The Ceaseless Chatter of an Island

Ciara Mandulee Mendis An enlightening dialogue between two Sri Lankan writers—Ashok Ferrey and Ciara Mandulee Mendis. Ashok Ferrey, one of Sri Lanka’s best-known authors writing in English, is known for his sharp wit, satirical voice, and deeply human characters. His works include Colpetty People, Serendipity, The Good Little Ceylonese Girl, The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons, and several others, including The Unmarriageable Man, for which he won the Gratiaen Prize, the most coveted prize awarded for Sri Lankan writing in English.

It is not every day that you sit with an author whose wit slices through colonial hangover and whose characters haunt you long after you finish the book.  

So, join me as I speak with the legendary Ashok Ferrey—the mathematician, the builder, the personal trainer, and the iconic Sri Lankan English writer—as he shares his insights about matters of the home and heart, and what it means to build a story—in concrete and on the page. As a writer rooted in Sri Lanka, but often placed within the larger South Asian and global literary currents, how do you negotiate the balance between the intensely local with local references and the broadly regional? Are you conscious of the audience when writing a story? I once had a crazy job on a cruise ship lecturing millionaires about Sri Lanka. A Vietnamese woman came to me brandishing a copy of Colpetty People, my first book. “You have written about my life in Saigon before I came to the States!” She said excitedly. I had never been to Vietnam. You can imagine how happy I felt that what I had written, which was intensely local, had a resonance with a society at the other end of Asia. If the intensely local has essential truth at its core, it can’t fail to have meaning elsewhere. Sri Lanka, in all its contradictions and charm, often pulses at the heart of your stories. How do you navigate the line between affection and critique when writing about home? My mother was someone who was difficult to live with, and even more difficult to live without, but never ever boring. I often say that Sri Lanka is the same. It is easy to navigate between the unqualified love and the intense irritation: we who live here have no other option!

Ashok Ferrey

Writers from the South Asian region often walk a tightrope, telling stories deeply rooted in culture without reducing them to spectacle for a Western gaze. How have you approached writing Sri Lankan life in a way that feels honest to the place and its people, without exoticising it for outside readers? This is an extremely difficult question to answer. First of all, what does exotic mean? Having lived abroad for 23 years, there are many things that seem unusual to me, which are perfectly normal to someone who has lived in Sri Lanka their whole life, and vice versa. So, who is to be the national arbiter of exoticism? Sri Lanka is so diverse, it means so many different things to so many people, that it is dangerous to pigeonhole it into one small box of ‘normality.’ The only way out is for us writers to write the truth of what we see and feel, resisting the temptation to pander. I am often told that my ‘truth’ is so crazy, it can’t possibly be true! Trust me, it is. (Being quite off my rocker helps, I think.) Often, the truth in Sri Lanka is so much stranger than any fiction I could imagine, trust me. That is why it is such a great place for writers! Your work often carries an undercurrent of humour. Is it something you do involuntarily, or is it used as a tool when crafting your stories? When my first book was published, I had no idea it was ‘funny’. It certainly wasn’t meant to be. I have since come to realise that humour is something a writer is either born with or not. It is actually God-given. Anyone can make you cry. Only a handful of people can make you laugh. What I have learnt over the years is how to make that joke funnier by tightening it up. Often, a misplaced comma will kill a joke. And if a joke has to be explained, it is no longer a joke. So, the humour is definitely involuntary; you can never take it for granted; all you can do is refine it. On a similar note, I have observed that the comic often walks hand in hand with the melancholy in your writing. Do you ever find readers mistaking humour for lightness? How do you ensure it carries weight?

All the time! There is a conspiracy (I think by dull people) to regard humour as somehow lightweight and disreputable. It is a sign of the times. We are back in a sort of Victorian age of false prudery and pious worthiness: we have to wear our hearts on our sleeves at all times lest we be mistaken for fools. As for the melancholy, that is always there: humour needs its dark twin, sadness. But if you mistake humour for lightness, you do so at your peril. You’ve written across genres, and we find your stories in the form of both novels and short stories. How do you decide the shape a story must take? Has genre ever surprised you mid-way?

If you look closely, every one of my novels is an expansion of some short story I’ve written over the years. The technical knowledge needed to write a novel is far greater. But the flash of brilliance a short story might contain can never be equalled in a novel. I adore short stories; sadly, I am told there is no appetite for them: publishers demand novels.

If you don’t write about civil war, or famine, or female genital mutilation, you are seen somehow as being inauthentic. Almost a traitor. Because, of course, people in the West know better, don’t they?

Your characters seem to stumble through life, delightfully flawed, comically tragic. Where do they come from? Are they inspired by real-life people, or are they completely fictitious?

They are ALL inspired by real people. I think Sri Lanka specialises in mad people. Often, as you know, the truth here is far stranger than fiction. So I have one difficult job: to prevent people from recognising themselves. Luckily, we all have such a high opinion of ourselves that we almost never recognise ourselves in print! Many South Asian writers speak of carrying ghosts—colonial ghosts, familial ghosts, language ghosts. Are there any such ghosts that haunt your writing? If so, how do you get rid of those ghosts?

You don’t ever get rid of those ghosts. Instead, you bury them by writing about them. That generally keeps them happy. But some come back to haunt you even after many years of burial. My last book, The Unmarriageable Man, was about my father’s death: it took twenty years for me to be able to write about it. I felt such a great sense of relief after I wrote it. Having written it, I have been able to erase some of the pain. But not all. You’re a familiar face at many local, regional and global literary festivals. What do you value most about these gatherings — the conversations, the performance, or the silences in between? And how have they shaped your understanding of the ever-changing audience?

I absolutely love these gatherings: I love the performances as well as the silences in between. I find audiences of readers are much more forgiving after they’ve listened to you live. I suppose they wouldn’t have paid good money to listen to you if they hadn’t come prepared to forgive! Do you think being a writer in English in Sri Lanka, and in the larger sphere of South Asia, comes with a specific responsibility — to translate the island and the region to the world? Is it necessary? If yes, how do you manage the balance between telling your story and speaking for the country and the region?

I cannot claim to speak for the country or the region. That would be false of me, disingenuous. I write single-mindedly for myself. If someone else chooses to use that writing as a clue to some bigger picture, that is up to them. The writing in any case takes on a life of its own once it leaves your pen: at that point it is no longer yours, and others can do what they will with it. It is extremely dangerous to set yourself up as some sort of spokesman for your country, though many do. How do you see Sri Lanka’s contemporary literary identity within the wider South Asian literary map, and what is something you wish more South Asian writers, especially emerging ones, would dare to do?

As the world gets more confusing and chaotic, and it becomes easier and easier to be a “writer”, there is a sort of convenient shorthand that people use to pin the identity of lesser-known countries. This is particularly the case with Sri Lanka and also many African countries. So if you don’t write about civil war, or famine, or female genital mutilation, you are seen somehow as being inauthentic. Almost a traitor. Because, of course, people in the West know better, don’t they? There are so many experts who write about our problems, seated in the comfort of their London houses. Added to that, Sri Lanka has one of the most complex identities in the world: we are made up of so many disparate (and desperate!) demographics that there is no one-size-fits-all. Our job is merely to be true to our own particular ‘take’ on this country, and over a long time, with an extended and more complete body of work, other people can figure out exactly who we are. We can’t do it ourselves.

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Ciara Mandulee Mendis is a Sri Lankan writer and a translator who has won multiple awards, including the State Literary Award. The author of ‘The Lanka Box’, she was twice shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize, and, for the 2025 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation. Her work appears in several international journals, including the Riptide Journal (UK), Queen’s Quarterly (Canada) Himal Southasian (Nepal), and The Aleph Review (Pakistan).