Plastic Emotions

By Shiromi Pinto

Plastic Emotions is inspired by the life of Minnette de Silva – a forgotten feminist icon and one of the most important figures of twentieth century architecture.
In a gripping and lyrical story, Shiromi Pinto paints a complex picture of de Silva, charting her affair with infamous Swiss modernist Le Corbusier and her efforts to build an independent Sri Lanka that slowly heads towards political and social turmoil.
Moving between London, Chandigarh, Colombo, Paris, and Kandy, Plastic Emotions explores the life of a young, trailblazing South Asian woman at a time of great turbulence across the globe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: INFLUX PRESS
• Release date: Jul 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781910312322

Shiromi Pinto

Shiromi Pinto's debut, Trussed, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2006. She has written short stories for BBC Radio 4, the Victoria & Albert Museum and opendemocracy.net. Born in London and raised in Montreal, she works full-time at Amnesty International in London.

Book preview

Prologue

8 December 2005

‘Christ it’s hot,’ mutters the student, and blows into her shirt. It’s early morning – too early perhaps to undo the top buttons and loosen her collar. She undoes them anyway. At least she won’t be visiting any temples today. Yesterday’s trip to the white Buddha began with the ticket lady reaching over unbidden and buttoning her blouse up to the neck. ‘Annuh hari’, she had said, and smiled.

The student is outside the train station, ready to leave this town for the capital. But she has one more thing to do before she can go. She scans the parking lot for a trishaw, ignoring those with ripped open seats or rusty chassis. She wonders at her audacity – an audacity that spirits her into a glorified motorbike with all the protective reinforcement of a tomato tin.

After some minutes, she settles on a clean-looking specimen. Its car is lime green, the seat is intact and the driver wears a well ironed shirt over a tartan sarong. She asks him if he knows the house and he tilts his head from side to side. ‘Hoyaganne puluwang-dha?’ she asks in halting Sinhala. His head bobs left and right again, and they set off.

The heat builds as they make their way upward. This is one thing they know for certain – that the house is on top of a hill. They know the name of the road: George de Silva Mawatha, after the architect’s father.

The young woman nestles inside the trishaw, peering at the roadside stalls, the cyclists, the thickening greenery. She wonders whether they will find the house, and if they do, what they will find there. She has only seen it in books – Nell Cottage.

She has seen one of the architect’s first builds here in this town. A villa on a different hill, with a sweeping staircase and floor-to-ceiling windows. The view from those windows is stunning, taking in the lake at the centre of the town and the gentle slope of the surrounding hills. Yet the villa is in an appalling state, so much so that the people living in it plead with her, a student of architecture, to buy and restore it. She thinks she would, if she had the money.

The student and the trishaw driver have been climbing now for the last forty minutes, the three-wheeler fretting and moaning up the steep path. The driver keeps stopping and jumping out to look at the house numbers. He waylays passing pedestrians who either shrug or point upward. So they continue. Eventually, they find numbers 13 and 15, but 14 – the one they’re after – has vanished.

She wonders if this isn’t some kind of trick the architect is playing on them. Her houses are often to be found camouflaged by greenery. Perhaps Nell Cottage is right in front of them, if only they knew which branch to raise, which grasses to part.

The architect was prone to tricks of all kinds, thinks the student. She remembers a story she once heard: how, when the architect was older and living in London, she called a student, much like her, to her flat in the middle of the night. Her panicked voice had been enough to propel him from bed and onto the tube. ‘Listen,’ she had said as he walked in, rubbing her cheeks so that he, too, could hear it: the thin hiss of aging skin. He ran to the chemist to buy her face cream.

The trishaw driver stops to inquire at a garage. The mechanic there tells them to keep going to the very top of the hill. The road jolts them left and right. Whole shovels-full of asphalt have been scooped out by hard rains. As they continue upward, they pass a gas meter reader who, fortuitously, has just come from the cottage.

‘Okoma kadila,’ he says. Then, addressing the trishaw driver he adds, ‘Thaniying yanna dhenna epa.’

The young woman bristles at the man’s cautionary directive, then accepts it. She and the trishaw driver continue a little further until they find the cottage’s elderly caretaker. Even at this early hour, his breath smells of toddy and his legs are unsteady. He seems irritated at the intrusion and frowns. Worried he will turn them away, she smiles. She wishes she had a bottle of something to bribe him with, but her fears are refuted. He beckons to them and lets them in.

They enter the grounds of Nell Cottage and she is astonished. The pergola still drips with red bougainvillea, although some of its brick columns have crumbled into the grass. The entrance to the house is magnificent, its wall covered in square terracotta tiles with Kandyan dancers sculpted in relief on each one.

Yet the front garden has been uprooted by wild pigs. And as she steps inside the house, she sees that the cottage has been gutted by the rains. The ceiling has caved in, the floor strewn with glass shards, glinting now like thousands of fallen stars.

‘Balagana,’ says the caretaker, and he puts out an arm to keep her back. She scans what’s left of the living room, its floor now a pulpy mess. Leaves of paper are scattered everywhere. The bespoke shelves that the architect had built, once orderly and chic, have collapsed like a stack of wet crackers. Sodden plans stick to an equally sodden desk.

Ivy has taken root on the splintered walls, trailing across the floor, leading their gaze deeper into the house. The hallway is part jungle, part ancient ruin. Halfway in, a lone slipper lies upside down, as if cast off by an impatient foot. The house is at once desolate and richly fertile.

The student’s thoughts return to the villa on the hill. She thinks it, too, will succumb once the people living there leave. If not succumb, then the inevitable drive to modernise this town, this country, will see the villa razed to the ground to make way for another hotel. Again, she regrets coming here with no money, no plan, nothing but her need to know.

They pick their way forward, through the remains of unidentifiable rooms. A small bird flies in as if from nowhere, and is immediately swallowed up by green. Wherever they look, they find a mix of unconnected materials: pages torn from magazines, melting photographs, broken plates, a muddy cushion, unopen letters. An absence of clues to the function of this part of the cottage disorients them. But their confusion is soon righted a few paces on.

The student is the first to see it: a white bathtub, now mossy and overflowing with ivy. This once elegant, claw-footed tub is the source of the profusion of green swallowing up Nell Cottage. Or so it seems to her.

‘Kavuruth nona-ve visit keray ne,’ says the caretaker. ‘Vasa hindha.’ He tells them the architect fell while getting out of the bathtub, and lay on the floor for days before anyone found her. She died later in hospital, remembered by no one.

The student imagines the architect curled like a gecko on the ground. And before that, sitting in Nell Cottage, stern and lonely in her old age. She never married, had no children. The student thinks of her, drawing up plans while dreaming of the man she loved. ‘Le Corbusier was a tall man,’ the architect had once said.

And as she takes a last look inside the house, the student glimpses a younger architect, designing, building, creating – holding her lover behind her eyes until the very end of her days.

I

May – June 1949

London

28 May 1949

Corbu. Corbu. Corbu. You would have thought me mad, writing your name so many times in my diary like a forgerer practising her craft. In the writing comes reality – the reality of you: cutting the page with black ink, as bold as you were when I first met you. Funny, too. There is something in the way that you write your name. That flourish that functions as a wink. It is there in your drawings – those strangely imprecise scratchings that grow more certain as the pages turn. How I long for that certainty now. The certainty of you. Who else can sustain me now that everything is over?

Papa has cut me off. He wants me back in Ceylon immediately. He said he will not pay for any more studies. Enough is enough, he wrote. You will come home now. Independence, you see. Papa wants me back to claim my place in a new Ceylon. He also wants to keep an eye on me. To make sure I don’t fall down some louche hole in Europe. You have been loafing about long enough, he wrote. It is time to work.

And what else have I been doing here if not working? How else did I make ARIBA? Yes, Corbu, I’ve done it. I, Minnette de Silva, have been elected an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. I – who had been giddy with London when I first arrived, spending too much time in the pub and not enough of it on my portfolio. I stand before you now – before everyone – as the first Oriental woman ever to have made ARIBA. Doesn’t the fact of this distinction mean anything to dear old pater?

It’s early, Corbu. A pale light shivers through my bare windows. Still no curtains. Marcia continues to be appalled, but I prefer it this way. From up here, I can watch London – say a slow goodbye.

How it has changed. When I first arrived, there were planes ripping open the sky. People were remembering the Battle of Britain, still celebrating the end of the war. Never mind that the city was half in ruins, it was as if hope itself would clear up the mess. But a few days later, everything returned to normal. People climbed back into themselves and stuttered about looking harried and glum. The city was depressed, most of it bombed out and clouded in soot. No amount of hope could undo that.

London was a disaster. My search for this flat took me through so many half-torn streets; so many houses destroyed in the war. I would turn down a road, be heartened by the proud line of a Georgian terrace, only to find it collapsing to one side like the face of a stroke victim. By the time I came to Savile Row, I’d resigned myself to living in less than ideal conditions – far less ideal than my hilltop lodge in Kandy or my beloved rooms in Bombay. I climbed that steep staircase, telling myself that I would have to take it whatever its faults. But this flat nestled high above Savile Row, with its dear sloping floors, made itself mine. The windows were still covered in black-out paper and the rooms quiet – as if they’d all been holding their breath until I arrived.

Sitting here watching the sun perfume the clouds, I remember the moment I stripped that paper off the windows, the dust puffing into the air, black crumbs catching in my fingernails, and then the view: Berkeley Square six blocks off but no less splendid. That was my reason for eschewing curtains, Corbu: Berkeley Square. And when I invited my AA friends round we would wander over to this window and stare out at that green patch, feed on its geometry, and talk about Gropius and Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright and that man, Le Corbusier.

Even Marcia and Werner love this place. In their eyes, it was the first proper thing I had done since my arrival – and this was saying a lot given I’d been here a few months already. Of course, I immediately squandered the moral credit I’d gained by throwing one party after another until the congratulatory allowance that Papa and Amma sent me was gone. We had everything: champagne secreted from the college, bananas off the black market, petit fours, Victoria sponges.

Marcia and Werner came, tutted over my profligacy and drank tea (well, my sister did; Werner can’t resist the whiskey). Mimi was there, too, causing Marcia to blanche with her purple language and shameless deportment with the boys. Honestly, Corbu, I don’t know when my sister turned into this caricature of herself. She certainly wasn’t like this in Bombay. Those were brilliant times. I’ll admit my attic flat pales rather next to Jassim House and its breezes surfing in over the Arabian Sea, delivering little Zubin’s violin practice through my windows each morning. Now, no more.

But then there were your visits here (of which Marcia and Werner shall remain ignorant). They more than anything else are what have made this place my home – our home. Yes, Corbu, I think of this flat – which has been my atelier for these last four years – as ours. I think of you huffing up those fragile steps, damning the English for their poor calculations as you bump your head yet again on the underside of a step, and I want to cry. How can I leave all this? I have one month – just one month left. It’s too soon.

You must come here, Corbu. Visit me once more at my penthouse flat. Stand here and hold me to your heart.

Ton oiseau

Minnette

30 May 1949

London

I’m just back from lunch with Mimi, dear Corbu. It’s only two days since my last letter, yet I can’t help but write of each day’s goodbyes. In your absence, I am writing you into these last hours, so that you will not feel left out and I will not feel quite so lonely.

I broke the news to Mimi of my impending departure over a plate of roast beef. She had the fork to her lips when I told her, but kept eating, saying nothing until she had flushed it down with a mouthful of red wine.

‘Tell him you can’t,’ she said, finally. This is typical Mimi. Tell him you can’t. As if I could do that. I have no real money of my own. I depend on Papa for my allowance. Disobedience would mean losing everything. ‘Will you take care of me, then?’ I asked. She looked at me like a cat might a fish and said, ‘But you have Corbu to do that, darling.’

Don’t worry. I won’t be turning up at No. 24 to stake a claim. I take none of what Mimi says seriously – she and her melodrama. I sat there and stared at her smooth white face. She is still the whitest person I have ever seen. And believe me, such whiteness has its uses. A few years ago, Mimi and I were walking along the Thames, doing what we did best: helping the other to evade her assignments. As we strolled along the river, a fog dropped on top of our heads, obliterating everything around us. We couldn’t see our own hands, let alone the river or Big Ben. But then I saw Mimi, pale and glowing. Like a lighthouse, she helped me orient myself and led us to safety. Later we sat in the Fox and Hound with our friends joking that the coal may have been short that season, but its dust was certainly prolific.

What a cold winter that turned out to be. Do you remember? Everything froze. Britain – and the rest of Europe – turned to ice. By December we were desperate for signs of any coal – dust or otherwise. The snow fell with abandon into Berkeley Square until its edges and corners and everything else disappeared. I wrapped myself in woollen shawls and blankets and sat with my back to the stove, but it was no use. Mimi tried to help by arriving impromptu with bottles of brandy and long cigarettes. We drank until we couldn’t tell whether it was the cold or the drink that had made us so numb. That was when I took up smoking, just to get my breath warm again.

Meanwhile, the snow fell like fat feathers, causing traffic snarls and collisions. The airfields were closed and temperatures dropped to 30 Fahrenheit (don’t ask me what that is in centigrade, Corbu. When it comes to measurement, I have been fully colonised). Marcia and Werner kept the motorcar off the roads, for fear of an accident. When we did venture outside, we slid off the pavements and into banks of snow.

One evening, not long before that Christmas, Mimi suggested we go to her mother’s place in Paris. ‘Pourquoi pas?’ she said. Exams were over and I was shivering alone in my attic flat, smoking and drinking and doing little else. So, we went. And Marcia and Werner came, too.

Paris was cold, but infinitely prettier. We ate pain au chocolat for breakfast and wandered the streets until lunch. There was no rubble to step over or bombed out houses to mourn. You were lucky. It was as if the city had gone on holiday during the war, only returning when it was over. The flat was in a typical old Haussmann-style block with a cage lift and wrought iron balconies. Do you remember it? You haven’t been there for a while, have you? It is grand and elegant with enormous windows. It was also empty when we first arrived.

‘Maman was a brave woman,’ said Mimi. ‘She was a member of the resistance, you know. Not one of those salaud traitors.’ When she said ‘salaud’, she raised her voice, glaring accusingly at the walls. ‘Ils étaient partout, ces salauds.’ She shouted again.

I put a hand on her shoulder and told her I was sorry. Her eyes, which had been steely and angry, clouded over like two opals. ‘This is my flat now,’ she said. ‘Welcome.’

I looked into those same eyes today, and saw my reflection. They are as clear and cold now as they were in the winter of ’46, but that’s the irony, isn’t it? Because Mimi isn’t cold. As I sat there, watching her smoke one of those long cigarettes, I marvelled at the struggle playing itself out on top of her head. It was hat against hair, Corbu. Her red ringlets were springing in all directions like frightened rabbits, so that her hat quivered like a jelly. You see, that’s the real indicator of her character, that irrepressible mass of hair.

‘Of course I’ll take care of you,’ she cried. ‘I’ll take you to Paris. You can hide at my flat. Claim immunity from your despotic father. You can spend some time with Basquin. He told me he’d like to paint you.’

Do you know Jean Basquin, Corbu? I met him that same winter. Mimi took me to his place one afternoon, shortly after Christmas.

Arriving at the door of a ramshackle looking building, I was not surprised to find a similarly dishevelled man in its entrance. Taking in his brambly hair, wrongly-buttoned shirt and frayed trousers, I was put in mind of the crooked man in his crooked house, and peered inside looking for a crooked dog. But Basquin was on his own.

His breath was bad, but his manners were very courteous. The house was cold and shambolic inside. He showed us to a greasy settee and we sat in it, Mimi dropping into it like an anchor, me perching on its edge.

‘I would offer you tea,’ he said, ‘but the water in my pips is frozen. For sure, they will burst.’ He turned away, his face looking momentarily pained, saying to no one in particular, ‘Ah, the pips. The pips.’ With that, he left the room. I was freezing. There was no heating or fire to speak of – everything had ceased to function since the war. How Basquin lived like that, I could not imagine. He was wearing an overcoat and muffler indoors, but his fingers were still purple.

Basquin returned bearing two saucers with little beige slabs on them.

I put up my hand to refuse, when Mimi pinched my leg. I stared at the saucer on my lap and the frozen square at the centre of it that had been, in a warmer life, cake.

‘Mais vous êtes gentils, Basquin,’ said Mimi, biting into her slice and chewing it with a grin. ‘Merci.’

I followed Mimi’s example, smiling and sinking my teeth into my own slab, but no amount of pressure would break it. Worse than that, my bottom lip stuck to the bottom of the icy block. I grated at the square with my teeth, letting the little filings fall and melt on my tongue. Basquin was not impressed by my efforts and cast me such a look of hurt when he took my plate that I immediately tried to take it back.

‘Basquin wants to paint me, Mimi? Are you sure? Even after I was so rude last time?’ Mimi looked at me blankly. ‘The cake. Remember? I couldn’t eat it.’

Mimi laughed. ‘Oh, dear Minnette. What are you talking about? Of course he doesn’t care about things like that. He thought you were charming. Timeless. That’s what he said. "She is timeless.’’’

So, I am timeless. Just as well, Corbu, as I have a habit of being late to most things. And speaking of being late, I must dash. I’m meeting Mimi this evening for drinks. At the Fox and Hound, of course.

How I wish you were here, my love.

Ton oiseau

Minnette

1 June 1949

London

My dear Corbu, you should have seen me last night. I was stunning. I wore my red silk sari and two roses in my hair. When I walked through the Covent Garden piazza, everyone turned to look. A young man smiled at me, another bowed. I felt like a queen.

It was just like that time after the war, when Mimi and I went to the reopening of the Royal Opera House. Everyone stared then, too. Someone even presented me to the King and Queen! I remember how Her Majesty smiled at me, admiring my silks. She kept asking me about the colour and the drape and how one managed to keep it secure. Since then, my saris have become a privilege pass to all the parties at the Royal Opera House – all the parties in Covent Garden, in fact.

Last night, I was beckoned to and passed around like a tray of champagne. Mimi attracted a good deal of attention with her auburn curls. Marcia and Werner were there, too. Each time I reached for a glass of champagne, there was Marcia, wearing an expression of such horror, you’d think I’d been thrusting my hand into the jaws of hell. This is some new thing with my sister. Where has she gone, Corbu? In India, she was a virtual Bohemian. And in our younger days, we got into all sorts of trouble. I remember us nearly causing a riot in Kandy once. We had been part of a pageant telling the story of how Buddhism came to Ceylon. Of course, I was Sangamitta, bearing the branch of the sacred Bo Tree. And during a break, I leaned over and took a puff of Marcia’s cigarette. There was an uproar, and we had to be whisked away to safety. Marcia didn’t even drop her cigarette. She puffed it through the corner of her mouth while leading me out of the throng of angry Buddhists. Now, my sister – the same woman who thought nothing of aiding and abetting scandal – thinks I’m an alcoholic. Just because I enjoy a glass or two of whiskey. She doesn’t know that I’ve often shared the same with her dear husband. ‘You vill not tell Mahcia,’ he says, whenever we are out and she has disappeared to the toilet. He’s very crafty, my brother-in-law – always lighting up a cigar afterward to mask the odour.

Marcia’s caustic glares aside, the night was a success. I met a couple who enthused flatteringly about my architectural opinions. There was Tambimuttu, the wonderful Tamil poet, along with a number of other artists and photographers who were regulars at the Fox and Hound. And – best for last, Corbu – Ram Gopal! He looked splendid in a silk turban and shawl.

‘Darling,’ he said, embracing me, ‘I haven’t seen you for years, but you still look marvellous – marvellous.’ You would love Ram, Corbu. He’s a choreographic wizard. He’s taken the dances of the Orient and translated them for a Western audience. His performances are spectacular. The last time he was in London, I had to lend him my flat. It was autumn 1947, just a few weeks before Bridgwater. Ram rang me up in a fit because his manager had let him down. ‘Minnette, darling,’ he said. ‘He’s a waste – an absolute waste. A horror!’ He rolled the r’s to emphasise the injustice then, to ensure my sympathies really were with him, added: ‘A beast!’ The troupe was coming to London in two days, he said, and had nowhere to stay.

I offered temporary lodgings at mine and Marcia’s. He accepted. Within two days, my Savile Row flat was transformed into a green room. Dancers pliéd in the sitting room and did the splits against my walls. There was make-up everywhere and amidst it all, Ram Gopal, gorgeous and shimmering like a sapphire on one of his many turbans. ‘Look,’ he said, spreading his arms wide as if to gather up his dancers, ‘they are like my children – so obedient.’

As soon as Ram saw Mimi, he called out, ‘Ah, the walking paradox rises amongst us.’ This is Ram’s nickname for Mimi: The Walking Paradox. ‘She is so pale,’ he said to me once, ‘yet there is a vigor to her… like a radiant corpse.’ We kept the corpse bit to ourselves.

Mimi, Ram and I spent the rest of the evening casting mischievous judgements on our fellow guests. Marcia was not amused, but she so rarely is these days.

So, Corbu, the night beckons, again. Tonight I stay in with a book, a cigarette and a small glass of whiskey – and no Marcia to tut-tut me for it.

Ton oiseau

Minnette

4 June 1949

London

I’m having tea from one of my finest china cups. This is not, in and of itself, worth writing about, but there is something about the colour of this tea that makes me think of Bridgwater.

The tea is not as bad as it was there, goodness, no. In fact, it’s rather good. I like my tea the Ceylon way – plenty of milk and sugar with a shot of the best brewed BOP leaves to be found: those grown as high as possible in the hills.

I remember thinking this at Bridgwater. I was taking a break between talks, wondering whether I would ever get a chance to speak to you. I’ll be honest, Corbu. I was desperate to speak with you. I wanted to impress you somehow. To make you notice me – the architecture student from the East with a passion for Modernism. I wanted you to train those rounded specs on me – to look at me, to see me.

You were preoccupied. A fissure had opened up between the young and old architects. They were attacking you, Gropius and the Athens Charter with its absolute separation of functions within a city. Who could deny the unique and radical needs of post-war urbanism? Who could still believe that a site was a blank slate upon which a plan and its architecture could be imposed?

I have always wondered at the arrogance of supposing a place has no existence without a building installed according to a man-made plan. Sigiriya in Ceylon is exactly the opposite. It started with an enormous rock into which King Kasyapa carved himself and his entourage. It is the rock that stands out. The fortress – for indeed, that is what it became – is barely visible, hinted at only in contours from afar. Its monumentality is drawn from its natural state. Closer inspection finds intricate claws and a staircase disappearing into the suggestion of a creature’s gaping jaws, but all of this is hidden until you’re close enough to touch it. The fortress was an island unto itself. Buddhist monks had once used it as an escape from this material world. Kasyapa came to it to escape certain death at the hands of his brother for killing their father. The fortress, was always there, inherent in the rock. Much as Michelangelo would find his sculptures buried in marble.

People were milling about, sipping cups of tea and nibbling on hard biscuits. I was stirring two spoonfuls of sugar into my tea, absorbed by the vortex of hessian liquid swilling about in my cup. I heard nothing but the ting of the spoon on bone china. Even that sounded so much like home that the air cooled around me and the mists blew in against my temples. If I looked out, I thought, I would see green hills and a lake below, and creepers of carnelian flowers. And Amma would be behind me, talking to Jaya, our housemaid, about the intricacies of making love cake. Papa would be sitting on the verandah next to them, offering his opinion on the ratio of cadju to semolina. I turned around.

I felt you behind me, Corbu. I turned around to smile at you, to say, finally. No – I had much more to say than that. Sigiriya – I was going to tell you about Sigiriya, Kasyapa, Michelangelo. About Marg – the magazine Otto, Marcia and I founded in Bombay. I was going to ask you about Poissy and La ville radieuse. And all the while, I would watch you watching me: my hair, my necklace, my sari. I was ready, holding all this on my tongue as I turned around.

There was no one there. The crowds had been winnowed to a scattered few, most engrossed in writing notes or brushing crumbs from their lapels. I turned back to my tea and drank. It was weak and cold. I considered the ratio of cadju to semolina alongside my imagined parents and Jaya, and somehow made light of my disappointment.

That’s my confession, Corbu.

I long for your news.

Write soon.

Ton oiseau

Minnette

POST OFFICE TELEGRAM

11.17 Paris 16IEME

June 9, 1949

DESARAM 15 SAVILE ROW W1

FELICITATIONS ON ARIBA STOP IN LONDON IN TWO DAYS STOP WE WILL EAT CAKE

LC

12 June 1949

London

You were here in this room, standing on this sloping floor, cursing it even as you smiled at me. Your shadow fills the room, throws its great darkness right over Berkeley Square. You were here. My bed is unmade. I am unmade. Cigarette ash makes a pyre at my feet.

I want to feel your heart again, know the sharp crease of it, feel it here, against my back.

I am leaving. This is the only command that governs me now and I must walk into the truth of it. With every step I shrink and duck. I can’t, Corbu, how can I? Each step takes me back to Bridgwater, back to that moth’s wing of a moment that swept fortune into my hungry mouth:

I have just finished a lunch of tough lamb. The lamb sits like a monk in my gut. The Bridgwater conference is over and we are invited to an evening concert to bring a formal end to the week. I forego dinner in favour of a nap, so that I will be fresh for the concert.

I take my seat next to a member of the MARS group. She is slim and pretty and one of my AA colleagues. It turns out it’s not her seat. She shifts down and in her place sits you. We don’t notice one another. I chat to the person to my right while you are engrossed in Miss MARS. At some point and

Reviews for Plastic Emotions

[missizicks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Plastic Emotions is an imagining of the life of Minnette de Silva, the first Sri Lankan woman to become an architect, the first Asian woman to be elected as an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and the woman who helped to remould the built landscape of a newly independent Sri Lanka with her daringly modern designs.Shiromi Pinto has woven a narrative that mingles fact with fiction to shine a light on this almost forgotten woman. It's a beautiful novel, full of rich description and insightful observation, that reveals something of what it was to be de Silva. She was a risk taker, a fiercely independent woman working in a highly male-centric society, and she wanted to bring the traditional crafts of her nation into the modern world so that they would continue to have relevance.The novel is an exploration of her life, with her friendship with Le Corbusier depicted in the language of a love affair and her existence as a London socialite, celebrated for her exoticism, juxtaposed with that of her architectural practice in Sri Lanka, where she was treated with suspicion because of her gender.The title is a quote from Le Corbusier's "Towards a New Architecture" and refers to the ability of an architect to mould the emotions of those who experience his (or her) buildings through the forms and shapes it is composed of. De Silva, in marrying tradition with modernity, was seeking a new, more plastic language of architecture. Her work in Sri Lanka was ground breaking. Pinto's novel is a stepping stone towards re-establishing her contribution to modernism.It's also a beautiful story. You don't need to know anything about the central characters or the world of architecture to appreciate the humanity of two people who love each other but can't be together, or the life of a woman making her way in a man's world against a background of political upheaval.