Among many Sri Lankan writers, brevity has often been the only way to get round the lack of talent and staying power that is required to produce longer works. When the great Sri Lankan short story (in English of course) made its popular entry about 50 years ago, everyone was too polite to say, that’s a terrible short story, but it might be a good novel if you add a few, say, 250 pages. Instead we were excruciatingly polite. We said how sociopolitically significant the stories were, and how nice that you’re writing about Ran Ethanas and Podi Menikes, all thrusting breasts in diya reddas, having uninhibited sex under the goraka trees with brown and muscly Ran Bandas and Juvanises. We were so thankful for the opportunity to drool over their pastoral lives that we know so little about, in a language we were comfortable in.

The short story carried on like this through the years, merrily gathering more writers, some even snaring international fans. But most didn’t. They didn’t even find many local fans, they were mostly self-published and mostly read by long suffering family and friends, the faithful spouse who really prefers Andy Capp in the Sunday Island and the friend with the literary pretensions who abandons her usual diet of Georgette Heyer for a minute. And now her grandson wants to be a writer like his archchi and is secretly filling his Atlas exercise book with his own fantasy story based closely on a cartoon he saw on cable TV. His grandmother also writes by hand, pages and pages of her scribbles are sent to husband’s clerk who first used to bang them out on an old Olympia and now on a desktop, and then off they go to the street-corner printer who is delighted, once more, to get another big order from the nona. And what with the end of year submission deadlines of coveted literary prizes our printer is more than happy to push aside orders for calendars with large pictures of Anarkali in favour of our liyana nona’s latest offering. Whether she wins or not doesn’t matter to our printer because anyway, by next December there will be another order. Along with this are the smaller orders for invitations to be printed for the book launch, for which he’s willing to give a small discount to the lady, after all. So the lady soldiers on industriously, she goes for her writer’s club meetings by the seaside or in another writing friend’s house, and makes note of other people’s bad marriages, race issues, and her servants’ poverty, she drafts and she redrafts, knocks up another 20 stories in 150 pages, goes back to the printer, and finally, there she is, happily fingering the bundles of ten that Banda brought home, and thinking of all the finger food and VIPs to get for the launch.

And now it seems the great Sri Lankan tradition of short writing is getting even shorter, with stories that threaten to be as miniscule as possible. This youthful offspring, cutely prefixed by hint or chap, is the afterthought, the lovechild of the traditional short fiction. Already two tiny oeuvres have come out, making a noise as loud as a baby with a bad colic in the new media, filled with one- or two liners by a multitude of creative people. Aney darling, so short and so sweet. The traditions set by the aunties have been faithfully followed as far as the launches and readings go, though thankfully with a few less trees in danger this time. And instead of being rather long and monotonous, the readings now sound like several disjointed mobile phone calls in a bus.

But their short sweetness is packaged far more slickly, so much better proofread than our aunties’ offerings. And they are endorsed by such good brains and accents that the dreaded next generation of writing enthusiasts should all but abandon any thought of writing anything longer than quarter of a page. In another few decades we will face the prospect of even shorter stuff, maybe one-word fiction, or even one-letter fiction. And while we’re on the topic, let’s get ready with our own offerings, because, after all, darlings, I certainly can’t resist seeing myself in print! So voila, here are two takas-stories for the 2065 edition, curated by the aunty’s grandson:

May 18, 2065
By Liyaanaa Liyanaarachchi

Mullivaikkal Mall

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To the cyclist who swerved to avoid the big CTB bus and crashed into me
By Liyaanaa Liyanaarachchi

Y?

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Not bad, no? I do so love creative writing in my spare time!