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Phantom queer >> Shyam Selvadurai on his alternate selves in Cinnamon Gardens by JULIET WATERS
Instead, he left Sri Lanka in 1984, at the age of 19. He went on to publish an autobiographical first novel, Funny Boy, about growing up queer in an upper-class family in Colombo, and became a full-time writer, thanks to the success of that novel. And for the last four years, he's struggled to write a radically different book, Cinnamon Gardens, a tragedy of manners that centres around the life of a gay man living in a dead marriage in 1920s Ceylon. "Like apples and oranges," laughs Selvadurai about how different the two books are. Funny Boy was an intimate, first-person, uncomplicated, charming and... well, funny account. Cinnamon Gardens has the tone and structure of a dark Victorian clash with society, and is packed with characters who, on the surface, seem to bear no resemblance to the 33-year-old author. Yet there is an invisible bond between he and Balendran, a married gay man in his 40s battling to live in a repressed, conformist, colonial society: "As a gay man, you can imagine that that phantom figure always walks, step by step, with me. Perhaps I would have married and perhaps I would have been like Balendran. While I didn't intend this as I was writing the novel, in retrospect I think that he is that phantom person, that other me." While his life in Canada seems relatively easy compared to the stifling lives of the characters in Cinnamon Gardens, writing a complicated, tightly structured second novel was far from easy. Much of this struggle had to do with the normal pressure of writing a second novel after an award-winning and internationally well-received first novel. But this hurdle was raised by his decision to return to Sri Lanka to get to the emotional core of that "phantom self." "I had to return to write this book. To remind myself that there's a freedom here, in Canada, that we take for granted on some levels. And that we don't quite know the price of rebelling against conformity. Going back to Sri Lanka was a way of totally understanding--emotionally--the price of non-conformity. I had to feel it in my own bones again before I could translate it into the characters. And I also had to remind myself of the enormous courage it takes to do even the smallest little acts. Like even riding a bicycle." Even today, riding a bicycle through the sporadically bomb-torn streets of Colombo involves a certain degree of courage. But Selvadurai is referring to the trials of another character in Cinnamon Gardens--Annalukshimi, Balendran's proto-feminist niece. In a family shocked by bicycle riding, it takes more independence than we might realize to consider refusing the pressure to marry so that she can continue with a teaching career. Based on a great aunt of Selvadurai's, exploring the character of Anna was the original impetus for writing Cinnamon Gardens. But only as he begins to discuss her does Selvadurai start to ponder the ways in which she may represent another "phantom self." Maybe the self he might have been if he'd stayed single and celibate, and lived a life of much smaller rebellions. "I suppose I'll never know where my writing comes from or where it's going to take me," he muses. In the meantime, he seems pretty happy to have some time to coast before he hits the next fork in the road. Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai, McClelland and Stewart, hc, 389 pp, $29.99
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"When you're an immigrant," says Shyam Selvadurai over a Perrier at Else's, "you take a fork in the road. But along the other road walks another person, who is a phantom version of yourself. You always wonder, at the point that the roads forked, what would have happened if you had stayed."