Booker winner: ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ is an intense satire, a scathing critique

GJV Prasad

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SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA is the rock star of Sri Lankan writing in English. His first novel, ‘Chinaman’, won the Commonwealth Prize, the DSL, and the Gratiaen Prize. I have always been impressed by the works awarded the (Sri Lankan) Gratiaen Prize, a prize that should have more visibility and enable better circulation of the prize-winning books in our country.

This second novel (Booker Prize winner this year) is hugely comic, an intense satire, a scathing critique of the Sri Lanka of the 1980s and, since not much has changed anywhere, of contemporary times. This is the Sri Lanka of the civil wars (with the LTTE in the north and JVP in the south), of murder and mayhem, where the number of the dead rises exponentially, where the boundaries are so porous that you don’t know who is fighting or colluding with whom.

The protagonist of the novel is Maali Almeida, son of a Sinhalese father and a burgher mother. He is a war photographer, an inveterate gambler, and gay. The novel begins after his death! He wakes up (dead) in some office in the hereafter and thinks that he is hallucinating. He has no memory of how he died and has no urge to transit fully to the Light and/or other lifetimes. He has seven moons in which to decide on his future or he would be stuck forever in the In Between with other ghosts and demons of various kinds. Once he realises that he has been killed, he wants to know by whom and why. But most importantly, he wants to lead DD and Jaki, his flatmates and dear friends (the first being his gay partner who will not come out to his father or anyone), to a cache of photos that he took at various times during the violence that has overwhelmed the beautiful land. These are explosive photographs and he thinks that they would change the nation forever, bringing various people to book, making all see how there is nothing to choose between one corrupt leader and the other.

Thus, this is a whodunit as well as a political thriller. Will Maali be able to do what he sets out to do? Will he sell his soul to the chief demon to fulfil his mission? Will his friends suffer because of him and his photographs? Who are the people he has been associating with, fixing things for, taking photographs for? His cache is made of the four extra photos he takes with every roll (the four extra that his Nikon camera rolls have and those commissioning him — including the army — have no knowledge of).

Will Maali learn how to communicate with the living? Will he find allies among the throngs of victims of violent deaths (from those killed by mobs, by LTTE, by JVP, by the army, by the secret service)? Will he succeed in finding out how he died and who killed him? He keeps meeting people he has photographed when they were alive or sometimes after their violent deaths. There are helpers at the office at the entrance to the Light, which leads to questions for which no one has answers even after death. Is there a God, is it a benign God, or is God indifferent? Maali never knows but he knows that he tried his best to change the world, that his photos can bring down governments, ensure some kind of justice and peace. Otherwise, his life would’ve been meaningless.

Being dead gives him a sense of urgency, but he had planned for this since he didn’t know when his luck would run out or when he would end up dead or ‘disappeared’. His photos are in a shoebox under a bed in his family home. He has left clear instructions with some comrades. The photos are his legacy to the nation, to force the people to remember the barbarous times, to identify as many of the perpetrators as possible.

Everyone in the world, every nation in the world, from Israel to India to China, seems to have a finger in the pie that is Sri Lanka. Everyone contributes to the violence in various ways and everyone is there to ensure peace. The ghosts that result from the various initiatives make Colombo a very crowded place, the ghosts easily outnumbering the living by many times. The humour in the novel and the absurd are simply ways of confronting the terrifying reality.

This irreverent novel is actually the new avatar (for ignorant western readers) of a book published earlier — ‘Chats with the Dead’ (2020). Unfortunately, this reviewer is yet to read that version and so I cannot say how different this novel is from the previous version. All that I can say is that this version is a great read, a novel worth buying and keeping and re-reading.