– G K Rao
If magic realism blends magical elements into a realistic atmosphere to get a deeper understanding of reality, perhaps the expression “nightmare surrealism” should be used to describe the living nightmare that has been northern Sri Lanka in the long night of the civil war. Shobasakthi’s Traitor begins quietly in the abortion centre of a small town somewhere in Europe, with Nesakumaran talking about his daughter Nirami in the waiting room. She has been raped by an unknown man (whom she refuses to name) and is with child by him. And even as you wonder where it is leading, the story shifts to the wry aside of another birth many years earlier, the birth of God in Palmyra Palm Island, off Sri Lanka’s northern coast. He describes with exact economy how the “young men of the island” build the tableau, how the service is held, with the priest assuring the congregation that the day of liberation is near.
Near the end of the sermon someone sets the school on fire. The suspect is Nesakumaran, a Vellalar boy, the poorest of the poor in that society, who begins his career as a terrorist with this act. So the coming of the Messiah is preceded by fire and water.
In swift, simple sentences the writer sketches the contours of the world in which Nesakumaran is placed, dominated and riven by caste, a society walled off into little enclaves of prejudice. It is a portrait so at odds with the more familiar one of a small, beleaguered people that it is hard to believe at first. But this is not a spin doctor’s fancy. It is, rather, an attempt to tell it as it was.
Nesakumaran’s story is that of a thousand Tamil youths in the days that led to the civil war. Idealist, well-meaning, somewhat clueless, they began as bumblers before morphing into the ruthless, terrifying Tigers, whose single-minded ferocity kept the Sri Lankan military at bay for two decades. Traitor, however, is not concerned with that. The narrative focuses on the blundering Nesakumaran. His attempt to indoctrinate his rich friend Kalaichelvan into Marxism and their failed bombing of the local police station have something comical about them, but things turn deadly serious when he attacks the policeman Jayakumar at the St Anthony’s feast day congregation.
Taken to prison, his journey into a never-ending twilight world begins. He is tortured into telling all his secrets. He betrays everyone, including his friend Kalaichelvan and the nurse Srikanthamalar, who has sheltered him during his days on the run and helped him find a bomb maker for the police station. He is stripped
of everything, and handed over to the next jailer and torturer until he reaches Welikada Prison, site of the infamous July 25, 1983 massacre. That story is told in dispassionate detail, almost as an official report, which makes it particularly chilling.
Slowly, the story winds down from there, and the reader is taken back to Nesakumaran’s European country and the story of Nirami. When the truth comes out it is like a slap in the face, the final death of innocence. The enigmatic, allegorical last chapter provides an intriguing twist that is both gripping and profoundly depressing.
Traitor tells the story of a loss too deep for tears, of a people whose spirit has been brutally maimed and their world fragmented almost beyond salvage. Only the diaspora maintains the delusion of clarity and moral force, and that too is crafted with desperate, painstaking care. For the writer, it is too pretty a picture. He studiously avoids the easy option of sentiment and self-conscious heroism. He has an obvious affection for his characters but in the entire cast perhaps only three glow, with idealism, innocence and a sad nobility.
The style is minimal and disciplined, giving the narrative surprising force and depth. Ostensibly, it is the story of forlorn, forgotten individuals in a small, virtually forgotten corner of the earth, but the underlying texture is richly universal. The world it reveals is stark and horrifying, of torture as state strategy and as an instrument of abjection, and how survival is not so often a matter of cleverness as blind, random chance. Perhaps there is no innocence, but there is redemption of a sort. Monsters maybe, but human as well, like the policeman D B Bassanayaka.
www. expressbuzz.com
02 May 2010