The Library

Characters:

• Donald Amaratunga
• A librarian
• Janice Conway

Summary of the Story

This story by Romesh Gunesekera, a Sri Lankan-born British writer, is about the search for one’s traditional roots and the preservation of personal heritage. Donald Amaratunga had come to Britain from Ceylon, present Sri Lanka, with his parents. After his parents died, he became alone. He had no other family. His father used to talk of an uncle of his who also had come to Britain from Ceylon, but that was long time ago, and no one knew about him anything more. As Donald grew older, he became more and more obsessed with information about anyone who could be regarded as a predecessor from the island of his forebears.

Donald works in a welfare organization. Though he is good at his work, he doesn’t get promotion. The Management tells him that he will have to be in the job for more than ten years and prove highly efficient in order to get the promotion. Donald becomes disappointed by this news, but soon accepts his limitations and decides to devote all of his spare time to the preservation of his personal heritage. Accordingly, he begins to collect everything he finds brought from Sri Lanka, turning his tiny flat into a museum. And he also starts to search for his uncle, whatever and wherever information he can find of him.

Recently, Donald has read a book about Leonard Woolf, in which there is a passing reference to a young Ceylonese poet who had once visited the Woolfs in Bloomsbury. Donald has found another mention of this poet in an account of 1920s or 1930s, where it is said that this fine young poet had gone on to produce one pamphlet having four leaves and seven poems before disappearing from the scene. After that, he has found one minor footnote somewhere that says there was a poem apparently dedicated to this Ceylonese writer by a Hornsey poet. Now, Donald is searching the poetry books by this Hornsey poet in the libraries of Hornsey. When he doesn’t find any such book in the branch library he first visits, he is directed to the main library some distance away. While going down to the main library of Hornsey, he meets Janice Conway, his neighbor, driving her car towards the same direction. She offers him lift in her car. She has a pet dog, Tommy, with her in the car, whom she treats like her child.

During their conversation in the car, Janice tells Donald that her grandfather was a poet, who wrote a lot of poems, and his name is G. F. Parker. By chance, it is the name of the poet whose poems Donald is looking for. He says that G.F. Parker dedicated a poem to a certain poet from Ceylon. Janice says that a man named Rohan Amaratunga used to come to visit her grandfather when she was little. Again, by chance, Donald is also Amaratunga, and Rohan is the name of his uncle. It seems the poet from Ceylon that Donald is searching for is none other than his own uncle. Janice further informs that her family had a copy of Rohan’s book, which she gave away to a local library in Hornsey along with her grandfather’s poetry books. Taking in this freshly received information Donald thinks about the next step he should take.  

Theme: search for one’s traditional roots and preservation of personal heritage