The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
By Shehan Karunatilaka
Reverie, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9692352482
388pp.

Malinda Albert Kabalana, better known as Maali Almeida, is 35. He is a photographer who takes dangerous pictures, and a gambler who loses lakhs at a single hand of baccarat. He has a boyfriend he adores — despite cheating on him regularly — and parents he loathes. He is also dead.

How he reached the last stage in life so early in the book is the mystery Shehan Karunatilaka presents in his darkly comic sophomore novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, winner of the 2022 Booker Prize. Karunatilaka is the second Sri Lankan author to win the prestigious literary award after Michael Ondaatje, who won in 1992 for The English Patient.

On a seemingly ordinary Tuesday, Maali wakes up hungover, missing a shoe, his trusty camera around his neck. But the camera is broken and Maali is furious and shouting at the woman behind the counter, because that’s what you do at a government office.

Except this isn’t a government office, but the waiting room in the afterlife. No, they do not know why and how it happened, but why remain stuck in the past when there’s so much to do in the future? Yes, the dead do have a future. Specifically “seven moons”, or a week, in which they must get their ears checked (ears are the preferred method of identification because in the Sri Lankan system of rebirths, everything changes except one’s ears), get all their previous deaths counted, their sins coded, paperwork duly stamped and then walk into The Light.

Shehan Karunatilaka’s Booker Prize-winning sophomore novel is a fantastical murder mystery that, like his debut Chinaman, sweeps across Sri Lankan politics, and is wrapped up in his trademark absurdism and dark humour

This is crucial because, if Maali lets the seven moons elapse, he will be trapped in The In-Between with nobody but demons and ghouls to keep him company. He can roam around and watch the living, but it is remarkable how much time the living spend being boring, picking their noses and scratching their privates. It’s an unpleasant, aimless existence and he has been duly warned.

But Maali would like to know how he died. From the looks of things, it was not of natural causes. Dang his post-demise amnesia! He can’t remember anything about his life, let alone his last hour alive.

Thus, he takes to the wind — literally — and sets about searching for the truth. Bear in mind that, when alive, he was no ordinary photographer. No, no. He took pictures that could make some very powerful men very anxious indeed. And he never limited himself, taking photos for whoever paid him, be it the international press, the government, ‘rebels’ masquerading as fundraising organisations or the army chief.

This context makes the political aspects of the story important. The country’s situation is murkier than the waters of Beira Lake — Colombo’s most popular spot to dispose of dead men such as Maali Almeida — so here’s a quick breakdown:

There are two major ethnic factions: Sinhalese and Tamil. Belonging to either is reason enough for the other to kill you. So far, so simple. Then, if you are too liberal or too extreme, you can be killed by your own side. Then, there’s the army, which obeys no one and kills whoever it well pleases.

This is 1980s’ Sri Lanka. Why does it feel like home to a Pakistani in 2023?

It is worth noting here that Karunatilaka appears to have based Maali on the real-life journalist Richard de Zoysa, who was abducted and murdered — allegedly by the Sri Lankan government — in 1990. De Zoysa is name-checked several times and Maali is named after a character De Zoysa played in a 1983 film titled Yuganthaya [The End of an Era].

Other than the main players, there is an American weapons seller posing as a journalist, Israeli weapons sellers posing as B-grade filmmakers, a driver’s son who is fast becoming a national danger and the minister of justice who is universally loathed as the vilest man in the land.

Rather than disturb, Karunatilaka’s dark humour makes readers smile, if not outright guffaw. Much of it revolves around the characters’ workdays and, while circumstances differ, one can relate to the human condition. Take the cleaver-wielding goon who adopts stray cats and sells them to the Chinese who have… interesting culinary preferences. He’s struggling with a corpse that refuses to sink into Beira Lake. Masking tape is better than rope to tie rocks to it, but the shops are closed. What to do?

Police inspector Cassim despises his job. He applied for a transfer a year ago and his everlasting hope that it will come through any day now is touching. Young Drivermalli, whose responsibilities include ferrying politicians around in government-issue Mercedes Benzes and corpses in unmarked vans, is indifferent to the work, but the sheer unprofessionalism of it all bothers him.

Karunatilaka spends plenty of time analysing the meaning and pointlessness of life, which could have made the book a ponderous drag. But the author was an advertising man for many years and so avoids falling into the pontificating trap with sharp sentences that read like witty, crisp and memorable taglines.

His mystery-crafting skills are also strong, the clues slipped in so unobtrusively, almost offhandedly, that — much like figuring out which bad guy is in cahoots with which other villain — it is impossible to come even close to pinpointing the murderer until Karunatilaka tells us.

Karunatilaka’s weakness is his inability to describe adequately. In the debate of books-versus-films, the argument is always that books let you picture things the way you want, rather than through someone else’s vision. But give us something to go on!

What does the Tamil activist Kugarajah, for instance, look like? He’s stocky and solid and has forearms that make Maali swoon, but does he have hair? What does he wear? Maybe I’d like to swoon over his forearms too, but I don’t know whether to picture him in a business shirt with the sleeves rolled up, or a short-sleeved polo. Even Maali is left wide open to interpretation. All we know is that he believes he is a handsome man. There are too many blanks to fill.

Then there is the convenient premise that almost everyone involved in Maali’s death has some connection to Hotel Leo. However, as Colombo is 101 times smaller than Karachi, I will suspend disbelief and accept that there is only so much space in the city available to rent. If a questionable NGO, a smelly fisheries storage and a seedy casino all want to be in a building owned by the ministry of justice, then so be it.

I also wish the — admittedly few — non-English words had been translated. South Asians can be quite defensive about ‘owning’ a language they don’t actually read or write in and should a brown writer dare to include a glossary helpfully explaining ‘foreign’ words, accusations fly of pandering to the West. But I’m a reader neither from, nor in, the West. I don’t understand every single language spoken across South Asia. Don’t force me to stop in the middle of a particularly exciting chapter to Google what a “kolla” is.

Because with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, it’s annoying to have to stop. Karunatilaka is clever with words, skilled at giving out just the right amount of information at the right time and his fresh take on the theme of a ghost seeking vengeance is funny, gripping and, for the most part, greatly entertaining.

The reviewer is a former staffer and works in advertising.

She tweets @SarwatYAzeem

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 29th, 2023