A tale of terror, death, and duty

FICTION: Arthur de Zoysa's novel No Longer My Child (Vijitha Yapa 2005) covers the socio-political history of Sri Lanka from 1983 to 1994, where the central narrative rests initially on four Tamil family members: Tambiah and Rajeswari, and their two sons Harendran and Shamendran.

The two sons diametrically select two different directions, as their pathways in their respective professions; one being an army officer committed to his cause, other a militant driven to disaster.

This situation is closely followed by, and interconnected with the miserable life of a Sinhala girl Veena, driven to lead an isolated life deprived of parental heritage. The girl is brought up yielding better results in a convent, which in turn becomes a pivotal centre of activities later in the narrative, due to various factors of both destiny and luck.

Zoysa has collected, in the guise of an investigative reporter cum researcher, a number of human-interest stories. Quite a lot of information relating to the atrocities of the terrorist devastations that bring disharmony to the life of the civilians in the vain hope of a separate state.

He characterises the encounters of both Tamil and Sinhala innocent families, as a gigantic prey for the monstrous actions of the terrorists, with several layers of meaningful insights embracing religious, ethnic, cultural, and historical significance.

The writer states he was an eyewitness to many an incident on that fateful day in July 1983. He has seen massacres and dehumanisation in unprotected settlements, shrines, and public places, where most of the innocent children and women became victims of unforeseen tragedies.

This narrative, as pages move quickly, brings into light the various historical incidents to the fore-front making a fictitious story look a real life narrative transcending the mere historical barriers in a chronicle, with a simple plotline, which though is sensitive and moving where, episodes of love, morality, and religious susceptibilities, as against the blind violence and terror are recreated as unexpected blows to the common harmony of human existence.

Episodes

One of the most significant episodes is the author's way of creating Harendran's character, who succumbs to a group of terrorists, as a leader though shown as a gifted scientist, is nevertheless a person of human degradation utilising his gifted abilities for a disaster attempting to bring harm and ill-will to the entire mankind starting from his own social background through the blind forces that manipulate him in the name of violence.

He is shown as a man behind a master plan of making bombs for human disaster to win a dream-state, which they deem as a haven for their better existence at the expense of other innocent humans.

The novel also rests on such areas as the dignity of family morals, as sensitively created in the characters of the parents Tambiah and Rajerswari, so struggling to exist in the middle of calamities for which they have no remedy around.

Then there is also the element of insight, which compels a person to take up an optimistic standpoint against the terrorist actions depicting them as cowardly acts brought about by a minority to mar the peaceful existence of the majority of innocent people, totally ignorant of terrorism.

Most of the disasters, as recorded in the novel, are symbolic representations of this view, where one example is the life in the convent with three female characters: the mother superior, Veena and Ross, disturbed from time to time, depending on the behaviours of the outer world full of disturbances sensitively seeping into the structure of the spiritual surrounding. With terrorism, it is hinted that even the structure of spiritual upheaval too is to be shattered.

Re-discovery

In the end however, nothing is achieved, but the steady-mindedness. Author Zoysa is sensitive to the events in life, and penetrative to the point, where he rediscovers in minute detail what is latent as psychological factors and physical factors, and interlinks them neatly, and makes observable mostly via the dialogues that ensue between the characters.

The narrative shifts from one point to another, making the reader feel that the attention should be drawn from several points of view, rather than from one central viewpoint, as in the conventional structure of the mere story-telling.

As such, the structure of this work is multi-dimensional, and more modernist in outlook enabling the reader to perceive many standpoints of his own, instead of depending on the mere authorial comments and views. Some salient cultural elements in the life-styles of Tamil and Sinhala speaking people are fused into the narrative, as factors that make the reading of the work a more resourceful exercise.

While Zoysa is a creator of human situations selective of his own manner, he represents a positive aspect of a philosophy, regarding the humanism from the standpoint of an existentialist imagination, where man has to face disasters, and be reborn out of it for a better existence.

As I finished reading this novel, I could go back to James Joyce's A Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man. The quotation is so interesting: "Welcome, O! Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience, and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

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