Inga Simpson interviews Rajith Savanadasa

Inga Simpson interviews Rajith Savanadasa about his debut novel, Ruins.


Rajith Savanadasa’s debut novel, Ruins, is a vibrant portrait of a family, city and country in the midst of change. It is set in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, around the end of the thirty-year civil war, in 2009. Initially, the conflict is off in the distance, reflecting Savanadasa’s own experience. The war was ‘Something happening up in the north,’ he says, ‘not part of daily reality.’ And yet it was the defining feature of his generation: ‘Most of my life I lived through the civil war.’

Savanadasa now views his former home ‘from afar’, having moved to Melbourne in 2001. His parents and sister still live in Colombo, and he goes back each year. Savanadasa says that prior to Ruins, he had tried writing Australian stories but they just didn’t work: ‘I felt like I had things to say about Sri Lanka.’

Ruins is told from the points of view of five family members, each revealing a different perspective, and the growing tensions between them. There are the usual generational conflicts. Niranjan, who finished his schooling in Australia, is itching to get out of home, and begin his own life. His sister, Anoushka, loves hardcore music and wants more freedom, and the acceptance of her peers. Their mother, Lakshmi, to protect them from the perils of modern life, attempts to enforce traditional values at every turn. Father and husband Mano, although on the surface more liberal, embodies the deeply embedded rules of Sri Lankan society. As Savanadasa explains, ‘There are certain things you just can’t talk about.’

Mano is Sinhalese and Lakshmi, Tamil. It is rarely discussed, and yet defines the family. It isn’t until we hear Lakshmi’s voice that the impacts of war come to the forefront: ‘The north and the east were quiet. The war had ended, a sheet pulled over its face. I almost couldn’t believe it. I stopped getting pictures of the dead.’ The war has been characterised as being against terrorists, the Tamil Tigers, rather than between Tamils and Sinhalese. The falseness of this is shown through Lakshmi’s experience. She receives stories of devastation, of people wanting her help, and attempts to enlist Mano to locate a particular boy, but Mano is reluctant to get involved.

In many ways, however, Ruins belongs to Latha. Although part of the family unit, there are clear demarcations, with Latha often referred to as ‘the servant’ or ‘that woman’. When the family takes a road trip out of Colombo for the funeral of Latha’s nephew – a soldier killed in the conflict – the story opens up, like the countryside.

Nona pointed at mountains far away that looked like elephants lying down, at temples, lime-washed and clean, standing like milk teeth against the earth and blue-green paddies.

The family stop at ruins on the way, tangible markers of history, and the intersections of old and new. This shift, from an urban landscape to rural Sri Lanka, ‘just happened’ during the writing process, Savanadasa says. He based the structure of Ruins loosely on the ancient stone artefact known in Sinhala as the Sandakada Pahana, or moonstone, which encompasses Buddhist notions of the wheel of life.

The further the family travel, the more the war encroaches. At a checkpoint manned by Sinhala soldiers, Lakshmi is nervous about producing her identification papers, fearing the possibility of arrest, and the family fumble their story, creating confusion as to the purpose of their travel, and the composition of the family unit. It is the normally passive Latha who takes charge:

‘They’re taking me to the funeral,’ I said. ‘And staying at a guest house in Anuradhapura because there’s no room at my sister’s house. It’s not a holiday.’

There are uniformed soldiers at the funeral, and the complex collision of Latha’s birth family with the family she works for, and lives with, brings all of the societal structures of race, caste, class and gender to bear on Latha. But the rest of the family is unravelling, too.

Nirinjan’s emerging maturity, and experience outside of Sri Lanka, enables an empathy for Latha. Here, Savanadasa draws on his own ambivalence towards some of Sri Lanka’s social structures. He recalls his increasing awareness of the circumstances of his family’s long-term servant, Yasa: ‘We would tell ourselves that she was better off out of the village, but she didn’t have a proper bed.’ As Savanadasa observes, today class differences are being continued ‘willingly’ and are slowing change.

Grounded in Savanadasa’s own experience of family and country, Ruins is alive with the colourful sights, sounds, and smells of daily Colombo life, from the trishaws careering along crowded streets, tropical downpours, Latha’s cooking, take-away dishes from Flower Drum, and Mano’s hidden arrack glass, to the beggars on their cardboard and newspaper beds. The text is rich with the cadence of local vernacular and everyday conversation, which tends to stick to the safe ground of cars and, of course, cricket.

Photograph by Craig Peihopa

Ruins was shortlisted for the 2014 Queensland Writers Centre/Hachette manuscript development program. After a process of reworking the manuscript, particularly the second half, Savanadasa was offered a contract by Hachette Australia. The good news call realised a dream, but came at a poignant moment. He had just returned from Colombo, where he had been visiting Yasa, who was seriously ill at the time. Ruins is dedicated to her.

Savanadasa has been hailed as one of a new wave of diverse Australian voices. While divisions of race, class and gender are, at first glance, less visible here than in Sri Lanka, he sees fiction as offering opportunities to explore ‘commonalities and difference’ and to engage readers in an ongoing conversation.

In addition to his fiction writing, which he is currently squeezing in between his work four days a week and the waking hours of his young daughter, Savanadasa is also the founder of Open City Stories, which documents the stories of Melbourne asylum seekers, and follows their lives. Seeing firsthand the critical role of translation in enabling such stories to be heard has inspired his next novel, told from the point of view of an asylum seeker.


Inga Simpson is the author of Mr Wigg, Nest and Where the Trees Were. In 2015, she was awarded a QLD Writers Fellowship to develop her next novel, Willowman.

Rajith Savanadasa was born in Sri Lanka and now lives in Melbourne. He was shortlisted for the Asia-Europe Foundation short story prize in 2013, the Fish Publishing short story prize in 2013, received a Wheeler Centre Hotdesk Fellowship in 2014 (supported by The Readings Foundation) and was part of the QWC/Hachette Manuscript Development Program in 2014. Ruins is his debut novel. Rajith is also the founder and primary contributor to Open City Stories, a website documenting the lives of a group of asylum seekers in Melbourne.

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Cover image for Ruins

Ruins

Rajith Savanadasa

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