[I’m reading this 2020 novel in four sections, writing only about what I read in each section. So far I have read the first quarter of the book. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
19 July 2023
First Moon
What we used to call Magic Realism doesn’t really exist any more. Or it does, but in the 21st Century it’s just magic. It isn’t only in fiction, but film and TV drama—we don’t bat an eyelid when a recently dead man, or what remains of him, tries to convince himself that the post-life arrivals hall just has to be a dream. It isn’t a dream, of course, and we could have told him that straight away—we recognise these arrivals bays, or whatever they are, much better than he does. But then, he’s dead ten years before the 21st Century even begins, so he hasn’t seen the fantasies and satires we have.
But Shehan Karunatilaka has, so the comic games he plays are mainly with details of presentation. OK, his man is dead. How is he going to have him negotiate the logistics of a labyrinthine investigation when he’s dead? (It isn’t exactly labyrinthine, but I bet that’s how it will become, if the first 100 pages are anything to go by.) Answer: this poor soul will only do it with comic, sometimes slapstick difficulty. He has a guide, a dead soul who has made certain choices in his afterlife in order to hang around and pester recent arrivals. He’s just trouble, say the officials, other dead souls who just want to keep things simple. Listen to him, and you’ll miss your chance to reach the Light before your time is up. That’s seven moons—or days, as living people tend to call them. ‘The moon is always up there, even when you can’t see it. You think it stops circling the earth, just because your breath stops?’ What’s the Light, Maali wonders, but nobody seems to know. And if it’s so good, why did these souls leave it to come back and work in a chaotic, understaffed arrivals hall?
His guide is a comic grotesque. Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t got the answers. He is, or was, Sena Pathirana, and he was hardly an adult yet when he was killed for his Marxist activities. Maali recognises him, eventually, as the ragged figure reminds him when they met, including Maali’s obvious sexual interest in him. (I’ll come back to his sex obsession.) Maali recognises anyone involved in politics, because he had been a freelance photographer. He would often take pictures of the atrocities being perpetrated in the civil war in Sri Lanka, but that doesn’t make him an idealist. He seems to have no interest in politics beyond a cynicism so bleak everything’s a joke. He quotes a glossary he once put together for a foreign journalist, of the different factions and so-called peace-keepers, and their different acronyms:
‘IPKF – The Indian Peace Keeping Force. Sent by our neighbour to preserve peace. Are willing to burn villages to fulfil their mission.’
Most of this comes in the first couple of short chapters. Maali might not know what’s going on, but the reader knows even less. Here, as throughout, the narrative is addressed to ‘you.’ Is it the reader who is being addressed? Is any of this real…? And so on. Then we do know, but we are only going to find out about Maali and his back-story as his first ‘moon’ unfolds. This is the first day following his death, and for him it consists of a floating, active/passive pursuit of whatever the truth might turn out to be. He can’t do anything on his own, so Karunatilaka has sets up an investigation by pair of only semi-competent cops. They are only doing it for the money—and the threat of reprisals from above if they don’t. Maali’s mother, whom he never loved, has enough contacts for her threats to carry weight.
But I’m jumping the gun. It’s Sena who tells Maali the rules of an afterlife that feels like a continuation of the chaos and confusion of Sri Lanka in 1990. Sena floats around in bin-liners because that’s where his body ended up. Another ghost, or ghoul—there are two types, the latter having stuck around rather than seek the Light—carries his own head. But there’s no consistency. Maali finds out soon enough that his own head was removed after his death, but it’s still attached in this world. What he carries around—and still brings up to his eye—is what remains of his trusty Nikon camera. Bit its lens is smashed and only rarely can he see through the viewfinder but mud. It doesn’t stop him trying.
Sena tells him they can only go to places they visited in life, or to wherever their corpse has been since. Otherwise hey have to float on the wind, or listen out for the sound of their name coming to them on the ether, which counts as an invitation to go to wherever it was spoken. This is how Maali gets to visit three important locations. The first is the Beira lake in Colombo. It has been shrunk to a fraction of its size by colonial meddling and later corrupt schemes, which the narrator is happy to tell us about. It has become notorious for what Maali now witnesses, the dumping of four dead bodies. Unsurprisingly, it smells ‘like a powerful deity has squatted over it, emptied its bowels in its waters, and forgotten to flush.’ Karunatilaka likes a simile. Presumably, Maali recognises the first of the bodies, because it isn’t difficult. It is ‘wrapped in rubbish bags. It wears a safari jacket with five large pockets filled with bricks. Stylishly accessorised with one sandal, three chains and a camera around the neck.’
He is witnessing his own story, but it’s 4 a.m. now and he doesn’t know when or how he was killed. He recognises the men first failing to keep his body underwater, then failing to make a neat job of cutting it up. ‘They work at the casino and are paid to beat those who beat the house and collect from those the house has beaten. You didn’t know that they worked as garbage men,’ a euphemism for ‘those who dispose of bodies that can’t get death certificates.’ Karunatilaka likes a euphemism, preferably darker than the truth it masks, as much as he likes similes.
The men are Balal Ajith and Kottu Nihal, who can only overcome the disgust at unspeakable task with a bottle of spirits. ‘The second robs them of their motor skills,’ so it’s no surprise everything about them is like Laurel and Hardy. But Maali isn’t laughing. After they have cut all the bodies up and thrown the heads, hands and feet into the lake, they bag up the rest of the remains in separate bin-bags. Maali is able to hitch a ride on top of their van, and I think my favourite simile yet comes when he discovers he can dive through the metal of the roof. ‘In you go. It is like jumping into a swimming pool, if the water tasted like rust and wasn’t wet.’ Yep.
Now, he and Sena are both inside. The men’s driver seems no better than they are, and when he doesn’t avoid a bump, the others crack their heads together. “‘Sorry, boss,” monotones Drivermalli. “Just a small bump.” “I’ll give you a small bump.”’ It turns out the driver is susceptible to a technique Sena has of whispering to the living, which doesn’t lead to anything useful but might in future chapters. We also become more familiar with Maali’s sexual habits, as he contemplates Sena between the two men. ‘It is not beyond the realms of possibility that you tried it on with this skinny lad. In the last decade, you screwed anything that moved and many things that preferred not to.’ This had been ‘a taunt, disguised as a joke,’ made by his room-mate DD. We don’t know it yet, but we will soon, that DD is the son of a cabinet minister, and had been Maali’s faithful lover. Maali isn’t faithful. In a separate chapter helpfully titled Egg-plant, he talks to DD about having encountered a lot of specimens of this particular vegetable euphemism. He doesn’t tell him it’s a three-digit figure.)
They are still in the stinking, meat-van—one of the men doesn’t only butcher human corpses—when Sena tells Maali about listening out for his own name. He hears nothing in the snatches and wisps of conversations that come his way… and then he does. ‘You know the voice and you have heard it angry on many occasions.’ It’s his mother’s, and he is able to follow the unworldly breezes towards it until it leads to a police station. This is Colombo, and the station might receive thirty reports of missing persons every day. Distraught mothers and wives fill the waiting area—the chapter’s title is Twenty Mothers—but we quickly realise that Maali’s mother, with DD and Jaki, a woman and genuine friend of Maali’s, have jumped the queue. And everything about the conversation they are having tells us about the convoluted and violent factionalism, and the all-pervasive corruption of Sri Lankan politics.
We also find out a lot about Maali’s life. He really is a photographer, but he travels the country looking only for images he knows will sell. And he also photographs atrocities nobody will publish, like the burning of a woman whose spirit he encounters in his wanderings, and who rages at him for doing nothing when he saw her but take pictures. But he’s a pragmatist—I might be putting that kindly—and it isn’t in his nature to feel guilt. And for all his adult life he seems to have had as little to do with his mother as possible. Right at the start, in the arrivals hall, someone is screeching at him, ‘but you ignore her like you did your Amma right after Dada left.’ Everything is dysfunctional in Sri Lanka, including families.
We know he has a gambling habit, and that he is always calculating odds. He does it before he knows he is definitely dead, and it does him no good. ‘The odds of the soul surviving the body’s death are one in nothing, one in nada, one in zilch. You must be asleep, of this you are certain. Soon you will wake.’ But in life he had been good at it, and had met Jaki in the casino. She is making beginner’s mistakes, and Maali starts to advise her. She is British-born, working in Sri Lanka for her uncle and hating it, and she has a British woman’s contempt for men and their advice. But she starts to take it, and is happy to leave the casino with him, knowing she is in no danger from him. She can hold her own anyway, it seems, her sarcastic tone and goth-like makeup keeping the ‘sweaty hetero men’ well away. Pretty soon, they are both very happy to let everybody believe they are in a relationship. And they really are good friends.
The important thing in the police station is that Maali’s Amma has enough money and contacts to let her make realistic threats. The hapless cops will have to do something about his disappearance. Normal practice is for everything to be put on hold for 72 hours which, obviously means nothing will be done. But Detective Cassim, and his boss ASP Ranchagoda, another ill-assorted pair, know that for this missing man, their jobs, and who knows what else, are at stake.
So this is going to be a kind of whodunit. Whilst keeping up the satirical, knowing references to the corruption and routine atrocities, we accompany Maali as he (literally) follows the investigation of his own death. The cops know Balal and Kottu, the two garbage men, and meet them where the remains are kept to begin with. But there is only the paperwork for three of the four sets of remains. The missing person unaccounted for is—guess. The police also know where the men work at night, in the seven-storey building in which the Pegasus casino occupies the sixth floor. So that’s where they go, and after meeting various dodgy characters—Karunatilaka’s description of the building makes it sound like a microcosm of colonial practices and either corruption, incompetence, or both—they start to question the ‘pit boss’ of the casino.
This is where we might, or might not, be getting a bit closer to the truth. They talk about what Maali was up to the previous night, and he mostly doesn’t remember the things he is supposed to have done. “‘He didn’t vanish,’ says the croupier. ‘He went upstairs. I saw him drinking with a foreigner.’ You do not recognise the croupier, nor remember doing what he said you did. Either the croupier is lying or, worse, he is telling the truth. You look through your camera and see only mud.’” The foreigner is ‘a suddha. White man. German, I think. But could be English,’ and Maali is mystified.
All this is taking place on the fifth floor, which is occupied by the club that runs the casino above. At the back is a balcony, which is where they go next. Maali knows it well, because he can bring willing young men like the (unattractive but amenable) bartender, to spend a few pleasant minutes. He knows everything about it, and that the mesh that has been installed to prevent further suicides—not uncommon near casinos—is very easy to get through. It’s where Maali supposedly met the European. ‘Where was Almeida and his suddha friend?’ ‘They were seated near the edge.’ ‘And?’ ‘They ordered three gins, three vodkas, two tonics and three plates of devilled prawns.’ ‘You memorised that?’ Maybe the cops aren’t as incompetent as they look. The pit boss has their bill, and has to explain, possibly truthfully although probably not, that he was with a client. The bartender happens to have the bill with him, and the pit boss grabs it off him. Meanwhile, the senior policeman looks down at the bloodstained wall below the balcony
In other words, it’s starting to look dodgy, and Karunatilaka reminds us of all Maali remembers is his usual sort of evening. ‘Here’s what you don’t remember: (a) sitting with a suddha, (b) being thrown to your death.’ And the police haven’t finished in the building. On the seventh floor, where the private apartments are, is a double or triple-locked door. As it is opened, ‘You feel an ache where your belly used to be. It claws at your insides, like a creature trapped in your ribcage. “Yes?” And there she is. The lady whose face you know, but whose name stalls on your tongue’s tip. Charcoal skin, crimson lips, the dark queen.’
I’m starting to feel lost, but this isn’t about me. The woman is a Sri Lankan (I think) usually living in Canada, and her ‘cousin-brother,’ Kuga (short for xxx), who has ‘the croak of a Madrasi Tamil.’ ‘“I’m Elsa Mathangi. My cousin-brother and I work for CNTR. This is our office. We raise funds for victims of the war. We have a charity office in the mall downstairs.’ ‘CNTR stands for?’ ‘Canada Norway Third World Relief. It’s pronounced “Centre”.”’ They have often used Maali’s photographs in their supposedly philanthropical publications, and some of them can be seen in the office. But, she tells them, he had told them the day before he wouldn’t be working for them any more. When Cassim tells them about Maali’s disappearance, she and Kuga seem to be trying to hide how shocked they are.
Outside, she catches up with them to do some business. She tells them Kuga wouldn’t want to do what she is doing, which is bribing them to take out a warrant to search Maali’s bedroom. We know more than she does, that in addition to the envelope of photos she wants are others, never published. They are enough, Maali is sure, to bring down the government. She tells the police there are also photographs of what sounds like a notorious atrocity perpetrated by Tamils three months before, ‘the Batticaloa police massacre.’ 600 police were killed, and Maali was there.
At the end of this section, ‘Dr Ranee Sridharan—‘Call me Ranee,’—who is in charge of the arrivals hall, appears in order to tell Maali he has wasted his first moon. And I feel I’ve left out as much as I’ve included. Never mind.
24 July
Second Moon
This section is slightly shorter, and that’s a pattern: the sections become shorter as, I guess, Karunatilaka has to spend slightly less time on the back-stories both of Maali and Sri Lanka, and more on developing the mystery plot. He’s also developing aspects of Maali’s post mortem skill-set. He knows from Sena that these need to be worked for, and already he can get around more confidently. Near the end of Second Moon, Sena explains to him (and the reader) what he really needs. ‘The currency over here isn’t rupees or roubles or bonds or coconuts. It is varam. The more varam you get, the more useful you become. To yourself. And to others.’ We haven’t encountered ‘varam’ before, but Sena’s definition closely matches an online definition I found: ‘a Tamil word that means blessing, or advantageous gift. It implies that the present is more than an expression of goodwill and has real-world or strategic worth.’ It’s about a pragmatic-sounding system of mutual back-scratching, and it gives Maali a way to give the living a little nudge in the right direction. I’m guessing that as he becomes better at this he’ll be able to move things on more quickly.
I’m also guessing—and I’m less than half-way through yet—that his seven moons will actually be redemptive for him. He’s avoiding going straight to the Light, we know, so that those photos under a bed somewhere will see the light of day. But at the time of his death, it seems his motives weren’t at all clear. He only took up photography because he wasn’t good at anything else, and almost accidentally discovered that the opportunistic reportage he fell into could earn him some money. He would definitely have denied being any kind of crusading photojournalist… so why is he doing everything he can to avoid what Dr Ranee tells him is the only rational course of action?
I’ll rewind. At the beginning of the Second Moon, Dr Ranee is still with him, still trying to persuade him to get his ears checked and seek the Light. (I didn’t mention that an ear check is a compulsory part of the deal. There’s more to it than just going through a forensic formality. ‘Your ears have patterns as personal as your fingerprints,’ she’d told him in the first chapter. ‘The folds show past traumas, the lobes reveal sins….’) But it becomes a tetchy debate between her and Sena, who is floating around on the roof of the building. (As ever—I’m not sure I mentioned it—there are plenty of other spirits floating around. It gives Karunatilaka’s narrator an opportunity for one of his dark jokes: ‘At the other end of the roof, a crew of suicides stumble along the ledge like toddlers falling off tricycles….’)
In fact, it’s possible to see Dr Ranee’s argument as one side of a serious debate. In First Moon, she had argued he needs to do what she has done in death: after a life of campaigning, she has left all that behind because there’s nothing she can do to change anything now. Sena, on the other hand, isn’t going to give up. He’s spent 150 moons in this ‘In Between’ world, continuing with his Marxist take on everything, including the afterlife. For him, giving up isn’t an option because if there is something the living should know, it’s the duty of the dead to try to tell them. I’m guessing that this is why he sought Maali out in the arrivals hall—either he somehow knew there was unfinished business or guessed that a man like Maali would have left a lot of damaging evidence behind. Whatever… Maali continues to take his advice, avoiding the ‘Helpers’ Ranee brings with her. He is able to escape from the roof fairly easily, but she hasn’t given up yet. Watch this space….
Karunatilaka reminds us that Maali isn’t spending his precious time doing what we might expect. Instead of seeking out who killed him and why, he’s much more concerned about the box of photographs he’s left behind. They are in five separate envelopes, each with a playing-card drawn on the outside, as we first discovered in an early chapter. ‘You have photos of the government Minister who looked on while the savages of ’83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants. You have portraits of disappeared journalists and vanished activists, bound and gagged and dead in custody….’ And so on.
The search for the photos is what a lot of Second Moon is about. At first, Maali is with Jaki and DD while they piece together what they know. There’s enough time for Karunatilaka , by way of Maali’s often wistful memories, to give us a much better insight into his life with them—and, for instance, Jaki’s life as a radio presenter. She’s only got the job through her Uncle Stanley, DD’s father, but she makes her programmes as subversive as she can. That is, not very.
They know Maali had originally hidden the box under his own bed, but he had told them where he’d moved it to later. One envelope contains intimate photographs of other men which would be awful for DD to see—but, from the earliest chapters, Maali has wanted the world to see the others. They had all been drunk at a party of the Colombo middle classes that Karunatilaka has a good time satirising, and it’s DD who now remembers where they are. Off they go to Maali’s mother’s house, because the box is now under the bed of the long-suffering cook and housekeeper there, Kamala. But when they arrive there with Maali in tow, there is an argument going on. Elsa, who is posing as a detective with the cops, is being denied access by DD’s father Stanley. He owns the property, and recognises an unverified search warrant when he sees it. He is the only Tamil minister in the government, and has always been disappointed that DD doesn’t want to follow him either into his business or into politics. The cops are harangued by Amma—where is her son?—and their embarrassment is part of the farce.
Stanley, for motives of his own, is as interested in the photographs as the other three, so he lets Elsa stay if she can help. They find the box—and, of course, have no idea what the ballpoint sketches of playing cards are about. But it doesn’t matter, because trouble arrives in the form of Cyril Wijeratne. He’s the Justice Minister, a fictional amalgam of two real-life monsters in the regime, and Maali’s hatred of him would be visceral if he had any viscera. A photograph of him, present during an atrocity he claims to know nothing about, is the one that Maal would most like to have published. It’s clear that Stanley was the one who alerted him to the existence and location of the photos and, after looking through them, he takes them all away. Elsa and Jaki, at least, think that this is a mere formality. Maali knows, and the reader knows, they will disappear.
What to do? Stunned by the loss of his life’s work, he is easily tricked and hemmed in by Dr Raani and her faithful helpers. There’s an interlude as he finds himself back at the arrivals hall, and unable to avoid the compulsory examination. With no anchors in earthly reality, everything is dreamlike here. He seems to find it unremarkable that he has had 37 lives, and Karunatilaka takes him, and the reader, through some of the absurdities of the beliefs and mythologies of different religions. There’s only one thing he finds troubling—that he has supposedly killed several people in the life he has just left. The reader assumes that there must be some truth in this, although Maali has no memory of it….
He somehow manages to escape again, and this is when Sena tells him he needs varam. He needs the help of the Crow Uncle—a genuine medium, but one who appears fake because he’s only interested in money. Karunatilaka shows us the lie of the land through a comedy set piece that Maali and Sena are obliged to become involved in. The daughter of a recently dead man wants to know where he hid all the family gold and jewellery, and the Crow Uncle has to pretend that her dead father isn’t nearby, hugely enjoying her money-fixated distress. She keeps giving Crow Uncle money, while Sena urges Maali to offer help to gain Varam. The Crow Uncle pretends to be appalled by Maali’s disingenuousness, but decides he can use him to find out more about the father’s treasures.
Back at the dead father’s grand house, it becomes a farcical satire of greed and wealth. He gleefully dances around her and the chauffeur/lover as they halve the value of a Rolls Royce while trying to dismantle it in their search. She turns her attention to the building in the garden, housing the dead man’s law office and huge library of books on constitutional law. The dead man is still delighted by his daughter’s frustration, but nettled enough by her barefaced greed to tell Maali he gave everything to his mistress in 1973. He also tells him that the law books, his father’s, were 300-year-old first editions and ‘worth more than the cars.’ Unwisely, Maali wonders aloud to Sena if this information will be enough to satisfy the Crow Uncle, and this angers the dead father. He rushes at Maali, but Sena pulls him away and it all ends in a scene from pantomime.
‘The son of a lawyer … collides with the bookshelf, bringing with him a wind that slams the door. The wind causes volume 49, already teetering on a termite-nibbled shelf to topple onto volume 32 below. Volume 32 tips over volumes 33-38, which avalanche to the bottom shelf, that snaps on impact, bringing volumes 1-23 cascading to the floor like chunks of buildings during air raids.’
1 August
Third and Fourth Moons
We’re comfortable with the way the narrative works now. We get the premise, we get the tone…. But now I’m becoming really impressed by the complexity of it. Karunatilaka doesn’t have to keep explaining how it all works, so things move much quicker and everything happens at once. Or, there are about five different narratives all being collaged together to build up a picture of how inextricably intertwined everything is. And I’m not coming close to describing the way Maali’s post-death experiences leave the reader with a sense of a world gone mad, or beyond hope, or incomprehensible. Or all three. And the scope widens, now that Cyril Wijeratne and other top officials are involved. Characters who have only been names so far are brought into the story, so that even though it’s still all about Maali, it’s also about how things really are in this world, not just in his perception of them. It’s horrible—so Karunatilaka gets into questions of whether the best idea is to be cynical about it all. And the humour—it’s still as bleakly funny as before—only gets darker.
So what are these narratives? There’s the world of the afterlife, in which Karunatilaka’s satirical take on religious beliefs starts to have a more and more serious edge. Sena has always been a cynic, but towards the end of the fourth day this becomes sharpened to a lethal point. There is no Khama, he insists, no cosmic righting of wrongs. According to him, the dead have to take matters into their own hands, and Maali realises he’s gone over entirely to the dark side. He’s become a follower of the Mahakali, a real Hindu super-demon being impersonated in this world by a dead priest gone to the dark side.
Sena is gathering to himself powers and followers enough to cause the deaths of Ballal and Kottu, the men who killed him and probably Maali, and no doubt countless others. Sena can take the deaths of five innocent bystanders in his stride, because—well, why? Maali comes face-to-face with the Mahakali on the roof of the Palace, a specially built three-storey factory of torture and death, that nobody leaves alive. What begins as a harmless-seeming, and rather pointless discussion with the dead priest about what on earth God thinks he’s doing—‘I’ve heard that joke,’ says Maali—becomes a nightmarish, existential vortex. Maali knows that the Mahakali is like the Borg in the Patrick Stewart iteration of Star Trek, gathering souls to itself and growing ever more powerful. This comes at the end of the fourth day, and it looks as though Maali is going to be the next victim.
‘It now has its face against yours and you are no longer sure if it is a he or a she. You feel the cold and the empty roaring through you. His eyes are made from a thousand other eyes and her voice is a thousand other voices. … The Mahakali’s arms are around you and someone else’s arms are around you and everyone’s arms are around you. “Say it once more. Louder and slower.” Its teeth are as black as its eyes, and when its mouth grows wider you see its black tongue and the eyes peering from its throat. “We have fucked it up. All by ourselves.”’
How many narratives are we being taken through here? There’s Maali’s picaresque adventures in the afterlife, carried this way and that by whatever mention of his name comes his way. (He’s whisked away to wherever he’s being spoken of as though, the narrator suggests, by the transporters in Star Trek or Blake’s Seven. I always think there’s a fine line between popular SF and magical fantasies.) Alongside, or within this narrative is the philosophical [narrative] about the rightness or wrongness of what we do, either in life or after it. Dr Ranee had set this one gong in the cosmic arrivals lounge, with her insistence that nothing matters in a dead soul’s former life. It’s been carried on by Sena and now the Mahakali, and has some way to go yet. Maali, of course, is choosing to tidy up certain loose ends he left behind. And there’s the overarching narrative…
…the one behind the writing of this novel in the first place. It’s facing up to the truth of the political and moral chaos in Sri Lanka that the Mahakali insists on, and this seems to have become overwhelming for Maali on that terrible rooftop. The monster reminds him of Sri Lanka’s history of conquest by other nations, and of how it began with a turn-a-blind-eye willingness to trade. ‘“Our people too have always been tradable. Look at today. The rich send their kids to London, the poor send their wives to Saudi. European paedophiles sun on our beaches, Canadian refugees fund our terror, Israeli tanks kill our young….” It is then that you realise that … if you stay here any longer, you will forget why you arrived. “The British sell us guns and the Americans train our torturers. What chance do any of us have?” The Priest has grown muscular and crawls towards you as she speaks. Her voice doubles, trebles, and then multiplies. You recognise this walk and this growl. You pull away from the shadow and it blocks your exit. “The Brits left us with an unpolished pearl and we have spent forty years filling this oyster with shit.”’ It’s those forty years that have led to the Sr Lanka of 1990. Does Maali really think a few incriminating photographs will make any difference?
But I should rewind, because I haven’t mentioned the narrative that holds this whole enterprise together—the determination of Maali’s friends to find out what happened to him, and to retrieve his photographs to use them in evidence. At the beginning of the third day Maali is over his initial shock at their loss, and remembers where the negatives are hidden. But how to communicate the details to Jaki and DD? First he has to wait in the right kind of wind-blown tree for the expected call from the Crow Uncle. Sena tells him it will be fine, which it very nearly is, because when the call does come, Jaki is in the Crow Uncle’s cave. She’s hoping to make contact with Maali, and everything is set up for a happy outcome. Except…
…perhaps Maali can’t exactly communicate their location. What he has to offer sounds like a kind of riddle about the King and Queen. Karunatilaka doesn’t want everything to be too easy and, not for the first time, things become farcical. The Crow Uncle has a cold, and collapses into sneezing fits whenever Maali is trying to say anything important. He gets the messages garbled—‘something about the King. King of Elves? Or Queen. Or something’—and he doesn’t insist, as Maali urgently wants him to, that she must leave his address book as the dead person’s offering. The Crow Uncle’s boy puts the red bandanna on to the shrine instead.
When she tells him, DD can’t believe Jaki has been wasting her time with some charlatan—‘a witch doctor? Or a wizard? Or a Jedi?’ He doesn’t know what kind of novel he’s in, but perhaps Jaki does. Maybe she also knows she’s in a thriller, and that she’s supposed to be the amateur investigator. She’s looking through the address book, and phones the numbers with a playing card drawn next to them. Several numbers have the Jack of Hearts next to them, and Maali knows why most of them hang up. They are memorable lovers, mostly one-night stands Maali dropped with an empty promise and a non-existent phone number, whose photos are in that particular envelope. Maali really, really doesn’t want DD to know the stories behind these…. But the Ace leads to Jonny Gilhooley, Cultural Attaché at the British High Commission. When Jaki and DD go to visit him, lurking in the next room is the somewhat shady Bob Sudworth, supposed reporter for the Associated Press.
As often happens, Karunatilaka has this encounter segue into a long flashback, this one allowing the reader to see for the first time the chaos, cruelty and everyday corruption of the civil war. Jonny and Bob employ Maali not principally as a photographer, although most of his picture-taking is tolerated. He’s a fixer, knowing enough people, and speaking the three main languages—his parents were from both ethnicities—for him to make useful introductions. They have found a village where they can speak to the boys and old men who are opening boxes of new weapons, supplied by the Tamil insurgents. They are telling the supposed journalists about how they can trust the Tamils more than the government, when the Sri Lankan army attacks. Maali and the others are caught in the crossfire, but the red bandanna—a largely discredited non-combatants’ badge—seems to work for them. Later, he is taking an illicit photo of a meeting when he notices a man he works for, one of Karunatilaka’s monsters. It’s Major Raja Udugampola, the leader of the army and responsible for the attack that just left the village full of dead and injured. (He’s also the man who designed the Palace, so evil a place it becomes the Mahakali’s favourite haunt.) Bob Sudworth, really a representative of arms companies, is also there, and they are both speaking to—guess who?—the current leader of the largest Tamil Tiger faction, the one the Major is supposed to be fighting.
Back to the present-day timeline. Maali finds himself at the Beira lake, where the UN (I think) has had a tip-off. They are dredging up bones, already picked clean by whatever creatures are still able to survive in its polluted waters. Sena is there too, because the remains of fifteen of the disappeared include his own. And, yes, there’s Maali’s skull, the only part of him that sank and wasn’t retrieved by the garbage men. At the mortuary are the spirits of the others, including several Maali recognises from the night of his own death. There is also a white man in a colonial-style hat, no doubt bumped off decades before. There are no colonial hierarchies in the afterlife, and Sena is sarcastic to the European about the Knighthood he’s spent a long time waiting for.
Jaki, already in trouble at her radio station, goes all-out with her next report. She announces the finding of the remains, hastily explained away by the government as dating back decades. This is the report that leads to her dismissal from her job—after which she and DD pay a visit to Maali’s mother with the bad news about him. She already knows, and seems to be taking it calmly. And it’s now that Maali is forced to realise that after death, you can’t control what other people say about you. Which might, of course, be the truth. He was a selfish boy, a liar always trying to manipulate her and his father… and so on. Maali also realises that her version of the marriage is more nuanced than his, and that he might not be the only aggrieved family member. And that she didn’t deserve his constant punishment of her after his father left, and their later near-estrangement.
Elsa with Major R [or is it Cyril?]. Looking through the photos. Two highly incriminating ones. The ‘deal’ made with Elsa: ‘48 hours…’ Wants the negatives. Maali’s memory of R. Contract ending three years early. Real reason: M too ready to go beyond his remit of photographing Tamil atrocities. Not supposed to arrange illicit meetings, or take different sorts of photos ‘without permission’seduction of seven boys. ‘Only seven?’ Stated reason: M’s Threat, homophobia mixed with closet homosexuality. Visit to the Palace, which he visits again now. Mxxx.
Stanley and DD at restaurant/gym [name?]. Stanley trying to steer DD’s life towards conventionality. Maali’s memories.
Maali in the car with Cyril, with the ‘gunny-sack’ of his own bones and the box of photos he doesn’t notice at first. Crematorium—second visit, after witnessing the industrial-scale incineration of 77 of the recently disappeared. Their spirits like a shadow above the crem.
Stanley’s conversation with Cyril about the photos. Satire of politician-speak, as Cyril promises etc. as he drives them to the crematorium.
11 August
Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Moons—not quite to the end
Maali isn’t ingested into the Borg, sorry, Mahakali. He is about to be [quote] when the cavalry comes to the rescue. Dr Ranee, on best Headmistress form, roundly scolds the monster for overstepping its brief: it knows, she says, that it can’t take in any soul who has been hanging around for less than the full seven moons. She’s a born—or dead, or reborn—bureaucrat, and Maali wonders if she had been like this when she was an activist. Her poor followers, he thinks. Whatever, she doesn’t spend too much time tut-tutting over his insistence that he stay in the In Between for the maximum seven moons—he has important things to sort out—but she is sceptical about his promise to follow her directions to the River of Rebirth when the time comes….
In fact, she still wants to help him, and tells him he can communicate to the living by finding a way into their dreams. She takes him to a Disney-like fluffy cloud where other spirits are seeking to do what he seeks and she escorts him down to where Jaki is sleeping. Cue Maali getting endlessly sidetracked into musing on not only her dreams but DD’s too, as he sleeps in the next room. It’s Karunatilaka’s own cue for some dreamy flashbacks to their times of friendship. And we realise that one of the many bits of unfinished business for Maali is to do with Jaki—he had neither fully come out to her about his relationship with DD, nor let her know how much he relied on, deeply respected, and frankly loved her friendship. Too late now… but it isn’t too late for him to make the mental pictures, complete with sung soundtrack—both following Dr R’s advice—that will lead her to the negatives. They are in the box of records, in the sleeves of the two least likely to be played by ‘anyone with a functioning set of ears.’ He had also had the foresight—sometimes authors have to make it easy on themselves—to have left a note with them explaining who can print them.
This part of the present-day timeline is pretty straightforward for a while. There’s only one blip to spoil the successful printing of the photographs and the mounting of the exhibition—and it might be seen as Karunatilaka inflicting a little Khama of his own on the misbehaving Maali. He, Maali, screams inaudibly into Jaki’s ear that she mustn’t wake DD before she carries out the instructions, and we might guess it’s because of the rogue set of images of the hunks he has known. When he does see them, DD goes into an incandescent rage against the one man in the pictures who is also there as the exhibition is mounted. It’s Viran, the young man in the FujiKodak shop who always developed and printed Maali’s photos. He’s printed these, and now DD has him by the neck, and judging by the blackness in his eyes—eyes are always changing colour in this universe—he might well strangle him. But he doesn’t, and leaves the exhibition space looking terribly upset. Damn.
It had taken Viram all evening and into the night to print the photographs, then he and various helping hands had mounted the exhibition ready for the opening next morning. Zzz, an old friend, had lent the space and contacted people he knows will spread the word like a pre-Internet social media platform. Everybody will know about it. zzz tells the others, excluding Jaki and DD, for some reason, that they need to disappear for a couple of weeks at least. Maali is relieved to know Viram is going to fulfil an old ambition of going to [Thailand?]. Then, before the opening, Maali meets several ghostly visitors. I’ll come back to them and the bleak humour of the encounters, because…
…other things are happening in the world of the living. There’s a brief scene in which Elsa realises Major Raja is closing in, and makes preparations to leave. Kuga [?] isn’t leaving, which seems to confirm that he’s been making deals all along. In fact, only Elsa seems to think CNTR is anything but a front for channelling money for arms from Canada and the USA. Later, we find out she’s escaped, and this puts big pressure on Cassim…. By the end of the sixth Moon Maali, and the reader, knows who they’ve had to arrest instead, and is in the hands of the dreaded Mask. I’ll come back to that.
We know who the Mask is by then because Maali has encountered him before, once when he was alive and once after his death. The first time was when Major Raja, in the most creepily unpleasant ways possible, is letting him know that he’s dispensing with his services. This is in 1987, and Maali had been an official photographer for him as head of the army. But Raja had cottoned on to the fact that Maali is getting assignments for his own reasons, and that he seems a little too quick to take photographs that aren’t in his brief. In fact, he doesn’t know the half of it—it’s around now that we find out that Maali’s trick was always to deliver strips of film with 32 images, by pretending that’s how the film was manufactured. This allowed him to keep the final four on the strip. The trick is a convenient way to reassure Raja that there’s nothing illicit going on, and the extra ones he keeps are the source for many of his best war-zone negatives.
Raja wants to scare Maali. He fires him on the pretext that it’s for homosexual behaviour with army men and others—he’s had seven complaints, he says. Maali silently wonders, only seven? But it’s enough for Raja to read him a long lecture on army morality—and then leave his big office chair and come up far too close to Maali standing like a schoolboy before the desk. He strokes Maali in mock affection, ridiculing his sexuality before his hand slowly reaches right down to his crotch. It’s a highly ambiguous, and highly threatening move, but Raja isn’t hurting him. Then Maali takes a risk, and kisses him, in order to confirm something to himself. He knows Raja is gay—and this is why the major really needs to scare him. He takes him to the top secret Palace, and shows him the tortures and killings going on there. At one point, Maali looks through the glass screen of a cell and sees a victim with his mouth wide open in desperation at the hands of the man Raja tells him is the Mask. He realises he can’t hear him screaming through the soundproof American glass that accounted for half the building’s budget.
The Mask is the chief torturer, and Maali had never gone near the Palace again after that. Even when he’d been on top of it with the Mahakali, he didn’t want to see inside—the dark cloud of pain and despair rising from it had been more than enough. But during the sixth Moon (I think) he encounters the Mask accidentally. He’s an affectionate family man, playing a game of cricket with his children before setting off to work. On the bus—guess—he offers his seat to someone who needs it.
But where was I? Wherever, I’m with Maali now, hanging around before the exhibition opens. There’s a kind of semi-comic interlude, as he encounters some dead European tourists. They had been killed when their plane had been blown up on the runway as they were about to take off, late. It was supposed to go off while in the air, which causes some amusement for them in hindsight. One of Maali’s key images—there are six of them, carefully placed round a corner to add to their quiet impact—shows the crashed plane with bodies scattered in and around it. He’d happened to be at the airport, that’s all, and the tourists look for themselves in the picture. They tell him they are hanging about in the In Between a) because they paid for a holiday, and hadn’t seen anything when the bomb went off, and b) they think that ‘the Light after ninety moons.’ Maali doesn’t tell they’ve been dead for a thousand…. They like his wildlife and landscape shots best, wondering why he shows such an unpleasant side of his country.
He also encounters two ghost dogs, looking for the River of Rebirth. He knows the way, so he tells them. They are grateful, but also let him know they are routinely disgusted by human arrogance. People think they’re the only ones with souls, for goodness’ sake. Also, there’s a majestic leopard, dead despite the efforts of a conservationist it holds up as the only human being who ever showed any humanity. It seems quietly surprised by this.
Meanwhile, I what is becoming a new timeline, Maali is trying to piece together the final hours of his life. Snippets of memories that had completely left him after his death are coming back to him, and (I think) it’s a conversation he witnesses between DD and his father that jogs something. Stanley is haranguing DD about Maali. DD is still raw after seeing the photographs of other men, and is ‘stuffing his pretty face with devilled cholesterol’ as his father warns him it’s time he pulled himself together, and stopped dreaming. And I think it’s at this point that Maali remembers what he had been planning on the night he was killed. All through the novel, we’ve heard about DD’s half-baked plans for the future. He’ll go to Hong Kong, he’ll go to Tokyo…. But it’s Maali who decides that once and for all it’s he who will drag DD off to their dream life in California.
It sounds as half-baked as DD’s ideas… except that Maali is acting on it. He is going to tell DD on the very night when he is killed, having left a note on his squash racquet to meet him at the casino. (DD is often at the gym with his father, which provides Maali with some of his fondest memories of DD in his speedos….) During the day and into the evening, he has been clearing up a lot of loose ends in his life. He has been to see his mother—I can’t actually remember how well that goes—and plans to pick Jaki up from her work early next morning as usual, in order to tell her. He decides he needs to pay off all his casino debts, which a kindly author brings about by way of a high-stakes poker game with the Karachi Kid, an arms dealer as fond of the casino as Maali is. He even pays off little loans the staff, at least one of them always good for a ‘fag break’—their shared joke—on the balcony.
We get an explanation for the fact that witnesses at the casino had told the police durng the First or Second Moon that Maali had had a meeting upstairs with at least one European. Jonny Gilhooley and Bob Sudworth come to see him with the tempting offer of a big advance. But he reminds them that on his last assignment with them, they had put him in a lot of danger and treated him with no respect. ‘Fuck him, Bob,’ mutters Jonny as they leave with their fat envelope of cash. Which leads directly to a flashback, and another explanation: ‘everyone assured you it would be safe and it proved to be anything but. After it was over, they sent you home in a bus. The thirteen-hour ride gave you plenty of time to think, but all you did was replay one scene on infinite loop.’ It’s of a woman, beyond distraught and holding up her dead child, who looks at something around his neck—‘the twine with Tiger cyanide capsules.’ He gives her two, which she swallows… and then he administers more, to a dying dog and a man with a piece of wood sticking out of him. These are what the ear check had revealed: the killings were acts of mercy… and the desperation he had witnessed had turned him against his old life forever.
It’s after 11.00 by now in this new, all-revealing time-line, and Maali is wondering where DD is. He’d phoned him earlier to check, but DD has seemed tired out and reluctant to come…. But then, in the middle of a fag break he has lost interest in, ‘you saw a figure emerge. You recognise the stride, and know the gait well. The body of a swimmer, the glide of a dancer. He held the pink paper on which you wrote your note. He saw the bartender’—the one who had been giving Maali a blow-job—‘scurry across the terrace and his head turned and, instead of coming to your arms and letting you tell him that you had quit everything and were coming with him, he charged towards the bartender and the moon peeped out from the clouds and you saw the look on his face.’
Eh? What’s going on? Maybe this time-line isn’t as all-revealing as we thought, because that’s where the Fifth Moon had ended. But things have been happening since then, and Cassim becoming more and more uncomfortable with what the major—and the timeserving ASP Ranchagoda—are forcing him to do. It’s clear to Maal when he catches up with them at the Palace that Cassim is in danger if he doesn’t go along with the other two. He is going to have to write a false report of the arrest, and starts to do it, when the Mask, in one of the torture rooms, is called away to an special meeting. Whci is when Maali sees her: ‘on the floor, with a gunny sack barely fitting over her bushy curls, is not a Tiger separatist, a JVP Marxist, a Tamil moderate or a British gunrunner. It is your best friend, Jaki, the other great love of your life.’
How on earth is Maali going to stop this? Screaming at Cassim isn’t going to get him anywhere, and he is desperate. He can only think of going to the tetchy, unreliable Crow Uncle to try to force another favour out of him. By coincidence—you couldn’t make it up—Stanley is there handing over big money for anything the old fraud can give him to keep Maal’s malevolent spirit away from DD. Which he is happy to do, whilst completely ignoring Maali’s frantic pleas for help. In fact, Karunatilaka is setting up a spectacular denouement. (He’s set up several other things too, to bring about the kind of Khama for Maali that only a kindly author can provide.) Sena, who has been looking smarter and more confident each time he’s appeared recently, has a plan of his own—and he also has the answer to Maali’s dilemma. Only one spirit will be willing to offer him a way out—the Mahakali. The price will be high, but Maali hardly thinks twice: ‘you know that some lives are worth more than others, each one a poker chip in a different colour. Your life is a plastic ten-rupee chip from Pegasus, and Jaki’s is a gold-plated casino plaque from Vegas.’ Coming from Maali, praise doesn’t get much higher. He accepts the deal—three whispers in return for being swallowed up by the beast.
Now things begin to fall into place. Or are pushed, by both Maali and Karunatilaka. We see why it had been convenient for Stanley, reluctantly accompanied by DD, to be at the Crow Uncle’s. Maali is able to pass a message to both of them as they are about to drive off. He does’t need to whisper—the Crow Uncle’s boy is susceptible to his voice, and writes a seven-word message. ‘Jaki is in the Palace. Save her.’ If anybody can save Jaki, it’s her cabinet minister uncle. Meanwhile, the Mahakali’s image is a centrepiece of the Crow Uncle’s shrine, and the monster had emerged from it at Sena’s bidding. At the Palace, Maali can get to work on Jaki. He starts whispering words into Cassim’s ear that he shouldn’t be harming an innocent young woman, but helping her. But it’s only when he feeds Jaki with ideas and information that she will be able to offer Cassim a plan. Not only will he be doing the right thing by smuggling her out. Her uncle will make sure he is rewarded, and safely out of the major’s line of fire.
This is also when Sena’s plan is about to come to fruition, in a building not far away. He has recruited a rag-tag troop of ghosts who want to have their revenge on the Minister and his supporters as much as he does. They have recruited poor, abused Drivermalli, as unhappy in his own way as the ghosts are and, as we have seen from that first scene in the garbage men’s vehicle during the First Moon, highly susceptible to the voices of the dead. This is the meeting that the Mask is going to with the Minister, the Major and the RSI, and it is to take place during the late afternoon of this, Maali’s Seventh Moon. And Drivermalli has been persuaded to become a suicide bomber if the ghosts can remove the obstacles in his way.
What could possibly go wrong? Almost nothing, as it turns out, as is signalled in the narrative many pages ahead of the explosion: ‘The events that led to the loss of twenty-three lives on the fourth and fifth floors of the Department of Justice Administrative Branch is later attributed to bad luck and evil charms….’ But we know about Karunatilaka’s games-playing by now, and it’s no surprise that there are several twists. One is that Maali is present during the meeting, because the Mahakali is there with the other spirits, and isn’t letting Maali out of its sight. And Maali isn’t happy about the deaths of so many innocent employees, especially office-workers on the floor below. Also, DD’s father is there, and he isn’t guilty of state terrorism like the others….
He uses his third whisper to delay the triggering of the bomb. All the ghosts are crying out for Drivermalli to do it, but Maali has other ideas. ‘A feeling that’s been bubbling inside of you since entering this ugly building now curdles at the base of your broken neck and floods your senses.’ There might not be any redemption in Sena’s world, or the Mahakali’s, but this isn’t their world. Maali hated it when Sena caused the garbage men to crash into, and kill, five innocent victims. And now this. ‘There are people downstairs. Office workers. Three floors of them. There is the secretary with a picture of three children on her table. There is my friend’s father downstairs. Who is a pompous idiot, but has no part in this….’ The point is, it’s the end of the working day, and employees are just starting to leave. He can save at least some of them by delaying things. Which he does.
But, eventually, Drivermalli does detonate the bomb. And meanwhile, other things have been happening. Stanley has come upstairs, wondering why he wasn’t invited to such an important meeting. And Minister Cyril has a guardian demon, a deranged former bodyguard Maali has met before. He had been hypnotised into a doze by a dead exotic dancer with a score to settle, but when the other ghosts finally wrestle Maali away from Drivermalli, Sena’s knife heads in his direction and wakes him up just in time. So as Stanley dies, and the major, and the Mask, and ASP Ranchagoda, the Minister survives, pushed into a washroom and an empty bath. Damn. Except…
…not damn. There’s honour among demons, and he’s grateful to Maali for waking him up. Things had been looking hopeless: ‘the Mahakali grabs you with a clawed fist and pulls you towards the faces on its skin. You howl. but your cries are drowned by the wails. They come from the fire and crawl from the smoke. Major Raja Udugampola, the Mask, the ASP and Stanley Dharmendran.’ It’s a scene from hell, but then ‘the Minister’s Demon breaks through the scrum and jumps on the Mahakali, who lets you out of its grasp. … It pushes the Mahakali’s head of snakes into a wall. “Thank you for protecting my watch. Now we are even. Run, you fool!”’ It turns out he’s not just doing Maali a favour. He knows this so-called Mahakali, once introduced to Maali as the dead priest: ‘Talduwe Somarama! You got past me once. Never again!’ And he punches the Mahakali in the face. Talduwe Somarama was the assassin of the elected prime minister in the 1950s, and the Minister’s demon hadn’t been able to stop him then. Well, now he can
Maali is able to escape, and reaches the River of Rebirth with the Mahakali about to grab hold of him. He-man, Maali’s name for one of the helpers, tells him to jump in quick, which he does, and… ‘the last thing you feel is a claw being dragged across your spine.’ It’s as close a shave as a thousand action movies. But the next part sees Maali swimming through water peopled with his former selves, while on the riverbank are scenes from past lives. And, finally, the last fragment of memory comes to him. ‘The thing that had eluded you all these moons. The last thing you did, the last thing done to you….’ And can you guess who did it? All the clues have been there, among the red herrings. All those politicians, all those so-called terrorists who were sure you were working for the wrong side, all those former employers—they had nothing to do with it. The most blatant clue—I can say that now, after I know the truth—was the familiar walk of the man striding towards him some time after 11.00 on Maali’s last night alive.
‘When the figure emerged from the shadow of that rooftop, you realised how much Stanley Dharmendran resembled his son. The sloping gait, the symmetrical skull, the dark skin, the white teeth, the bounce in the step, the swivel in the hip.’ These family traits have been there from the start, so we can’t complain. And, with an easy drawing-out of certain vowels, it had been easy for Stanley to imitate his son when he answered Maali’s phone call to remind him to come to the casino. ‘Father and son shared the same walk, the same skin and the same toffee voice.’ Yep. The chapter is The Price, referring both to Stanley’s question—‘What is your price for leaving my son?’—and to what Maali has to pay for refusing a big pile of money. Stanley has recruited the casino heavies—the two garbage men—to put the frighteners on Maali, but it hasn’t worked. So he forces two of the cyanide capsules into his mouth instead. Then—let’s not forget that Stanley has earned his explosive exit from life, even if Maali had for a while—‘he screamed and pulled at the Nikon 3ST around your neck and then brought it down on your face. Your eye exploded and your head snapped back and you caught a glimpse of Kottu and Balal. They both looked as astonished as you.’ My goodness.
But that isn’t the end. As his body bounces off the side of the building and, but before it hits the ground… ‘you felt something that wasn’t quite comforting but wasn’t all that unpleasant. Something that was invisible and true, the semblance of a microscopic point in this gargantuan waste of space.’ For the last two pages of the Seventh Moon, this idea is developed a little. ‘We must all find pointless causes to live for, or why bother with breath?’ … ‘that is the kindest thing you can say about life. It’s not nothing.’ Maali has reached the end, and has come to an important realisation. Or, he has reached the beginning—because he’s back in the post-death arrivals hall, and an exact repeat of the novel’s opening paragraphs. They make more sense now. ‘You woke with the answer to the question that everyone asks. The answer was “Yes”. The answer was “Just Like There But Worse”. That’s all the insight you had, so you decided to go back to sleep.’
The end? No.
23 August
The Light
I wonder if Karunatilaka is a fan of Calvin and Hobbes. Calvinball is a chaotic game in which the players make up the rules as they play. Nobody wins, but players take credit for particularly outlandish new rules. Despite a whole novel’s-worth of telling us that the universe doesn’t care, that there’s no Khama, that nothing means anything, Karunatilaka has been playing Calvinball all along. In The Light he gives us 25 more pages which, whilst still in the irreverent style of the rest of it, seems to be based on aesthetic and moral premises a Victorian novelist would be proud of. Do things turn out well for the people who showed righteousness? Yes. Jaki has a fond lover, the woman she’s been having good times with since before Maali’s death. DD has a new lover, and Maali is proud that he could let him engage with his own sexuality. Elsa is safe in Canada, Vxxx and the others who mounted the exhibition aren’t in trouble… and so on. Meanwhile, everyone responsible for the bad things, bar one, is dead. OK, the Minister is still around, but he is ‘feeble’ after the bomb blast. Poor old Cassim is still in thrall, but at least he’s in a position of trust: ‘The Minister has a bandaged leg and an arm in a cast. He sits in a wheelchair, propelled by Detective Cassim.’ Jaki can’t thank him directly, but she hopes her expression conveys her gratitude.
This takes place at the exhibition of photographs. It had been largely ignored for weeks, until suddenly it gets some publicity. Everybody goes, in the end, and most of the ones we know take down some of the photos they either like or want to hide. There are no surprises about which ones the Minister takes. Kuga takes some, for motives that are all self-serving. Jonny Gilhooley takes the best of the hunks, Jaki takes the two that depict the good times with Maali and DD…. And Maali doesn’t mind any of it. One thing he knows by now is that photographs don’t change governments. When all that’s left are the ones of landscapes and wildlife, he’s OK with that too. ‘This island is a beautiful place, despite being filled with fools and savages. And if these photos of yours are the only ones that outlive you, maybe that’s an ace that you can keep.’ Bless.
After finally choosing the Light, Maali has a surprising number of further choices open to him. Not bad in a universe in which he’s learnt there are no choices but false ones, and nothing matters anyway. Of course things matter, and Dr Ranee seems to have taken on the role of guardian angel. She takes him to where he is allowed to choose one of five drinks. And the one he chooses—he says he couldn’t choose any other—puts him straight into a white robe, and behind the arrivals counter. He learns quickly, and soon he’s even good with the impossible customers. He offers commonsense advice to the two suicidal lovers he’s often met, and out-argues the Dead Atheist. Not that it makes any difference. And finally there’s the leopard, who wants to return as a human being, one of the good ones. This taxes Maali to the full, making him think hard about everything he’s ever believed. He ends up escorting the leopard to the River of Births—where, after realising he has nothing left to say or learn as a helper, he jumps in.
‘And when you jump you know three things. / That the brightness of The Light will force you to open your eyes wider. That you will choose the same drink and it will take you somewhere new. And that, when you get there, you will have forgotten all of the above.’
It’s a win-win for Karunatilaka. If there appears to be Khama, or redemption, or some other kindly nod from a universe that might no be so bad after all, that’s great. If there’s something bad, or unfair, or random still going on, well, what do you expect? You’ve heard all the arguments, in all their permutations, and you’ve only yourself to blame if you don’t still get it. Oblivion’s too good for some people.
We can read it for you wholesale 