The Copper Tumbler & Donkeys in Mannar:A Work of Mourning – III

‘it is not narrative that we should abandon but chronology’’ – Kumar Shahani

By Laleen Jayamanne

Rajani Thiranagama, sister of Nirmala and Sumathy, was shot dead by an LTTE gunman for criticising the organisation’s totalitarian ethos and violent actions. Both Nirmala and Rajani were members of the LTTE and Nirmala was jailed for her work with them, in the very early, seemingly idealist phase as an organisation for social and political justice for the Tamils. Escaping prison, she fled to Madras as a political exile, to escape arrest and now lives in Britain. Critical of the LTTE violence, she was unable to come home for Rajani’s funeral for fear of being assassinated by the LTTE which had become a terrorist force.

So, for those of us who know this thick political history, Nirmala’s presence as the mother is loaded with memory. I am told that some found Loganathan’s Malaiyaha Tamil accent jarring in his role as a son of the Northern Tamil family. Similarly, Anu also appears to break the realist link, through her confident dance, as a fresh presence unburdened by the family history. Sumathy’s approach to acting is therefore hybrid, eclectic, unconstrained by an idea of consistency of acting style.

The silent maid is part of the family but appears alienated. In the midst of her chores, she is given a moment of attention when she sips a hot cup of tea seated quietly on a step, resting. In her unsmiling, entirely silent, sullen presence, she remains quite unknown in the way some neo-realist figures remain, as in life. They are opaque, not consumed by the narrative which was an aspect Bazin especially admired in Italian neo-realist acting, because it does not tell us how to respond to it, in the way a performance in a Hollywood film might.

The ’mad’ mother is also quite opaque, though clearly delusional, she appears quite lucid at times. As an admired Teacher of English and a mother of four children, having nursed a terminally ill husband, run a large household, and sustained a friendship, she is quite fascinating. I have never seen such a mature professional woman, presented with a complex interior and social life in the Sinhala cinema, with its lamenting mothers and venerable grandmothers in Kandyan sari.

Her monologue, delivered as she is seated on the back veranda, is worth listening to carefully for all its contradictions, lucidity and craziness. She is not quite the blindingly insightful mad Lear. But King Lear is a fierce family squabble about inheritance between an egocentric king and his children, with soaring existential poetry on a stormy heath. The Single Tumbler meditates on mass political violence, evoked by a professional woman gone mad, stuck at home, broken by the weight of her history. Nor is she the stoic Maurya, at the end of J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, after all her seven sons have died at sea. Though a mother and a grandmother, Nirmala does not present Daisy Teacher sentimentally with pathos, despite her grievous loss. Her religious faith is emphasised when we see her pray at her own little altar with holy pictures and statues of the Virgin Mary, Jesus and Saints. Though mentally delusional, Daisy Teacher, is a singular figure in Lankan cinema, made of strong mettle.

Daisy Teacher

with her short grey hair, usually wears a long chintz dress and we see her in a short white cotton nighty too. But there is a brief scene when, wearing a sari, she shuffles around the veranda calling out to Jesse and looking for Jude. Seeing her dressed in a sari for once, Lalitha exclaims going up to her saying, Amma How nicely dressed you are!’ She is draped in a luminous, soft-yellow cotton sari, with a grey and black border, with a striking dark bluish-green blouse. As she smiles in response but somewhat vacantly, we get a glimpse of her former self, a strong, handsome professional woman who dressed with flare. She even still wears a wristwatch, though she doesn’t function within chronological clock time. Nirmala’s Daisy Teacher is a superbly calibrated, illuminating performance of the mental decline and madness of a professional woman, under immense political duress.

Singing & Dancing

Song and dancing are familiar motifs in Sumathy’s films where people sing to each other, mostly when asked, but also when alone. We know that she comes from a family of trained musicians. Nirmala sings a long hymn of intersession to Mother Mary of Madhu while reading the newspaper attentively, a most engaging scene where she seems to ‘multi-task’ with ease. We are left wondering if she is as mentally disabled as we were led to believe. The sister-in-law who sings regularly in church, requires little persuasion to sing for the family and they all join in keeping time by clapping – a delightful scene. A male voice chants the Kyrie as Jude enters the church having walked by the ramparts of the old Dutch Fort (built on the Portuguese original from 1560), on his way to request that the parish priests speak to the LTTE not to expel the Muslims who are their brothers. It’s a slow walk through the long history of Mannar, which was colonised and Christianised by the Portuguese beginning in 1543 when 600 locals were baptised en masse. In another of Jude’s slow walks by the Fort and the sea we see minarets of a mosque in the distance and hear the Muslim call to prayer faintly echoing in the distance.

Then there is a long dance sequence by Daisy Teacher’s young granddaughter, Anu, who for the most part has been absorbed in her new cell phone gifted by the aunt from Canada and we see a recording of her school dance passed around. Later, out of the blue she does the same Bollywood-derived dance in the courtyard, looking at the camera, at a point in the film which marks a strong break in tone from what I think of as the elegiac sequence of the film. One doesn’t feel like asking why she is dancing and for so long, because the quality of her attention, her gaze and the strength of her gestures are in themselves sufficiently persuasive and beguiling. (To be continued)