Who murdered Maali Almeida?
When an intrepid Sri Lankan photojournalist discovers himself in a poorly managed afterlife, he is caught between two choices: follow a set of cryptic instructions that will take him towards the “The Light”—whatever that is—or haunt the winds of Colombo until he figures out who killed him.
Almeida’s decision is made no easier by the fact that in 1990, the air above Colombo is already saturated with restless spirits. The civil conflict has claimed more lives than the afterlife can hold, and many victims have no interest in getting over their past. Forgetting, letting go and moving on don’t come easy to those who have suffered the horrors of war.
“Why should the afterlife be so organised, when Sri Lanka is anything but?” expresses author Shehan Karunatilaka, who conceived The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Penguin India) in 2009 at the end of the civil war. “The idea of restless spirits wandering around also tallied with the notion of the ghost, as a spirit who cannot rest, because there is some unfinished business. There are so many restless spirits around Sri Lanka… we just seem to have more and more tragedies, as if there are these restless spirits whispering bad ideas into people’s ears.”
When Karunatilaka began working on the 2022 Booker Prize-winning novel, the climate of Sri Lanka was clouded by debates about the aftermath of the war: who killed whom, how many were killed, how many of those were innocent, and who was to blame. “The post-war period was just a lot of arguments, and I think it was eroding peace and reconciliation,” he recalls. “My thought was, ‘What if the dead could speak?’”
The spirits that populate Karunatilaka’s narrative, languishing in the winds of Colombo for justice that will never come, are based on real-world figures from 1989. “You have the student revolutionary leader who was assassinated, then you have the moderate Tamil leader who was also assassinated,” says Karunatilaka, his tone reflecting one of the tragic realities of war: whatever side you’re on, you’re always making an enemy of someone. “It’s the ghost of Sri Lanka’s past.”
These spirits personify the sparring ideologies that overwhelmed the war-torn nation. “A lot of people were like, ‘Why don't we just move on? What is the point of raking up all this stuff, what is the point of memorial days?’” recalls the author. “It’s easy for privileged people to say that, but for many, the scars are real, and they are seeking justice.”
Maali Almeida, for his part, is representative of the privileged, English-speaking faction of Colombo that remained sheltered from the worst of the war. He may have passed on three decades ago, but in many ways, Karunatilaka’s protagonist is the figurehead of our generation. He is cynical and chaotic, torn between conflicting identities. He won’t identify as queer, though he has slept with more men than he can count. He hurt the people he loved while he was alive, but in death, his conscience won’t allow him to abandon them.
The book started out as an “out-and-out slasher-horror” story and indeed, one of the novel’s most compelling qualities is its cinematic, noir-esque narrative. Through a protagonist like Almeida, who is involved with so many different political factions while overtly ascribing to none, Shehan Karunatilaka granted himself the opportunity to move between contradicting perspectives with nuance and complexity. “That’s what murder mysteries do,” Karunatilaka explains. “You can go anywhere in the city, because you can investigate the police chief, and then the drug dealer. You can use the murder mystery to talk about bigger things, and I think that's where this came out.”
Even while Karunatilaka grapples with weighted questions of politics and ideology, with a heavy undercurrent of spirituality, his mastery lies in his ability to weave those elements into a genuinely entertaining story. Questions of morality—who is good and who is evil—are subsumed by the notion that people are simply people, doing the best they can with what they have, acting not with malice but with stupidity. In this light, no character is too evil and no situation is too murky: the grim afterlife, ripe with despair, is still, in Karunatilaka’s hands, a place of hope.
“I do lean towards forgetting the past and not thinking about this—but then we keep repeating the same mistakes,” admits the author. “We keep getting back into this cycle of race-baiting and appointing these incompetent, corrupt people who stir up suspicion of minorities. It doesn’t seem like we have learnt from a 30-year-old war. Maybe if they read the stuff we are writing now, future generations will understand this.”
Also read:
The best books of 2022: A preview
7 unputdownable contemporary fiction books set in Delhi
10 books by debut diaspora authors that tackle important questions about identity
