Reviewed by Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo

THE civil war in Sri Lanka began in 1983 when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) led the first insurgency against the government. This began a war that would stretch over a period of 26 years, ending in 2009 with the LTTE defeated by the Sri Lankan military. Driven by the ethnic conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils, the civil war is reported to have caused about 100,000 deaths, in addition to numerous human rights abuses and disappearances. These years also witnessed a proliferating of writing by Sri Lankans, both by writers living through the war and those who sought exile in other countries. The resulting corpus of literature is a broad collection of writings in Sinhalese, Tamil and English.

Many Roads Through Paradise presents to us poetry and prose by a large number of these writers translated into English. Shyam Selvadurai, the editor of the anthology, writes in the introduction that in a post-war Sri Lanka “this anthology provides an opportunity to build bridges across the divided communities, by allowing Sri Lankans access to the thoughts, experiences, history … of their fellow countrymen, of which they have remained largely ignorant due to linguistic divides.”

The anthology offers us a rich history that portrays, sometimes in excruciating detail, how individuals from various social and economic classes lived through the time preceding, during and after the civil war. What it has added to the relatively limited current literature available in English by Sri Lankan writers are the stories of many of those neglected in official histories; the repatriates, women working in exile, children whose memories were permanently implanted with images of war. It is, therefore, more than a ‘people’s’ history; it is, in many cases, also an ‘under-represented and a marginalised people’s’ history.

However, perhaps even more intriguing are those stories that depict human beings caught in the ambivalent space that opens up in human relationships in the midst of ethnic conflicts. Individuals suddenly find their loyalties suspect and their identities under piercing scrutiny; they are subjected to a singular definition based on caste, religion or ethnic group. It is in these stories that we find the most disturbing and memorable moments.

In ‘A House Divided,’ a girl and a boy from a Tamil and a Sinhalese family, respectively, living on two floors of the same house, fall in love. In ‘Let’s Chat in the Moonlight,’ a group of toddy tappers from the “depressed castes” congregate outside a Tamil judge’s house to persuade him to change his stance on the ban of liquor that will take away their livelihood. In ‘The Hamilton Case,’ a man is killed saving a drowning English girl when her friend in the boat, seeing her “being manhandled by a native,” crushes his skull with her oar. In ‘The Homecoming,’ a Sri Lankan woman who moved to the Middle East to earn money for her family returns to her home to find a changed family; her grown up children eye her bags covetously during the day and at night we find her sitting on the floor in the darkness, feverishly clutching her passport.

As ethnic tension and the resulting violence escalate around them, mothers arrange marriages for their daughters, friendships blossom in the most adverse circumstances, and ill-fated lovers go on recklessly to love. In short, life goes on. Sometimes, the reader is offered a moment of respite through poetry — I say respite not in terms of lightening of the mood, but as a welcome variation in form. In one of my favourite poems, ‘The Walauwa,’ Wimal Dissanayake writes “They fought foolishly / times vast rough waves / they have been swept away / without even a marker.” But have they, one wonders? The stories seem to be littered with markers, if Dissanayake’s beautifully vague allusion refers, indeed, to the markers posited by war.

There are characters with memories that reach into the world of the past with deft, persistent fingers. And then there are the unforgettable images; one is that of a teenage Tamil girl compelled to prove that she is Sinhalese to save her life, when a group of militant Sinhalese men forcibly enter the train carriage she is travelling in along with her class fellows. As the girl, Radhini, recites “Buddhist verses preaching unattachment, impermanence, the inevitability of death,” “the front of her uniform drips yellow with fear and shame.”

Sometimes while reading the book, the reader finds that, having entered and settled in the atmosphere of a story, she is uprooted as the excerpt ends, leaving her with a compelling yearning for more of the story just as she is forced to enter a new story, a new landscape. Yet, a simultaneous advantage of a collection of this kind is its ability to include a wide range of narrative voices and styles. We get the renowned writers of the 1990s such as R. Cheran, Michelle de Kretser and the canonical poet Mahakavi as well as more recent writers such as Nayomi Munaweera, whose voices are a fresh addition to current Sri Lankan literature.

The only real drawback of this anthology appears to be one that all anthologies are inherently subjected to: that they are, ultimately, selections. In this one, there are a few stories that appear to be meant primarily for a Sri Lankan audience and seem not to offer much more than a descriptive account of a certain time or place in Sri Lanka to an outsider. The story ‘Our Valavu,’ for instance, lacks any apparent plot line and offers little to a reader who expects fiction or poetry. It reads more like a manual, information guide and historic-cultural archive than good fiction.

However, apart from these few exceptions, the overwhelming impulse after reading most of these stories and poems is to read more — more of the same story, more by a particular author, more poetry — almost always: more. A verse by the poet Rumi comes to mind: “the wound is the place where the light enters you.” I think that the light is certainly coming in with this anthology, with a fresh perusal of the damage inflicted by the experience of life in a time of great turbulence, for people of different ages, social classes and from different regions of Sri Lanka.

In retrospect, the experience of reading Many Roads Through Paradise is a bit like travelling through the history of Sri Lanka — a history that, like ours, is still contending with its post-colonial heritage, and more so, with the aftermath of a recent and protracted civil war. I don’t know if it makes for comfortable travel. But it’s certainly a worthy journey.

Many Roads Through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature

(ANTHOLOGY)

Edited by Shyam Selvadurai

Penguin Books, India

ISBN 9780143423034

536pp.