THROUGH A BUDDHIST LENS
Selvadurai's latest work is an exploration of the human condition
This is where the novelist comes in. You have to extrapolate backwards and, you know, guess. But that's what a novel can do, it can guess. You can make an informed guess. Shyam Selvadurai
When researching his new novel, Mansions of the Moon, author Shyam Selvadurai often felt like an archeologist.
The epic story takes place in ancient India and follows the early life of Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, and his young wife Yasodhara. It is rich with details outlining the food, clothing, rituals, family life and power structures of the period. Selvadurai was good friends with an archeologist in his native Sri Lanka, who once explained the process of gleaning broader information from the fragments of history unearthed in an archeological dig. It was a conversation the author found useful during his years researching Mansions of the Moon.
“They excavate something and say `OK, how does this fit?'” says Selvadurai. “Then they have to extrapolate, moving backwards or forwards.”
Researching a historical novel is a similar process. Selvadurai would find snippets of information and little details that have been unearthed by others and then let his storytelling skills kick in.
“You can't find all that information,” he says. “This is where the novelist comes in. You have to extrapolate backwards and, you know, guess. But that's what a novel can do, it can guess. You can make an informed guess.”
The topic of research is an obvious one for Selvadurai when discussing this novel. It's not that he hasn't written period pieces before. His 1994 Giller-shortlisted debut, Funny Boy, was a comingof-age tale about a Tamil boy set against the backdrop of the Sinhala-tamil conflicts in Colombo that led to the 1983 riots. His 1999 followup, Cinnamon Gardens, was set in the 1920s in the former British colony of Ceylon.
But the author admits he had never previously attempted anything that required the sort of deep-dive research he undertook for Mansions of the Moon. While there is no shortage of academic research to be found regarding ancient India in the 6th century BC, there are significant gaps.
This is particularly true of the figures Selvadurai wanted to be front-and-centre in the novel. The earliest Buddhist text, the Pali Canon, says very little about the life of Siddhartha before his spiritual journey. Even less was said about his wife, Yasodhara, in those early texts. But her enigmatic presence depicted in Buddhist literature later on has long fascinated writers. Selvadurai, who is a practising Buddhist, says his fascination intensified after reading Ranjini Obeyesekere's translation of the 19th-century Sri Lankan poem Yasodhara, The Wife of the Bodhisattva.
“I hadn't really encountered very much about her at all,” he says. “She is pretty much erased from those oldest texts. Because of that, she has become a fascination for writers over the centuries. But what I love about this poem that was translated was that there was this pang of loss around being abandoned by the person she loved. I found that was a very universal experience and that I could connect with her feeling. It's a fundamental human feeling, this fear of abandonment.”
While not a first-person narrative, Mansions of the Moon is largely told through the eyes of Yasodhara and traces her life with the future Buddha from their days as newlyweds to his eventual return post-enlightenment. The story is set amid the power struggles and strict class structure of ancient India but often unfolds like an intimate family drama as Selvadurai examines the dynamics between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters. Yasodhara is introduced as a savvy young woman who is devoted to her husband but struggles to understand the anguish and disillusionment that eventually leads him to abandon her and their son for his spiritual journey. The tale begins with a resentful Yasodhara receiving news that her husband is alive years after he disappeared from her life.
“That is very Buddhist as well, that structure of the present-tense story and then (look at) how did this happen? So you go back to the past,” he says. “So you know what happened but now you are looking at how it happened. The `how' of it, in those Buddhist stories, in an exploration of the ideas and philosophies of Buddhism. We see how this happened and how Yasodhara deals with it. So it is a historical novel, but it is also very much a novel of ideas and an exploration of the human condition but through the Buddhist lens. She embodies that basic notion of Buddhism, which is change.”
Selvadurai arrived in Canada from Sri Lanka in 1984 when he was 19, settling in Scarborough, Ont. Funny Boy and his third novel, 2013's The Hungry Ghosts, both seemed to have autobiographical elements. Funny Boy, which also picked up a Lambda Literary Award for best gay male fiction, told the story of a boy struggling with his sexual identity. While not directly autobiographical, it did draw on Selvadurai's experiences growing up gay in Sri Lanka amid the escalating tensions between the Buddhist Sinhala majority and Hindu Tamil minority in the 1970s. The Hungry Ghosts, meanwhile had the author re-creating the anxiety and displacement that he and other immigrants experienced upon arriving from Sri Lanka to the inner ring of Toronto's suburbs in the 1980s.
The Hungry Ghosts, which took Selvadurai 13 years to write, also marked a significant turning point in the writer's work. The title is taken from Buddhist mythology, specifically the idea of wandering and insatiable spirits that are so driven by desire in life that they are unable to find peace after death. It also followed some basic tenets of Buddhist philosophy and put them in the context of the immigrant story, replicating the cyclic nature of struggle and karma that is passed down as his characters moved on to a new life in Canada.
It's part of a broader approach Selvadurai says he will continue to take with his novels.
“It was some time in 2005, 2006,” he says. “That's when I first read (the early Buddhist) stories. I wanted to create a hybrid form. Those stories embody, in their plot lines and their character tropes and arcs, the concepts of Buddhism just like the Western novel embodies Judeo-christian realities. I wanted to take the Western-realist novel because it's complex and its characterization is subtle and psychological.
“That started for me with The Hungry Ghosts, in which you've got immigration, trauma, sexuality all through the concept of these hungry-ghost stories. But it is also a very realistic novel. It started there and has continued on for me. It's become this thing I'm pursuing now and I don't know when it will stop.”