The story is told by Yalini, a young woman born in the U.S. to Tamil parents from Sri Lanka. It is August 2005. Kumaran, Yalini's uncle, has come to Canada to die. A stream of Tamils come to pay their respects to this veteran "Tamil Tiger."
Is Kumaran a terrorist or is he a freedom fighter? The answer is not simple, because the truth is not simple. "Kumaran began as someone who planned to put places together, and he became someone who planned to blow places apart." The book makes us ask ourselves just what is truth, as when Yalini comments: "My father, as always, told me the truth; exactly what he thought was true, no more and no less."
The book refers repeatedly to the massacre of Tamils in July 1983, but each time the story is told a little differently, with a different individual's perspective. We learn of the massacres, and also of the insanity of the Tamil reaction to the horrors. The lesson brought home is that war itself is an insanity.
Sprinkled throughout the book are scenes of terror and horror for the Tamils, which serve to make Kumaran more understandable. There is one incident when Kumaran, then a young man, was riding on a bus which was pulled over "... by some members of the army. ... the soldiers boarded the bus. ... Kumaran guessed that he was one of the only Tamil men on the bus, and he knew that they had not boarded the bus to search for a Sinhalese man. ..." The soldiers shoot the man sitting next to Kumaran and drag his body off the bus. Kumaran realized "that if they had been aiming at him, no one would have done anything," and he recalls "the words that had been on his tongue at the moment that misdirected bullet was fired: O God, it's not me, I'm not even Tamil. He was horrified at what he had almost said. I have always thought that this for him was the second that everything came into focus."
There are other scenes, of the government massacre of Tamil men at a conference in Jaffna; of riots in July 1983. But I was struck with how little we know about the conflict:
There was a war, and it killed over sixty thousand people, and no one stopped to notice. No one even knows if that number is right. And now no one stops to ask why. A country with no oil. A country full of people who were Of Color.This could have been a depressing book, but the lyricism makes it a beautiful tragedy. This was a well-told story and an education in a tragedy of war.