The other day I was re-reading Carl Muller's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cemetry...in fact, I have lost count of the number of times that I have read this book...the book relates a number of humourous, and sometimes hilarious, incidents from the life of the author... some of these are from his navy life...absolutely 'laugh-your-head-off' hilarious...and there are some incidents taken from his life as a journalist in the Gulf (Persian/Arabian Gulf)...and some inincidents from the general life in Sri Lanka...
I bought this book long back on the strength of his wonderful abilities as a 'riotously' humourous writer as seen in his wonderful trilogy...The Jam Fruit Tree, Yakada Yaka, and Once upon a Tender Time...this trilogy introduces us to the Railway life of the Burgher community in Sri Lanka...like the Anglo Indians in India, Burghers are a Eurasian ethnic group in Sri Lanka, and formed the bulk of employees in Railways...and this trilogy traces the three generations of the Von Blosses...a thinly disguised retelling of the events of the three generations of his family...the Mullers...the protagonists are Cecilprins Von Bloss, the patriarch, who we see in The Jam Fruit Tree, his son, the uncontrollable Sonnaboy Von Bloss, holds fort in Yakada Yaka and Sonnaboy's son, Carloboy Prins Von Bloss, who comes to the foreground in Once Upon a Tender Time...of the three, my favourite is Yakada Yaka...it is a laugh riot...and this book has rescued me many times from low moods and gave me company on many lonely rummy saturday evenings...and I have invariably ended up laughing uncontrollably at the end of each funny railway episode... 'hilarious' would be a mild term...how Sonnaboy thwarted the pentecostalists, how he ruined the perfect party, how his railway colleagues almost ate a human heart and had to be rushed to the hospital, ...all this and much more...Sonnaboy's volcanic anger...his brood of children...his cranky brothers and sisters...their spouses...their children...a real volatile mix actually...and each episode explodes with laughter, songs, ribaldry, sometimes innocence, and many a times, the English Railway officials, are left wringing their hands at the perfectly loony explanations given by Sonnaboy and his equally crazy railway colleagues...
1 comment:
Muller is an absolute hoot and when I feel a little down I always dip into one of his books. I'm a fellow Burgher, domiciled abroad, and can still relate to the social antics of the day.
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