Brotherless Night

“I loved the market, and often chose to help my mother by going there. I could have drawn a map of it as it stood before it burned. I knew where to find everything: the tidy packets of fragrant curry leaves; the sinuous heaps of yellow-green snake gourds, burnished eggplants, long green beans, and hot chillies; toasted cashews; the ground pockmarked with remnants of betel leaf; the betel itself; the king coconuts halved and ready with spoons carved from their shells; the neat rows of uncracked eggs; the dark cannisters of gingelly and coconut oil; the bloody halal meats; the barrels of brown rice, red rice, white rice, lentils, curry powder, and flour; the men yelling, ‘Vadai-vadai-vadai-vadai-vadai-vadai-vadai,’ as they hawked snacks; the beggar who collected coins and scraps of food by a well in a filched metal cup.”

Sashi’s description of the lively market juxtaposes the profusion of life that could be found there with the terror and death brought by the conflict. The sensory descriptions—like the visual images of the “burnished eggplants” and the olfactory images of the “fragrant curry leaves”—help immerse readers in the scene and also highlight Sashi’s affection for the place. The lists of items available for sale convey the abundance and liveliness of the market while also reflecting Sashi’s deep familiarity with it. Her tone as she describes the market “as it stood before it burned” conveys her sense of loss and nostalgia for a vibrant, bountiful past.

“Dayalan’s pencil made us look somehow warm and alive—Appa, heavy-browed and stern; Niranjan with his steady, quietly content gaze; Seelan smiling a slightly angry smile; Aran clutching a newspaper; Amma happy and worried; Dayalan himself at one edge, with a too-serious expression. He had put me in the center, a stethoscope around my neck.”

Dayalan’s drawing encapsulates the character of each family member, as well as showcasing Sashi’s central role in both the family drama and the novel as a whole. Sashi will navigate between the stances of her brothers—the ethical lessons from Niranjan, the revolutionary fervor of Dayalan and Seelan, and the principled defiance of Aran—to find her own path.

“We had the same smile. I still have it—his is the face I see in my mirror. He said he would come back. I have never forgiven myself for letting him go. Could you?”

Sashi speaks of her brother Niranjan, who was killed in the Colombo riots. Their shared smile emphasizes the connection between the two, as well as Sashi’s devotion to her eldest brother. Like Niranjan, she, too, will become a doctor; inspired by his ideas, she will take up his anti-caste position. This quote also invites the readers’ empathy by concluding with the rhetorical question.

“As siblings, we had cupped our hands around those tiny flames of shared laughter: the intimacies of family habits and histories. But then the lights winked out across the peninsula, as boy after boy I had known and loved was extinguished or gone.”

Sashi’s happy, childhood experiences of growing up with her brothers in pre-conflict Sri Lanka are essentially extinguished by the war. The “tiny flames” are a metaphor for warm memories and family bonds, while the image of the “cupped […] hands” symbolizes the fragility of this happiness and the need to protect the flames to prevent them from being extinguished. The image of the “lights wink[ing] out” indicates that these memories and happy times are erased by the darkness of war, death, and violence.

“During the early part of that year, Sri Lankan Army soldiers still walked menacingly through the villages of the Jaffna peninsula. Some people may tell you that soldiers are not always menacing, but why should an unarmed civilian in their own village ever walk past a soldier with a gun? We did not consider the army protection, and never had. We wished to be protected from them.”

According to Sashi, the mere presence of armed soldiers within civilian villages is a tactic of terror. In addition, when she suggests that others might disagree with her position (“Some people”), she foreshadows her role as truth teller. She will record history as it was, regardless of apologist revisionism or propaganda.

“Something beyond anger possessed me; eventually, ashamed, I discovered it was envy. While I had some sympathy for the Tamil nationalism taking hold in Jaffna, I did not know what it meant to feel an obligation greater than the one I felt to my family. I wished that I did.”

Sashi navigates her complex emotions about her brothers’ commitment to the militant cause. Unlike them, Sashi chooses the path of family loyalty. As she closely analyzes her emotions about their different paths, Sashi shows herself to be self-aware and certain about her own identity. Her envy arises from her longing for a purpose that is larger than the personal; eventually, she will find it in documenting the historical truth.

“We had spent the three months before [Indira Gandhi’s] death in a bloody tear of violence involving the military, militants, and civilians, during which she had been one of the only people to raise an opposing voice. It was a daily brutality roulette.”

The grim metaphor of the “daily brutality roulette” conveys a sense of mindless violence and chaos, highlighting that the violence is unrelenting yet unpredictable. The list “the military, militants, and civilians” expresses the ways in which violence penetrates every level of society, with even innocent bystanders being dragged into it.

“I found this almost disturbing at first—very much against my own instinct to hide everything I loved—but then I realised that she thought that the more she announced her loves, the harder it would be for anyone to take them away from her. And she was reminding herself and all of us what we had that was worth defending: the ordinary things. Our daily lives, our parents, our siblings.”

Here, Sashi speaks of Anjali, her beloved teacher and then colleague. Anjali’s wisdom denounces the conflict in favor of defending the everyday. She believes that these “ordinary things” are worth protecting, far more than the separatist visions of the militants or the oppressive tendencies of the government.

“Did knowing K implicate me? By that time, he had risen to a position of some prominence with the Tigers; he was in charge of much of their political wing, and the Tamil newspapers quoted him almost daily, which made sense given the depth of his intelligence and how well-spoken he was.”

Sashi fears that her connection to K might put her in harm’s way, given his more prominent role with the Tigers. This quotation also reveals how K is a foil to Sashi: He becomes the mouthpiece for militant propaganda, while Sashi eventually records the historical truth. Even as Sashi acknowledges K’s dangerous associations, she also emphasizes his charisma and intelligence, highlighting her own complicated relationship with him—she admires him even though she doesn’t agree with him.

“I was guilty of that kind of quiet too. In my throat a choking terror expanded, that I did not know Dayalan or what he might do. But I knew what I had done, and that I could tell Aran. I had not planned to inform him about my work at the field hospital, and now I saw that by omitting aspects of my life from my exchanges with him, I was making a choice. I could lie to him; I could leave things out. Or I could openly do things with which I suspected he would disagree.”

After Aran reports that Dayalan has been involved in a massacre against a rival militant group, Sashi is startled into thinking about her own role in the movement. She defends her work at the field hospital as helping others, but she realizes that she cannot defend her silence about it. Silence signals acquiescence and implicit approval of the movement’s actions.

“Their words drained the night of terror. In the Colombo refugee camp, I had longed for a book to remove me from reality. With every chapter I read now, I felt not removed but partially returned to a safety I had thought entirely lost. I tethered my interior life to the pages, which the people I loved had turned in different times and places.”

During some of the darkest days of the war, books serve as Sashi’s protection against the harsh realities happening outside her door. She says that their “words drain[] the night of terror,” highlighting the power of books to return her to a sense of safety. Not only are these books a sanctuary, but they are also mementos of loved ones either lost or absent who had also read the same books in happier times. Sashi “tether[s] [her] interior life to the pages”—an image that suggests that she anchors herself to imagination and emotional connections to survive her harsh present.

“Daily we were haunted, not by ghosts but by the malevolent, unavoidable present.”

The constant presence of the conflict—its violence and uncertainty—troubles the people of Sri Lanka, combatant and non-combatant alike. This personification of the present—it stalks Sashi and everyone else with its evil intent—emphasizes its inescapability and malevolence.

“The new house was easy to hate and easier to leave because it was not ours. I wanted memories of the seven of us together, and that house was not big enough for them.”

Sashi and her family are not only victims of conflict and bearers of loss but also casualties of displacement. They are removed from their family home by the Tigers, and with that displacement comes a sense of disorientation. Sashi’s tone is nostalgic as she describes her longing for family togetherness. By declaring “that house [i]s not big enough” for her memories, she paints her happy memories as being too expansive for her narrow, unhappy present.

“‘I don’t know what will happen, but he should be with someone from home,’ I said. From before there was a movement, I thought. Before there was a movement, there were six children on a lane. Shouldn’t I go as far as I could, even if I did not agree with him?”

Sashi defends her decision to sit with K as he embarks on the hunger strike. Though she is aware that her presence implies her acceptance of his (and the Tigers’) actions, she still emphasizes the importance of home and their shared past. The repetition of the phrase “before there was a movement” emphasizes the contrast between the happy past they shared together and their conflicted present. The image of “six children on a lane” evokes a time of innocence and togetherness, and it explains Sashi’s loyalty to K even in the face of their ideological divergence in the present.

“We had grown up together. Say goodbye to someone every day for a week and you will know what I mean. Do it in public when you cannot help but weep half in humiliation and you will know what I mean. Do it without saying what you really want to say, and you will know what I mean.”

Sashi enlists empathy from her readers as she attempts to bring them into her situation. As K dies on stage, what should be an intimate moment between two lifelong friends (and star-crossed lovers) turns into a locus for publicity and makes Sashi complicit in the militant propaganda. Her voice is silenced by the political display that is K’s death.

“But if this version of the story is true, he was murdered, on a stage, and slowly, with me beside him. Was I helping him, or the people who killed him?”

Sashi hears rumors that K begged for food in his final hours, while she was sleeping; she hears that he did not think the leaders would allow him to die. She realizes that if these rumors are accurate, then K did not voluntarily submit to death but rather was sentenced to it by the militant leaders. Sashi worries that she is complicit not only in the propaganda surrounding K’s death but also in his actual murder.

“To begin, you must put one foot in front of the other, one word after another word, one story after another story. Have you ever tried to record this kind of history?”

In this quote, Sashi acknowledges the difficult and deliberate task of recording history as it actually happened. She works with Anjali and Varathan to compile the Reports, and their efforts are constantly undermined by government officials or militant spokespeople who want to silence the truth. By directly addressing the readers, Sashi challenges them to consider the difficulty of this task.

“Still, it is one of the few moments in the war that I remember perfectly: Anjali, in a white sari in a white-hot rage, speaking with unflinching clarity. She spoke about what had happened to ordinary people, her anger at the Indian army, her horror at the plight of women surrounded by soldiers for so many years. The Indian army had raped and slain so many civilians. In her speech she did not spare the Tigers.”

The image of Anjali in a white sari enhances the “white-hot rage” of her words, and this stands out in Sashi’s memory as she thinks back on Anjali as a figure of courage. As befits her character, Anjali speaks directly and does not prevaricate about the perpetrators. She declares that the Tamil Tigers are just as guilty of violence against civilians and women as the Indian soldiers (as well as the Sri Lankan army, as she states elsewhere).

“You must understand: I hate this version of the story. To tell it I have to tell you how the Tigers abandoned the doctors who had helped them, and made them targets for the guns of others. I happened to survive.”

Here, Sashi is speaking of the massacre at Jaffna Hospital, perpetrated by the IPKF upon the falsified reports coming out of the Tamil camps. The Tigers had already taken their cadres from the hospital, leaving only the innocent behind; their intention was to have the innocent slaughtered in order to tarnish the image of the IPKF. Sashi’s insistence that her readers must understand—she repeats the phrase “You must understand” several times in the book—becomes a corrective to the chaos and insensibility of war, violence, and terror.

“I want you to know, I can still see it, how radiant Anjali looked sitting there, sipping her cup of tea. What can I tell you about being in the presence of such a warm person? No one looking at the sun thinks about how swiftly it can be eclipsed.”

The metaphor about the sun being eclipsed functions as a description of Anjali—her central, brilliant presence explains everyone’s orbit around her—and also foreshadows her fate. Shortly thereafter, Anjali is taken by the Tigers and executed for her work in trying to shine the light of truth on their role in the war’s violence.

“You must have realised by now: although I had been so afraid, in the end, nobody turned me around; nobody refused to let me go. But I went only as far as the boarding gate. I was the one who turned around. I was the one who refused to leave.”

When Sashi is first set to leave Sri Lanka, she refuses to do so: She realizes that there are more stories left to tell, such as Priya’s, the pregnant suicide bomber whose actions Sashi has just learned about. Her falsified passport does not block her from leaving; rather, it is her commitment to telling those stories that keeps her in her country.

“But we were not alone; as I had placed one story next to another, Anjali over my shoulder, I could see how each small piece fit, until the whole war stretched out around us, its costs horrific and fathomable.”

For Sashi, the act of writing is ultimately an act of clarifying. Once recorded, she sees that the war is neither inexplicable nor unfathomable; these horrors happened, and these events are now recorded for posterity. Writing transforms the seemingly incomprehensible into coherent, if still horrific, facts.

“Bracing myself against a rickety tray table, I waved off airplane meals and ignored turbulence, looking only at the words rising out of the page, each one a brick in the wall of a sentence, each wall leaning against another to assemble the city of facts, the palace of history.”

Sashi slowly but surely builds a “palace of history” out of the jumble of stories, facts, and eye-witness accounts. This metaphor elevates the act of writing to an act of restoration. While writing and historical records cannot restore lives, it can restore the truth and lend dignity to the victims of violence by acknowledging their humanity.