Sri Lanka in the 1980s. Maali Almeida is a photographer, or in fact, was a photographer. He is dead and in a place between the real world and the afterlife. He can freely travel in this place for seven moons, during which he will try to remember why he is dead and guide his still living friends to find a box of compromising photos he has taken during these years of civil war. Not only that, but he also looks from above at his last love, DD, a “beautiful man who likes handsome boys” like him. This story is beautifully built. It gives an account of the terrible events that happened in Sri Lanka but then adds this magical and mystical tale of life after death with a somewhat ironic analysis of Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism. A pleasure to read.
“If the Mahavamsa is to be believed, the Sinhalese race was founded on kidnapping, rape, parricide and incest. This is not a fairy tale, but the story of our birth as given by the island’s oldest chronicle, a chronicle used to codify laws crafted to suppress all that is not Sinhalese and Buddhist and male and wealthy.
Once upon a time in north India, a princess meets a lion. Lion kidnaps and forces self on princess. Princess gives birth to girl and boy. Boy grows up, kills lion-father, becomes king, marries sister. She gives birth to boy, who becomes troublemaker, who is banished with seven hundred flunkies, who arrive in ships on the shores of Ceylon.
Prince Vijaya and his band of bald thugs kick-start our history by slaughtering the native Naga people and seducing their queen, though perhaps not in that order. If the origin story is true, the mess we are in should be no surprise. Betrayed and ruined by the callous prince, Queen Kuveni of the Naga tribe curses the land before she kills herself and abandons her children to the forest. The curse sticks for a few millennia and, in 1990, shows no signs of lifting.”
Listened to as an audiobook