WHEN WE MEET MAALI ALMEIDA—an intrepid photojournalist and the protagonist of Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats with the Dead, published earlier this year—he is recently dead. The novel is set in 1989, a time Karunatilaka chose because it was what he calls a “perfect storm of terrors.” The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan army, Indian peacekeepers, members of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party and the state’s death squads were all locked in conflict on Sri Lankan soil, running an obstacle course filled with curfews, bombs, assassinations and abductions.
The story is told from Maali’s perspective, as he tries to navigate the convoluted landscape of the afterlife, and reconcile with his own death. He does not remember who his killer is—and so, in fact, has been effectively disappeared, both from the world and from himself. “The details come to you in itches and aches,” he muses. “In the Sri Lanka of the ’80s, ‘disappeared’ was a passive verb, something the government or JVP anarchists or Tiger separatists or Indian Peace Keepers could do to you depending on which province you were in and who you looked like.”
Before this book, Karunatilaka was best known for Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, an acclaimed book that was ostensibly about cricket but derived some of its narrative momentum from a mystery. Its protagonist, WG Karunasena, is an alcoholic journalist—a fairly common Sri Lankan stereotype—determined to track down a once-legendary bowler, who appears to have disappeared without a trace. When I wrote to Karunatilaka, asking whether he had intended to write two books with mysteries at their heart, he said he had not. “I began both with the intent of writing a cricket story and a ghost story respectively,” he said. “A mystery is also a convenient device that allows you to go wherever you choose, while misdirecting the reader’s attention. In the end, WG’s quest for Pradeep or Maali’s quest to find his murderer weren’t really the point of either story, but they allowed me to go to interesting places and meet strange people.”
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, though published two decades earlier, occupies the same time period as Chats with the Dead: the 1980s in Sri Lanka, full of hidden violence and open tumult. Some of the seeds of the conflicts that played out in that decade can be traced back to Independence and before, when the British rulers of Ceylon played favourites with various ethnicities and helped establish a legal framework and a constitution that would dog Sri Lanka for years to come. The Hamilton Case, by Michelle de Kretser, is a novel set in that pre-Independence era, which provides glimpses of 1930s Ceylon, an island in the long pause between two world wars. While reading an academic paper on this book, I discovered the short stories of SWRD Bandaranaike, the influential and controversial man who served as the fourth prime minister of Ceylon. Bandaranaike’s preference is for classic detective fiction; he shares de Kretser’s predilection for a colonial atmosphere and Karunatilaka’s interest in demons. This interest in demons in contemporary fiction about Sri Lanka brings us back to the present day, with Ruvanee Pietersz Villhauer’s The Mask Collectors, a novel published last year, which is littered with murders connected to Sri Lankan rituals.