'Hot Butter Cuttlefish' book review: Satisfying tale of love and other pirouettes

By Saudha Kasim

The multi-hyphenate Ashok Ferrey doesn’t give us a detailed description of hot butter cuttlefish, the popular Sri Lankan starter that lends its name to his latest novel. The internet obliges: it’s batter-fried squid stir-fried with chilli, garlic, butter, and spring onions. “No Sri Lankan party is complete without this as an accompaniment to whiskey”, proclaims one blog, and it’s “great with fried rice too”. In Ferrey’s novel, the dish doesn’t have much of a role to play besides being the star item on the menu of Mr Yung’s Chinese eatery in the fictional village of Kalabola, where the story is set. But the tale he tells is as delicious as its namesake dish.

Malik, the personal trainer who narrates Hot Butter Cuttlefish, describes Kalabola as nestled “in the armpit of that vast natural lake, the largest in all Sri Lanka, which spreads its tentacles like an octopus between the Colombo and Kalatura districts.” The village has a collection of distinct, oddball personalities, ranging from villainous politicians to middle-aged women from the Kandyan aristocracy who have seen better days, and young girls on the make looking to escape their humdrum circumstances by marrying a much older man with a large estate.

The man with the large estate in question is Arthur, the final descendant of the de Fonseca dynasty that made its fortune collaborating with colonial powers and from mining plumbago to supply gun manufacturers during the world wars. Arthur has none of the shrewd business sense of his forefathers — most of the family fortune has been lost, and only the ancestral house on the lake in Kolabala remains, where Malik first meets him, “wearing a long shapeless raincoat and black tights” as he twirls and pirouettes through a ballet routine. Arthur is about to put on a ballet performance and would like Malik’s help with fitness training for one of the dancers, Chanchala, the prettiest girl in the village.

Arthur, whose income mainly comes from coconut harvests these days, was much indulged as a young man by his mother and never married. He lives under the autocratic rule of Kamala, his housekeeper, who regards him as the 'one-who-got-away', who’d turned down the opportunity to marry her when they were both young (the rejection still stings — especially as she’s from a prominent Kandyan family, even if they were reduced to running a bakery). While Arthur is kind and easy-going, he can also be very slippery. Kamala “could never decide whether she loved or loathed her employer. It seemed to her supremely logical that she could do both.”

Things in the de Fonseca household — and in Kalabola — come to a boil during the ballet performance when Kamala storms the event, yelling at Arthur and creating a scene. The Sinhala word for prostitute, vaisey, is thrown around liberally — Kamala has cottoned on to Arthur’s amorous intentions toward young Chanchala, who is encouraging his overtures with her mother’s support. Soon after the ballet fiasco, Arthur proposes marriage to Chanchala.

However, Covid interferes with their plans, and when the country goes into lockdown, the nefarious local MP and minister Biju starts selling tap water as Kalabola Water, a miracle cure. Kamala is roped in as brand ambassador for this quackery (the label on the bottle features her with brawny forearms in a red dress and the tagline “Take the water, there’s no arm in it”) which she willingly participates in partly out of a need to one-up the feckless Arthur and also because Biju is her second cousin and had courted her in their youth. Biju is also angling to get hold of Arthur’s estate at a steeply discounted price so he can build an ugly but lucrative township by the lake.

Hot Butter Cuttlefish packs in a lot — and you don’t realise how much is going on because Ferrey’s tale is so languorously paced and there’s a pleasingly high ratio of jokes per page. His humour is the kind that sneaks up on you:

“‘There are plenty of other bedrooms,’ the Minister crooned in her ear. ‘Plenty? What am I supposed to be, part of some harem? Among how many others?’ It pained her deeply, this unwarranted increase of tarts in the village. Any more and she’d be forced to reopen the bakery.”

As I read Hot Butter Cuttlefish, I did wonder if Ferrey would close it with a strong finish — surely such a high-wire act couldn’t be sustained through 260 pages. I needn’t have worried — this story of Kalabola, as told by Malik the trainer, has a deeply satisfying end, and I hope it’s not the last we see of Arthur, Kamala, Biju, and the rest of these oddballs. They deserve another outing in Ferrey’s highly capable hands.