A dead person who addresses himself in the second person “you” for the entirety of the novel is the narrator of Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker Prize winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. This, in itself, is a striking fact about this novel as the second person pronoun is a difficult narrative voice to sustain meaningfully and entertainingly for nearly four hundred pages. But Karunatilaka’s dead narrator tells his story skillfully and vivaciously with deadpan humor mixed in with unnerving descriptions of the Tamil genocide committed during the Sri Lankan civil war of the 1980s. In particular, the novel concerns itself with the unspeakable atrocities of the Tamil pogrom in July 1983, when, in the violent confrontation between the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE), the government, the military, and the Marxist radicals, hundreds of Tamil citizens were violently executed and burned to death in their homes and out in the streets. The humor is somewhat unsettling. The novel is smart, it is funny, it is moving; but it is ultimately the heinous territory of genocide, torture, dismemberment, beheadings, and assassinations that we traverse.
Shehan Karunatilaka is the first Sri Lankan author to win the Booker, and the Sri Lankan civil war was a consequential genocide in modern history. It is estimated by various national and international human rights organizations that thousands of Sri Lankans both Tamil and Sinhalese, were killed in the 26-year war that ended in 2009 with the government defeating the LTTE. Its consequences were far reaching. Many were displaced overseas never to return to the island. The Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by LTTE sympathizers in 1991 in India for India’s military intervention in the civil war on the side of the government in the form of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). As Sri Lanka and the world approach 2023, the forty-year anniversary of the civil war, Karunatilaka’s novel and the Booker award underscore the presence and power of literary art as remembrance and historical witnessing.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida tells the story of Malinda Albert Kabalana Almeida, a professional photographer and a “fixer” for the foreign press covering the war, son of a Sinhalese father and a Eurasian Burgher mother, the second person “you” narrator of the novel. The seven moons refer to the seven nights that he has at his disposal to finish whatever it is that dead entities have to finish in the land known as In Between (apparently, get an ear check, and finish paperwork), to go over to another region in the post-death world called The Light whose objective is to get you to forget this just finished life. Maali does not remember how he was murdered or who murdered him and why; the novel has the familiar stirrings of a murder mystery.
Maali is a slightly confused, but bemused and detached observer of the carnage on all sides— Tamil, Sinhalese, Marxist, the military—in the early chapters, which accounts for the sometimes-breezy register of the novel. For instance, here is Maali learning his way around the post-death region known as In Between. His teacher is Sena, a young Marxist radical murdered by the government:
Sena climbs to a vacant branch and you follow. “Why are we sitting here?” You ask.
“Mara trees catch winds. Like radios catch frequencies. So do bo trees, banyan trees and probably any other big tree that blows winds.”
“I thought the wind blows the trees.”
“Your grandfather thought the world was flat. Do you want to be a ghost or a ghoul?”
“What’s the difference?”
“A ghost blows with the wind. A ghoul directs the wind.”
One hesitates to use the word ghost, ghoul or spirit to describe what Maali Almeida is in this other world, or, to ascribe the word “limbo” or “purgatory” to characterize the other world in this novel. From the biased perspective of the living, the newly murdered Maali is closer to life than death for the duration of the novel.
This place where the dead perambulate—the setting of this novel—has an uncanny resemblance to the “real” Sri Lanka, as much as novels can be said to represent “reality” within their covers. The murdered entities occupy every inch of Colombo, the main setting of the novel, and every other place in the novel, which has a certain peripatetic quality to it. The dead move, glide and fly in the wind, on top of planes, trains and automobiles, like Patrick Swayze’s character in the 1990 film Ghost, standing neck to neck with the living in their rooms, their chairs, beds, palaces of torture, jungles where the bodies of the murdered rot in the heat, polluted lakes where the dismembered limbs and carved heads are thrown, blowing and breathing and whispering in their ears, listening to their conversations, responding to them and talking to each other. This narrative layering is deftly done throughout the novel, and the alternating voices of the living and the dead side by side in the same place and time raises the possibility that the visible world is suffused with negotiations and transactions taking place in an invisible realm. Was Hamlet right when he observed, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy?”
“I feel there is a presence around my son,” says Stanley to Crow Man. “I feel it around me at times.”
“What kind of presence?” asks the blind man in robes, as he casts breadcrumbs to the parrots. Behind him, the Sparrowboy lights the lamps of each shrine and then goes back to his corner and his transcribing of letters that you cannot read.
“It is like a wind. An ugly chill. I get shivers whenever I am around my son.”
While Maali Almeida is on a mission to find out who killed him, he is also appalled to discover that the government and the military forces are after his lover, Dilan Dharmendra, or DD, for short, the son of Stanley Dharmendra, a cabinet minister, and Jaki, his friend and DD’s cousin. They have access to a box of photographs that Maali shot which incriminates the government and the military in the Tamil pogrom of 1983. Maali’s photographs are a stand-in for Karunatilaka’s novel itself; a forensic witnessing of the Sri Lankan holocaust.
It was the hour after the last shell had dropped and the air was still smoky and smelly. You stumbled through dust and you saw the wailing. You could not hear it, because your ear was abuzz with the low hum at the end of the world, the frequency that spirits swirled at, the white noise of a thousand screams. But, all around you, you saw the wailing. People had stopped running and were rooted to the spot and staring at the heavens and roaring. There was a woman holding a dead child, there was an old man peppered with shrapnel, and a stray dog shuddering beneath a broken palmyra. The celestial finger released the mute button and the screams were unleashed on your ears. There were no medics or aid workers or freedom fighters or insurgents or separatists to help. There were only poor villagers and one poor fixer.
The novel references several historical events and personalities from the civil war; for instance, the character of the corrupt minister Cyril Wijeratne appears to be modeled after the real Ranjan Wijeratne, the minister of Defense to whom the government’s death squads allegedly reported, and, the character of the savage military general Major Raja Udugampola, the leader of Sri Lankan Tactical Force who runs the torture palace appears to be modeled after the real Deputy Police Inspector General Premadasa Udugampola who allegedly oversaw the torture and murder of Tamil separatists and Marxist radicals. Seven Moons opens with an epigraph from the poem Good Friday 1975 by the Sri Lankan poet and activist Richard de Zoysa: “Father, forgive them,/ for I will never.” Zoysa was kidnapped and killed in February 1990 allegedly by death squads with high level ties to the government.
The novel, in effect, merges three or more genres—murder mystery, ghost story, historical novel, political satire, and the supernatural thriller. Into this mélange, Karunatilaka weaves a homosexual love story between Maali and DD. While Maali is open about his sexuality, and the novel gives a panoramic and gritty view of the gay subculture of Colombo and rural Sri Lanka, DD is a closeted individual whose secret sexual orientation eventually pays a heavy price in the resolution of the personal and the political conflicts in the novel.
The final section of the novel, which is organized into seven sections, each one named for one of the moons of the titular seven moons, opens with an epigraph from Shutter Island, the 2003 novel by the American novelist Dennis Lehane.
“God’s gift,” the warden said, “His violence … God loves violence. You understand that, don’t you? … Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. There is no moral order at all. There is only this – can my violence conquer yours?”
Martin Scorcese made a film based on Lehane’s novel, and it is quite possible to see The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida optioned for the silver screen. Not only does it have spectacle, mostly of the violent kind, but it also, more interestingly and more ambitiously, explores the limits, constraints, and mechanisms of translating between times and places within narrative borders. How does the living communicate with the dead? How do those borders look? How do you move between life and death? Between language, thought and silence? There is an engaging level of world building in the novel that would translate very well to a film narrative.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which was published in India in 2020 under the title Chats with the Dead is Karunatilaka’s second novel. His first novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, from 2010, won both the Gratiaen prize and the Commonwealth Book prize, and it has been described by many reviewers as the best “cricket novel”. Karunatilaka’s civil war novel is a fearless take on a vast and painful national subject not to restage historical inequities and hostilities, but to stand with Sri Lanka by amplifying the voices of its dead against oblivion and invisibility in the march of time.