65 pages • 2 hours read
Shehan KarunatilakaA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The year is 1990, and Maali Almeida is dead. Maali thinks about all the things he’s quit in his life and what his gravestone will read. He knows what life after death looks like.
Maali believes he is in a dream. He finds himself in a line in a lobby, and he’s yelling at a woman. He notes that many other people in the room are wearing hospital gowns or have missing limbs, and the room looks foggy. Maali registers with a woman in the lobby, who asks him about his religion and cause of death. The scene is chaotic, with other dead people asking questions and trying to register. Maali takes pictures with his Nikon camera.
A familiar-looking woman tells him everyone has seven moons, which marks a week. He doesn’t understand what she’s trying to say. He figures that many of the other dead people in the lobby are victims of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Maali is a photojournalist and explains that he is needed by society. He realizes that the woman is a university professor named Ranee Sridharan, who was murdered by Tamil extremists in 1989.
Maali figures that “The odds of the soul surviving the body’s death are one in nothing, one in nada, one in zilch” (10), so he must be dreaming. He is informed by Dr. Ranee Sridharan that he must find the Light before his seven moons are up. A mysterious boy dressed in a hooded garbage bag encourages Maali to avoid the Light. Dr. Ranee shouts out at Maali as he follows the boy down the elevator. Maali follows him outside to the streets of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The boy has Maali’s sandal, which he found where Maali died.
Maali has a box of photographs that bear witness to the atrocities that have been going on in Sri Lanka. The photographs are under a bed at his Amma’s (mother’s) house, belonging to Amma’s cook and Dada’s driver. He wants to post the photographs all over Colombo and reveal the atrocities.
Maali floats around the city, which is crowded with live people and ghosts. One older, headless ghost warns him about the In Between, which he’s been in for a thousand moons. He warns him against following the hooded boy, who doesn’t keep his promises. Maali recognizes the old man as a schoolteacher who had run for provincial council and was murdered by his own brother for the position. Maali had taken a photograph of the man’s dead body. The man mocks the typical beliefs about the afterlife, which he never believed in because he’s an atheist. He tells Maali that the hooded boy is a JVP communist, a killer who is now dead. He encourages Maali to find his Light. Maali takes a photograph of the headless ghost and sees three dead bodies on Beira Lake.
In December of 1989, four bodies are dumped in the lake by two men who have done this before. The 1987 peace accord between Sri Lanka and India created a need for these so-called garbage men, who get rid of bodies that can’t get a death certificate and proper burial. Maali recognizes one of the bodies in the lake as his own.
In 1988, JVP Marxists controlled the country, but in 1989, the military took over. Maali figures that the men trying to hide his body in the lake are goons for ex-military factions. The hooded boy encourages Maali to meditate over his body. He reveals that his body was also flung into Beira Lake. He introduces himself as Sena and reveals that he met Maali once before, in life, when Maali tried to kiss him.
Maali recalls the cheat sheet he made for foreign journalists with abbreviations that would help them make sense of the situation in Sri Lanka. LTTE refers to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who want a Tamil state separate from Sri Lanka. JVP refers to the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, who want to overthrow the capitalist state. UNP refers to the United National Party, who are involved in wars with the LTTE and the JVP. STF refers to the Special Task Force, an organization that works for the government and tortures those who support the LTTE or the JVP. One of the conflicts is between the country’s different cultures, which are divided into races and then into warring factions. Power is wielded by those who want Sinhala Buddhist domination.
Maali acknowledges that the Civil War is confusing to both outsiders and insiders. The Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) is meant to be supporting a mission for peace but often massacres villages. The United Nations (UN) is difficult to work with. The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) is an Indian secret service that navigates dodgy deals. The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) watches from afar. Maali encourages foreign journalists not to assume anyone is the good guy in this conflict.
Maali realized he was gay when he was a child. His father told him that “poofs” should be raped with knives, terrifying him. The options for Maali’s life as a gay man in Sri Lanka are to have hidden flings in alleyways or marry a woman to avoid suspicion.
Sena wants to follow the garbage men, who have just entered a van. Maali and Sena debate the body count of the JVP; Maali insists that they had only killed a few hundred people but had been massacred in the tens of thousands. Sena teaches Maali how to jump on vans for transportation, explaining to him that he can travel anywhere he has been in his lifetime. He shows Maali how to mess with the living and bumps the heads of the garbage men in the van. Sena can teach Maali how to use his new ghostly body if Maali chooses to join him and the others who have dedicated their ghostly lives to avenging their deaths.
Maali’s sexuality is seen as an “ugly” thing, but Maali knows what real ugliness is because he has taken photographs of war atrocities. Dilan Dharmendran (DD), Maali’s boyfriend, has only been with Maali, but he suspects that Maali has been with many other men. Maali stopped counting after passing three figures.
The garbage men in the van, Kottu and Balal, wish they had different jobs. They joke about chopping up bodies. The driver wants to go home.
As Maali tries to get more accustomed to his ghostly body, he revisits his memories. He recalls people he knew and scenes he photographed, such as the Sooriyakanda mass grave and a suicide bomber. He recalls cheating on DD and telling his father something that broke him. He does not remember meeting Sena while they were alive. The last thing he remembers before the lobby is betting in a casino.
Sena jumps from the van, and two ghosts from the dismembered bodies in the trunk wake up. Maali and the two new ghosts follow Sena. They are frightened by a terrifying being with the body of a bear and the head of a bull. Sena calls this a naraka, a hell-being. Maali can hear the dead souls in the naraka’s body screaming. Maali follows Sena in a rapid escape. They rush through the Borella Kanatte cemetery, where Maali sees ghosts and horned figures. Sena calls the naraka the Mahakali, a swallower of souls more powerful even than demons.
Sena uses charcoal to write the names of the squad that killed him, and, he claims, the two new ghosts (engineering students) and Maali. The names are Drivermalli (the driver of the van), Balal, Kottu, the Mask, Major Raja, and Minister Cyril. Sena proposes that the ghosts work together to avenge their deaths, but Maali wants to go visit his family and friends instead. He feels he has a lot of explaining to do. Sena implies that Maali died by being pushed off the roof of a building. Maali reluctantly agrees to help him with his revenge plan.
They travel on the wind to reach a mara tree. Other spirits are already meditating in the branches. Sena instructs Maali to listen carefully for his name in the wind. Maali tries to meditate and sees four faces that turn into images from playing cards. He hears his name: Malinda Almeida. Someone is looking for him.
DD is at a police station, handing over Maali’s ID and attempting to find him. Maali’s mother and a girl named Jaki, whom DD introduces as Maali’s girlfriend, are with him. The police refuse to file a missing person’s report because Maali hasn’t been missing for the minimum three days yet. Maali’s mother insists that Maali has been acting strangely; he had invited her to lunch after months of not speaking.
The police point out that because Maali is a photojournalist, he could be on assignment. Maali often took photographs for Major Raja, his commanding officer in the army, but Maali’s family and friends don’t know this, so they’re unable to help the police connect to someone higher up. DD wonders if Maali is missing because he’s on another gambling binge. The police point out that if Maali has been mixed up with politics, a police investigation won’t make a difference.
As Maali watches DD, Jaki, and his mother leave the police station, he yearns to tell them he loves them and show them where his photographs are hidden. Instead, he follows the police.
Maali met Jaki in a casino, where he was gambling away a recent paycheck from the Associated Press. Jaki got so drunk she passed out, so Maali brought her back to his apartment. When she woke up, she saw his photographs and warned Maali that the photographs could get him killed. They struck up a deep friendship, and Maali moved into an apartment with Jaki and her cousin. They lived in an apartment owned by the Minister for Youth Affairs, DD’s father.
Maali tries to follow the police but is ushered away by the wind. He ends up near a bus stop, where he sees the spirit of a woman who was burned alive, whose death Maali documented. She used to be a lawyer. In death, she refuses to find her Light because the Light makes one forget the facts of their death and life. She reveals that victims of a bombing have captured the ghosts of their victimizers. Maali hears his name echoing in the wind.
ASP Ranchagoda and Detective Cassim start their investigation of Maali’s disappearance because his mother bribed them. Maali follows them as they track down Kottu and Balal and show them a picture of Maali. Kottu points to a bag that contains limbs. They explain to the cops that they found the body in the dumpster, a common site for body disposal. They dismembered Maali and threw his head into the lake. The cops tell Kottu and Balal to get the head back, no matter what.
Next, the cops go to the casino and speak to the boss, Rohan Chang. He reports that Maali was seen the night before his disappearance, drinking with a white man.
A croupier leads the cops to the fifth-floor balcony where Maali and the white man were drinking together. Maali’s spirit follows them, but he can’t remember the man or their night together. He remembers the bartender he hooked up with, named Chaminda, who is called over to speak to the cops. They figure that Maali either jumped or was pushed off the balcony. They want to take Chaminda in for questioning as the last person who saw Maali alive. They search the casino and meet a woman who owns one of Maali’s photographs.
Maali recognizes the woman but can’t remember her name. She introduces herself to the police as Elsa Mathangi of the CNTR, Canada Norway Third World Relief, an organization that raises funds for victims of war. Her cousin-brother, Kugarajah, CNTR’s Director, is also present. He tells the police that Maali recently resigned from his post as CNTR’s photographer. Looking on, Maali feels a metallic sensation in his mouth because he knows that Kugarajah is lying about both his name and the reason Maali resigned. Maali sees two other ghosts arguing about Maali.
Cassim and Ranchagoda decide that they have good suspects in the bartender and the CNTR siblings, depending on whether or not Maali’s body is recovered. Elsa follows the cops to privately tell them about Maali’s hidden box of photographs, which can be lucrative for the police and her. The photographs include evidence of the Batticaloa police massacre.
The police drive away, but Maali is unable to follow them. He sees the two other ghosts arguing again and recognizes them as Sena and Dr. Ranee. Ranee has come to warn Maali that he wasted one of his seven moons.
Two fundamental conflicts inform Part 1 of this novel: the Sri Lankan Civil War and Maali’s internal conflicts as he navigates the memories of his life and comes to terms with his death.
The historical context of the Sri Lankan Civil War is crucial to the development of setting and tension. From 1983 to 2009, Sri Lanka was embroiled in a Civil War in which political and ethnic factions battled, resulting in massacres, disappearances, and other forms of violence. Karunatilaka demonstrates the immediate suspicions between Tamils and the Sinhalese, a rivalry rooted in colonialist caste structures in the country. This is also a conflict of religion, as Tamils are typically Hindu and Sinhalese are typically Buddhist. After the end of British rule, the Sinhalese took power as the dominant ethnic group and enacted oppressive and discriminatory policies against Tamils, leading to escalations of violence. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) advocated for Tamil freedom and power. The violence led to other paramilitary organizations escalating the conflict, such as the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a Marxist-Leninist faction. This conflict establishes the setting and sparks the plot; Maali, a photojournalist who specializes in documenting the war’s atrocities, is killed and finds himself among the ghosts of bombing victims. The war overwhelms the novel’s characters; families are torn apart, institutions can’t support the weight of human suffering, and ethnic and political differences mark out individuals.
Karunatilaka alludes to several major events in the conflict to highlight Sri Lanka’s insecurity and how that insecurity affects his characters. Elsa attempts to win favor with the police by promising them evidence of the Batticaloa massacre. This event transpired on June 11, 1990, when the LTTE surrounded a police station in Batticaloa in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. The LTTE is alleged to have killed over 600 police officers in execution-style line-ups to gain control over the region. This event was formative in the Civil War because it effectively demonstrated to citizens that police departments could not protect them. Evidence of the massacre is especially interesting to the officers in this novel because they are insecure in their positions. At the same time, Karunatilaka is careful not to illustrate any party in this war as objective heroes; the police are threatened, but they also need to be bribed to investigate Maali’s murder and cooperate with the garbage men, hinting that the police play their own role in the country's instability. This points to the deterioration of institutions that comes with widespread violence.
Another historical reference is the Sooriyakanda massacre, of which Maali also has photographic evidence. A JVP counterinsurgency led to the mass killings of the schoolchildren at Embilipitiya Maha Vidyalaya high school. The mass grave was not found until 1994, at which point an estimated 300 bodies were found. This event emphasizes the extent of the violence against citizens during the Sri Lankan Civil War, as well as the secretive nature of the conflict.
Maali is intimately involved in the Civil War because of his role as a photojournalist. Through his traumatic experiences photographing atrocities, Karunatilaka questions the voyeuristic nature of photojournalism. Maali is at once a part of the war and an observer of it, uninvolved in the killing but a witness to the massive violence. Evidence of atrocities and war crimes is important, but the text asks whether Maali’s photographs help the victims or victimize them further, dehumanizing them by making them symbols. Maali is confronted with this conflict in the afterlife when he meets victims of the war, former subjects of his photographs. For example, the slain lawyer from Chapter 14 points out that Maali didn’t ask her permission when he took her photograph. The subjects of Maali’s photos don’t have a choice about what happens to the images of their bodies and deaths, positioning Maali in the role of observer and storyteller. But Maali’s job is dangerous as well; as a photojournalist, he risks making enemies with all sides of the conflict because his photographs can expose their violence and war crimes. Maali has a box of unpublished photographs hidden under a bed, emphasizing Maali’s role as secret keeper and potential whistleblower. Maali is, therefore, characterized as brave yet voyeuristic in the novel’s first section. His voyeuristic role is duplicated in death; he watches the events unfolding around him but cannot intervene. In later parts, Maali will find his voice as he works to expose the truth, emphasizing The Importance of Journalism.
Many chapters are written through a second-person narrative point-of-view as Maali attempts to understand his new reality. As a ghost, Maali is not free of human concerns. Like a living being, he must make plans and goals for his afterlife. He can either find the Light, an undefined wisdom that will potentially save his soul, or he can learn how to manipulate the living through ghostly skills and potentially avenge his murder. This in-between existence poses many problems for Maali. He is forced to reckon with his past as he attempts to understand the events leading up to his death. He is forced to watch DD and his Amma fight for recognition of his disappearance, demonstrating that even in death, the human soul is tied to their loved ones. Maali has unfinished business. His relationship with DD has been complicated by his ineptitude for monogamy, and he hasn’t spoken to his mother in months. There is much about Maali’s past that he needs to reckon with, including his fractured relationship with his father, his hidden sexuality, his gambling addiction, and the trauma of his work. It is implied in Part 1 that finding one’s Light within seven moons frees them from the past, potentially by erasing it. But Maali is not yet ready to erase his past. The second-person narration helps highlight the disembodied nature of Maali’s new identity as a ghost; he is not alive, yet he is sentient and aware. He is a spirit, not a body, and his use of the second-person helps the reader and Maali study his new reality.
The ramifications of the Sri Lankan Civil War bleed into the afterlife, as the afterlife is just another place to continue fighting the war. Sena was directly involved in fighting and killing while alive, and in death, he is committed to continuing cycles of violence in the name of revenge. Sena attempts to create another gang to replace the JVP he left behind. This demonstrates that there is no rest for the human soul, even in death. Thus, Karunatilaka stresses that human conflict bred through bigotry and violence is so damaging to the national and individual consciousness that there is no escape from the ripple effects of war.
Karunatilaka subverts traditional notions of the afterlife to criticize the Civil War and celebrate the enduring resiliency of the human spirit. Sri Lankans are mostly Buddhist or Hindu, with similar historical and cultural understandings of what happens after death. Buddhists and Hindus both traditionally believe that the human soul is reincarnated after death, appearing in a new creature’s body in a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Karunatilaka’s depiction of the afterlife splits from these beliefs. Rather than experience a reincarnation based on the character of his lived experience, Maali has one week to find the Light and leave the turbulent and sad in-between world. Karunatilaka uses the Mara tree as a symbol of death and rebirth, an allusion to Buddhist and Hindu religious beliefs. In Buddhism, Mara is a celestial King who distracts people from enlightenment. As such, when Sena brings Maali to the Mara tree to meditate and find where he is needed on Earth, Sena acts as Mara, keeping Maali away from his Light. Karunatilaka sets up a subversion of the Hero’s Journey, in which Maali, must undergo several tests and missions before he can come to terms with his past, find the Light (or commit to not finding the Light), and leave home.
The lobby Maali wakes up in also functions as a symbol that criticizes the ineffectiveness of man-made systems. Death doesn’t look so different than life in this novel; Maali and the other newly deceased souls grow frustrated with the chaotic lines in the registration process. They are given contradictory directives, and bureaucracy confuses them in death as in life. Karunatilaka creates a satire of society, in which institutions and systems get in the way of human life. This novel includes violence and brutal criminality, so Karunatilaka’s satirical humor provides comedic relief. This is also part of the author’s meditation on humanity; life includes violence, but it also includes laughter. Juxtaposed though these concepts are, they are both fundamental to the human experience.
Furthermore, Karunatilaka observes the nihilism that can result if religious narratives of the afterlife don’t exist. The atheist in Part 1 did not assume what his afterlife would look like, but he is no better served by that freedom than the ghosts who were religious in life. Thus, the afterlife becomes a democratic space in which everyone is disappointed. This reveals that the narratives one tells themselves in life are just that: stories. They do not necessarily inform the reality of what happens in life after death. In the novel’s world, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and atheists all end up in the same place. This further criticizes the Civil War because the religious divisions that were heightened before and during the war are ultimately pointless.