The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2020) by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka (48) is a riveting read. The gripping cover had me from the beginning and I was drawn into the vortex of its colours (though the face did remind me of Homer, the cartoon dad from The Simpsons.)
The humour is in order, even though it is black, because this is a story told by a ghoul who is dead. Witness to the excesses of the genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka in the 1980's the central protagonist Maali aka Malinda Albert Kabalana (1955-1990) has seven days to figure out how he died.
The book inspired a painting by Savia Viegas. The painting depicted various themes of the novel with verve and sensitivity. Gauravi felt the novel was dark. This was the collateral, I felt, of the situation in many places in the world today. The Palace which is, in fact, the torture chamber is symbolic of spaces of suppression worldwide.
What is unique is the ingenuity with which Shehan has been able to indict a regime so many years after it all happened - lest we forget. The way he does it so creatively - he speaks with the spirits of the dead - is a master stroke, as he has a ringside view of the events of the past. Now that he has passed on, he can join the dots. The earlier title Chats with the Dead (2020) attests to this fact.
Savia threw light on the role and purpose of a war photographer - which Maali is/was. To document the atrocities for the world to know is important. The photographer has to choose whether to help the victim or take the photograph.
It was a photograph of the suicide bomber which led the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to zero in on the assassins of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. The photograph was developed from the camera of Haribabu who was part of the hit squad and who died in the blast.
The discussion moved to Maali's partners. Tanvi felt that Maali is indiscriminate in his liaisons. He is not loyal. Which is perhaps the reason the novel ends the way it does. I recalled the poem I had written about the murder of Pushkin.*
A line from the poetry of Richard de Zoysa (1958-1990) begins the first section of the novel, 'The First Moon.' The manner of Zoysa's abduction, torture and death by a death squad and the throwing of his body into the sea is very much what Maali ruminates on in the novel. Maali's life span parallels Richard's.
ASP Ranchagoda, one of those responsible for Richard's murder, is also featured in the novel (pg.47). This is historical fiction with a dose of magic realism. Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005) is invoked to prove the efficacy of photos to bring the perpetrators to justice. (pg.105) Jaki, Maali's interest, browses pages about the Sri Lankan pop singer Alston Koch (b. 1951) (pg.161).
The line, 'At Dematagoda, Fanged Ghouls stare out at traffic lights looking for three-wheelers to mangle' (pg.163) seems like a scene from Shyamalan's movie Sixth Sense. (1999) There is unrelieved gloom here.
From a line from Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road - which is the epigraph for the 'Third Moon' (pg.169) - the reader moves to the hideous lines from Greg Widen's The Prophecy of an angel killing firstborns for the Fourth Moon. (pg.221)
It is then that the epigraph of the section of the Seventh Moon taken from Shutter Island (2003) by Dennis Lehane seems prophetic - like out of the book of Revelations:
'God's gift,' the warden said, 'His violence . . . God loves violence. . . Why would there be so much of it? . . . 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? (pg. 323)
The Seven Moons is finely textured. Maali discovers how he met his end - with a little help from Mahakali. He can glide into oblivion. His tale is done. Fiction mimics history.
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*August 15 Pushkin / Nafisa /Dhananjay (New Delhi, 2004). Pushkin was stabbed repeatedly by his lover in South Delhi; Nafisa was a model in Mumbai who committed suicide; Dhananjay was hanged in Kolkata for a rape and murder he said he never committed. The discussion of this book was curated online by Savia Viegas of the Margao Book Club, Goa on 28/1/23. All page references to the Penguin edition, 2020. Article updated 5/2/23.
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