Jaffna Eyes

Let me tell you about dark men with white smiles, these Tamil men I loved and who belonged with me. In my house there were four of them. Each of my brothers resembled my father in a different way. All of them had what some people call Jaffna eyes — dark and piercing. […]

Niranjan, my steady, sturdy oldest brother […] had turned twenty-five. […] Quiet, pleasant Dayalan who was nineteen […], mathematically minded […], loved to read. […] Seelan, my hot-tempered, popullar, bright third brother was one year ahead of me. He loved music. […] And my youngest brother Aran […] was a skinny, precocious thirteen.

And there is K, just a year older and a friend of Seelan’s, who lives with his family “down the road from me and mine”.

Sashikala, the shy, smart, thoughtful and perceptive narrator of this story is sixteen when the novel begins, in “Jaffna, 1981”. This is the period of the beginning of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE, in northern Sri Lanka: the year of the first bank robbery performed by the Tamil Tigers and the murder of the mayor of Jaffna by the Tiger leader, Prabhakaran.

In Sashi’s little world, an injury caused by spilling boiling water is the scary event of the year, ameliorated by the ministrations of K, who wants to be a doctor, and is familiar with both traditional and modern medical practices. She has protective older brothers and aspirations of becoming a doctor herself. But for the reader, the threat of Sri Lanka’s civil war that lasted almost thirty years looms over Jaffna — we know that Sashi and her family will not be spared, and that the events will change all those who survive.

It seems wrong to use the word ‘beautiful’ about such a tense and traumatic book, yet there is a beauty in the the language, pacing and framing of this compelling novel. You can see it in the title, Brotherless Night, immediately evocative and disquieting, an unusual combination of words that captures your attention with a sense of waiting and helplessness.

For those readers who are unfamiliar with the details of the civil war, the author summarizes the background in short, clear, paragraphs that never seem pedantic or historically detached. Bit by bit, every normal activity is altered by the conflict, and even language is weaponized:

Appa was lucky — unlike us, when he had gone to school in Jaffna, he had studied Sinhala […] and still spoke the language fluently. But when Sinhala had become the only official government language, several years after the British left and well before I was born, the schools in Jaffna had stopped teaching Sinhala in protest. Now the language of instruction was Tamil; although I spoke excellent English, I could not say a word in Sinhala. My future depended on a language I did not know, no one wanted to teach me, and on principle, I did not want to learn.

The novel spans decades, and the shifts in politics, society and the LTTE operations are laid out through Sashi’s eyes. At first the events intrude on the family in an intellectual way — there are stirrings of rebellion, and the boys read books about the 1958 anti-Tamil riots — but soon enough, every person in the family is deeply affected and sometimes complicit.

Sashi is a young woman, and the novel has a distinctly female and feminist perspective. As with most wars, the fighting is done by men. No one on either side asks the women what they think or want. The Tigers demand the support of the Tamil families.

“I’m sorry”, he said again. ‘Change always costs us”

Us, he said, but who did that include? Who were the Tigers to decide who would pay?

The women are not without agency. When the government arrests all the young Tamil men in the village, their mothers and sisters march to have them released, and are successful. Later, at university, a particularly powerful character is Professor Anjali, who speaks out forcefully against the actions of both Tigers and government, at risk to her own life.

The novel is even-handed in its descriptions of the events. Sashi notes the discrimination against Tamils that led to the initial Tamil-rights movements, but also the increasing brutality of the Tigers against other Tamil movements, against suspected traitors, and against Tamils who speak out. Yet the Tigers, known for their violence, have their own moral code: they are anti-caste and

were known for their discipline at least in this regard: eve-teasing almost entirely ceased.

The main events in the novel are based on real history, but are portrayed in an intensely personal way. One of Sashi’s brothers dies in the anti-Tamil riots in Colombo in 1981, and Sashi barely escapes. In 1987, a young Tiger man fasted unto death; in the novel, it is one of the main characters who fasts, with Sashi, the incipient doctor, by his side. In Jaffna university while Sashi attends classes, young men start disappearing, either joining the Tigers or ‘disappeared’ by them. The Indian Peacekeeping Force is welcomed by the Tamils at first, but they set up independent deals with the government that the Tigers do not want. Violence, as always, falls heavily on the civilians: ,one of Sashi’s friends barely escapes from rape by an Indian soldier.

Sadness permeates the book, but it manages to be both the intense trauma of current events as well as the more remote sorrow of past events. There are many introspective, thought-provoking sentences:

I realised that this idea of gradual improvement was how I head heard m parents, who considered themselves progressive, speak about caste [..] — yes, it’s very unfortunate — as though such a system had simply happened naturally. Things have to develop, it takes time, you can’t expect change overnight, they have to educate themselves, we are sympathetic, but — ! This was, I suddenly understood, a very patient, middle-class way to talk about change. [p241]

It took the government and the Tigers together to make our lives so small. I remember how my three remaining brothers, who loved music and art and libraries and school, became quieter as the call of militancy grew louder. [p113]

“Just because”, he said. If you speak Tamil, you will know the single word he said, its ease and simplicity, and perhaps you can imagine how it made me feel. [p258]

That year, when the militants turned on each other and when I heard where my brother had stood in that fight, I no longer knew what to believe. [p237]

V.V. Ganeshananthan’s first book, Love Marriage, was a remarkable debut, and Brotherless Night is an even more potent, a riveting work. It took the author 20 years to write, but was well worth waiting for.

Jaffna, at the northern tip of Sri Lanka