V.V. Ganeshanthan’s novel is an intimate, heart-wrenching portrait of a family shattered by the civil war in Sri Lanka; it shows how hopeless the fight for a homeland always is
When an island floating on the bottom of the peninsula we called paradise turned into hell in a civil war that lasted over 30 years, all we could do was watch in anger and dread. There was no closure, only death and more deaths. Any war has no winner and the story of the loser is what is powerful and lasting.
One such story — perhaps the most painful, truthful and searing to emerge out of that tormented island — is V.V. Ganeshanthan’s Brotherless Night (Penguin Random House). The novel is hugely autobiographical; it could not have been otherwise. From inside the escalating war, from inside an accomplished Tamil family, comes this story in first-person narrative that can singe our hearts and make us wonder once again about the horror and futility of war.
Restraint, yearning and love
Four brothers and a sister, the narrator Sashi, try to navigate through the civil war as it slowly breaks outside their house in the small lanes of Jaffna, near the temples, inside the Jaffna hospital, till blood flows everywhere and then their lives are torn apart.
First, they watch it, disbelievingly. Then, they are drawn into the vortex of the war for Tamil self-determination against the Sinhala supremacists of Sri Lanka. The novel weaves its way through the bloodied streets, driven by the heart beats of the narrator Sashi, torn between love for two of her brothers, who one day walked out of the house to join the Tigers, and her yearning for peace and a home.
Through it, all she studies for her medical degree supported by the most large-hearted teachers. When K, her neighbour on whom she has a crush which blooms into unspoken love in the turmoil of war, suggests that she treat the wounds in the Tigers’ hospital, she goes. It is a novel of unstated but endearing love, of revolution, the heroic but doomed fight for one’s land, (the subject of all classic novels) told so endearingly.
Without doubt, Brotherless Night stretches the limits of Sri Lankan writing, already in the limelight with a Booker Prize last year for Shehan Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which also emerged from the war. With Brotherless Night, Ganeshananthan, who teaches at the Minneapolis University, lays open for us an incredible fight for land and freedom and all the pain and death that goes with it. It is a stupendous work of restraint, yearning and love.
A narrative steeped in pain and sorrow
The novel starts in the 80s when Tamil resistance begins in the form of various guerrilla groups like People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO), etc till the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) takes shape, slowly loses its humanity under the leadership of a maniac, and turns its guns and bombs against everyone around them: friends, teachers, Tamils, students. They were all suspects.
The narrator and her brothers are academically brilliant. The kids spend most of their time in the local library, which is later burnt down. At least two of them, Niranjan, the Perianna (elder brother) and the sister, are so good they will become doctors.
Perianna perishes in the anti-Tamil riot in Colombo. One fine day, the two other brothers, Seelan and Dayalan, walk out into the dark without as much as a goodbye to her but later the youngest brother, Aran, rebels against his brothers and the Tigers for killing a much-loved teacher of Jaffna.
In a bitter confrontation in their big house, Aran takes on the two brothers for the cowardly killings of Tamils by the Tigers. One heartbreak follows another in this narrative steeped in pain and sorrow. One such is how the rest of the family is forced to leave their house as the Tiger leader T comes to the gate and suggests so.
Sashi collects all the books, each covered with the memory of their childhood as the bombs go outside. It is there, in that house, that sometimes they sat on the terrace watching the flares go up and the Sri Lankan missiles came raining down on Jaffna: “Jaffna lay stretched before us like a heap of cigarette ends in the dark.”
And it’s again so wrenching that we think of how hopeless the fight for a homeland always is: ‘As others died in shelling, by some miracle, we did not; we gathered our dwindling things and moved, and moved again. I wondered where K and Seelan were, and how they were surviving. We went from kovil to church to kovil, hunting for one with room, one that hadn’t been bombed.”
The public fast unto death of K stands as one of the finest pieces of writing in recent memory. It is the only scene in which LTTE founder Velupillai Prabhakaran appears.
The longing for a lost paradise
Two funerals mark the concluding chapters of the book: one for K, Sashi’s secret lover (a parallel narrative that runs like a shadow throughout the story), who undertook a fast unto death in front of the Jaffna temple; and the other for her mentor and philosopher, Anjali Acca, who not only taught medicine but was also a friend and guide to all the girls at the medical college. Anjali Acca met a tragic end, shot by the Tigers, with no reasons sought or provided, bringing the story to a sombre close.
One funeral represents tragedy, while the other symbolizes triumph. The public fast unto death of K, with Sashi ever-present in the background, as the boy she loves inexorably approaches death day by day, stands as one of the finest pieces of writing in recent memory. It is the only scene in which LTTE founder Velupillai Prabhakaran appears.
Between the dream of revolution and the harsh reality of death, there exists only a small space. When K, Sashi’s beloved, dies, all of Jaffna turns up for the funeral. Funerals become the only final escape, distancing themselves from the homeland and the promises it once held. K’s funeral serves as a prelude to the demise and burial of Eelam.
The fight for homelands is what history is all about. Homelands promised, imagined, fought for, carved out, and written about. The Tamil’s fight for a homeland in Sri Lanka, appropriated by the Tigers which turned rogue and then went mad, was heroic, but always doomed to fail. It did fail, blasted out of the homeland it was fighting for.
Jaffna became Sri Lanka once again, instead of being reborn as the capital of Tamil Eelam. What will survive are such stories recreated from lived experience with so much longing for a lost paradise, a lost house, lost brothers, and a lost homeland. And written with a trembling pen.
