Marriage and Mutton Curry by M. Shanmughalingam

So — the first review that I will posting on this blog is a short story collection graced with a blurb by a Malaysian monarch.

If the name M. Shanmughalingam (also known as Dato’ Shan to some) is familiar to you, then you might have encountered him in one of the many public readings and open mic events that he has participated in across Kuala Lumpur (and from time to time, Singapore). He is known for his lively delivery and the way he presents the rich verbal and physical mannerisms of his characters. He is no stranger to Southeast Asia’s literary scene as well, having been published in over thirty anthologies, and was recently seen at the Singapore Writers Festival for the launch of Marriage and Mutton Curry.

From Left to Right — Jason Erik Lundberg, Ng Yi-Sheng and M. Shanmughalingam at the Singapore Writers Festival in 2018

Marriage and Mutton Curry is a collection of fifteen short stories about social foibles in the world of families, high finance, and fearful events in history – with a surprisingly feminist touch. It is the author’s first short story collection.

Expecting this collection to be a compilation of either all of his short stories or a selection of ‘the best of the best’, I surprised by the direction that this collection took. Instead of any of the previous assumptions, the selection of the stories was very specific, and together they told a narrative of Malaysian history presented through the personal lives of fictional (or perhaps merely fictionalized) characters.

The stories in Marriage and Mutton Curry tend to concern mainly (but are not limited to) the Malaysian Jaffna Tamil community. The Jaffna Tamils (also known as Ceylonese or Sri Lankan Tamils) were part of the wave of migration from South Asia to Malaya during the colonial era, and their strong work ethic and high regard for education landed a number of Jaffna Tamils in key roles in administration and civil service. The small community boasts of producing a number of noteworthy political figures – Sir E.E. Clough Thuraisingam, Tan Sri Devaki Krishnan, Sivarasa Rasiah, Dr Michael Jeyakumar Devaraj – and the record-breaking athlete Tan Sri Dr Mani Jegathesan, among others.

Conversely, the stories in Marriage and Mutton Curry are rife with a pleasant sense of irreverent humour although (as elegantly phrased in the foreword) M. Shanmughalingam laughs with, and not at, the community that he identifies with. There is a strong sense of love for the humanity of his characters – their hopes, desires and dreams – and if the portrayal of his characters is satirical, it is satire that comes with a lot of heart. The community’s high regard for work and personal achievement is reflected in stories like ‘Naming Names’, in which anyone who finds himself named ‘Kandiah’ will need to be defined by his community through his deeds and achievements (there is a ‘Prof. Kandiah of the University of Malaya’, a ‘Lawyer Kandiah of Shearn, Shook and Skrine’, a ‘Tax-i Kandiah’ and ‘Own Car Kandiah’, and even '19 Children Kandiah’).

M. Shanmughalingam has credited his life experience as his muse, and his childhood experience of listening to the voice of his mother – whose banter with the neighbours permeated the thin walls of the government clerical quarters that were the family’s home – must have shaped his imagination as a storyteller. Although we have no records of what the conversations were, from the stories we can imagine what they must have sounded like: each story is rich with expressions of (what Singaporean writer Ng Yi-Sheng calls) ‘idiosyncratic English’.

Examples of how these sound like can be seen in a story like ‘Free and Freed’, where the two main characters use expressions such as ‘I am your senior-most friend’ and ‘When a boy and girl go out alone at night without a chaper-one or a chaper-two, even broad-minded people will think something’. (Interestingly, the author himself has revealed that when stories come to him they appear as he must have heard them as a child – as lines of dialogue – and I believe that these verbal witticisms are nod to the world of oral storytelling that shapes the lessons and lore of ethnic communities in Malaysia).

I mentioned the foreword written by none other than His Royal Highness Paduka Seri Sultan Nazrin Muizzuddin Shah Ibni Almarhum Sultan Azlan Muhibbuddin Shah Al-Maghfurlah, the Deputy Yang di-Pertuan Agong and Sultan of Perak (who is identified on the cover of Marriage and Mutton Curry as HRH Sultan Nazrin Shah) earlier.

Normally, I tend to recommend skipping the foreword as their purpose is to distill the book’s contents and explain their importance to the reader, a process that I think is best left to the last. (In some cases they may be worth skipping over entirely, as authors of forewords can get too academic or worse, have nothing meaningful to say.) HRH Sultan Nazrin Shah’s foreword is an exception to these (one might call it an exceptional example of what a foreword should be like). Although it is only three pages in length, it provides important context for the collection and is absolutely worth reading first.

Much of what I would like to say concerning Marriage and Mutton Curry has already been said by HRH Sultan Nazrin Shah in the foreword and in his opening speech for the book launch in Kuala Lumpur (and in both cases, he is far more articulate than I am). In his speech at the KL launch of the book, His Royal Highness praised the collection for offering ‘insights...into our country’s history’ and that the value of historical fiction is that it allows us to ‘empathise directly with the people who shaped and were part of this history’. In this sense, Marriage and Mutton Curry presents an invaluable narrative of Malaysia’s history through the lens of one of its many minorities – the Jaffna Tamil community.

Beginning with stories set in colonial Malaya and the Japanese Occupation in ‘Victoria and Her Kimono’ and ‘Half and Half’, the collection moves on to a selection of narratives related to the upper rungs of the Malaysian civil service and the finance sector specifically: ‘Money Man’, ‘Rahman’s American Visitor’ and ‘Seek and Ye Shall Find?’ all concern the intrigues and dealings of high finance, reflecting the leaps and spurts of a young and wealthy country. It is also impossible to write about the history of Malaysia and write out the history of migration, and the other stories in this collection have done an excellent work of writing the stories of migrants in – ‘The Barefoot Man from Malaya’, ‘Marriage and Mutton Curry’ and ‘Dodol for the Doctor’ trace the fascinating stories of migrants from South Asia to Malaya.

I found ‘The Barefoot Man from Malaya’ particularly captivating and intriguing – it tells the story of a young woman who makes a decision to marry a literal stranger from Malaya based on little more than a few compatible astrological readings and a kind of gut instinct. The conditions for her migration brings to mind another brief mention that brings t mind the uncertainty the early migrants faced, as Ramanan from ‘Victoria and Her Kimono’ takes pride in his forefathers’ decision to venture to Malaya based on ‘the strength of a [mere] telegram’ that said ‘Work Arranged. Come.’ (I have been informed that this little bit of fiction is based on real events.) Stories like these are important records of the danger and the faith that the first generation of migrants had to experience to arrive in Malaya.

Most remarkably, stories such as ‘The Barefoot Man from Malaya’ as well as ‘Flowers for KK’, ‘Birthday’, ‘The Indra Quarter’ and ‘Free and Freed’ show M. Shanmughalingam’s remarkable grasp of the concerns and voices of women. Anyone who has heard M. Shanmughalingam at a reading will note how well he gives life to the female characters in his work, capturing their voices, quirks and mannerisms. In a purely textual form, the stories may not have that physical augmentation, but they remain just as strong. The world of the Malaysian women in the country’s infancy is a world where patriarchy is an important social structure and the social mores of women dictate the way they express – or suppress – their desires.

In fact, while ‘taboo’ is not a word that one would usually associate with these short stories, many of the stories derive their energy and conflict from social systems and expectations and the individual’s attempt to live by or transgress them. From the ethnic Indian Anglophile of ‘Victoria and Her Kimono’ whose life is turned upside down when the British ruling powers were replaced by the Japanese military in the Occupation, to the misunderstanding of social cues in professional negotiations in ‘Rahman’s American Visitor’, to the love life of a young woman who is scrutinized by her older peers in ‘Free and Freed’, each story concerns an individual’s attempt to navigate the unwritten do’s and don’ts of their community. It is the very stuff that makes good writing and good literature.

While fiction generally does not get the same regard as non-fiction among Malaysian English readers (non-fiction seems to be the preferred genre of Malaysians who read works in English), I am hopeful that Marriage and Mutton Curry will find readers among those who seek to understand a little more about Malaysia’s rich and varied history. The stories may in Marriage and Mutton Curry may be fictional, but the world of personal histories that they convey are (in all likelihood) important and true.