At Home in the Nation? Negotiating Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy1

Abstract

In the opening chapter of Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy, Arjie, the young narrator and protagonist, is plucked from play in the children’s game of “bride-bride” and paraded before the adults gathered in his grandparents’ drawing-room dressed as a bride, an old sari wound carefully around his body and his face painted with lipstick, rouge and kohl. When Arjie’s uncle mockingly remarks to his father “Ey Chelva . . . looks like you have a funny one here”2 the ambiguity of the word “funny” disorients Arjie’s sense of meaning and comprehension. When Arjie hears the word uttered it is inflected with ridicule and his parents react with shame and disgust. However, Arjie’s description of adorning himself in the improvised paraphernalia of the bride produces a very different sensation for the narrator of being transfigured into a “more brilliant, more beautiful self, a self to whom this day was dedicated, and around whom the world, represented by my cousins putting flowers in my hair, draping the palu, seemed to revolve” (FB, pp. 4–5). In the “remembered innocence of childhood” (FB, p. 5), a space in which the narrator experiences “the free play of fantasy” (FB, p. 3), the sense of being “an icon, a graceful, benevolent, perfect being upon whom the adoring eyes of the world rested” (FB, pp. 4–5) expresses the potency of desire and nostalgia for the past. However, Arjie’s recollection of the allure of childhood is hardly figured on the page before it is succeeded by acknowledgment of a sense of “exile”, of movement away from “the safe harbour of childhood towards the precarious waters of adult life” (FB, p. 5), a process which starts much earlier than his actual departure from the island to Canada. At Home in the Nation?