Silencing the Metanarrative: Personal Memory Avenging History in Romesh Gunesekera’s The Sandglass

Abstract

Romesh Gunesekera (1954—), the Sri Lankan British diasporic writer in his second novel The Sandglass (1998) captures the diverse aspects of Sri Lanka with its essence, sentiments, nostalgia, its smugness and tenderness in the characters of Jason Ducal and his wife Pearl Ducal. While Jason, a patriarch vaunts in the luxury and glory of a massive house, Pearl fails to adhere her feelings to the same, and instead seeks joy in the intermingling of her self with her children. Jason carves his own world around his house, which in a way becomes symbolic of the nation under strife but Pearl feels trapped in her husband’s ego. After Jason’s death Pearl escapes to London, where in a flat at Almeida Avenue she recreates the essence of her land in shoring her children, and sheltering her granddaughter, and Chip, a reporter whom she had called son. However in spite of her attempts at preserving the core of her existence in her children, she fails to guide them out of their personal loss or longing. Her younger son Ravi is devastated by the discrimination he had faced in the homeland and almost similar racial bias in his place of work in America; while the elder son Prins retrieves his father’s dream of erecting a big house. As the characters evolve out of their grief and metaphorical deaths, the Ducals meet their death one after the other symbolizing the spiritual death of Sri Lanka in diverse aspects. Jason buys a house in 1948 and is shot dead in 1956, the two significant years in the nation’s history. Memory dies as Pearl is left heart-broken with the agonies of her journey; Ravi commits suicide in an alien world and Prins returns to Sri Lanka and enters his father’s dream of mansion only to meet his death.