Brotherless Night by V V Ganeshanthan

Reviewed by PROF. RAJIVA WIJESINHA

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Coincidentally, I have recently read three books which dealt with the period of violence and terror which this country experienced in the eighties. They were very different in style, as well as in substance, between them providing illuminating insights into not just what happened but into the complex personal relations to which diffuse violence gave rise.

Brotherless Night was written by V V Ganeshananthan, who seems to have been born and brought up in the United States. But she has researched her story well, and was inspired even more by the stories she heard when she was growing up about what had happened in Jaffna. Though the story is complex, the narrative is comparatively straightforward, the memoirs of a girl who had four brothers. All of them were swept up in the terrorism of both the state, in the eighties, and the terrorism in response of the Tamil Tigers though the youngest brother tried with bitter cynicism to stay aloof from the maelstrom.

The children are deeply concerned with their studies, with the hope of getting to the medical or engineering faculties of the universities. This was more difficult for youngsters from Jaffna in this period, following standardization and then its reintroduction in the form of District Quotas, but when the book begins the eldest son is at the Peradeniya Medical Faculty. His younger siblings look set to follow him to different universities, but then the violence wrought by government forces during the 1981 District Council elections changes their lives. The persecution of youngsters, including a neighbour referred to as K, embitters the second and third sons, and they eventually join the Tigers.