By SH Lim

Title : Funny Boy
Author: Shyam Selvadurai
TOKL Rating : 4/5
Vintage, RM45.90

This isn’t quite a novel. Yet, neither is it a collection of short separate stories. They are all told by ‘funny boy’, Arjie Chelvaratnam, a pubescent Tamil boy growing up in Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lanka. Each story stands quite independently of the others, yet each builds on the reader’s growing understanding of the country’s socio-political situation and the Chelvaratnams’ familial dynamics as detailed in the preceding story. So there’s great benefit reading the work turning the pages in a sequential order, rather than something more random. Perhaps it is aptly called ‘a novel in six stories’.

The first story reveals why Arjie is a funny boy. It has everything and more to do with his way of seeing and expressing himself in the world. When visiting his grandmother’s with all in the extended family, he would always  join in and lead the girls in their activities. ‘The pleasure the boys had standing for hours on a cricket field under the sweltering sun, watching the batsmen run from crease to crease, was incomprehensible to me,’ he says. But events soon banish him from the domain of the girls without giving him any entrance into the boys. Arjie’s awakening to his difference from other children is accompanied by his complicity in his aunt’s relationship with a Sinhalese boy and his mother’s trysts with a former lover.

The complications in his life parallel the growing interethnic tensions in the country. While in the first story, the conflict is personal and domestic—bickering with a cousin and with his older brother—the latter stories deal with ethnic and public enmity. And it wouldn’t take much for us Malaysians to appreciate the violence of Sri Lankan laws like the Prevention of Terrorism Act which allows the police to hold someone without reasonable cause.  Or the notion that race spells criminality. Arjie’s father response to the question, ‘Why would [the authorities] accuse us?’ is ‘These days, every Tamil is a Tiger until proven otherwise’. Arjie’s mother’s response to the increasing ethnic violence is migration to Australia, America or Canada. Sounds familiar?

‘Funny Boy’ is funny, although less chuckle ha-ha than poignant-catching-your- breath. Initial laughter at children’s antics and name-calling are replaced by the pain of witnessing race riots, interethnic killings; and the realization that prejudice at any age is not-to-be-tolerated violence. SH LIM