I don’t think there can be a better way for strangers to get to understand one another. Chaucer showed us that in his Canterbury Tales. Sri Lanka and Britain are oceans apart, linked by an uncomfortable history, by language, and by cricket. But when I tell a tale, whether it is one of mine, or an Aesop’s fable about a lion and a mouse, or Kipling’s ‘Elephant’s Child’, what we discover at once is not what divides us in our cultures, but what links is in our lives, how we deal with the human condition, with the world about us.
It is empathy that we learn from reading, from listening to one another’s stories, and with both come knowledge and understanding. I was reminded of this constantly during my recent British Council visit to Sri Lanka, to Colombo, to Kandy, to Galle. In Colombo in the garden of the British Council I talked to maybe 200 people, of all ages, and many cultures. Through stories we got to know one another, laughed a lot, wept a little. Like so much cricket in England, it was a rain interrupted talk. But it was the better for it. We just moved into the hall and on we went with renewed vigour!
Kandy was intense, more intimate in an upper room that kept filling and filling, the children spilling over around my feet. Very few had read my books. And did it matter? Not a jot. We got to know each other through the stories I told, through the questions they asked.
Then during the Galle Literary Festival I went on my own outreach programme, visiting a Sri Lankan school, the first I’d ever been into, a school ravaged by the tsunami of 2004. I got to play cricket in the playground – the bowler showed me no mercy whatsoever! I got to tell stories, and we got to laugh together about them. was as wide eyed as they were, all the time. By the end of it, when the stories were done, we were no longer strangers. One girl stood up bravely and asked me what I thought of Sri Lanka. I told her I had found the people I’d met kind and generous hearted. I told her that to be joined for breakfast by a mongoose and a family of monkeys has made me think I should write my own Aesop’s Fables. And I also said that the traffic was a nightmare of tuc-tucs, bicycles, motorbikes, cars, buses, lorries, monitor lizards, dogs, elephants and carts drawn by buffalo, but that I never enjoyed car journeys more in all my life, every minute might have been a near death adventure, but that it was all right because Sri Lankans drove on the left – sometimes!
 
 
 
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