It’s fascinating to watch a country emerge from a civil war. It takes some time after peace has been reached, but slowly as the checkpoints are removed and the fear of terrorist attacks dwindles, people begin to return to a city’s public spaces and businesses reinvest in attracting them. The wartime guardedness that infuses everyday actions eases and is permeated with new lightness. The human cost remains: lives and families have been destroyed but there is also a necessary willingness to forget.
The Sri Lankan civil war began in 1983 and was infamous for its invention of the suicide bomber. The radical Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fought the government for an independent Tamil homeland in the north and east of the island, and for much of the time maintained a de facto state there. Both sides deployed brutal tactics and while the country’s commercial capital, Colombo, was spared the devastation visited on the north and east, it was nonetheless in a state of suspense punctuated by terrorist attacks for more than 25 years.
Rajith Savanadasa, who first came to Australia from Colombo as a university student and who now lives in Melbourne, has drawn on his own experience for his first novel, Ruins, which inhabits the period when the Sri Lankan army, championed by the former Rajapaksa government, brought a savage end to the war.
It’s a multiple first-person narration about an upper-middle-class family in Colombo. Mano and Lakshmi are a Sinhalese-Tamil couple who met at Kandy’s Peradeniya University. While the Sinhalese majority can celebrate the end of the war, for those with relatives in the north and east the emotions of the peace are far more fraught, especially as the victory was chauvinistically celebrated by the Sinhalese extremists the government relied on as its support base. This tension is reflected in the microcosm by Mano and Lakshmi’s marriage, which has stalled in middle age, and their two children’s attempts to articulate their identities.
Mano is a Sinhalese parachuted into a job as editor of a pro-government newspaper through his wealthy brother-in-law’s political connections. It’s the way things work in a culture where family comes first and nepotism is the natural order of things. Having been banished from the marital bed, on his way home from work he often parks and watches a woman through her window in the wealthy part of town. It’s stalking at its most passive, though Lakshmi’s suspicions have been aroused.
Lakshmi, a converted Buddhist Tamil, has suspicions about her husband’s fidelity though he is no longer at the centre of her concerns. Her primary worry is for her children, Niranjan and Anoushka, whom she fails to keep on a tight leash. She has also been tasked by a former neighbour from Batticaloa, the main city in the east, with tracking down Khanna, a disabled boy who went missing at the end of the war.
It’s a task that could easily put Mano’s job and the safety of her family at risk. It can be dangerous to ask questions in Sri Lanka, where the white van is an euphemism for unexplained disappearances. Literary corollaries can be found in Michelle De Kretser’s Questions of Travel, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Nihal de Silva’s The Far Spent Day.
While tertiary education is free in Sri Lanka, places are extremely limited, which is why many middle-class families financially extend themselves to send their children overseas. Niranjan is one such beneficiary of his parents’ largesse. After an expensive five-year degree in Australia, he returns to Colombo full of entitled swagger and pretends to found a start-up business while getting wasted in Colombo’s nightclubs. Bizarrely enough, given his background, he buys into the Sinhalese chauvinism against the Tamils, until a series of events forces him to reassess the notion of his privilege.
The shift in his outlook is sudden and might have been more affecting had he not begun the book as such a prat. It’s a perennial risk of first-person narration. Anoushka, on the other hand, is going through a silent rebellion, leavened only by the hard rock coming through her headphones. Good at school, she is under pressure at home to perform well in high-school exams at the same time as her best friend abandons her to move into a cool group of schoolgirls who go to parties and nightclubs. Lakshmi causes her daughter great stress by denying her the opportunity to become her own person out of an insistence on the traditional modes of middle-class behaviour, which is born partly from the insecurity of being Tamil in a Sinhalese social world.
Anyone familiar with Sri Lankan culture will instantly recognise the central role in this family of the servant Latha. Savanadasa creates a compelling picture here of how emotional bonds coexist with the blithe acceptance of entrenched social inequality.
This is a novel framed by its revelations about its characters, the relationships between them, and how maps of tradition, but also the psychic consequences of the war, limit the possibilities for individual identity. This is not a society where choice features highly.
In this polyphonic family portrait, Savanadas explores the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm. His characters are perhaps not as memorable as those in recent works such as Questions of Travel or Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman. However, as a debut Ruins is a worthy (even dutiful) addition to the burgeoning ranks of English-language novels by writers of both Sinhalese and Tamil backgrounds (mostly in the Sri Lankan diaspora), such as Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, Ashok Ferrey and Roma Tearne that have chronicled the lives of Colombo’s privileged classes.
Source: The Australian
