Island of a Thousand Mirrors

In Hikkaduwa village Beatrice Muriel celebrates Nishan’s entry to university as an engineering student. Mala also passes her university entrance examinations, although her success is noted only after “the jubilation has subsided” (48). At university, Nishan exhausts himself with his studies, while Mala attracts the attention of male classmates with her developing curvy figure and “the curling vines that flee from her bun to linger about her throat” (49). She falls in love with Anuradha, an engineering friend of Nishan’s who looks at Mala “not appraisingly like some of the others, but as if he actually desired her opinion” (49). Beatrice Muriel is at first offended that Anuradha would dare ask for Mala’s hand in marriage with only a friend to support his request, but her tone changes to one of praise when she considers what she thinks to be the only alternative: Mala as a spinster.

Mala’s engagement is solidified, and the narrative turns to Nishan’s budding romance with the recently rejected Visaka. The two meet at a birthday party, where Nishan is taken by Visaka’s “big eyes, sharp chin, fragile collarbones” (53). Visaka, however, is still preoccupied by her longing for Ravan. Against Beatrice Muriel’s wishes, Nishan and Visaka are engaged. It is a good match for Sylvia Sunethra’s daughter, who Beatrice Muriel looks upon as “some Colombo girl of reduced circumstances” (53).

Courtesy compels Sylvia Sunethra to invite her upstairs neighbors to her daughter’s wedding, so Ravan and his bride attend Visaka and Nishan’s marriage ceremony. Visaka remains distracted throughout her wedding, “barely aware of the young man beside her” (55). Her trance is broken when Ravan again treats her with cold civility in the reception line. Ravan is “confident, self-contained,” with eyes that “are vacant except for a sort of seething hatred” (56). Ravan’s vacant yet hateful look removes any uncertainty regarding his feelings toward Visaka.

Visaka warms to Nishan somewhat during their honeymoon and is pregnant after their first year of marriage. Ravan’s wife upstairs is also pregnant, and the two women support one another through childbirth and new motherhood, temporarily easing the tension between them as former rivals for Ravan’s affections. Ravan’s son Shiva and the novel’s narrator Yasodhara are born side by side.

Yasodhara and Shiva grow up together, their mothers no longer rivals. Visaka gives birth three years later to Lanka, and the three children—Yasodhara, Shiva, and Lanka—become “a threesome from then on. Joined at the hip. A pyramid. A triangle” (62). Their youthfully blissful naivete over their conflicting ethnic backgrounds is shattered when Sylvia Sunethra slaps Shiva for speaking to her granddaughters in Tamil. As an adult, Yasodhara shudders at this memory and warns readers that what’s to come between them later will be “so much more painful” (63). In the meantime, though, the narrative follows Yasodhara and Lanka, who goes by La for short, as they grow up amid events leading to the civil war. Alice’s son Dilshan enlists in the Sinhala army as rumors of violent unrest spread and tensions grow between Tamil and Sinhala populations across the island.

Velupillai Prabhakaran, described as a “seventeen-year-old revolutionary secessionist,” assassinates a Tamil mayor for being “a lackey to Sinhalese oppressors” (71). Alice remains the only family member directly impacted by the increasing violence when her son leaves home to train in the army; Yasodhara and her sister continue to enjoy a relatively naive coming of age. Yasodhara and Shiva continue their friendship, discovering and occupying Visaka and Ravan’s former secret hideout below the apartments. When the Sinhalese burn a Tamil library in Jaffna, Shiva’s usually high spirits are deflated. Tension grows between Shiva and Yasodhara.