Urala is a town near Galle in the south of Sri Lanka. Its existence could be fiction, but it could equally have been, or be reality. Daily life there, as anywhere, is a mixture of the expected and the unexpected, change and tradition, ritual and experimentation, received values and new directions. In fact, Urala is more or less like any place where people live their lives, set up homes, get married, have children maybe, grow up and die for sure. So what is special about Urala? Well, at first glance, nothing. But this town has the distinction of having its daily life described in some detail by J. Vijayatunga in his book Grass For My Feet.
This is not a novel. Nor is it a factual account, a social study of a community. And these cannot easily be called tales. There are no obvious plot lines. Grass For My Feet is more of a collection of descriptive or occasional pieces, approaching in style to a regular newspaper column, of the “letter from” genre. Sometimes something typical is presented. Sometimes it is an event, and other times the focus is merely inter- and intra-family relationships. But the reader should not expect a drama to unfold, not even something resembling a linear story. And perhaps it’s better to approach these pieces one or two per session, rather than as a start-and-end collection.
The tales cover many aspects of village life. There are robberies, weddings, even a murder, funerals and births. There is an argument or two. There are inheritances, ceremonies, religious holidays and visits to the doctor, traditional remedies along with apothecary potions. We entertain Bikkhus and then we do it again. We visit temples, prepare food for parties and celebrations, and then eat it. We describe food, grow it, praise family livestock, harvest fruit, winnow grain, plant trees, climb and cut trees. And we also walked through the woods, memorably.
This is, then, the life of the town in the middle of the last century, write as small as it was and as big as it felt. Sri Lanka is Ceylon in much of this text and there are still English settlers in administrative positions. There’s a reverence for things European (at least white and English) along with the assumption that anything local is better. But there is also change in the air, despite the fact that its advance is almost imperceptible.
The style is unconventional in that Mr. Vijayatunga’s paragraphs are often long and winding, often without focus or point. But again, life in Urala is probably just like that, and these pieces are offered as an impressionistic record of that life and the culture that sustains it. In the end, we feel that we have been there, in this Sri Lankan village, we felt its warmth, we wandered through its forest, we tasted its food and we were grateful for our invitation. But we are also aware that it is a matter of a remembered past and, to a certain extent, of a reconstructed ideal. The experience is rich enough to convince us that we can never, as literary tourists, understand the true meaning of these memories for the villagers themselves. We are strangers and remain so even at the end of the book. Yet between the covers of Grass for My Feet, we are invited and allowed to share in the life of a Ceylon village. So if this is tourism, it’s the richer, more enlightening kind.