After finishing the utterly charming Hot Butter Cuttlefish, I wanted to read more novels by Ashok Ferrey. This slim novel is light yet incisive, wryly funny, and the characters induce empathy—even the antagonist, a local politician. Although the real villain is COVID-19, which invades Sri Lanka in the course of the story. Even the coronavirus is not a cruel and terrible actor but one beyond any agency. All you can do is live through it.

To tell the story of the imperfect world, stumbling from one moment to the next, in the microcosm of a village, with good humour and lots of sniggers, is perhaps the best service a writer can render to readers. Here, the village is Kalabola, situated by a lake not far from Colombo, and comprising opinionated oddballs. In short, a village no different from any other in our part of the world.

In Kalabola reside four main characters: Kamala, a descendant of the former Kandyan nobility but now the housekeeper for a man she nearly married; Arthur De Fonseca, that very man, the last of a line of local wealthy landowners; Chanchala Dabare, a girl 25 years younger than Arthur to whom he is engaged; and our narrator Malik, a personal trainer whom Arthur hires for Chanchala.

Malik is a 39-year-old migrant from Colpetty, a coastal neighbourhood of Colombo. His back story: ex-wife Fiona, whom he met at Colombo Fashion Week, drained him of most of his money, so he relocated to Kalabola with whatever was left. His opening paragraph is a disclaimer that personal trainers never talk about their clients, much less reveal their secrets. He then proceeds to do precisely this.

Arthur and Kamala have an old couple’s coexistence until he is asked to train Chanchala in ballet, and he enlists Malik’s help in toning her body. He falls in love, much to Kamala’s dismay; she has not forgotten the humiliation of being rejected by him as a young woman, and his lack of recognition 20 years later when she came to work for him. Despite this, she feels ownership over him. Arthur and Chanchala agree to marry; perhaps she (or her mother) eyes his lakeside acreage and its inherent wealth.

That is when COVID-19 hits: everyone is quarantined, and the marriage is put on hold.

The COVID effect

It is a moment for a Minister, Biju, who is Kamala’s distant cousin, to shine. He has a political inheritance from his father as the local parliamentarian. He once lusted after Kamala, but she turned him down because, well, politics stinks. Now he lusts after Arthur’s property for he wants to develop it into lakeside luxury residences. His wife passes away soon after the virus arrives.

Arthur falls sick and has little choice but to wait it out since the local hospital is little more than a death pit. Malik points out to us that traditionally, the only cure for a virus is to wait until it passes. (We now know how useless and unnecessary ivermectin and chloroquine were.)

Thanks to Kamala, the Minister hits upon a money-making scheme: bottling the water from a local tap as a cure for COVID-19. Bottles of “Kolabola Water” become popular nationally, earning Biju so much money that he even considers leaving politics. (Perhaps the vaccinations we all rushed to take were akin to miracle water. Whither those vaccines that earned pharmaceutical giants billions of dollars—some of it donated to politicians who enabled them?) Really, humankind is just like Kolabola’s villagers.

Of course, COVID-19 passes. What happens then is something for you to find out by reading Hot Butter Cuttlefish.

And it is a pleasure to read, with its innocuous asides providing laugh-out-loud moments within the narrative. For instance, when Malik has an evening visitor, he says of his dog Fritzi: “I had put Fritzi in front of the television to watch the election speeches, so he was safely asleep.”

Loaded sentences

But there are also some sentences that are food for thought. How much do our bodies define us? Malik describes the ill Arthur: “He looked small, shrunken... breathing noisily, as through a damp cloth.... He had always had such an esoteric, distinctive personality: with that gone all you were left with was this rattling bag of bones, disappointingly commonplace, bearing no relation to the witty sophisticated spirit we were familiar with.” This will resonate with anyone who has a dead or dying close relative.

“I wondered, did dogs experience the passage of time?” Malik says. “It occurred to me that the older people got, the more dog-like they became: unconcerned with the world outside, much more worried about whether it was time for their next meal.”

This is exactly what I noticed about my father, who passed away three years ago. He had Alzheimer’s for perhaps 15 years before that, and he, like my late darling Poppy, was always hanging around the kitchen, hoping to get lucky.

Malik observes about Lankans who are not invited to weddings but are later inevitably interrogated by common acquaintances as to why they were absent: “In my Colpetty days I actually knew friends who took the latest flight out of the country to Chennai or Bangkok to avoid this sort of confrontation.”

I enjoyed such throwaway comments. As Malik remarks about his friend Arthur’s unshakeable faith in his fiancée’s love: “There’s no fool like an old fool, they say.” I recommend the book to all fellow fools.

Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.

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