Brotherless Night weaves together two stories: one about the Tamil separatist movement, the conditions of discrimination, and the provocations, threats and violence that fed the yearning for a Tamil state and fanned the flames of separatism; the other, the story of an ordinary (middle-class?) Tamil family in Jaffna engulfed by the hostility that breaks out. The violence, in distant Colombo to start with, is soon at their doorstep in Jaffna. The tranquil existence that allowed their children to dream, aspire and strive is rudely shaken. What follows, and how the family works its way through its entanglements in the civil war, is the core.

Sashi, the only daughter of the family, is the protagonist. She loses her brothers to the separatist movement one by one while she holds together her home with her mother. There is the prospect of an intense romance that has its beginnings in her first encounter with a bright local lad. It alternately glows and smoulders as time passes, but remains muted and robbed of its full potential. The Liberation struggle devours him.

She matures under the shadow of war, studies medicine amidst dread, death and destruction, engages and dodges the militant Tamils, surviving and serving her people. Moments of pause, tender moments of togetherness, and quiet moments of reflection on meaningfulness during this period of turbulence throw in relief a relatively tranquil past, and a life of accomplishment that could have been. While her mother is a picture of solidity and silent efficiency, her father is veritably absent, on a job posting away from home and seldom there in moments of crisis, seemingly impotent, resourceless and irrelevant, and not in touch with the challenges of surviving in a climate of distrust, menace and numbing violence.

As events unfold in our hero’s perilous journey through life, we learn about the genesis of the Tamil ‘problem’, the hurts and humiliations that Ceylonese Tamilians suffered at the hands of the Sinhalese majority, state repression, the call for resistance, the mushrooming of resistance groups and their quest for supremacy, and the brutality on display from all sides. We understand the dilemmas and Hobson’s choices that civilians caught in the middle had to deal with, and the toll and the indelible scars that resulted.

Stories about freedom struggles or battles for survival, human rights and dignity speak of tall leaders who shape coalitions and movements, or captives of a past they are unable to shake off and end up being cast aside or walked over. Our hero takes with her the lessons of adversity, love and loss and draws upon her courage and resilience long after the Tigers are checkmated, serving people in another part of the world, forgotten and unsung by her people, in her own land. 

India finds a place in the narrative—first, as a dearly loved harbinger of support, then as a rescuer, a peacekeeper who is suspect, and finally, as a rampaging armed force gone astray and amok, a betrayer, whose brutality becomes indistinguishable from the Lankan troops and the Liberation Tigers.

The book could well be the story of liberation movements across the world—of the fightback by people, typically minorities, who face indignities, the destruction of cherished signs and symbols, and the prospect of erasure.

The ideology of liberation is first an inspiration, and then a refuge. It moves further to become a cloak, and finally corrupts to become an instrument of coercion and oppression. Everyone, without exception, is called upon to make critical choices of allegiance, the forms it will take, the paths one will tread, the means one will adopt—the choices that quickly seem like non-choices as you begin to get indoctrinated, dictated to, or simply terrorised into submission.

Many a time, liberators morph into authoritarians, oppressing the very people they claim to represent and denying them the freedoms that they fight to wrest back. Their threats and intimidation replace popular appeal. Demands for allegiance to the cause and compliance with their writs become all too common. The cause becomes an excuse to justify excess, and the common man is caught in a cleft—unable to escape the tyranny of powerful forces among his own, and the brutality of the state determined to root out resistance. Distrust rules. It is easy to be labelled a colluder and a collaborator and be eliminated. People disappear, never to be seen again. Any street can turn into a battlefield, and any building a target.

The book stays away from extravagant descriptions of places and seasons that might distract from the starkness of the unfolding tragedy of disruption and dispossession. The simple and unpretentious narrative style allows for a near-direct experience of the complex circumstances, the unfolding of events, the tangle of familial relationships and the depth of the emotional landscape. What I liked was the unabashed use of Tamil words and phrases for people, food and the familiar activities of daily life—an assertion of Tamil and Tamil-ness.

In sum, it is hard to decide if this book is historical fiction or documented history appearing as thinly disguised fiction. It makes an important contribution, succeeding in helping the reader relive a period that is very much part of the Sri Lankan and Indian consciousness, spanning from the 1980s to the first decade of this century. It also offers lessons and insights to better understand intractable conflicts rooted in identity and majoritarianism in our world.

Recommended.

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Image: Taken from the cover of the Random House edition (2023).