A Passage North

Soon after I read Brotherless Night, I found another book about the conflict, which was also a sort of pendent to the Booker Prize winning Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and had indeed been shortlisted for the book the year before Shehan Karunatilleka won it.

- REVIEWED BY PROF. RAJIVA WIJESINHA

Unlike those two, which were a retelling of history, this was an introspective novel that explores something of the suffering caused by the war though it did have set pieces within that were in fact retellings of actual episodes during the war.

The book was called A Passage North, written by Anuk Arudpragasam, who lived in Sri Lanka as a boy but moved to university in the United States. He notes that he was brought up in Colombo so that the war barely impinged on him, but in his writing he tries to come to terms with the violence that affected those with whom he felt kinship. However this novel, his second, is written at a remove, and deals more with the psychological impact of violence, on a woman who lost two sons and on the narrator, who tries to enter into her feelings.

Krishan, who like Arudpragasam had spent some time in India after graduating, had come back to work in the North East to try to make up for his absence previously from the scene of conflict. But at the time the novel opens he is based in Colombo, though working for an agency involved in that area. The story is set off by the death of the woman who had cared for his grandmother, who had become increasingly frail, too much to be managed by Krishan's mother who was still working. Almost as an aside we learn that his father, son of the grandmother, had died in the Central Bank tragedy when the Tigers drove a vehicle full of explosives into its entrance.