The Past is an Unhappy Country

Pages: 384

Amitav Ghosh called Shyam Selvadurai’s first novel,Funny Boy (1994),a novel of departure. The young narrator,who has left a Sri Lanka collapsing behind him,recalls a paradise that is now sundered,a happy childhood home,an idyllic past. It is a novel seared by that great sorrow,“the recollection of better times”,as Ghosh puts it.

Selvadurai’s latest work,The Hungry Ghosts,may be called a novel of displacement. Once again,the narrator flees a Sri Lanka riven by the Tamil insurgency and violent government reprisals. Only,there is no lost paradise,no Serendib. The Sri Lanka of Selvadurai’s later novel is always a harrowing place. Shivan,the narrator,is the son of a Tamil father and a Sinhala mother. He spends his childhood listening to his parents fight. After his father dies,he is under the thumb of a bossy,manipulative grandmother. The spectres of poverty and homelessness are never far away. Canada,where the family emigrates after the violence breaks out,holds no solace. This is not a novel of departure but a restless back and forth between two places,neither offering comfort or a sense of belonging. There is no happy home,there never was. So there is no possibility of nostos or homecoming. Hence,perhaps,the hungry ghosts,the perathayas who stand outside the gates,caught between worlds and always desiring more.

Both Funny Boy and The Hungry Ghosts have autobiographical strains — like Arjie and Shivan,Selvadurai left Sri Lanka in 1983. In Funny Boy,there is a past untouched by conflict,made luminous by what came after. These are the memories of dispersal,Ghosh says,which go back to a time where present enmities did not exist. Soon the memory of that time will be lost,as the history that made it possible is wiped out. In The Hungry Ghosts,written two decades later,this seems to be precisely what has happened. No one remembers a past that is happy and whole. Each generation makes mistakes that the next one must pay for. Memory trails off into myth. It is sublimated in Buddhist jataka tales and other fables. In faraway Canada,Shivan remembers these as well as he remembers his childhood.

Already cut off from the past and from home,Shivan’s experience of race and sexuality deepens his sense of alienation. In Sri Lanka,the realisation that he is gay isolates him from his peers. In Canada,which is more accepting of his sexual choices,he is marked out as brown,Asian,different. Sexuality is fate in the novel,as Shivan must bear the tragic consequences of a love affair.

For all its tragic potential,The Hungry Ghosts is rather flat,crammed with awkward dialogue and descriptions of furniture. It is tempting to draw comparisons between Selvadurai and Michael Ondaatje,another Sri Lankan who left his homeland and eventually settled in Canada. Indeed,the “ayah Rosalin” of Ondaatje’s poem about a lost homeland seems to reappear in Selvadurai’s new novel.

But the novel lacks the lyrical cadences of Ondaatje’s prose and none of the characters draws much sympathy. Shivan comes across as vain and self-absorbed,resembling one of Alan Hollinghurst’s more irritating protagonists. The grandmother is capable of caricaturish evil,the mother takes to religion and the sister is set for tenure right from the start. Halfway through the novel,the reader might well lose interest in what happens to any of the characters. Selvadurai records an important register of experience,for the story of the Sri Lankan exodus is still largely untold. But the reader needs to keep reminding herself of that.