by Angeline Singam Lye

Amy Tan famously said about Bengali writer, Jhumpa Lahiri,’…..She is a dazzling storyteller with a distinctive voice, an eye for nuance, an ear for irony’. It could almost have been written about Samantha Sirimanne Hyde’s offering, a book of short stories titled ‘The Villawood Express and other stories’ published by Ginninderra Press, Canberra .

As the title suggests, a few of the stories deal with immigrants and detention, but they are not political in content. Quite the converse really - they deal with the dilemma of ordinary people, who are by default immigrants. Samantha identifies strongly with them, but to read the book as stories about immigrants would be to deprive it of its general appeal. Quite original and neatly interlinked, they are a series of short stories that circle around themes of love, loss, family, displacement and identity.

It is not pretentious to call Samantha an artist. Her stories are subtle, evocative and often impressionistic in content. In a few master strokes she captures characters and landscapes as vividly as a Manet. Her stories have grit and substance and display fine sensitive writing recognised by Samantha winning the 2004 Fellowship of Australian Writers' ( Victoria ) Jennifer Burbidge Short Story Award for ‘A Trace of Lavendar’.

After completing her secondary education at Visakha Vidyalaya in Colombo , Samantha studied for an honours degree in English at the University of Kelaniya . Her creative writing has appeared in publications in Sri Lanka and in India . Everywhere in her stories there are hints of the cultural nuances of Sri Lankans - the speech, the attitudes, the social divide, the snobbery… and they only add to the dimension of her writing. ‘Putha (says Tilak’s father to Tilak in ‘Of Clouds and Friends’)…All we want is a respectable wife for you. A respectable daughter-in-law for us’; Ramya’s parents ‘……were peeved to ‘gain some dosai-eating Tamil bugger’, as their son-in-law in ‘A Gardenia Bloom for the New Year’. There is so much authenticity in the dialogue, so much realism to the social situations that the writer’s protagonists are in, that you wonder if this is fiction or reality.

Samantha has made the great leap from poet to short story writer with the ease of a true artist. And she dismisses it, as an artist might, as being a by-product of an MA in Creative Writing. If it were only that simple, we would all be attending this course! The reality is that her writing is more spontaneous than contrived. Somehow the alchemy that goes on in her stories is combustive but effortless.

At the heart of her writing is the ‘ability to imagine other lives’, however different, however disparate. Sucharitha, the accidental prostitute, thalidomide Tommy disfigured in body but not mind, Mona the tragedy waiting to happen… Samantha transcends boundaries and borders to capture personalities and characters with an unerring eye. She also crosses the great divide between the Eastern and Western cultures seamlessly when she explores different settings shifting from Australia to Sri Lanka . The dialogues and thoughts ebb and flow between the characters depending on the shifting landscapes of their relationships and settings.

There are traces of the dislocation Samantha herself may feel as a migrant in Australia . You see the ‘imaginary non-existence’ of migrant life clinging to some of her characters. Quite a few of her stories deal with these invisible people, Ajith in ‘A Temporary Reprieve’, Tilak in ‘Of Clouds and friends’ Tommy in ‘A Trace of Lavendar’ and very specially Nalini in ‘A Gardenia Bloom for the New Year’. Hans and Ajith are modelled on her experiences in Germany on scholarship and Ranjith on Samantha’s experiences during her formative years in the US .

Samantha’s strength lies in her deft characterisation. Anti-hero Harold in ‘Harold’s Decision’ is the modern day everyman. Riddled with complexes, wracked with self-doubt and indecision, Harold somehow manages to extract our sympathy. His emotional growth has been stunted by his upbringing at Grandma’s hands ‘…Harold has nightmares of running down an alleyway with a pair of breasts pursuing him. They are not attached to a body as such, but he nevertheless recognises them as Grandma’s.’

Strong hints of Thurber run through this story and it makes compelling reading. Every page provides glimpses of such psychological intensity that Norman in Psycho looks tame. ‘As he lightly squeezes the lime green packet and feels the gel moving between his fingertips, his breath quickens and he feels a strange lump moving around his stomach’.

There is an amalgam of passion and restraint in ‘Harold’s Decision’. A broad range of subject matter is combined with an insightful style, delivering a view which is both objective and empathetic at the same time. 'Harold’s Decision' is my runaway favourite. It crystallises every facet of Samantha’s writing skills. Here you find the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique at its best, and it’s apparent in the book that it’s a technique that works strongly in building up characterisation. 'The Keyhole’ and ‘A Gardenia Bloom for the New Year’ are also fine examples of this skill. The dexterity with which the writer does it, allows her to build layer upon layer of emotional content almost insidiously. To be able to do it and do it successfully in short stories is a Mansfield like art that few others can claim as their own.

The hallmark of Samantha’s technique is really in the unsaid and the unspoken. The vivid little images that she uses to highlight a situation; a trace of lavender that escapes into the cool air in ‘A Trace of Lavendar’ symbolising the end of a gentle romance for Tommy, the clouds and the rain typifying Tilak’s dark, dank situation in ‘Of Clouds and Friends’, the box of chocolates melting in the ruthless December sun, like Harold Pike’s short-lived dream of building a relationship with Lucy… even the glass of cognac plays a symbolic part in ‘The Keyhole’ when Shalini finds out that its ‘appropriate cognac time’ to blot out her painful meeting with her best friend after ten years.

Not a single short story ends with grand finale or a dramatic conclusion. Neither do they end with a splutter and a gasp. The stories almost steal away in a muted and understated fashion – like life itself. Despite the tragedies that Samantha’s characters deal with, not once does a story melt into melodrama or sentimentality. Take Mona whose downward spiral to suicide has a perilous intensity. The writer doesn’t let the reins go and there is a subdued inevitability to the conclusion. When Hans kicks the Buddha statue, it remains a totem of his fractured relationship with Ajith and at the end of the story the subtle reminder of the statue leaves us with a sense of desolation. Through ‘Ranjith’s Thesis’ we have Ranjith grappling with Buddhism and the cruelty of life and at the end when he decides to go to the temple ‘to find some other way to put out the fire’, there is a sense of equanimity;

‘In the bottomless ocean of Samsara
We are born, die and are born once more…’

Few of the stories, if any are positive but there is no nihilism here. Few of the stories, if any show a relationship that is not fraught or fractured by some accident of circumstance, but there is no cynicism here. There is a gentleness in them which keeps the bleakness from becoming negative and gloomy.

Somewhere in these short stories is a parallel universe that everyone can relate to. Somewhere in these short stories are people we feel we know or have known at some time in our lives. That is the power of the book. It makes you believe, it makes you feel and it makes you share the experience of the characters with compassion, but without sentimentality. This is a most exciting piece of work.

The book is available for sale at:

• Ginninnderra Press, Canberra
• Sunils Spice Shop at Thornleigh Sydney
• Isuru Spice Shop, West Ryde Sydney
• Alpine Heritage Motel, Goulburn, NSW

‘The Villawood Express and other stories’ is published by Ginninderra Press, ACT.