island of a thousand mirrors by nayomi munaweera

It is impossible to tell what they have seen, what they are escaping.” “Every year they come looking more and more shell-shocked. The escalating violence and brutality in their homeland manifests itself on TV screens and radio, and in the waves of refugees flowing into the US. Rumblings of upheaval are too distant from their lives in Colombo.īut when violence steps across their threshold, it tears the family asunder Nishan, Visaka and their children flee to the United States, where Visaka’s brother has set up home and business. The idyllic quality of life-save one incident where Sinhala hoodlums board Nishan’s train to school in search of Tamil children to slaughter-is inherited by the narrator, Yashodhara, and her sister, Lanka. “When Sylvia Sunethra calls Buddhist monks to the house, their monotone chant is interrupted by the voice of a Tamil film heroine winding seductively down the stairs… Once a week the Shivalingam patriarch comes to grumble that his grandchildren cannot study because Sylvia Sunethra’s daughter is again playing her Western songs too loudly or that the smoke from Alice’s kitchen is rising into his windows.” Woven into the story of the children’s lives are the politics of caste and social hierarchies and aspirations, parental ambitions, marital disappointments, teenage love and heartbreak, and the differences-those expressed politely by dignified and proud heads of families rather than those likely to set households ablaze-between Tamil and Sinhala people. The story begins in the childhood of the narrator’s parents-Nishan and Visaka. But what it does achieve, and quite remarkably so, is an idyllic, near-perfect picture of the island, beaded together from the childhood nostalgia of generations. What it fails to entirely achieve is historical perspective-not everyone is well acquainted with the origins and details of the Tamil-Sinhala conflict. Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel attempts to transcend a little more than 60 years of history-the violent and strife-torn decades of post-colonial Sri Lanka-through three generations of two families.

Island of a thousand mirrors by nayomi munaweera