Sri Lankan author Ashok Ferrey is a personal trainer to the rich and infamous, who also designs and builds houses - including the Cricket Club Café in Colombo, which has just been nominated for a Geoffrey Bawa Award. An Oxford graduate of pure mathematics with a penchant for architecture, bodybuilding and being a film extra, one quickly discovers how much of his extraordinary life is woven into his latest brilliant book ‘The Unmarriageable Man’ set between Colombo and London.
‘The Unmarriageable Man’ opens dramatically with Sanjay de Silva angrily grieving at his tyrannical dad’s funeral in Colombo, surrounded by the many women who wished to be wife number two. Sanjay wants to break away, not
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| Nat West Bank is where Ferrey saved his deposit |
only from his father’s beastly controlling ways, but also the scheming satellites who orbit around him. He heads for London straight after the funeral, only to discover that his father’s presence continues beyond the grave - demonstrating the impossibility, sometimes of escaping from the evils of family control. In the process of looking for a whole new way of life, Sanjay unravels a number of shocking family secrets, while accidentally falling into the building trade in Brixton at the start of the blue-rinsed Thatcher years of the 80s - when every girl looked like Princess Di, though not every boy looked like Prince Charles.
From his father’s death in Sri Lanka to the excitement of the booming 1980s in England, Sanjay finds himself South London’s first Asian builder, wheeling and dealing with the best of them in the exciting world of buying, doing up and selling some 84 properties, while also in hot pursuit of Janine, a scandalous older woman in a mink coat and high heels. Ashok’s eyes twinkle when he talks about her and the total disapproval of his father’s ‘satellites’.
“I met the real ‘Janine’ at a Sri Lankan dance in London that I was actually attending with my mother. She wore this superb mink coat, and was easily the most glamorous woman in the room. Ignoring both my mother (who was actually related to her by marriage) and her own companion (a strikingly handsome guy - though in a strikingly handsome guy - though in a ‘miniature poodle sort of way) she wrote her number on a scrap of paper and gave it to me. I carried that number around with me for a year or so but never had the courage to call. From this point on the novel veers away from what actually happened, because the woman who appears in the story is based on someone else I actually had a relationship with.”
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| The Unmarriageable Man by Ashok Ferrey - reading it to his family dog |
This pacy book is at times so vividly real you feel like you are actually there with Sanjay - meeting these extraordinary characters in the British building trade that are largely based on Ashok’s hilarious personal experiences, while he was doing up flats during the height of the Thatcher years. The realism adds to the deeply poignant and unexpectedly funny aspect of this book even though The Unmarriageable Man is at heart about grief - and how each of us copes with it in our own inimitable way. By the end of it, have a box of tissues handy as your tears of laughter will, by the last few chapters, turn into tears of deep sadness, as we learn what really happened to Sanjay’s mysterious British mother.
Not everything is based on Ashok’s actual life though, although the places he talks about in the book all exist and make for a great day out in London following in his footsteps. I discover, speaking with him at a talk in London, that Ashoks own dad was really lovely, and that they did not go to the UK as so many others did in the late 1950s/1960s, but to Somalia, when he was 8 years old - to avoid the ideologically and economically repressive regime that existed in Sri Lanka at the time. It was here that Ashok attended the American School in Mogadishu till the age of 11, after which he was packed off to “the wilds of Sussex”, to a Benedictine monastery where he completed his pre-University education - which took him to Oxford University where he received a very poor third class degree in Mathematics. Maths, interestingly, plays a major theme in the book, such as with the Mobius Strip - which represents the infinite loops of behaviour that has us all going up then down repeatedly, following the patterns of our ancestors, linking us together like the links in a necklace chain. Unlike most graduates yearning to escape to the exotic east and warmer climes, Ashok found himself in a hovel of a room with no furniture in North Clapham, and this is where we join the author on his epic journey of discovery: getting his first loan to buy a property - almost impossible at the time - having been turned down by 12 high street banks and institutions who must, if they read this book, be kicking themselves right now. Of course, determination is in every Asian’s DNA, so he ultimately found himself a loan shark and bought the house from his rather creepy landlord for £24,000; but being young and totally unrealistic this was where the adventure really began.
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As we learn about the 84 flats he renovated and the exciting ‘gold rush’ of those Thatcher years we realise - as he moves from doing up one property to the next - the impact of the Iron Lady. But Sanjay had his challenges. “Unquestionably the worst moment was when Mr Jurisewicz (not his real name, though he was Polish too) said, ‘These flats are not fit for pigs to live in.’ Unkind and unfair,” says Ashok. “I love my pigs. I know they would have been very happy in my flats.” He describes his own amusing but shocking experiences through his character Sanjay, a total ingenue in that builder’s world. “I had no idea what sort of people I might be catering to when I sold those flats. But an agent from Barnard Marcus in Clapham once told me, ‘We love to visit your flats because we notice you always get interesting buyers, compared to other developers.’ I now think this must have been something to do with the design,” he says, though he was not really aware of it at the time. “So I guess you’re right: buildings do choose their occupants.”
But there were definitely at least two properties among all those Ashok worked on (not the ones he mentions in the book) where there was a certain malevolent presence. “Those houses were always cold even after the central heating was put in; it was terrifying to work alone in them after dark. It is still a wonder to me that I found perfectly decent young couples to buy them - which just goes to show that the occult only affects certain people, those who are susceptible to it. As I say in the book, people from the developing world seem to be more attuned to this sort of evil. Perhaps it is because concepts of good and evil still figure more strongly in our lives than in those of the rational world.”
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| Exploring the world of Ferrey’s Unmarriageable man in London. |
The British builder, one quickly learns, is a race apart; and he certainly wins the prize, Ashok declares. The Sri Lankan equivalent is a more put-upon, harassed creature. “Many are frustrated artists,” Ashok explains. “I have had a Sri Lankan welder on my site - an iron man in every sense of the word - bursting into tears because I criticised his work. But precisely for this reason it is easier to get a higher standard of workmanship in Sri Lanka.” He has always been lucky with property, he says. It was no special skill on his part to pull out with weeks to spare before the property crash in London. “This was not an emotional decision but an intellectual one. You have to remember I had left Sri Lanka a few days after my eighth birthday, so I hardly knew it. My Sri Lanka was a mythical place in an 8-year-old’s imagination. The decision to return when I turned thirty was based purely on that, and the firmly rational one that this unknown island might be the only place in which I might truly belong and be accepted. But you know what? I have since discovered, after 32 long years, that I will never be fully accepted here either. It seems I am too tainted by ‘abroad’. This is something I fear that so many of us people of mixed race, religion and culture have to learn to live with, harsh though it may seem. Something that now, at the tender age of 64, I have finally made my peace with. Everywhere is home, yet nowhere is home.” Living in Sri Lanka through virtually the entire civil war, Ashok thought frequently about turning tail and running back to the UK, “But the truth is that the sheer quality of life here is so superb that I was never seriously tempted. Just ask any of the thousands of Brits who continued to live here during that time.”
When asked why he didn’t return to a much easier life in the tropics sooner, Ashok explains, “This is a question that has puzzled me these last 30 years and I still don’t know the answer! We in Sri Lanka have this puzzling notion that as human beings we are not worth our salt until we’ve been tried and tested in the harsh uncompromising world outside this rather luxurious and indolent paradise home. I don’t know why it should be, but it remains true to this day: ask any young person in Sri Lanka and they will tell you that they would much rather be ‘abroad’ - in the mythical nirvana that we imagine exists beyond our shores. Had I returned sooner, I would forever have been worrying about what I might have missed out on. So it was probably necessary for me to ‘work the UK out of my system.’”
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| Ashok saw the beauty of Victoriana Brixton and Clapham North in the 1980s |
Intrigued as to why he chose to put a mixed race marriage at centre stage, I ask Ashok why he made Sanjay’s mysterious mother white British and not Asian? “I felt it was a requirement of the plot: Sanjay would not have been entitled to go and live in Britain so easily had he not been half-English. But there is another reason. I wanted to explore this phenomenon of a “mixed” marriage. Over the course of a long career, I have observed so many British-Sri Lankan marriages in Sri Lanka. I am truly sad to say I have found their chances of success not high. Why is this? Do we start out thinking we can change the other person to our way of thinking, that anything is possible - and realise by the end that very little is? As we all know, marriage is a series of compromises; are we less willing when we’re older to give in gracefully to the other person’s way of thinking? Is it a question of laziness to revert to our natural genetic inclinations? Why did the mother in the story take the radical decision she did? Why was the father not willing to compromise his creature comforts to fall in line? I wanted the reader to consider these questions. There are no right answers.”
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| Ashoks first house No 23 Tintern Street |
Ferrey’s writing is also proof of the importance of religion in Sri Lanka, which plays a part throughout the book, and these other dark forces of nature that worm their way into the pages, like the devil did in his last book. It is all about realising that if you leave them an opening, the demons will appear. As for the true character of Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans, “It is easy,” he says, “to fall into the trap and see Sri Lanka as a one-trick pony, a sort of one-dimensional India lite. It is a convenient shorthand - particularly in this instagram age of tweets and sound-bytes where people have no time to investigate the bigger picture. But I have to say - and I have lived for fair amounts of time on three continents - that Sri Lanka is easily, I repeat easily, the most complex country I know. The religious diversity I like to show is only a small part of it. We writers have a long way to go to do justice to the complexity that is Sri Lanka.” Talking about Sri Lanka, Ashok’s permanent base, he explains, “This is an ancient country, and let me tell you a secret: nothing much has changed in the last thousand years and this is how we like to keep it. As long as there are doctors, for instance, they will be at the top of the Sri Lankan marriage tree! And of course, builders will always be somewhere near the bottom; with labourers even lower down. And you mustn’t forget I was actually a labourer before becoming a builder.”
Many readers of the book mistakenly think The Unmarriageable Man refers to Sanjay when in fact it is all about the tyrannical father - a very common South Asian character. “So many South Asian men are not really cut out for fatherhood - they would much rather be out drinking and playing cards with the boys! We South Asians specialise in difficult family relationships: I didn’t have far to look, to come up with these characters - they exist in every family!” This provocative exploration on the subject ends in Italy, and will create heated family discussions long after you have finished reading the book. So, whether you love or hate Ashok’s page-turning, painfully insightful, pithy observations of a tyrannical father-and-son relationship while exploring the exciting backstreets of Brixton and Clapham, you will be all the richer for reading this incendiary work. A book that blows the lid off family secrets in a pandora’s box-like exposé , that will force every reader to look at their own life and how hiding from destructive patterns ends up with them being passed on from one generation to the next, hence the mobius strip analogy.
“For me, the UK and Sri Lanka are like the English mother and Sri Lankan father of the book,” Ashok says in conclusion. “You can love them, you can hate them; but the truth is that you can’t leave them behind; they are with you for life.”
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