If there is a paragraph in this excellent collection of short stories by Romesh Gunasekera that summarises the thoughts of the Sinhala van driver, Vasantha, it is to be found in the last page of the story, Janus: “When we first heard the war was over, we believed a line could be drawn between the mistakes of the past and the promise of the future. One was a place you had been, the other was the place you were going to. We believed there was no need for the two to be connected. But as a driver, I should have known better. To go from one to the other, you need a road. And a road is nothing if it doesn’t connect.”
There are two sections in Noon Tide Toll, and inevitably, both are connected with each other. The first, titled North, comprises stories about the heartache and guilt of Sinhala soldiers, and about the Tamil fighters who refuse to dwell on the horror of the civil war in times of peace. The second section, titled South, is somewhat less poignant in tone, and consists of stories of war and peace and natural disaster in the island-country of Sri Lanka.
What is significant about Gunasekera’s writing is the ambiguity he brings to most of his characters, including suspected war criminals and erstwhile terrorists. At the end of every war, the ‘victors’ tend to manufacture a dominant narrative that flattens out nuance and uncertainty. This dominant viewpoint is challenged in different ways in the stories that are narrated from Vasantha’s perspective. In Mess, Vasantha wonders, “Why is it … that some of us cannot shake our doubts whatever we do while others can be so dead sure of things?” Indeed in Mess, Vasantha is far more sympathetic to the army major than are his passengers, Father Perera and Mr Patrick, who believe that the major is a war criminal for having tortured and killed a Tamil woman. But for Vasantha, the courteous and hospitable major “did not seem to (be) a bad man. He acknowledged me in a way that many people in the civilian world don’t.”
In Folly, we have the Sinhala soldier’s grisly, albeit heartbreaking, account of waiting for the Tamil woman to pat the baby’s back and burp him, before getting a clean shot at her. In Ramparts, a Sinhala soldier kills the brother of the Tamil girl he is in love with. He discovers the photograph of brother and sister in the dead man’s pocket. “She was there in it with him soaked in blood.” Vasantha sees something redeemable even in the petulant young man, Mahen, in Deadhouse, who wants to live in his father’s ancestral house and make sense of the past.
Perhaps Gunasekera’s most colourful character is that of Miss Saraswati in Roadkill, who seemed to come “from somewhere dark and hungry and deep”. This is a woman who is assistant manager of a hotel on the Jaffna tourist trail, with a thick scar on the neck, a callused trigger finger and a remarkably accurate aim at throwing bottles at rats. When Miss Saraswati deflects any personal question by saying, “After a war, it is best not to ask about the past”, Vasantha is intrigued. If we do not know what really happened, he muses, will it not be repeated?
If there is a flaw to be found in this book, it is in the characterisation of Vasantha, the van driver. Vasantha is understandably full of folksy wisdom and humanity; but he is also a man who knows far too much. He knows that the German Chancellor is boss of Europe, that Pinewood Studios are in the UK, that Sarajevo and Croatia are trouble-spots in Eastern Europe, and that courts in The Hague try war criminals. He also knows about the Ruins of Pompeii, about Frankenstein’s monster, about Cassandra’s identity and about New Age anglers.
That said, Gunasekera is an extremely talented and empathetic writer and Noon Tide Toll is a moving account of individuals in a nation that continues to be ravaged by the aftermath of a long and terrible civil war.