Brotherless Night

This is a book about the Sri Lankan civil war, but it is not just a book about the Sri Lankan civil war. It is really a book about justice, indifference, and courage, amidst unspeakable violence. Early in the book, Ganeshananthan narrates how Sinhalese men went down the street, seeking out Tamil homes and businesses to burn, Tamil people to slaughter, in the middle of riots. They used electoral rolls to find and identify these people and places. In 1992, when Mumbai, India was gripped by riots, the Shiv Sena party did the exact same thing - using electoral rolls to find Muslim houses, drag out the men and beat them, drag out the women for worse. I know, because I was there, and because I belonged to a family that had Hindus, and Muslims, Christians and Jews, we had our front door marked in the middle of night by rioters who left posters identifiying us that said 'Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain' ('Say with pride we are Hindus'), and we had friends and families who tried to help us by printing signs to cover up these posters, which said 'Prem se kaho hum insaan hain' ('Say with love we are human'). In her late dementia, my grandmother, gripped with memories of those days, would wake up at night, saying 'They're coming, they're coming'. So, I didn't live through the civil war in Sri Lanka, and I can't speak for this experience, but my own lived experience is caught so acutely in her finely-crafted expression of this kind of violence that I wept, and so I cannot be objective about this book; only to say that I was gripped by it.

We could not believe it - to begin to believe all this, we had to write it down. You must understand: I have to tell myself again, because even though I was there it seems impossible.

I can, however, tell you what it is about: in Jaffna, 1981, Sashikala Kulenthiren, known as 'Sashi', grows up in a Tamil family that prizes education above all. Her four brothers are dedicated to their education: Niranjan, the eldest and gentlest, is almost qualified as a doctor; her next two brothers, Dayalan and Seelan are studying to be engineers, her youngest brother, Aran, is still in schoo, like her, and Sashi and her neighbour, a boy she calls K., are both hoping to get into medical college. As the Sri Lankan civil war begins, and signs of ethnic violence emerge, Sashi loses her brothers one by one: to violent death, to those that join in groups for reasons just and unjust, and ultimately, to those that escape the conflict altogether. The book follows Sashi's life; through medical school, through her family's travails, through until she is in New York, in 2009, making a futile bed to have the U.N. intervene in a bloody conflict that world ignored. Although this is a fictional account, it was built on two decades of research, Sashi's mentor in the books, Anjali Premachandran, is based on the real life doctor, human rights activist, Rajani Thiranagama, who was assassinated after publishing a book documenting the violence, torture, and rapes committed by both, the Indian Peacekeeping Forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Sashi's story may be fictional, but the extraordinary courage that she showed, in her profession as a doctor and her work, is based on the works of dozens of real people who put their lives on the line to document horrors that the world ignored. Ganeshananthan handles this complex, difficult, subject matter with a touch so deft that it never feels overwrought or exploited for sensational effect. There is emotion, but not melodrama.

Early in the book, the local library where Sashi and her brothers study is burned down by Sinhalese policemen. As a young teenager, she insists on going to see the damage despite the risks; her brothers take her. As she says:

They had torched the elegant palace of white rooms where Seelan and K and I had studied, its clean and well-lit shelves, the rare book section with the beautifully lettered palm leaf manuscripts. Dayalan had shown some to me when had first begun working there. Ninety thousand volumes gone, some of them original and single copies. Our past, but also - oh, the beautiful wooden tables where I had turned the pages of my textbooks and my brothers' textbooks! - the future. Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.

Towards the end of the book, as Sashi is without any of her brothers, without her friend K, without her mentor, without her family, she says, "I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes." This is how the book is written, directly addressed to the reader. It is a difficult approach to sustain, but Ganeshananthan does it, so that you turn page after page with Sashi, following her fight through her fear and loss and grief until it has honed her into a woman who is walking into a future she can't imagine, but with her spine held straight, no matter the cost. I can't even tell if you I liked this book or I hated it: only that I wept through it. If that's not a testimony to the skill of the writer, I don't know what is.