If The Hungry Ghosts was set in contemporary times, instead of an unspecified period stretching back from the early 1990s, protagonist Shivan Rassiah’s relationship status on Facebook would have undoubtedly read “It’s complicated”. Just how complicated? Consider this: The significant other in his life is not a girlfriend or boyfriend but his grandmother-from-hell. The baggage is only a couple of generations old but the resonances go back centuries, to the foundations of Buddhism and its belief in peréthayas (the origin being the Sanskrit preta), the hungry ghosts of the title, who desired too much in life and are dissatisfied in death.
In a way, the invocation is ironical because Toronto-based, Sri Lanka-born author Shyam Selvadurai is nothing if not ambitious in this, his third novel for adults. The epic tale is spun out with a sense of languor, spanning countries and cultures, ethnic conflict and emigrant angst, sexual orientation issues and activist propaganda. And through it all, malevolent and manipulative (and yes, inevitably, misunderstood) looms the shadow cast by Daya Ariyasinghe, dowager of Colombo, owner of vast acres of residential property and Shivan’s grandmother.
The characterisation of Daya is more crucial than that of the narrator, Shivan, and it is a task Selvadurai accomplishes with finesse. In keeping with his show-not-tell style of narration, he uses the barest of physical descriptions — we learn from throwaway details that she is thin, bony and likes wearing starched saris — to create a monster of a woman, twisted and warped by time and circumstance, capable of intense love yet condemned to a distorted expression of it. Daya is deeply damaged by the time we encounter her through her grandson but, long before he puts together her backstory, we begin to appreciate — and abhor — her financial cunning and emotional coldness.
On the other side of this troubled equation is Shivan. Returning to his grandmother’s household after his rebel mother is widowed at 29, the boy recognises early, if subconsciously, that this relationship will be forged based on her wealth and his beauty. In the unarticulated manner of the very young who are anxious to protect their nearest, he offers himself up to Daya so that his mother and sister aren’t turned out into the streets to become “beggars”. After a particularly traumatic episode involving nail-studded footwear that ends with Shivan apologising to his Aachi, he understands “that my mother would not defend me anymore. She was no longer in control of our destiny. I was.” Shivan is six.
Years later, when escalating Tamil-Sinhala violence offers the Rassiahs a chance to escape to Canada, Shivan masterminds the rupture with his shattered grandma. The Colombo mansion is replaced by a mean row house in Toronto, the school with university even as Shivan struggles to establish his gay identity. Ostensibly, they all move on with their lives but the tribulations endemic to immigrant life seem to be overshadowed by the oppressive personality of she who won’t be left behind, even when distanced by 8,000 miles. A single attempt at reconciliation goes terribly wrong, fracturing Shivan further and alienating him in both the worlds he knows best.
Selvadurai positions his book at the cusp of a more hopeful, healing future for the Rassiahs but The Hungry Ghosts is curiously weighed down by the bleakness of its subject matter. Except for the somewhat self-conscious and disruptive moralisation of the peréthaya tales, Selvadurai’s prose is fluid, but the protagonist’s inner passivity and the lack of any real exploration of Daya’s own agony prevent the novel from soaring into brilliance. For all its girth, The Hungry Ghosts’ triumph lies in its respect of the silences and boundaries that govern relationships in this part of the world; it is in what is not said that the author’s talent is most evident.