It took me over two weeks to read Shehan Karunatilaka’s latest novel, though I had actually purchased it just before the Booker Prize was announced. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was the only book I ordered from out of the short list and I started reading it immediately after it was delivered by Amazon. However, I found the going tough and not just because of external diversions and lack of time. Seven Moons is brilliant piece of writing, satire coupled with tongue-in-cheek humour, used with devasting effect to show the brutality that pervaded Sri Lanka in the late eighties when the IPKF was deployed in the north and the JVP was active in the south. Human brutality is what slowed me down, not the ghosts who abound in the novel. Though I have a pretty good idea of how bad things were then in Sri Lanka, it wasn’t possible for me to digest Seven Moons with any degree of speed.
Maali Almeida the protagonist, at the commencement of the
story, has just ceased to be. A brave (and possibly foolhardy) photojournalist with
a gambling addiction and a homosexual to boot, Maali works for anyone who hires
him to take photographs, from media houses, to the Sri Lankan army to human
rights organisations. His profession makes Maali a witness to the brutality of
the Sri Lankan civil war and the JVP insurrection. Maali has even managed to
snap a photo of a government minister who literally stood by and looked on
while Tamils were being slaughtered during the riots of 1983, not to mention
numerous portraits of dead bodies, bound and gagged, of journalists and
activists who fell afoul of the government.
Immediately after his death, Maali passes through some very
bureaucratic red tape, something reminiscent of a third world country’s
government offices and with difficulty, he gathers that he has seven moons (a
moon a day), to figure out how he ended up dead, which would prepare his spirit
for eternity with The Light. Maali watches his corpse being chopped up by goons
with a cleaver, before it is dumped in Lake Beira, which doesn’t help him much.
As each
of his seven moons is used up, Maali flies around Colombo, surrounded by other
phantoms, many of them victims of the Sri Lankan violence. Some of the spirits are
friendly and many are not. Maali decides that he needs to get his secret cache photos,
that have the potential to bring down governments, published. Maali knows where
these photos are - underneath a bed in his family home and mixed up with some
erotic stuff.
Karunatilaka’s writing has an effortless quality which adds to the dark beauty of the story. One barely takes note of it, as one drowns in the narrative. Almost all the others characters in Seven Moons are as exotic as Maali, who has a Singhalese father and a Burgher-Tamil mother. Maali’s lover Dilshan and his flat-mate Jaki are not run-of the mill Sri Lankans. They are the cream of Colombo, though they too are victims. Dilshan’s father Stanley Dharmendran is a Tamil Parliamentarian who hobnobs with the powers-that-be in Colombo, yet he finds it difficult to find out what happened to Maali after “he was disappeared”.
For those interested in the LTTE’s history and growth, Gopalaswamy Mahendraraja (aka Mahattaya), who used to be second-in-command to Vellupilai Pirabhakaran, till he fell afoul of his Supremo on suspicion of betrayal, has a significant role in Seven Moons. Karunatilaka calls him Colonel Gopallaswarmy(sic). Further, the LTTE’s use of child soldiers. is acknowledged by Karunatilaka in his signature fashion.
Karunatilaka’s first novel, “Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew,” the rambling story of an alcoholic Sri Lankan sports journalist tracking down a missing cricket star had appeared around ten years ago, to critical acclaim. I think I 'enjoyed' Chinaman more than Seven Moons, though Seven Moons has left left a more profound impression on me and it will take me more than seven moons to recover from the trauma.
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