Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshanathan

The book is unputdownable, and at the same time impossible to read at a stretch. At every turn of a page you have to take a break: to allow your heart to slow down, to wipe at your blurry eyes, to have a full on meltdown, to quickly look up one or the other reference.

It is one thing to tell a compelling story, but to tell that story with such beauty in tone and writing is another level of skill altogether. Many of the main characters in the book are based on real people even if they are named differently. If you are even part familiar with the war in Sri Lanka and what was done to the Tamils there by the governments and militia you’d identify the characters.

The story is set in the 80s, the start of the war after Black July of 1983, told by Shashi who loses her brothers to the movement and to the war. Shashi’s key influences, be it Niranjan her brother, K or Anjali (in real life LTTE leader Thileepan and slain academic Dr Rajani Thirganagama), and the decisions she makes often contrary to the beliefs of one of the three and her own. The idealogies and sometimes conflicting actions, the simple joys and deep grief, Shashi pleads with the reader to understand. “I want you to understand…” is a refrain.

“I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes.”

Because the book is no doubt seen as controversial by many still loyal to the LTTEE, I did read up some of the critiques (just google and look it up). But it doesn’t resonate, because the betrayal is deeper when one of your own turns against you. What the Lankan government or IPKF did is criticised through out the book, but as the violence of the state which is expected even if deplorable.

The story takes a leap from 1989 to 2009, when the war ended. So we don’t read of the aftermath of IPKF, Rajiv Gandhi’s assasination etc. The author helpfully provides a list of other reading material.

Highly recommend reading this book. But first take a deep breath. This is a wild ride.

Some parts of the book that made me cry.

The burning of the Jaffna Library, the breakdown of the most bookish of the brothers who then joins the movement.

The lose of Niranjan. The beginning of the end for the family unit.

The mother’s front.

Let me share some powerful lines:

“Must we explain each humiliation to be believed?”

“Turn a dead boy into a militant and his death is excusable, you see. Every Tamil boy born in the year I was born was acceptable collateral damage.”

“Because it was not a request […] we consented.”

“Evil is not limited by what you personally can imagine.”

Inspired by this book the next two on the reading list are The Broken Palymra and Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World.

That all of this happened in our lifetime, and you now meet people who were children or veterans of that time, you wonder how we refuse to learn from the horrors and trauma of war. Because what Brotherless Night speaks of, is based on, is the still the reality in so many parts of the world. In Palestine this is the reality decades before, during and after what transpired in Lanka. And there seems to be no cognition of humanity’s failure because we so easily can keep othering those we refuse to empathise with.

Growing up in Chennai in the 80s and 90s, I had Lankan Tamils as friends and classmates. I heard a version of the truth from them, estates burnt to the ground, a grieving mother, a brother who was seen as a rowdy in the colony we lived in, stories of how the tiny apartment they lived in was a far cry from their home back in Sri Lanka. Stories that as a child I was curious about, but didn’t fully grasp until years later. Some of them migrated to Canada and Germany.

Then I moved to Qatar and for several years an ex-Tiger worked in our home in the early 2000s, when the war was still on and his young sons were caught in the crosshailrs of the military and the iyyakkam. His life story he entrusted us with is reflective of parts of the book.