Chats with the Dead
Shehan Karunatilaka
Hamish Hamilton: 2020
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It is a still night in October 1989, in the middle of curfew in Wellawatte, Sri Lanka. My mother is hanging half out of the window of a maternity hospital, ignoring the pleas of the ward nurses. “Stop! That’s my husband!” she yells at the policemen who have circled the car where my father is fast asleep.

The police officers who surrounded my father that night initially thought he was a dead body. This wouldn’t have been an unusual discovery at the time. In 1989, Sri Lanka was fighting battles on multiple fronts. The army was battling the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the north and east of the country. In the south, the government, led by Ranasinghe Premadasa, was mercilessly cracking down on an insurrection led by the leftist political party Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). And the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF), sent to Sri Lanka to disarm the LTTE and other militant groups, were carrying out widespread human rights violations, including torture, extrajudicial killings and disappearances. It was a time of everyday violence—when the headlines would state matter-of-factly bodies washed up on riverbeds and along lonely roads. It also left multiple fractures in Sri Lankan society. The uncivil war between the army and the LTTE exacerbated systemic discrimination and oppression of the Tamil community. The JVP insurrection led to Sinhalese killing Sinhalese and deepened class divides. Today, Sri Lanka’s interactions with India are viewed with some trepidation, given memories of their intervention in our country.

This is the Sri Lanka that Shehan Karunatilaka wants to introduce readers to in Chats with the Dead, a darkly satirical novel with a good dose of the fatalistic humour Sri Lankans will find familiar. The protagonist, Maali Almeida, is a jaded photographer with a knack for taking searing photographs. For the army, he photographs captured LTTE cadres, bodies piled high on to funeral pyres and the captured JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera in state custody. For a non-profit called CNTR, he documents the human rights violations wrought by the IPKF in 1989, the Eastern Province massacres of Sinhalese civilians in 1987 and the 1983 Black July violence committed by Sinhalese mobs on Tamil civilians. These photographs become a central part of the plot, although the context behind them is never fully unpacked; that’s left for readers to research themselves. Instead, the focus is on Maali, who wakes up in the afterlife and sets about trying to discover why he ended up there.

• Tags: Fathima Cader, Issue 32, Shehan Karunatilaka, Sri Lanka