Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai

“‘Knowledge is a weapon of defense, an inner fortress no foe can raze.’” Arul, seeing the puzzled look on Balendran’s face, gestured to the letter. Then Balendran understood what he meant. He was talking about the knowledge of servants, their awareness of what went on in a house. Pillai was a servant par excellence, never supervised, his household accounts never checked, so implicit was his father’s trust in him. Yet that very same Pillai had acted on his own conscience and had, all these years, maintained contact with Arul. He had flagrantly defied his master’s dictates, ignored the vow he took in front of the family Gods.

Arul was looking at him, his eyes bright with the understanding that his brother knew what he meant. He beckoned Balendran close to him. “You are a fool, Bala, a damn fool.” Then he quoted the Tirukkural again. “’Only the learned have eyes— others two sores on their face.’”

Balendran nodded, thinking his brother was talking about his ignorance of Pillai’s insubordination.

Arul shook his head to say that Balendran had not understood. He gripped his arm tightly and drew him forward again. “You have been blind to the reality of life, Bala. You have spent your whole life living by codes everyone lays down but nobody follows.” It was the longest sentence Arul had uttered since his coughing began and he lay back on his pillow, drained.

Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai is a lush historical fiction novel set in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1927. The country then under colonial British Imperial rule, the story is swirling with personal and political developments, while bringing to life the period through two characters part of an affluent Tamil gentry family in the capital city of Colombo.

 Annalukshmi a lover of English literature and at 22 a teacher at a prestigious Mission School, is a “new woman” with more interest in her career and improving women’s rights than marriage. Her Uncle Balendran, 40, and the dutiful younger son of a Mudaliyar has maintained and grown the family’s wealth while bringing some modest reforms complimented by a family of his own with a wife and grown son, the latter off in England. Yet, despite their privileges and accomplishments Annalukshmi and Balendran struggle with the various expectations, duties and limitations of family and society plus their own conflicting ideals and yearning for certain freedoms. Annalukshmi very much wanting to be a regarded more as an equal, no less because she is not a man, or not English. Balendran, as one of the terms of the day posited it, recognized in his younger days a “sexual inversion” in himself. Educated in England he met a love of his life while in London. A relationship that came crashing to an end once his father became aware of the true nature of the “friendship” with another man. Balendran’s disposition as he accepts it though otherwise kept in confidence. But a gay Uncle is not the only bit of familial drama or secrets that wind their way through the novel. There’s Balendran’s banished older brother and well, to say much more spoils it.

Shyam Selvadurai, a gay man himself originally from Colombo, won a Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction along with literary magazine Books in CanadaFirst Novel Award for his debut titled Funny Boy in 1994. That title a coming-of-age tale tackling issues around sexuality, ethnicity, and class. Cinnamon Gardens his sophomore effort in 1998 delivers much of these same themes adding feminism. Combined with his adeptly human characters experiencing an even early time of Sri Lankan history effusively conceived with thoroughly researched historical details. Like the neighborhood it takes for a title (suggested by Selvadurai’s partner), Cinnamon Gardens is a truly beautiful book not just in the writing but, regarding the “greatness and littleness” when it comes to people.

Cinnamon Gardens by Shyam Selvadurai is available in print from Hachette Books