Sunila Galappatti’s cultural highlights

Sunila Galappatti has worked with other people’s stories as a dramaturg, theatre director, editor and writer: at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Live Theatre (Newcastle), Galle Literary Festival, Raking Leaves, Suriya Women’s Development Centre, Commonwealth Writers, Himal Southasian and Untold Narratives. She spent five years working with a long-term prisoner of war in the Sri Lankan conflict, to retell his story in A Long Watch (Hurst, 2016). She is an editor of My Dear Kabul (Coronet, 2024).

Dance: Chotto Desh by the Akram Khan Company

I’ve been watching the Akram Khan Company dance for years: so long that I had time to grow up and have a son old enough to take along, this time to see Chotto Desh (adapted for family audiences from Akram Khan’s solo work Desh, which I never got to see). The piece has a boyish energy— restless, exhilarating and funny (and there’s nothing quite like humour in dance). But it is also an unflinching search across borders, selves, stories: for belonging, precision, truth, perfection of form. If you’ve seen Akram Khan dance, you marvel how another dancer (here, Nico Ricchini) can step into his place without falling. Chotto Desh is easily the best thing I’ve seen on stage since returning to London two and a half years ago.

https://www.akramkhancompany.net/productions/chotto-desh-2023/

Essay: “We tried to be joyful enough to deserve our new lives”: (The Guardian, 20 July 2021) by Zarlasht Halaimzai 

The memoir essay can be a magical form. For the writer: it is short enough to be possible—you need limits to write about a life. For a reader: when an essay takes you in its thrall, you’re rarely expecting this effect from so unassuming a form. I read Zarlasht Halaimzai’s essay because it flashed by online at a time when I was working with Afghan writers and Afghanistan was being turned upside down again. I stepped into an essay I expected to be specific and found it about everything: home, loss, grief and the permanent unease of war. It is written so well and with a clear-eyed emotional lucidity we rarely summon. I have read it more than once and each time I’ve held my breath for the duration. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/new-lives-refugee-britain-afghanistan-asylum-uk-taliban

Photographs: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes

I last saw Hiroshi Sugimoto’s enormous photographic canvases a winter ago, in the Hayward Gallery’s staggering retrospective Time Machine: Hiroshi Sugimoto. The show was so huge and various I remember sitting down more than once as I tried to take it all in. But I had gone for the seascapes, remembering the feeling I’d had being amongst them when I saw a series twenty years ago. On the surface they are so still, the line between ocean and horizon as diffuse or as stark as the light. Yet you bring to them everything you know about the ocean. They represent the smallest possible unit of time and last an eternity. 

https://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/seascapes-1

Book: Whistle for Willie by Ezra Jack Keats

Each time I’ve read this picture book, first with my nieces, then with my sons, I’ve been struck by its perfection. The subject is so big and so small: a boy learning to whistle. Over a few pages, an urban neighbourhood is built with collage cut outs, and along its streets Peter makes many attempts to whistle for his dog Willie: from inside a cardboard box; stepping carefully on the cracks in the sidewalk; in the mirror, wearing his father’s hat. He does other things while he works at it: trying to hide from his shadow; drawing a line up to his front door in coloured chalk. Finally, he triumphs. The book ends in simple satisfaction (I quote from memory): ‘Peter’s mother asked him and Willie to go on an errand to the grocery store. He whistled all the way there and he whistled all the way home.’

https://www.ejkf.org/ezras-books-whistle-for-willie/

Song: ‘On a Slow Boat to China’ 

I don’t remember which version of the song I heard first, or with what degree of swing — try Fats Domino or the Platters or Kay Kyser and his Orchestra. I love the single-image single mindedness of the song: ‘I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China/ all to myself alone’. I read just now that when Frank Loesser wrote it, he was literalising and romanticising a poker reference. The wishful escape of the song makes me laugh (‘…leaving all your lovers weeping on a faraway shore’) – a love song more mischievous than earnest. Also, where have we left on Earth that is far away? China, I suppose, by the sheer force of our collective will. 

https://open.spotify.com/album/039knyekwKgMvnB8sYdKDx

Transport: Long distance trains

I suppose it is true of any train that there will be people on it who repeat the route and know it well. But you notice it on long distance trains: perhaps you run out of other things to think about and eventually come around to reflecting on the journey itself. On the East Coast Mainline from London to Edinburgh, people know when to look up to see the Angel of the North, the bridges across the Tyne and the sea; on coastal trains from Colombo to Matara in Sri Lanka, it is after Kalutara South that the standing crowd will thin enough for passengers to take out their parcels of food and offer them around. I’ve only once taken a train across (half of) America, from Chicago to Albuquerque in the dead of winter; the glare of snow such that the ground lit up the sky. In the dining car, I sat with two older women. They smiled knowingly at my silver and turquoise ring from Rajasthan: ‘See: we just knew you were from New Mexico’.

Photo by A.Savin, courtesy of wikicommons

Favourite WritersMosaic writer:

Gary Younge, not only for the quality of his thinking but also its warmth.

Author photo by JA Byrde