Action and Reaction – Chitra Fernando

                                                                                       Citra Fernando - Author

                           

Setting

·         A village in the southern coast of Sri Lanka

·         The story depicts Sinhala Buddhist culture through names and practices

Characters

Mahinda - The narrator – a university educated westernized person

Loku Nanda

·         An ugly unmarried woman possessive of her wealth 

·         “Unless they were her relations Loku Nanda kept all men at a safe distance”

·         She practices popular Buddhism - Does a lot of meritorious need to outshine others and to obtain comforts in the next life

·         Commanded respect form her family and acted as the arbiter of family matters – smoking

·         “everyone acknowledged loku Nanda to be the wisest. This was her own opinion as well - naturally”

·         Egoistic: gloats that her pirith mandapa was “ten times nicer than” Mrs Welikala’s

·         In the end she becomes old and wheelchair-bound and at the mercy of Kusuma

·         “It’s my Karma. It’s My Karma” – she tells Mahinda

 

Punch Nanada

·         “though she was always singing Loku nanda’s praise she had a strange preference for living in our house”

·         She thought it was “much better for Kusuma to stay with loku Nanda than going off with that Piyadasa and having ten children”

Kusuma

·         A child from a poor family of toddy-tapers raised by Loku Nanda as a servant

·         Loku Nanda prevents her from going to Colombo with Mahinda’s family and later from marrying Piyadasa

·         She turns into a carbon copy of Loku Nanda

·         She too does meritorious deeds to obtain a better life in the next birth 

·         She wants “the merits” from her dhana to be “hers and hers alone”

Themes

·         Karma – one’s deeds determine the kind of life one would here and in the lives to come

·         Popular Buddhism – religion as a status symbol; to satisfy one’s ego

·         Spinsterhood – fear of marriage; sexual frustration

Techniques

·         Local hues: names – Mahinda, Kusuma; kinship terms – Loku Nanda, Nangi; places – Galle, Matara; sweets – Kevun, kokis, aluva

·         Irony - “everyone acknowledged loku Nanda to be the wisest. This was her own opinion as well - naturally”