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the author’s own experience growing up gay in Sri Lanka and eventually moving to Canada, thereby contributing much to its authenticity.
The story primarily revolves around Shivan Rassiah, the main character of the book and his materialistic grandmother, a control freak. Shivan is gay, born to a Sinhala mother and a Tamil father. After his father’s demise his family reluctantly seeks refuge with the grandmother. However, affected by the country’s political violence and unhappy with his grandmother’s dominance, Shivan migrates to Canada with his mother and sister. Canada provides safety, but leaves Shivan dissatisfied and marginalised. Then Shivan returns to Sri Lanka when he hears that his grandmother has suffered a stroke. The return also means assuming management responsibility of the family business and working with his grandmother’s thuggish enforcer Chandralal.
Shivan also reconnects with his old school buddy Mili in Sri Lanka and develops a fulfilling gay relationship with him; this induces him to prolong his stay in Sri Lanka. However, the prevailing political turbulence under a brutal JVP insurgency was not conducive to Mili’s security as a human rights activist. While planning to return to Canada with Mili, Shivan’s grandmother intervenes brutally to end Shivan’s affair with Mili, which then leads to Mili’s untimely death.
Shivan returns to Canada and starts a new life with a new partner Michael and lives happily until Shivan’s past relationship with Mili is revealed to Michael. This along with his mother preparing to bring his ailing grandmother to Toronto brings up a lot of issues for Shivan. Shivan is caught between his love for Michael and his obligation to reconnect with his grandmother. Until Shivan makes up with his grandmother and purges himself of all his past baggage relating to her, Michael prohibits Shivan from coming back to him. The story ends here. It is left to the reader’s imagination to figure out how the story would unfold when Shivan reconnects with his grandmother.
Karma and predestination
The Buddhist concept of karma and predestination constitute the principal undercurrent in Selvadurai’s novel. It is one’s bad karma (actions) that leads to the embodiment as a ghost in his/her next birth. The author undertakes a challenging task by trying to address several burgeoning contemporary topics within this karma-ghost model.
It is remarkable how the author explores his main characters and the inter-relationship within them and also each character’s relationship to the larger society through this model. He invokes Buddhist tales as the allegorical backbone of the text, to exemplify his approach. The novel illustrates how racial, political and sexual preferences affect the human life in a materialistic society until the ghosts are freed.
The concept of the “hungry ghost” or peréthaya is derived from Buddhism. In Buddhist mythology (Petavatthu) a person is reborn as a hungry ghost [peréthaya] by committing unwholesome deeds (karmas) due to excessive greed (thanha) for material possessions during his/her human life. Karma (or karume in colloquial Sinhala or karmam in Tamil) loosely means the sin one committed in a previous birth. In Buddhism, a human action becomes sinful only when it originates from deliberate intention (chethana).
The grandmother
Shivan’s grandmother is a hungry ghost (peréthi – female ghost) in the sense that she is unable to enjoy the good life surrounding her; everything she touches and loves disintegrates in her hands. A hungry ghost is a creature desperately hungry but unable to fill his/her large belly through its tiny mouth and the food turns into blazing coals, blood or secretions before he/she can consume it. Peréthayas can only be rescued from their misery by their relatives or loved ones transferring merits that are gained only by offerings made to Buddhist monks, on their behalf.
Pathetic, alienated and rejected by her relatives and denied affection from her only daughter, Shivan’s grandmother tries very hard to get close to her grandson. She cares for her grandson’s welfare; showers him with toys in his child hood, buys him a house in Canada when he immigrates, offers to pay off his student loan and makes him the heir to her wealth. Shivan is the “rain soaking a parched land” to her.
She even relates the story of King Nandaka implying how his grandson could rescue her from her misery. The peréthaya in that story, a miser in his past life was rescued by his daughter’s good deeds and offerings made to a monk, with the merits then transferred to her ghostly father. Despite all her efforts, Shivan despises her affection. For Shivan his grandmother’s love always came “with its dark twin-spectre of loss which drove him to do such terrible things.” The dynamics of this relationship between the pair runs through the story from beginning to the end as a constantly oozing wound unable to heal.
The grandmother’s link to the outer world is limited to her business deals with her faithful thug and her association with the Buddhist temple. Chandralal is only a loyal servant and the one who provides protection to her and nothing more. To escape from her misery, she makes generous offerings to the temple and builds an elaborate bana maduwa (sermon hall) for the temple. Shivan angered by her efforts to control him, condemns her pious acts and curses her, saying that she would be reborn a cat or dog or even more likely worms or insects for eternity. Failing in her efforts to mould Shivan into a shrewd and ruthless exploiter, the grandmother then takes a harsher path to intimidate and separate Shivan from his lover Mili and in the event the lover get killed. This completely backfires on her and she loses complete control over him; Shivan returns to Canada. However, that does not end the relationship between the two.
The grandmother’s aversion to homosexuality is not unexpected. Although widely prevalent homosexuality, it is against the law in Sri Lanka and not socially accepted. In Buddhist scripture on monastic discipline (Vinaya Pitaka) homosexuality is explicitly mentioned and prohibited. In one incident in which Shivan goes to collect rent from one of his grandmother’s properties, the tenant ridicules Shivan as a beautiful, girlish lad from high society and cruelly suggests having sex with him in exchange of rent. As portrayed in The Hungry Ghosts, homosexuality is a matter of embarrassment in Sri Lanka, so much so that even Mili’s boss Sriyani, the head of an human rights organisation, Kantha, had to cover up his homosexual relationship with Shivan by declaring that Mili died from drowning. Thus a murder was suppressed in order to escape the humiliation of homosexuality. Shivan fails to recognise this reality as well as the generational gap and misjudges Sri Lanka because he is now foreign to it.
The hired thug
Chandralal plays a good supporting role to the grandmother in the drama of The Hungry Ghosts. As her hired thug, he serves her well and becomes a rich property developer in his own right, and later a government minister. Compared to Shivan’s grandmother, Chandralal is a happy and a wise ghost. His greed for wealth and power also has no bounds but he is not miserable and isolated as the grandmother. Chandralal knows how to exploit the prevailing political conditions successfully. During the 1983 pogrom, he provides protection from the marauding mob to a Tamil family with two young girls, while the grandmother exploits the situation to purchase their property at well below the market price.
Chandralal does not mull on the effects of karma; people who are soft and compassionate are weak, ignorant and deserve to be made use of. After Mili was killed, Shivan tells Chandralal that he must pay for what he did since it is the law of karma. But Chandralal relates the story of king Sirisangabo to justify his action. It is the story in which the King refuses to sentence his criminals to death because of the fear of committing bad karma. His kingdom was plagued by crime and he had to abandon the throne. Chandralal says he was an ignorant and vacillating king who earned nothing but demerits for his future life, whereas a wise king would have gained merit. Chandralal implies that he is the wise and the composed king who can save the kingdom. There is more than an element of bitter truth here in the context of current politics in Sri Lanka: one has to be corrupt and ruthless and not righteous and compassionate to get ahead.
The consequences
The grave consequences of his gay relationship with Mili only sink into Shivan’s consciousness when he was preparing to leave Michael in order to reconnect with his grandmother. Shivan is filled with repulsion at himself for the relentless way he pursued Mili. The blame rests squarely on Shivan for pushing too hard and too fast for what he most wanted, ignorant of the surrounding danger. Shivan sees himself as a hungry ghost craving for excessive love and in turn destroying the one he loves the most.
Shivan finds himself open to corruption while running his grandmother’s affairs but his profound love for a morally pure man is simply not acceptable to his grandmother. The way in which this situation unravels constitutes the core of the novel, but the whole story is more complex. Selvadurai portrays Shivan at times as brave and at other times as reckless. The high point of the story is when Shivan faces the choice of selecting between his grandmother and his lover Michael. Shivan’s attachment to his grandmother is bitter-sweet and finds it difficult to escape from it. Is it because his karma from his previous birth is following him?
The karmic effects
The author brilliantly brings in the story of demoness Kali to illustrate how karmic effects can take a long time to work off. Kali’s fervent wish to be reborn and devour the children of the barren senior wife of the rich merchant follows the two women through many lives. Kali, the demoness does not stop sinning until she surrenders to the Thathagatha, the Buddha. Thathagatha preaches to Kali that she cannot use vengeance to clean her past wrong and only the waters of compassion that can cleanse her past enmities. Shivan comes to a realisation that the conflict between him and his grandmother will continue through many births unless he puts an end to it in this birth, right now. He is prepared to give up his love for Michael in order to fulfil this endeavour. Shivan comprehends the ultimate truth; in the law of karma, there is no escape from evil deeds; one has to pay in this life or the next one. The ultimate message to the reader is that one should follow Buddha’s guidance of compassion to cleanse one’s past enmities and not seek vengeance.
This glorification of the philosophy of “ahimsa (non-violence)” may generate frustration in the minds of who cry for social justice. Despite the various injustices in his life Shivan chooses the path of least resistance, not to fight back. Shivan’s suffering is reasoned as the karmic effects of his own wrongdoing. This passive approach to life can discourage some readers. Shivan’s story for some may not be inspirational or uplifting. In today’s context of ethnic cleansing, human rights violations and bloodshed, is the author able to win over the reader to his path of compassion and reconciliation? On the other hand, for the search for social justice may be more appealing to sociologists, anthropologists and journalists. But, of course, the novelist must be free to tell his/her own story.
A thread of sadness runs through the whole story from the beginning to end; this appears to be a deliberate choice. The author had the option to bring about reconciliation between grandmother and Shivan and turn the Hungry Ghost into a Happy Ghost. It seems the author did not want such an uncomplicated, happy ending. That would not balance with the main theme; the relentless logic of karmic currents and suffering in human life.
The characterisation
Characterisation is a strong element in this novel. All characters are somewhat flawed and therefore realistic. All of Selvadurai’s characters are nuanced with motivations stemming from their natural human yearnings. Shivan’s grandmother is certainly a complex and credible Asian female character. Most of the characters in the book are portrayed well. The plot that weaves through the lives of all of the characters is quite interesting on its own. Yet the essence of the story really lies with the relationships between the characters, and the effects of major issues presented throughout the book on their lives. After all, the novel’s expansiveness, the ability to deal with multiple characters and span eras and nations, is aimed exactly for such narrative attainment.
I believe Selvadurai’s ‘The Hungry Ghosts’ is all in all a satisfying novel. It is also beautifully written, full of substance and dichotomy. The plot is rich as it is turbulent and engaging, filled with the torment of conflict and anguish, creating an emotionally charged and gripping tale. He has contributed a valuable piece to mainstream gay literature as well. I would strongly urge anyone to read it. Selvadurai is a very promising writer and I look forward to his next novel.
