Q&A with Srianthi Perera and Romany Kadurugamuwa

 

 

 

Srianthi Perera and Romany Kadurugamuwa are the authors of the new book Two Friends on Many Roads: Travel Tales from Near and Far. Perera also has written the novel A Maiden's Prayer. A journalist, she grew up in Sri Lanka and now lives in Arizona. Kadurugamuwa also grew up in Sri Lanka. She spent many years working as a librarian, and she lives in Texas, California, and Sri Lanka.

 

Q: What inspired the two of you to write this book?

 

A: Our childhood "reading buddy" friendship morphed into writing descriptive letters to each other as we entered our teens. As adults we had the opportunity to live and experience diverse cultures, even traveling together in Tuscany and Umbria to celebrate a milestone birth year.

 

The writers' group we traveled with were amazed at our decades-long friendship, which planted the seed in our minds to celebrate our friendship and share our various travel experiences in the form of a book.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: We spent hours on the phone playing with words and phrases until we decided on “Two Friends on Many Roads” to illustrate the many roads traveled by each of us, separately and together.

 

Life takes us on a long road, with sweet and bittersweet memories, and we hope readers will relate to the nuances of each individual experience.

 

Q: Of the various places you write about, do you have any particular favorites?

 

SP: I loved Istanbul, Turkey. I have detailed how I learned of the sect of whirling dervishes, but Turkey was much more to me than the Sufi followers.

 

The splendid mosques, the pigeons in the squares, the blue Bosphorus Sea, the colorfully clad Turks, the delightful confections and the humorously friendly salespeople who unroll carpet after carpet in a vain attempt to make a sale: these impressions layered in my mind and colored my experience. I yearn to visit again.

 

RK: I look back on the years I spent in Switzerland and Germany and feel grateful for the opportunities it gave me to experience pristine nature, cultural practices, and historical changes first-hand.

 

The beauty of the Swiss Alps, the efficiency of Swiss systems and rigidity of Swiss customs were eye-opening and enriching.

 

To live in Germany at a time when history was being re-written with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall ushering in a new era for Eastern Europe was amazing. I would like to re-visit and observe how things have changed over the intervening years.

 

Q: What impact did it have on you both to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: It made us delve deeper into cultures, traditions, experiences, and our own emotions to understand what we were seeing, hearing and feeling in our travels. 

 

We hope readers, whether or not they are able to visit the places and experience what we write about, are able to "see and feel" what we describe.

 

Also, we hope to inspire readers to learn more about the places they travel to, because knowing the history, politics, culture, and traditions of a country or a city, makes a difference.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

SP: I’m working on a book of travel stories to literary destinations in the US and around the world. The places include author homes, tombs, libraries, bookstores, literary walks, and similar others that a bookworm would appreciate.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Srianthi Perera.