Shehan Karunatilaka, Booker winner: ‘Should we dig up our past or bury it?’

Booker winner for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka speaks to HT about the work, his journey, his style, and his influences

Booker winner for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka speaks to HT about the work, his journey, his style, and his influences. Edited excerpts:

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Your Booker Prize-winning second novel was published in the subcontinent as Chats with the Dead. Your note in The Seven Moons… says the 2020 novel has been revised for the global audience. Have there been major changes to the storyline?

When Chats with the Dead was published, India was quite enthusiastic about it. There were a number of offers and most publishers were keen to publish it, without the need for big editorial intervention. But, sadly, the novel struggled everywhere else. It was quite puzzling to me. It can be quite demoralising to see such a reaction after you spend so long (nearly 10 years) on a book. Even people who liked my first novel, Chinaman, were quite puzzled by this book; they said they found it very confusing, and impenetrable. But, finally, I ended up with Sort of Books, UK’s independent publishing house.

During the pandemic, the publication date kept getting pushed. Initially, I had six months to work on it for the new set of readers so I ventured to fix some characters and subplots. Though it’s the same story, The Seven Moons… is much more accessible. If you know nothing about Sri Lanka, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) or the Eastern philosophy of the Bardo, you can still find it easy to read. In Chats with the Dead, I assumed too much knowledge on the part of my audience. So, while it’s the same book, the new one is the improved international version. The Seven Moons… is going to become the definitive text, with a paperback out in India.

While making these tweaks, did you have the Western reader on mind?

Very much so. In fact, that was the brief. In Chinaman, the publisher told me to write it in a way that even those who knew nothing about the cricket were able to follow the story. That was quite challenging. And that’s why there are short chapters that explain the basics of cricket. Similarly, for The Seven Moons…, the brief was to make it interesting for even those who knew nothing about the LTTE, the civil war, or the Bardo. There were some minor stylistic changes, too. It is a novel which has so many layers: it’s a murder mystery,a character study, and a political satire. Then, there are the ghosts spread across its pages. I had many months to do these tinkerings: it was like having a film that you shot and you were in the editing room with it for two years, with all the special effects; so you played with it.

The protagonist of the novel, Maali Almeida, has seven nights to solve the mystery of his own death. How did you arrive at the story?

There are a lot of moving parts in the novel, but the premise of it was: what if Sri Lanka’s dead could speak? What kind of story would they tell? And they have been dead from tsunami and Easter attacks during the last phase of the war. I had my choice of the period, but I went to 1989 because I remember living through it as a teenager. We have had quite a few massacres in Sri Lanka, including the ones in 1971 and 1983. In South Asia, we all have that past. I was fascinated by the different factions there; if a body turned up, you had no clue about the possible killer: Did the government do it or the militants?

I wanted to explore what these characters were in their afterlife. Every ghost is based on some real character. When I was reading through the records, I came across many murders; I resurrected some of these assassinations. And that is how I came to the story; I just assembled the cast of ghosts. And, of course, the journey of Maali, a closet homosexual, trying to solve the mystery of his death, was the central idea.

The ghosts in the novel come from all our conflicts which have been put to rest: the idea of ghosts as a cast of characters was an obvious metaphor for the fact of not dealing with our past. I thought I should dig up to unravel the country’s dark chapters. The central question Sri Lankan writers have to ask themselves in: should we dig up our past or bury it? The rich vein of research and study left me with a lot of fictional possibilities in the novel.

And you leaven the grim story with your characteristic mordant humour…

One thing that Sri Lanka has in its national character is the ability to laugh at ourselves even during dark times. Even during the presidential crisis recently, there were memes and jokes doing the rounds: people played cards, making fun of the government, even as tension rose. Though we have a lot to be upset about, there is a tendency among Sri Lankans to make a joke about it. I don’t know if it’s a good thing, but it just seems to be what is our national character. Even when Sri Lanka loses in a cricket match, the band keeps playing, and everyone keeps partying.

May be that’s the way I naturally write as well. Otherwise, if you write about all the grim stuff, it becomes quite a depressing commentary. So, you temper it with a bit of glib humour. I feel that may be that’s the style that I have developed, like Kurt Vonnegut. He is a big hero of mine and continues to be so. I was always struck by how he can talk about pretty grim subjects, like the destruction of Dresden or humanity which is doomed or humans that are cruel, with his kind of wit, anecdote and absurdity. I have always been in awe of how he does it; I clearly wear that influence on my sleeve when I write about depressing subjects without making the writing depressing.