![]() ![]() ![]() Yasodhara Rajasinghe her sister, Lanka and their comrade-in-mischief, Shiva, grow up in the same house in Colombo - the Sinhala girls downstairs and the Tamil boy upstairs, in a partition that matches their island’s. From the maternal expanse of the Indian Ocean to the sterile swimming pools of Los Angeles, the lives of Munaweera’s characters are defined by bodies of water that reflect the state of their souls, including the corpse-clogged wells and lagoons of the Tamil north and the playful shores of the Sinhala south, alive with flying fish and ancient turtles. The weight of these humiliations, momentary yet everlasting, is the ballast of a narrative that ebbs and flows in time and space. ![]() He recalled a moment in Mogadishu when he was forced to recite his genealogy, the string of grandfathers’ names that place all Somalis within their clans, and he borrowed a school friend’s lineage, as his own would have marked him for death. This chilling exchange reminded me of a conversation I once had on a London bus with a Somali refugee, who swerved from banal chitchat into dark reminiscence. In her panic, she recites the Buddhist sutras “preaching unattachment, impermanence, the inevitability of death,” an unholy trinity that could apply to all civil wars. In one of the many startling scenes in “Island of a Thousand Mirrors,” Nayomi Munaweera’s first novel, a Sri Lankan girl riding the train to school is suddenly surrounded by a machete-wielding mob, who demand proof she isn’t Tamil. ![]()
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