“A troublesome sister” between four brothers, Sashi is poised, determined, on her way to becoming a doctor. Then she meets K, a charismatic and academically gifted boy who lives down the street. The relationship between the two, which begins with a searingly memorable encounter and develops into something neither completely platonic nor romantic, anchors many of the ugliest years of Sashi’s life, as war breaks out in her hometown. In response to the bloody repression by the Sri Lankan government, a number of militant Tamil groups are beginning to take shape, most notably the Tamil Tigers. Disillusioned and angry, K joins them.
In the ensuing years, even as nearly everything and everyone she knows is taken from her or made unrecognizable, Sashi refuses to let her own life fall apart. Subject to the willful brutality of both the government and the various militant groups, she is forced to navigate her way through a daily series of obligations and constraints, both moral and social. When requests come from the militants – to pay them taxes, to move – it would be essentially suicide to refuse. The young Tamil men who routinely torture and kill in the name of her people are not strangers, nor have Sri Lankan government officials committed the atrocities fueling the destruction of these militants. Perhaps Ganeshananthan’s finest achievement in ‘Brotherless Night’ is to show with painstaking accuracy what it feels like to live in an everyday life where someone else can, from the privilege of a great distance, throw a word like ‘terrorism’. and be ready.
The novel opens with its grim prologue and uses the same sort of fallacious guess as Johannes Anyuru’s “They shall drown in their mother’s tears”, which opens with a scene of Muslim terrorists storming an event in a Swedish bookstore for the author of a collection of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, before pulling the rug from under the reader’s feet with alternating timelines and unexpected twists. “Brotherless Night” does something almost as dangerous, but much more grounded: It takes the supposed terrorists from that opening page and shadows them, showing them for all their conflicting impulses. The narrator of this story is not neutral – she judges, accuses, but bases herself on the whole character of a person. She has no choice: these are her people, too close to be flattened into moral neatness.
One of the best scenes in “Brotherless Night” involves a meeting of Sashi’s book club – the members gather to discuss a particularly subversive text, only to discover that the girlfriend of a member of the Tamil Tigers has decided to join them. Close. What follows is a tense, charged conversation between people who know how quickly one wrong word can turn their lives upside down.
Ganeshananthan is a writer of remarkable restraint. Occasionally a precious exclamation point finds its way into a particularly disastrous scene, or the narrator feels the air rush from her lungs or her hand involuntarily cover her mouth at the news of the death of a loved one; but otherwise the prose is almost unsatisfactorily steady. And yet, in tone and emotional register, Sashi’s storytelling fits perfectly with the delicate balance she must maintain living in a society where she clashes with the dominant forces, says the wrong thing, gives too impassioned rebuke, can be a capital crime prove.