Handa Sakki Kima is a collection of short stories by Martin Wickramasinghe (1890-1976), the Sinhala novelist, critic and essayist often called the father of modern Sinhala literature. It was first published in 1945, and English-language bibliographies render the title as The Moon is Witness. This is a Sinhala-language edition. The title is also spelt Handa Sakki Keema.
The collection appeared at the height of Wickramasinghe's career. It followed his landmark novel Gamperaliya (1944) by a year and came shortly before Madol Doova (1947), at a time when he was producing his most widely read fiction. Among his short-story books it sits between Pavkarayata Galgesima (1936) and Vahallu (1951).
The author's publishers describe the book as a collection that shows his creative strength, matured by a deep understanding of life and a developed artistic sense. The political scientist Jayadeva Uyangoda, writing on Wickramasinghe's short fiction, groups Handa Sakki Kima with Vahallu as later collections that carry forward the worldview of empathic compassion first seen in his 1924 collection Geheniyak: a way of looking at ordinary people without passing judgement on them.
The book suits Sinhala readers who know Wickramasinghe through his novels and want to read the shorter fiction he wrote in the same productive years, and students following the development of the modern Sinhala short story.
- Author: Martin Wickramasinghe
- Published: 1945
- Language: Sinhala
