This story has been included in the Cambridge IGCSE anthology: Stories of Ourselves Volume 2 and used in schools. I have been sent three questions about the story from Hampton School in London. I am sharing my answers here in case it is of help to other students too.
1. Who is Mr Weerakoon a representation of in society and how are we intended to feel towards him?
As a writer, I have a fondness for all my characters. Empathy is necessary for the fiction. I want Mr Weerakoon to be a believable and recognizable individual struggling to make a life in a modern society. Sometimes perhaps against the odds. He has had to become a corporate man and is doing the best he can, or so he thinks. He is ‘the brand new face of our remodelled country … open for business’ as Vasantha sees him. Marketing is often mistakenly seen as the answer to a problem. Selling the message, whether commercially or politically, becomes the focus when perhaps there is a more important matter that needs attention.
2. Is your protagonist, Vasantha ‘the van man’, intended to serve as a direct contrast to Mr Weerakoon or, given that he appears in each of the short stories in the collection, does he embody or represent something or someone else?
The book, although a collection of stand-alone stories, is also a kind of novel as it traces the development of Vasantha as a man who is beginning to discover the changed world he lives in. Changed by the war and the peace that followed the brutal end of the war. He is a man discovering the nature of the country he lives in by seeing regions he has never seen before and learning about its recent history through the people he meets. The book is divided into two parts, north and south, both deeply affected, but in different ways, by the recent traumatic past. Mr Weerakoon is one of the people who gives him an insight into this new world post-war world.
3. Are we intended to view the guests to the presentation as a collective, or do they each represent a more nuanced or specific element of society?
As a writer what I am trying to do is see the world through Vasantha’s eyes. He is a man who has lived a life through difficult times and beginning to see, for the first time, how other people cope with the world and forge their own lives. It amuses him sometimes and baffles him at other times. The guests give us a glimpse of people in other walks of life who are also searching for the way forward either for themselves or on behalf of others.
Throughout the book I am concerned with language. Both how we use it our purposes in describing the world around us, but also how it changes with time and context. ‘Toll’ in the title of the book, for example, has a meaning that changes over time. During the war and the tsunami it brings to mind the toll of death. But for Vasantha the word will soon have a different resonance as new expressways are built, and toll plazas become an everyday feature for him as a driver. ‘Fluke’ is also a word where the different meanings are part of the texture and music of the story.