Brotherless Night 
By V.V. Ganeshananthan 
Penguin Random House
ISBN: 978-0812978278 
384pp.

Sometimes a book is truly worthy of the award it receives. Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan, which won the UK’s Women’s Prize for Fiction this year, is one such example. It is the story of a family and country — Sri Lanka — breaking down and, quite simply, it is unforgettable.

We begin in the early 1980s in Jaffna, the largely Tamil province where tensions with the majority Sinhalese are brewing. Sashi is the only sister to four brothers and wants to continue the family tradition of becoming a doctor, like her eldest brother and grandfather.

She is a studious girl, obedient daughter, and loyal friend but one particular friendship with K who, like her, dreams of becoming a doctor, will test her moral compass when he, along with two of her brothers, join the militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or Tamil Tigers. But before that happens, the public library they all frequent is burned down. (This incident did take place in 1981 and is largely recognised as setting the stage for the civil war.)

Vellupillai Prabhakaran said he founded the LTTE in the late 1970s in response to violent and discriminatory anti-Tamil policies by the Sinhalese-dominated government. He murdered the mayor of Jaffna in 1975 in revenge, he said, for state violence during the Tamil conference a year earlier, where police shot many attendants.

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, a Sri Lankan novel reads like a devastating and unputdownable memoir of a woman doctor navigating life during a brutal civil war

As the Tamil Tigers organised and gained more arms, the conflict widened and became more violent. By 1983, the conflict turned into a full-blown civil war that lasted nearly three decades and killed 100,000 people. The LTTE was considered one of the most feared guerilla forces in the world, with a military, navy, airborne and even suicide units.

Many of these details feature in the novel and also help the reader understand what motivates men and women to support and/or join the militants. Sashi encounters men and women wearing cyanide vials around their neck — to take should they be captured; a poisonous death was considered “better” than anything torturous they could face at the hands of their captors. The Tigers wore the poison vials because they did not want to be interrogated either, as any information about their superiors, their plans and their thinking was valuable.

A part of why this story works so well is that it’s not one-dimensional and there’s no judgement. What position do you take on a militant organisation that, despite its persecution, commits acts of violence against ordinary people themselves? You understand why Sashi agrees to K asking her to work as a medic for the Tamil Tigers while she’s still studying to be a doctor. You understand the conflicted relationship she has with two of her brothers, Seelan and Dayalan, who joined the LTTE, leaving the family home in the middle of the night to return months later from guerilla training in India.

The war creates so many fissures in familial relationships — Sashi’s with the aforementioned brothers, with K, and with her own parents, from whom she conceals many things as she struggles to reconcile with the Tigers’ actions.

The most painful portion for me was reading about the young men, even teenage boys, that were rounded up by the government and taken away to undisclosed locations. Their crime was being Tamil, potential LTTE recruits maybe. This felt familiar, as it has happened here to mothers and there is a long list of missing sons, husbands, brothers and so forth, taken away on suspicion of being terrorists. To read about Tamil mothers, including Sashi’s, valiantly organising and fighting for their return is powerful, but does not take away from the tragedy that wars bring. The boys return, but are never the same.

You must understand: There is no single day on which a war begins. The conflict will collect around you gradually, the way carrion birds assemble around the vulnerable, until there are so many predators that the object of their hunger is not even visible. You will not even be able to see yourself in the gathering crowd of those who would kill you.” — Excerpt from the book

Loyalty is a key theme throughout the novel and poses many difficult challenges. Is Sashi loyal to the Tamil Tigers’ cause or does she act out of her love for K? When K volunteers to go on a hunger fast, will he be rewarded for his loyalty? These dilemmas are eloquently captured. As is the brutal imagery of war.

A dog weeps because it “could hear what we could not: tanks or planes on the move in the distance.” Homes are destroyed overnight, neighbours in Colombo turn on one another, identifying the Tamils in a bid to save themselves. But others will take risks. Sashi finds refuge at a Muslim friend’s house after her grandfather’s home is burned in Colombo.

“Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned,” writes Sashi. “But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.”

Following the death of a beloved teacher, the Indian military arrives to maintain “peace” but the violence does not abate. Every player has blood on their hands in this (and indeed every) civil war. As she witnesses this, Sashi begins to question her position. She leans on her medical school professor, a feminist and dissident familiar with the Tigers’ practices, who urges her to help document the atrocities taking place. It is this project that will help shape Sashi’s stance and also make decisions that will alter her future, as well as her family’s.

“It did not occur to me to count or prove, to measure our losses for history or for other people to understand or believe. I did not collect the evidence of my own destroyed life; I did not know people would ask me for it,” she writes.

It’s strange to read a book that is so devastating and tragic and yet feels like you can’t put it down. I read it in a day-and-a-half. I can only think that it’s a testament to the eloquent, powerful writing, which reads like a memoir of a woman doctor navigating life during a brutal war, witnessing tragedy and gruesome violence by all sides and how heartless political leaders operate to achieve their goals.

Against all this, Sashi feels compelled to pick a side and you’re compelled to keep reading to know which way she will go.

The reviewer is a journalism instructor.

X: LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 28th, 2024