A name etched in Sri Lankan English literary circles is Ashok Ferrey, winner of the Gratiaen Prize in 2021. Ferrey is known for his unique blend of humour, cultural commentary and vivid storytelling. Ferrey’s work often reflects his experiences and observations of life in Sri Lanka. His novels and short stories, delve into the complexities of identity, society and the human condition, all the while maintaining an engaging and accessible style. As a voice that captures the essence of contemporary Sri Lankan life, Ferrey invites readers to explore the nuances of his homeland through a lens that is both personal and universal. The Sunday Observer met Ashok to discuss his creative process, new projects and more.
Q: As a child did you ever dream you would be a famous writer?
A: Well, I can still dream because I am not famous and still write. Truth be told, I never dreamt in a thousand years that I would ever put pen to paper. I never had any particular dream, now my brother when he was young was asked what he wanted to be, he said he wanted to be the Pope and ended up being an engine driver, so his desire was diluted. In my case, I still don’t know whether I am a writer. I feel a bit of a fraud because I never did English at University, I am a pure mathematician. The long and short of it is I never dreamt of being a writer. That’s something I would like to tell young people, always keep your mind open, you never know where life is going to take a hold on you. Never, say never! I wouldn’t say be prepared for any eventuality but be open, be neutral.
Q: Do you get this sudden urge to put pen to paper?
A: No, that’s the other thing I work as a personal trainer. I have other avenues of escape, I design and build houses, I restore houses so I have other things I escape into and as a result I don’t always write. I think that helps. That’s not to say I am not aware of what’s going on but it gets into the brain and soaks up but I do not use it consciously and when I do use it, it might be a good five years later or even two months later. More often than not, I write about things much later. I let a year or two to lapse. Because I feel you don’t get to the core of something or some sequence of events immediately. A writer has the luxury of reading the cards and reading them much later, quite often even as far back as 30, 40 or 50 years later. All of a sudden I think, ‘oh that’s the reason that happened’, for that you need quite a good memory for the visuals or aural recordings of events. I think I have quite a good ear, I can recognise people not so much by seeing them but by listening to them. The ability is to be able to re-play it, years later from memory. You don’t have to consciously play it back but subconsciously recall the recording when you need it in your writings. I think that’s how it works. It’s a physiological process
Q: So far what has been your favourite piece of work or character? Or is all your work equally important to you?
A: Yeh, I think they are all equally important, asking me to select is like asking a mother to choose her favourite child, she may have favourites but she is never going to tell you. Similarly, I am never going to tell you but I can say Colpetty People is the one most people like to read. It has continuous sales and it’s our bestselling book in terms of time because it’s been around for 20 years now. Everyone naturally assumes that’s my favourite book because it’s their favourite book. But not necessarily, I have a soft spot for it because it’s like your first baby. As far as it being my best book, it’s not necessarily so. I am fond of ‘The Professional’, which many dislike. What you’re reading at present is sadly not the original version because the original version had a lot of introspective thoughts. But when I sent it to my agent, he told me to cut out the introspective parts. I was a young writer so I did what I was asked. But now I feel it would have been better if those parts remained. Then ‘Serendipity’ is crazy. I have a soft spot for it because it’s my first novel.
Q: What about your Graetian Award winning novel?
A: Ah yes, my latest release. Actually, there is a lot of me in this book. A lot of it I was writing while my mother lay dying. This book took a lot out of me. It is a personal one and it is about grief and physiologically it cost me a lot to write this book because I had to draw out things from memory while my mother lay dying. It was a very difficult book to write! However, it turned out to be the best book I ever wrote so far. I never read my books once I write them. Never ever! I don’t dare look at them, because I would probably find a hundred things wrong with it. As for this particular book I don’t think I would like to read it because it will bring back memories which I’d rather forget. In a funny way when you write a book it gives you closure. So why reopen it by reading the book again? It was heartbreaking to write this book.
Q: Are there any particular themes or messages you aim to convey in your work?
A: Not that I aim to convey them but I would like to explore them for myself so that is the mathematician in me, because in my heart I am a pure mathematician so there are always abstract ideas that I explore in the book. It’s like the skeleton of a person, the flesh is the literary part, the plot, the characterization, that’s the flesh, but the underlying theme in every book is always an abstract theme that I want to deal with. For instance in the ‘Ceaseless chatter of demons’ I explore whether there is a God above. For example, how what is the explanation when almost 40,000 people died in the tsunami, if there is a good God above how could He allow so many people to die in one go? Although, this is a comparatively small incident in the book, the entire book revolves round this theme.
There are various characters such as Kumarihamy who is one of the most complex characters who does bad things for good reasons. Now the Catholic Church says you cannot achieve good results from evil action but in contrast Kumarihamy does. Little things produce huge consequences and ultimately it is exploring whether it is really so. In the book I am now writing, it’s all about karma and predestination. There are people who surrender themselves to their karma and others who fight it and then there are others who ride it, who create their own karma; those are the real strong ones like heads of state who are so in control of their destiny. And then there are people like me who let destiny push me along. Then there are people who think that there is some divine plan and your job is to know the divine plan and accede to it graciously. There are different people who think in different ways. The new book explores all that and of course there is a funny story as well. Ultimately, deep inside it’s an abstraction about what karma is and what predestination is. Sri Lanka is the perfect place to explore it because we are obsessed about karma. It’s a part of the religion that most follow and also a part of our social fabric. Even as Christians many are still obsessed with karma. I would go so far as to say karma has nothing to do with religion but is a social element we all tend to believe. That’s in a way a uniting factor and a curious one at that. You won’t find this in England or India for that matter. They are aware of karma but are not obsessed by it in the way that we Sri Lankans are.
Q: Your characters are lively and humorous, which is a trademark in your work. Are they based on real characters?
A: Yes, almost always. These people would want to ‘kill’ me if they only knew. I have effectively didguised these characters so that they will not be identified. Half the fun of writing a book is to disguise the actual characters and to do this I sometimes even change the sex of the person. Sometimes if it’s a woman who is funny I turn her into a man. The funny thing is in the end the true characters are unable to identify themselves. That’s the beauty of it. As for the main character of “Colpetty People” who die, I remember sitting one day at a well-known bookshop and signing a book written by me and at that moment a thought just passed through my mind that this reader would return to kill me. The fact however, is he never got the chance to read the book, he passed away. At the time I was signing the book for him, I had an eerie feeling as if signifying a bad omen. I still thought to myself even if he reads it he is never going to identify the character as himself.
Because we have an inflated idea of who we really are. If we only know what other people think about us, we would kill ourselves or kill those who think otherwise. This is the reason why we can’t read what’s going on in another’s mind. If that happens World War III would break out. The second thing is rather just like in real life, I think any writer is blessed with a ‘cut to the chase’ attitude. I think we are able to read people a bit better than non writers.
My characters are outrageous everybody says and this doesn’t happen in real life. But they read my books because I take a possibility and stick it with an extreme, absurd end. You take a possibility and make it a probability with these characters. ‘Would this man really kill because you know in your mind he has murder in his heart? Although he doesn’t commit the murder you make him do so in the book. People won’t believe you unless the possibility is there, that’s my point. Authors take a situation and take it to a more absurd end.It won’t ring true unless the possibility of that outrageous end was there anyway.
Q: Can you share a personal experience that has shaped your perspective as a writer?
A: I started writing at 42, when my father was diagnosed with cancer. I had an old upbeat car which couldn’t take us very far, so we travelled to Maharagama in a tuk-tuk. They were giving him chemotherapy and radio therapy and he was 83 at the time and was taking it very bad. I realised soon the journey in the tuk-tuk, the jolting on the Maharagama Road and back in those days when the roads were full of pot holes, the journey itself would kill him. It took a lot out of me seeing him that way but I had no option but to take him in a tuk-tuk and once he got the chemo, he couldn’t eat for another 48 hours. I would force him to eat a banana while in the tuk, pleading with him ‘please eat this eat this’ because that banana was all he had to live on for the next 48 hours. It was a traumatic time for me.
I would bring him back and put him to sleep and then think what on earth, is this going to be my life? Then one day, after one of those trips I went into my son’s room and found a Raheemas exercise book belonging to him and a pencil and I wrote my first story found in “Colpetty People”. It just poured out of me; it took me about 45 minutes to write that story and it went in for publication unedited that is how it was. It came out complete. I remember looking at that story and thinking what have I done, I have written a story that’s not my life, I am a builder what am I doing writing. I didn’t take it very seriously but this is the strangest thing, it was one of the funniest stories I have ever written. So it had nothing to do with the tragedy going on in the next room. This just shows how you can channel your mind into good things and move away from an evil act.
The evil act was my father dying in the next room. It wasn’t evil per se, it wasn’t that any person was evil but the situation was. And then here I was writing this story about this German woman who won’t pay rent. This was one of the strangest events in my life. Here I was exhausted and drowning in sorrow. Literally mentally exhausted with dealing with my father’s cancer, then I go into the next room and write this story which has nothing to do with the situation I was facing. It’s physiological not mental at all. It was a strange experience in my life.
Q: As a successful Sri Lankan English author what challenges have you faced in the literary world?
A: I have faced many challenges but I think I am old enough to talk about it now. I think the West has preconceived notions about what Sri Lanka is like. If you walk down the street and see a beggar you have preconceived notions about who that beggar is. You would be surprised to know that the beggar might actually be happier than you. The beggar might go to a five star home and have chicken biriyani for dinner. He might actually be quite rich. Sri Lankans are not beggars.
However, I think the West entertains preconceptions of what we are. These notions are aided and abetted by people who write about this country but don’t live here. It’s difficult to write about a country and its people if you don’t live in that country. It is difficult for a foreigner to get a true picture of Sri Lanka and read the cards well. As I said earlier, you need to read the cards to be a good writer.
An expatriate writing about Sri Lanka quite often gets the picture wrong and more often than not, even if they don’t get it wrong they don’t often get it right. But, that is the narrative the West will believe because those books are published in the West and are read by westerners far more than our local books which don’t see the light of day in the West. So the narrative belongs to those expat writers. They are sure to be angry with this statement but this is the truth as I see it. We Sri Lankan writers have to work twice as hard to get our voices heard. If you are a writer in South Sudan and if you write a book about female genital mutilation it will probably get published, the West will take it seriously. If you write a book in South Sudan of people enjoying themselves at a wedding that book won’t see the light of day.
Because westerners feel that in South Sudan people are not happy and are miserable and starving. The reason for this is our standards of journalism are poor. Journalists don’t take the trouble to find out the truth. Writers are even less. You can sit in London or New York or Toronto and go on the internet and learn all about South Sudan from articles but you don’t bother to go there. I am not saying you cannot write about something you don’t know but you have a duty to learn about the situation of a country. Sri Lanka is so complex it is one of the most complex countries in the world, and I find that even after having lived here for the past 35-years I sometimes find it difficult to get the hang of it.
Q: Is it difficult to break into Sri Lankan literary circles?
A: Yes on the one hand it’s very difficult for people outside to read the cards properly here and difficult to tell the truth and for them to believe it. My weapon is to make it funny. I weaponise humour because that way anyone reading in the West will say this is absurd, this is not how it happened. Trust me, everything I write is taken from real life, it’s just that I have disguised it. My characters are real life ones. I make fun of them but it is really how it happens in this country. In a way, Sri Lanka is a ‘La La Land’ where it’s difficult to imagine what you write as being realistic because there is a charming absurdity to it.
It’s easier to get a publisher abroad if you pander to the foreign, widely accepted narrative. If you don’t pander to that narrative and think as a writer you need to tell the truth and it’s often difficult to get published. But then there is the other side which I have seen time and time again. Foreign writers come here and have a patronising view of how things are and they take great pains to hide that view but it all comes out under the influence of liquor. It’s just that western narratives are strong and writers have a difficult time to break through.
Q: Are there any upcoming projects or themes you are excited to explore that you would like to share with your readers?
A: Yes my new book is coming up and it’s about karma, but it’s presented in a light hearted and enjoyable way. My daughter would say that the karma part is boring, take it out. So I fought her every inch of the way. Iit was a battle. I think I just won; I cut out most of the bad jokes. But I kept the karma bits in, so forgive me if you find the karma bits boring but there are lots of us like me who find that part quite interesting and need to be explored. I am not trying to criticise religion because for me, as a Christian I think karma is as much a part of my life as it is the part of a Buddhist’s. It’s more of a cultural thing. In Sri Lanka we are superstitious. We are one of the most superstitious countries in the world, and the Buddha never talked about superstition.
Q: How was the feeling when you were declared winner of the Gratiaen Prize?
A: Do you know I have been short-listed for the Gratiaen Prize on four occasions! It’s like coming up to the altar for the fourth time and for once I was not jilted. I always say I am the bridesmaid, never the bride, so finally when you win it’s an anti climax. Is this it? I asked myself. And it was just after Covid so it wasn’t the fault of Gratiaen but it was a subdued affair. That’s probably karma trying to teach me something. As if to say ‘don’t take these things for granted, just because you won it doesn’t make you a great writer’. I pity those who win it the first time, because then you have nowhere else to go after you have climbed the highest mountain. Also it will give you this false notion that you’re the best writer. This is not true! You’re only as good as your last book. Don’t get me wrong I am thrilled after 20 years of writing, slogging away and turning up with my pile of five manuscripts, but then when you win ‘It’s like oh my god that’s happened so anyway that’s it!”
Q: What advice would you give young aspiring writers?
A: Open yourself to all experiences in life. If you are young, I would also say go out and live a little because you cannot be a good writer unless you have faced life experiences. You need these experiences and strange happenings to keep your mind open to unusual, fresh possibilities. The other thing is to read, read and read! Because, mastery of the language is paramount. You can’t break rules without learning them. For writing one needs to know grammar, vocabulary, metaphors and similes. I have to say that one must excel in all these aspects. When my book goes to my editor, there are times when he tells me “You can’t use a capital letter here”. I say yes I know, but it’s my way of writing. Editors love putting commas, I hate commas. I know there should be a comma but I tell them I don’t need a comma there please take it out. And often with a new book I would have a battle with commas. Know your trade well, then, you can afford to break the rules. You learn the rules first and then you have the liberty to break it. Master your craft well, then you can break the rules. You must live life and be open to the world around you don’t shut yourself from living life.
