Did cricket make an allegory for Sri Lanka?/'Cricket seemed a neat way to talk about Sri Lanka'

'Cricket seemed a neat way to talk about Sri Lanka'

Srijana Mitra Das , TNN | Feb 6, 2012, 12.00AM IST

Shehan Karunatilaka has written Chinaman, a story of cricket, life and death in Sri Lanka - which won the $50,000 DSC prize at the 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival. Karunatilaka spoke with Srijana Mitra Das about balancing a day job with writing at dawn, hanging out with alcoholics as research - and cricket as an allegory for Sri Lanka itself:

Please tell us about your book.

The idea was basically a detective story about a drunk who's trying to track down a mysterious cricketer. I was working at the time as a copywriter in advertising in Colombo. When this idea hit, i started writing early mornings. I'm not a morning person but i forced myself to wake up at four, write a couple of hours before work and after a few months, i had 80 pages. I realised i needed to do my homework. Sri Lankans are obsessed with cricket and there'd be many guys to pinpoint mistakes. So for two years, i watched Sri Lankan cricket matches, read cricket books and hung out with drunks. I guess the book was finished because the research wasn't quite work...if you catch drunks before six, they're quite coherent and articulate. After six, no chance, they're all babbling. But they've got very interesting theories about cricket and Sri Lanka, so i was jotting these down and then writing in the morning.

Did cricket make an allegory for Sri Lanka?

It became thata¦a lot of Sri Lankan books are about the tsunami, the war or inter-racial love affairs. I was interested in ideas that weren't to do with thosea¦it seemed really strange actually that no one had used cricket before as a fictional backdrop, considering the game is such an obsession...it fell into place but it only later occurred to me when revising the book that the protagonist, Pradeep Mathew, this cricketing genius who happened to be born in Sri Lanka and therefore never realised his potential, was a metaphor for Sri Lanka itself.

It's a beautiful country blessed with so many resources and gifts but in 50 years of independence, we've squandered all of that. We're an underachieving economy, we've had a 30-year civil war and corruption at all levels. Cricket just seemed a neat way to talk about Sri Lanka through a character who's a failed genius. So yeah, the allegory fit well with the story.

Was dashing between rapid advertising and intensive fiction-writing easy?

It's the same muscles you're flexing, whether you're coming up with a headline, print ad, radio spot or a novel. You're absorbing facts about a product or setting and then, you sit there and stare at a blank piece of paper and come up with stuff. Advertising is a lot more immediate. If you're lucky, you have three hours to crack a brief and you present something quickly. Novel-writing is a process. It's being there for four hours a day, thinking of the same thing, analysing what you wrote before, doing research. It's like T-20 versus a Test match, let's say.

Speaking of different forms, why did you so determinedly stay away from themes of brutality in Sri Lankan history?

That stuff has been written of at length. Blogs, for example, are full of them. I just didn't feel i had a voice that was coherent, original, even well-informed. I didn't want to touch stuff i didn't know about...and i wanted to write a light-hearted novel. Cricket was a nice way i could talk about this stuff - without seeming to.