Brotherless Night

A novel by V V Ganeshananthan

Certain books end up making my heart and mind heavier and this is one of them.

But the book didn’t start like that. It started as a story of a happy family with 4 brothers and a sister: Niranjan, Dayalan, Seelan, Aran and Sashi.

This story is based out of Jaffna and the Sri Lankan Tamil community in the timeline of the 1980s to early 2000s.

The story revolves around what happened during those times in Jaffna and how it had its direct impact on their family.

The main character/narrator of the book is Sashi, the girl who aspired to be a doctor and treat people.

The story starts around the early stages of the family, speaking about the lifestyle they had, the food they ate, about her father, mother and each of her brothers. About their aspirations, their hobbies.

The initial phases of the story majorly weigh on explaining the geography of the land, the people, their house, their garden, the trees in their house, every small thing.

While it was interesting to read and imagine it, I slightly wondered why the author had gone to this precision of explaining it. The answer to that thought was in the following pages.

This book goes into the layers of how each and every event of the problems between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Rebel groups had an impact on them.

It was written in the story in such a way that, when a riot happens, what happens within the family, how each person in the family reacts to it and how it changes their perspective on a day-to-day basis.

The family loses their first son to the riots made by the Sinhalese people. Post that, the next 2 brothers join the rebel group LTTE.

There are 3 different phases of Sashi in the book. The first one is that girl whose only aim is to crack the medical exam and join the medical school, whose life mostly revolves around family and brothers apart from studying, the girl who loves all her brothers, especially her elder brother Niranjan, the girl who has her own opinions but doesn’t have the courage to speak them out loud.

Then Niranjan dies, and when she ends up surviving luckily as a refugee from the riots, she evolves into a person who wants to express her anger and question the injustice that happens around her, but doesn’t know what to do.

Along the parallel lines, both her elder brothers join the movement and her younger brother gets detained by the Sri Lankan army. She is exposed to pushing the limitations to rescue her brother. This is where she sees a different face of her mother who would go to any extreme to save her boy. Not just her - when all the mothers got together and formed the Mothers United Front and protested and successfully retrieved their sons back.

With so much happening around her and none of the brothers and her father around her, she channelizes all the anger to her exams and gets into a medical school.

This is the phase where she was introduced to different people she admired: her professor Anjali, her husband Varathan, her friends Chelvi and Bhavani. Leaving her small village in Jaffna and getting a wider perspective of what’s happening around her, she felt unsure about what the movement does for her people. She started having questions about their methods and whether they were really helping her people or playing a political game of their own.

That is also precisely when she was requested to work at the Movement’s field hospital. That’s something that changed a lot of things for her. The story then moves on to different parts of her losing another brother, losing K, losing Anjali, moving to New York, and so on.

But what stayed with me was the survival instinct and the hunger to do things. Irrespective of the fact that the situation demanded it, she is that person in nature who wanted to move forward with whatever was in hand.

There were a couple of other things that were very interesting.

The unspoken love story between K and Sashi. They both knew they loved each other and they both knew why neither one wanted to tell it out loud. K joined the movement before her brothers and K died in a hunger strike for the Rebels. K was the one that requested Sashi to work at the clinic. The only intimate moment was the 10-minute time they spent together in the campus, where they spoke, removing themselves from the current reality.

Their family was so much into literature and books. Amidst all the troubles, they spent quality time in books and discussed them. It showcases the way people lived at that point in time.

Another interesting fact I came to know is, Sinhalese people generally consider left-handed ones as unlucky ones. No good deed is started with their hands. I have never heard of it!!

This book has such detailed and meticulous writing and I loved it. I know I didn’t read it continuously but when I read, I’m there in Jaffna. The story has that hold on you!

The bitter history of the Sri Lankan people is something that cannot be spoken of easily, yet Ganeshnanthan did a great job in writing it in such a way that, I’m heavier yet I enjoy reading it at the same time.

PS: VV Ganeshnanthan is a female author also called Sugi.