A SPARROW FALLS

A Sri Lankan girl’s chance at a better life runs afoul of her village’s malignant prejudices in this coming-of-age saga.

Sixteen-year-old Balappuwaduge Sumithra—Sumi, for short—is the smartest student in school, but that doesn’t count for much in her Catholic village on the Sri Lankan coast. With ragged clothes and a meager diet, she lives a step above destitution in a hut with her two younger siblings; her grandmother; and her father, a fisherman who drinks away most of his earnings. She sees few prospects besides marrying another fisherman, like Ranji, a handsome, arrogant ne’er-do-well who makes her heart race. Life improves when she finds work as a part-time kitchen maid in the house of John Graham, an English textile exporter, who pays her the princely sum of 150 rupees a month. Graham takes a shine to the bookish girl, giving her English lessons and intellectual enrichment, like an outing to a film version of Swan Lake. Graham’s Sri Lankan cook Agnes Nona takes a dim view of their relationship, not because of any possible sexual undercurrents, which don’t exist, but because it bridges the social chasm between the wealthy businessman and the penniless villager, which, Agnes believes, may affect her own status within the community. Problems escalate when Graham decides to liquidate his business and take Sumi back to England as his ward. Her family accepts the arrangement as a huge step up in the world, but it fills the other villagers with resentment and suspicion of her unfathomable good fortune. As she waits to depart, she becomes the target of malicious gossip and insults—she’s called “the dirty white man’s whore”—that send her into emotional turmoil.

Fernando’s engrossing tale has an almost ethnographic feel as it portrays the folkways of the complex culture of Catholic Sri Lankans, teasing out the minute gradations in social rank that adhere to food, clothing, and language and rooting them in characters’ psychology. (“The rich were not meant to talk to the poor in that polite, gentle tone ringing of equality,” broods Agnes, watching Sumi and Graham. “If the news got out, he would be lowered in the villagers’ opinion, as well. They would begin to lose respect, to despise him.”) But there’s much subtle artistry in Fernando’s polished, beguiling prose, especially as it conveys Sumi’s point of view, which is sometimes deliciously teenage (“Now, in waltzed the prince’s mother who looked like a bitch if there ever was a woman who looked like one,” she observes watching the ballet), sometimes lyrical (“the silk of the iris with its darker pleats looked like water was moving through it”), and other times couched in homespun metaphor (“Sumi had once seen a washing machine in action in the advertisements before a movie. The clothes had been whirled about in soapy suds, hitting the sides of the cavity of the machine and then whirled around again and again. That was how she felt—buffeted and turned around and around!”). As in a Hardy novel, the subterranean oppressions of class and gender in Sumi’s life congeal into a palpable air of menace and an affecting moral tragedy.

A gripping, richly textured bildungsroman about community ties that bind all too cruelly.