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386 pages, Hardcover
First published August 4, 2022
You were born before Elvis had his first hit. And died before Freddie had his last. In the interim, you have shot thousands. 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. You have grainy yet identifiable snaps of an army major, a Tiger colonel, and a British arms dealer at the same table, sharing a jug of king coconut …………… If you could, you would make a thousand copies of each photo and paste them all over Colombo. Perhaps you still can.
The initial manuscript got a great response from Indian publishers, but seemed to baffle the international ones. Many found the quagmire of Sri Lankan politics in 1989 too hard to follow, and the local mythology perplexing. What began as simple tweaks and edits for clarity, turned into more extensive revisions and rewrites. Penguin India were happy with the book and keen to launch it at the Jaipur Festival, and did so. But Natania and I ended up editing the novel all through the pandemic as our publishing dates kept getting pushed back. It’s the same story in spirit (ha!), with roughly the same characters, but with a few subplots revised. The new version is perhaps tighter, pacier, more textured and nuanced, and hopefully more accessible to a wider audience
“You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone has. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse”.
[Originally] I wrote it in the first person, but I just found it hard to separate his voice from mine and so on, and then I just looked at it technically. When the body dies, what survives death? What is the soul? Is it breath? And I just came to the conclusion that what survives is the voice in your head. And mine is in the second person, it’s always ‘you, you, you’. So when I took that on the book started moving forward, so it worked from a philosophical point of view but also stylistically. And he questions it, ‘does the voice belong to me, or are there ghosts whispering in my ear?’
All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.
1990, Colombo. Maali Almeida – war photographer, gambler, and closet homosexual – is dead. He doesn’t know how he died, when or where he died, or even if someone killed him. After all, his job puts him into regular skirmishes with the various factions , both legal and illegal, governing over Sri Lanka. All Maali knows is that he is in some kind of divine administrative building that processes dead souls. He is told that he has seven moons to set his affairs in order before he needs to walk towards the light. There’s just one thing that Maali wants to do – lead the two people he loves most towards a hidden stash of controversial photographs.
The story comes to us written in the second person, addressed to Maali.