Responding to media’s obsession with war, crisis and disaster, Arundhati Roy, in an article ‘Peace is War: Collateral Damage of Breaking News’, writes: “Crisis reportage in the 21st century has evolved into an independent discipline—almost a science. The money, the technology, and the orchestrated mass hysteria that goes into crisis reporting have a curious effect. Crisis reporting isolates the crisis, unmoors it from the particularities of history, the geography and the culture that produced it… Wars are often the result of flawed peace, a putative peace. And it is the flaws, the systemic flaws in what is normally considered to be ‘peace’, which we ought to be writing about. We have to, at least some of us have to, become peace correspondents instead of war correspondents. ”
Set in Sri Lanka when war raged between the LTTE and Lankan forces, admittedly one of the most violent events in contemporary history, Chhimi Tenduf-La’s latest novel Panther tells a human story—of lives lived under the shadow of conflict. Fictional and non-fictional representation of political crisis and mass genocides are often rendered in the language of ‘terror porn’ that is meant to shock and stun the reader.
Tenduf-La’s novel resists this lure and instead uses humour, faith, and friendship to tell the tale of human resilience in the face of dehumanising conflict. Prabhu, the young Tamil protagonist of Panther is trained to be a child-combatant in the training camps that are set up to fight the Lankans.
Panther is a fictional construction by the author though its similarities with the LTTE camps are unmistakable.
But if the reader expects an angst-ridden, damaged, reticent, tortured protagonist because life has meted the harshest of blows on him as a child, abandoned by his mother and sister, dragged into the illusory safety of a military camp where death walks in shadows, then Tenduf delightfully surprises us.
Prabhu, the young adolescent hero of the novel, is funny,optimistic and disarmingly innocent.
He has a gift as a cricketer and it is this talent that becomes his ticket to escape Panther and its obligations, and integrate into ‘mainstream’ society.
He is selected to study in one of the most prestigious schools in Colombo, where he meets his soul mate and teammate Indika, a Lankan, another very promising young cricketer.
The novel is primarily about the growing friendship between these two boys who are from very diverse backgrounds, class and contexts.
Prabhu gradually adjusts to his new life with the help of Jayanettis-Indika’s family. While his new life unfolds before him—cricket, clubs, music, girls—his mind keeps going back to the horrors of the Panther camp that was built on the edifice of hatred and revenge.
The novel moves back and forth between the comedy of Prabhu’s adventures and misadventures in the present and the traumatic memories of his time in the training camp. The novel ends with the culmination of Prabhu’s life-long friendship with Indika into an enterprise they initiate called Sri Lanka Together.
This somewhat idealistic conclusion which alludes to the possibility of healing an irreconcilable conflict between communities and peoples could ring unconvincing. It is perhaps a fictional end but an end that we could all aspire to and hope for. The author himself works in a school founded by his mother. This schools works with an organisation called Sri Lanka Unites that was set up to foster and encourage cross-cultural conversations and understanding. Tenduf-La believes that in the present times there is greater willingness among young people to bridge divides and talk.
And it is this belief that inspired him to write Panther.
“I set out to write a coming-of-age, fish-out-of-water high school story, but the book also explores the trauma of being a child soldier, and although it will look like I am writing about the war here, I am not. I have made up a terrorist group, the Panthers, because I think it would be arrogant of me to pretend to know the ins and outs of the real war here,” the author admits.