World acclaimed Bollywood film producer and director, Deepa Mehta, has hailed a book written by a Sri Lankan writer, calling it one of the most powerful books she has read in years.
Mehta, whose latest film Midnight’s Children is currently playing in Sri Lanka, tweeted saying that the book ‘wave’ by Sonali Deraniyagala opens a “window into unimaginable grief” is pure and very sad.
Asked if she will make a movie out of it since she has been taken back by the story, Mehta says making a film out of it will bring down its value.
“The book contains her grief so perfectly , so horrifyingly . To bring it to film would trivialize it somehow,” she said.
The book is about the personal experience of Sonali when the tsunami struck Sri Lanka in December 2004 killing thousands including her own family.
On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived.
In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since.
She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing years, as she emerges reluctantly, slowly allowing her memory to take her back through the rich and joyous life she’s mourning, from her family’s home in London, to the birth of her children, to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo; all the while learning the difficult balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and the need to keep her family, somehow, still alive within her. (Colombo Gazette)
Report by Easwaran Rutnam