Fiction and history, passion and despair fuse in the tale of a city
That'S typically Muller, as readers of the Sri Lankan author would know. His might be the story of Sonnyboy von Bloss and a smoke-spewing locomotive which chug-chugs through hamlets in Yakada Yaka. Or, it might be a portrait of Colombo, a war-torn city which fell to the Portuguese first, the Dutch next, and the English thereafter. In his approach to writing, Muller remains immutable.
With Colombo, however, Muller has surpassed the brilliance of his previous novels. The reason: his choice of a theme which allows him to explore the city's past that has slipped into history. He has written a 'factitious' narrative—with facts anchoring the plot while characters pop in and out to generate a unified quasi-fictional texture.
Muller's modern-day Colombo is a city where people parade an inane belief in the supernatural; where gods sleep at night while devils stalk the streets; where beggars are 'manufactured' in an assembly line; where 60 per cent of the prostitutes come from middle or upper middle-class families; where politics and polemics go side by side in most conceivable aspects of social life.
The text's grim tone takes the reader by surprise. A substantial part of the narrative unfolds through visions of a city in darkness. The sprightly pace of The Burgher Trilogy is displaced by a slow and observant scrutiny of Colombo's momentous past and its lacklustre present.
The author isn't an ecstatic Mark Twain who had described the city as "utterly Oriental...utterly tropical" while indulging in "Oriental conflagrations of costume". An inhabitant and not a sojourner, Muller finds himself attached to far too many issues to be passionately uncritical. Disillusioned with the farce of pseudo-modernity, and aware of everyman's struggles to keep realities at bay, the best he can do is exclaim: "Behind the wealth, corruption; behind the gloss, leprosy. Oh, Oh, Colombo!" Is he being pompously pessimistic, one is tempted to ask.
Is he being self-pitying when the need doesn't arise? Is his approach a wilful attempt to condone virtues that exist everywhere—be it in a corrupt human being, or a populous city that merely grows but doesn't develop? Is he trying to suppress consciously his flair for painting vivid comedies in a commoner's life like he did in the cases of Sonnyboy von Bloss and the Burgher railwaymen?
No. No. And, no. For Muller, who knows his Colombo as well as Narayan knows the streets of his fictitious Malgudi, makes an explicit declaration at the book's outset: "I make no apologies for the dark pictures I have painted." The inclusions are deliberate, and have been primarily made to portray a Colombo whose "face changes continuously" and whose "vices are legion". It is a crowded city "racked by pollution and rimmed by shanty towns" that have become "Asia's hallmark" today.
Muller's is a kind of realism that, helped by the quality of his evocative prose, transforms the book into a mouthpiece for the under-privileged. Most of the time he is absorbed in the changing skyline of Colombo which has added little to the quality of living. While shops sell imported goods, beach wadis (the temporary cabanas) have something else to offer: young children who are tempted into submission to "tourists, usually the types with peculiar sexual tastes and inclinations. They come from Germany and Nepal, Thailand and Scandinavia".
Moulding the language like plasticine while he changes his tone with effortless ease, Muller's one real strength manifests itself in his treatment of monumentalised pettiness. With uncertainty the only certainty, the commoner feeds off the memories of furtive escapades. "Was this love, he wondered. Or was it simply the umbrella?...It propped them, blanketed them, screened them, protected them, also hounded them to be daring, to search each other."
In a journey through darkness, such a description is an oddity. And rightly so, since Muller's Colombo is not a lover's haunt but a new drug centre with 50,000 addicts; apart from being a city where "militancy, smuggling, dissent, tax evasion" can defeat the "strictures of the current law and its framework".
Colombo has gone haywire, he insists, validating his argument with an awesome support-base of data. History survives through ruins in a city heading towards ruin, he makes one feel. Is Muller's Colombo a part of the Ceylon that Anton Chekov had said was a site of Paradise?
No, one can assert again. Since the reality is this: Colombo is Paradise Lost.