Sudha Devi Nayak
‘Suncatcher’ is the coming of age story of two boys in the throes of adolescence. The book by internationally acclaimed Sri Lankan writer Romesh Gunesekera, whose first book, ‘Reef’, featured in the Booker shortlist, 1994, is against the backdrop of disarray in the ruling Government, linguistic chauvinism and burgeoning nationalism in Ceylon. It captures the pangs of growing up with its share of adventure and bravado, love and pain, joy and sorrow, dreams and awakenings. It is, above all, the endearing friendship of two young boys, Kairo from an ordinary middle class set up and Jay from a privileged background. Jay introduces Kairo to the glorious adventure of growing up. Bird sightings, bat trailing, building of aviaries and fish tanks, and riding horses and cars of his uncle Elwin.
Kairo leads a normal if boring life of a youngster reading westerns and comics and bicycle rides dreaming of a future where he could figure. It is only when he meets Jay at the chocolate parlour that he enters a different world of fantasy, spirit and joy. A predestined moment perhaps, as Kairo says, “I needed a guide, a hero, illuminator”. Sunbeam, the pretty yellow bird he caught is symbolic of Jay’s magnetic personality as the milk bar owner remarks, “He could catch the sun in a thunderstorm, if he wanted to.” While they build fish tanks and aviaries at Jay’s place, Kairo realises that in “Jay’s world, you could pin the Sun to a wall, hang the Moon from the ceiling. You could make the world a safer place. Nothing was impossible.”
As the boys get really close sharing an adolescence replete with joyous cycling experiences, Kairo feels a sense of entitlement to Jay and resents any interference in their friendship, including the friendship of the girl Niromi, with Jay. The trip to Elwin’s estate opens up a world of opportunity with car rides, bird sightings, shooting, rafting and make-believe games where a young estate hand was blinded in one eye and the manner they left him without a pang of conscience with all the callousness of youth. Jay is also the hero who rescues Channa from his tormentors and the three boys forge a, ‘All for one; one for all’ bond.
By end of the book, we see the marriage of Jay’s parents unravelling and the boy, never really close to his parents, plunging deeper into and seeking solace in his adventures. Jay’s life ends in a daredevil car accident with Kairo and Channa and Kairo learns after he recovers that Jay is no more. Kairo says, “I wept for the life I had lost. Mine as well as his.” Nothing can compare with the loss of the young who are unable to comprehend the sheer senselessness of the loss and the larger questions of life and death. “I wanted the world to stop. For nothing more ever to happen.” The loss is indeed complete. He says, “I never visited Elvin’s mansion again, or Casa Lihiniya with its garden and rooftop, the balcony, the fish, the birds, the vale of my blossoming; that whole magical world of discovery shifted out of reach and into a place of permanent impossibilities.”
Much later, Kairo goes in search of lost time to a distant beach where he once saw thousands of birds with Jay; but those barn swallows are no longer there. But then he sees a firefly, luminous, tripping along from one point of darkness to another, the glimmer of the firefly, holding out possibilities that everything is not over and their friendship endures beyond death with memories of joyous times that once were. Thus the novel ends on a note of light.
Gunesekera gives us the world of two young innocents, unencumbered by the realities of life, in his exquisite, translucent prose of lyrical beauty laced with metaphor and image. Fish were “sparks that swerved in water” and birds “clap with their wings and applaud the sky”. A master craftsman who could recreate childhood and adolescence with its precious, sanctified friendships we can all identify with.