By Sunil Kuruvilla
Playwrights Canada
76 pages, $15.95
ISBN 0-88754-672-2

   Warm, lyrical, immensely funny, achingly tender and tart, Rice Boy is a marvelous memory-play in which two cousins find themselves caught between two cultures and ways of life. Tommy, born in Canada, is taken on summer vacation to his father’s homeland where he finds himself inextricably entangled in the sweet-sour life of his crippled cousin Tina. Tommy’s widower-father, grief-stricken by the loss of his wife and embittered by life in Canada where he works in a pizza shop, turns slothful. Tina’s parents are trapped in a loveless marriage, and their Servant Girl, a sensual and proud beauty, has her own issues with an estranged husband who is the Fish Seller. The family anchor is Granny, an old gal with fire still glowing in her belly, who dispenses with Indian wisdom in a mixture of gentle but firm exhortation and sly wit.

   Although most of the play concentrates on these Indian characters, there are brief episodes about Tommy’s life in Canada, where he meets a Mennonite farmer who is treated as an alien by Canadian society as much as East Indians are. Tommy also befriends a man whose son has gone missing. Tommy momentarily becomes Mr. Harris’s surrogate-son. The Canadian sections are not as vibrant or colorful as the Indian ones, and, so, are rightly relegated to a subordinate role in the plot. As the big world spins on, Tommy serves as narrator, framing the story as he perches in a banyan tree from which he can observe a larger picture.

   Kuruvilla’s characters pulsate with passion through their exoticism. As the stories of Tina and Tommy become increasingly intertwined, a pattern of inter-generational and inter-cultural love and rebellion emerges. Even the smaller characters are presented in a manner that is vital, romantic, or poignant. And so we have a mysterious nut seller and a sly, homoerotic umbrella man; a befuddled Sari Clerk and a Fish Seller who is estranged from his proud voluptuous wife; Tommy’s dispirited father, and crippled Tina who glows with injured humanity. Only Auntie and Uncle lack adequate material for characterization, but they are counter-balanced by Granny, whose wisdom and love reveal darting fires in her soul.

   Kuruvilla’s script indulges in some lyrical description of sugarcane fields and village life that substitute for dramatic representation, but its language is often a thing of sensuous beauty. Although its narration is shared by various voices and has a tendency to over compress matters at the end, the text is notably candid about things erotic and sexual, uncompromisingly revelatory in its comedy even at the expense of violating good taste, and succeeds in conveying the texture and substance of Indian village life. The play has the tartness of tamarind, the succulent sweetness of an Alphonse mango, and the delicacy of patterns made by rice-powder. 

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