Shyam Selvadurai’s ‘Mansions of the Moon’ tells a seminal story from a new point of view

While the occasion of a new book from Shyam Selvadurai creates excitement among readers, it causes some anxiety for him.

“I work in such an isolated, solitary way. And then the moment it’s (launched) it ceases to be really mine, it becomes more the reader’s,” the Canadian-Sri Lankan writer told me in an interview from his Toronto home. “When we read … we picture the characters in a certain way, we picture the landscape in a certain way.”

It helps to have other projects underway to provide a buffer from the anxiety surrounding the launch, in this case a children’s fantasy novel “using mythological characters from those old Buddhist stories” — a theme he’s embracing more these days.

Selvadurai creates immersive, visceral worlds you can almost reach out and feel. His 1994 breakout novel “Funny Boy” recounted in six linked stories the coming-of-age of Arjie Chelvaratnam, who is gay, against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war in 1983. The Star’s critic said at the time that “much of the appeal of ‘Funny Boy’ lies in the unusual and, to most Canadian readers, exotic coloring (sic) Selvadurai gives to well-worn fictional material.” He told a traditional story — the coming-of-age novel — in his own way.

In his latest book, “Mansions of the Moon,” Selvadurai turns to historical fiction and imagines the life of Yasodhara, the wife of Siddhartha. In this book, as he did in his 2013 book “The Hungry Ghosts,” Selvadurai employs traditional myths and spiritual tales to create work that is unmistakably his own.

He is, he said, trying to create a “hybrid form” that combines Western realism and Sri Lankan folk stories, which began with “The Hungry Ghosts.”

The ghosts are from Eastern folklore, including Buddhism, and have an insatiable hunger or yearning. They are “often surrounded by everything they love, but can’t enjoy it. They’re surrounded by food, which represents sustenance, but they can’t themselves enjoy it because of something in the past. That’s such a visual symbol, but also a narrative symbol of the traumatized self,” he explained.

That book was about the immigrant experience in Canada; the metaphor works with the idea of the immigrant having to work hard and fight for what they get, but then not being able to stop working or fighting and enjoy what they’ve earned.

“Traumatized people, especially immigrants, they succeed, but then they can’t really enjoy that success because they’re still trapped in … the old fear that drives them,” Selvadurai said.

There’s a modernity to Buddhism that he says he wanted to bring into these works. “I don’t think of Buddhism as new-agey or mystical,” he said. “I just think of it as a nuts and bolts sort of way to live.” He doesn’t see it as something “over there and mystical and East, but something that is very relevant to our lives.”

“Mansions of the Moon” tells one of the seminal stories of Buddhism: the story of Siddhartha, who ultimately becomes the Buddha. Rather than tell it from Siddhartha’s point of view, though, Selvadurai tells it from the point of view of his wife, Yasodhara.

It wasn’t her story he initially intended to write but, as he did research, stories about her started to come his way. One was “Portraits of Buddhist Women” by Ranjini Obeyesekere. She had recently translated a poem, a lament on Yasodhara being abandoned by her husband. Yasodhara is not often referred to by her name when she is mentioned in historical texts and, as a result, has become of fascination to poets, dramatists — and novelists. Coming through in the lament, in her story “was a kind of fundamental human fear, which is a fear of abandonment by those we love,” said Selvadurai.

As he continued his research he took a trip to Nepal, where he saw a woman walking by, barefoot, holding a child’s hand. That was the moment the book took shape in his head. “I just suddenly saw the book,” he said. “I didn’t know how or what that woman represented … but I could just picture (Yasodhara) moving through these cities and I could picture the home.”

Yasodhara is high-born and marries the also high-born Siddhartha, who abandons her as he follows his life as an ascetic. He is thought dead, which allows her, over 10 years, to build a life as a widow. But when he’s found alive, “(w)hatever ground she has gained in the last 10 years, whatever little stability and happiness she has found, is slipping away from her … her former husband has snatched it from her.”

She sounds almost bitter — something that gives her an insider/outsider quality.

“When I thought about how to inhabit her (character), I gave her what I think is a fundamental characteristic of myself, which is that sense of this private self that is always separate from everyone else. That private self needs to fall back on itself, it needs solitude,” said Selvadurai. It’s a quality that allows her to be both in the world and away from it “as it does with me.” A useful quality for a writer, certainly, but also for Yasodhara as a woman: it means that she has a world apart from her spouse, a “web of other relationships” that give her sustenance, as they do, Selvadurai said, for himself.

As with his other books, the world he creates in “Mansions of the Moon” is immersive, full of detail that brings alive the time and the place of 600 BC. It wasn’t particularly onerous; surprisingly “there is quite a bit of information from that period that’s been collected by scholars over time,” Selvadurai said.

For example, women at that time, particularly in Yasodhara’s class, had a certain degree of power and autonomy: there was no “widow burning,” he said — they could remarry, could own businesses and property. It wasn’t great for women, but it was “oddly better than in the centuries to come.”

If history is written by the victors, then historical fiction is a way of ensuring marginalized voices are inserted into history. “It is the truth based on what’s available plus imagination,” he said, even if “facts” are scarce. “If you have a hint of another history, then the received history is immediately thrown into question.”

In fact, he thinks historical fiction works best when it’s told from the marginalized point of view. “I think historical fiction is very subversive, because it allows you to bring to the page those people who are on the footnotes of history, whether it’s women or queer people or, in this country, Indigenous people. It allows you to bring them to the page and put them centre.”

Ultimately, that gives these historical stories a modern relevance. But it also allows him to explore some of the spiritual and philosophical questions that explain why Buddhism appeals to him.

“The thrust of the novel … has been around the central question of change and how one might deal with change in the world — change is a fact of life, whether you like it or not, and Buddhism looks at the central fact of existence; it just looks straight at it and says ‘OK, so what are you going to do?’ How are we going to live a meaningful, peaceful and happy life?”

Given the times we’re in, this ancient story set in an ancient time has resonance. Rather than seeing Buddhism as a “forest religion,” Selvadurai points out that Buddha was dealing in his time, 600 BC, with issues that seem remarkably contemporary: the problems created by the rapid urbanization of India, for example (the major monasteries were either in the major cities or just outside of them). Or the rapid accumulation of wealth by a certain (upper) class. “He’s examining this,” said Selvadurai. “You can see that wealth does not bring happiness. Power does not bring happiness, he can see that. So if these things don’t bring happiness, where does happiness lie? In essence, I feel it’s very relevant to us living in urban centres ourselves.”

When “Funny Boy” came out in 1994, it was, Selvadurai remarked to NOW magazine last year, part of the first wave of identity politics. That wave, he now says, was in some ways very practical: making sure the arts councils had diverse juries, that they had diverse staff “because, initially, the only non-white staff was the cleaning staff.” That wave was also about pushing for conversations around appropriation and representation — about making sure other voices got into the mainstream.

Those questions encouraged him to write “Funny Boy,” he said, in which Arjie comes to realize that those with power are the ones making the decisions. “It’s all about power.” And so how do you go about taking power? “That was a kind of basic question of that first movement,” Selvadurai said. “It’s still a basic question of the second movement.”

But there’s been progress, or at least movement, he believes. With that first wave the idea was “to lay down a sediment of people in the … decision-making bodies.” Because everything comes and goes, things change. This second wave, hopefully, builds on the first and ensures even more people get into decision-making positions, people “who can change for the better the arts in this country.”

The question of barriers to publication continues to be raised within the industry and Selvadurai feels that young Black, Indigenous and people of colour, in particular, have this sense of “my God, I’ve got to get in now before those doors shut again.” There is still this perception they have, he said, of not being decision-makers.

“It makes me feel uneasy. Because they are the ones who are on the forefront now. And if they are feeling like that, I don’t know.”

One of the big differences between this second wave and the first is social media, he said. Young people are very activist and use social media skilfully; one of the problems he says they faced in the first wave was getting their voices into the mainstream. “Now the mainstream has to run along to catch up with these people.”

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