Serendipity
by Ashok Ferrey
Self-published pp208
ISBN: 978-955-99819-1-6

Sri Lanka was a pleasant surprise. I had been expecting a bad copy of India made in China, but five minutes after landing in Colombo, I realised that the teardrop of India was a separate, proud reality. The country is utterly beautiful, so fertile that if you plant a cigarette butt, you will find a whole carton the following day. But what shimmers a gleam in your eye is the country’s honesty. Here is a nation which is not what it pretends to be – rather, it proudly is. And despite years of strife, bombs and war, everyone trusts life.

Such a beautiful context makes for happy accidents – there is the serendipity of block colour tuk tuks buzzing like bees around blind corners; the flocking together of shooting stars; a gust of wind setting the smell of cinnamon trees free; the staccato of food vendors on the train selling steaming hot delicacies for next to nothing.

Sri Lankan author Ashok Ferrey’s Serendipity is a collection of similar happy happenings. While on the road to apparent unhappiness, the characters in Mr Ferrey’s novel fall off their high horses to experience life-changing epiphanies.

Since such coincidences are more likely to happen with a large cast, Mr Ferrey introduces a long line of characters.

There is Piyumi Segarajasingham, who cold-shoulders her London life and her pretentious mother and returns to Sri Lanka to take possession of her inheritance. Skanda, the grocery store owner, in reality heads a shady organisation while Marek, who goes to Skanda’s for a carton of guava juice, meets and falls madly in love with Piyumi. So does Deb, who also has to swat away the unwanted attention of tuk tuk driver Viraj. Then there is Marek’s mother, who begins an affair with her neighbour Dennis Ridoynauth.

With a cast of more than 20 characters, Serendipity moves fast, the kind of book that you read in one sitting. The brief chapters just burst off the pages – such sinewy brevity owes a lot to Mr Ferrey’s strength in short story writing. In fact, Serendipity is Mr Ferrey’s first novel, following two collections of short stories, Colpetty People and The Good Little Ceylonese Girl.

Mr Ferrey, whose two previous books were shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize, Sri Lanka’s premier literary award, has an ambiguous relationship with his characters. He sympathises with them but also gives them below-the-belt knocks that go beyond satire. This is Mr Ferrey’s primary strength as an author – his witty, laugh-out-loud one-liners. Some are just masterful. The little cruelties that Marek inflicts on his mother are “like so many sushi on a plate”.

There are two downsides to Mr Ferrey’s enjoyment of his own wit. At times, they border on the narcissistic – Mr Ferrey knows he is good with words and sometimes overdoes it. Halfway through the book, Mr Rodrigo, the Minister for Internal Affairs, reasons how “There is no point being in charge of Internal Affairs if you can’t have an affair with an intern”. That’s self-conscious punning at its best.

The second side-effect is that sometimes, one-liners fall so hard and fast that they just overwhelm the reader. Moreover, since they are dished out by all the characters, this takes away from their individuality – they come across as mere mouthpieces for the author.

Although Mr Ferrey’s writing is buffed and polished, there are some sloppy instances. Serendipity is set in the 1980s, yet there is a mention of Twitter. Also, since Piyumi leaves Sri Lanka in 1983 as a little girl, there is no way she can be practising as a barrister by 1989.

Despite such shortcomings, Serendipity is a very clever work, wittily observational, engaging and colourful. Like Sri Lanka itself, it is still trying to find feet, but while doing so, it can perform a beautiful dance.

• For Mr Borg, books bring us closer to the truth.

The review copy of this title is the reviewer’s own.