed those boarded at College.” Along the way, he managed to seal his friendships with them. “Even now, I know that if I call them up, they’ll be with me and by my side. They may have been demeaned as loafers, but I know that they are much, much more sincere than those who demean them.”

In a way, this found its way to his writing commitments as well. By now he had published a story about his dog, a stray, and had written a novel titled ‘The Super Five’ – telling, since it reveals his fascination with fantasy AND Enid Blyton – which remained unpublished. They remain a world away from ‘Farren’, of course, less because of the differences in the plot than because of the differences of the themes explored in, and by, them.

While I won’t reveal what takes place in Farren’s universe – influenced more by C. S. Lewis and Narnia than Tolkien and the Hobbit – I will say this: in his quest to discover what lies beyond his father’s kingdom, the hero and his sidekick discover certain values Sachintha no doubt picked up from his boarding years.

I feel I’ve written too much. I’ll conclude by mentioning that Sachintha offered an unusual combination for his A Levels – Combined Maths, Literature, and Economics – and topped them to such an extent that New York University Abu Dhabi offered him a scholarship. He plans to leave next year, in January or February, and “to carry forward my childhood wanderlust.” He could have added, though he didn’t, that he’ll continue to write there, as he has here: While majoring in Economics and Legal Studies, he plans to minor in Creative Writing. In those two paths, no doubt, lies the key to his future.

udakdev1@gmail.com