Smriti Daniel
appear and reappear across his pages as metaphors revealing the inner workings of characters’ emotional lives.
Though there are many things to love in this book, you’ll find few characters make the list. Certainly, neither Daya nor Shivan are at all likable but that, says Shyam, is how he intended it to be. He confesses candidly to being a “fairly autobiographical writer”: “My books are autobiographies of time, place, period detail and feeling but not of character or plot.” So while it comes in handy that Shivan like Shyam is gay, roughly the same age and has one parent who is Tamil and another who is Sinhalese, he nevertheless takes his creator to places Shyam has not set foot in before. “I feel that one must travel to a dark place with one’s character before coming up to the light. That a story or a
drama should be cathartic in the true classical sense,” says Shyam, revealing a personal aversion to characters who “skim the surface of dark feelings, who seem to pander to the audience.” He knows Shivan is not lovable but hopes readers will root for him, will understand him anyway. “Likeable characters are dull. Shivan is tragically flawed in the way that Lear, Macbeth, Oedipus, Humbert Humbert in Lolita etc are flawed…We all have parts of us that are like him.”
Shyam’s autobiographical impulse extends to the context in which the novel is set. He wanted to incorporate the complicated politics of the 80s and 90s. “To me politics to fiction is like salt to food. Too much and you ruin the taste, too little and the book/meal is insipid…I think that once I had figured out that the politics would fit the theme of the book i.e. the cycles of violence and enmity, as in the Demoness Kali story, I had my scaffolding.”
As a young boy, Shivan is kept safe while the riots of 1983 rage outside their home. Afterwards, he speaks of the sizzle of fear that has bystanders start at the backfiring of a car and the disturbing sight of the building hollowed out by fire. ‘We never went, like others, to ogle the destroyed houses on neighbouring streets but little messengers of