What happened at the end of the war is still contested, with accusations of war crimes on both sides. They acted on impulse and they got away with it.”
They won the war and they had so much support from the Sinhalese majority. The government at that time had so much power. “One minister’s kids were disciplined by a school teacher: he tied the teacher to a tree and had him flogged. “If I wrote the things that actually happened, you wouldn’t believe it,” Savanadasa says of his restrained portrayal. But outside pressures intrude: an air raid, media censorship, road blocks, a missing boy, a dead soldier, Lakshmi’s Tamil identity in a Sinhalese community – and an isolated but shocking moment of intimidating violence when a government minister visits Mano’s office and casually smashes a picture of his family. There’s Mano, the editor of a local newspaper his unhappy wife Lakshmi their hustling son Niranjan their Iron Maiden fan daughter Anoushka and their humble servant Latha, who quietly runs the household.Īt first glance, the war seems far away, and the novel seems all about internal tensions in the family. He tells five intertwining stories in Ruins, a tale of a middle-class family in Colombo at the time the war was coming to an end. “That made me think I had to forget about the idea of a message. And I thought: These people are not really talking about the politics, they are just telling me their stories about what it was like to live in Iran or Bangladesh.
“I’d be drawn into the story and I’d be moved.
But then he began voluntary work with a group of asylum seekers in Darebin, interviewing them and recording their stories on a website, Open City Stories. “I was making my characters do things that would get the message across.” It was supposed to be a big novel about a Sri Lankan family that also commented on the country, culture and politics and the civil war that had raged for 25 years and had cost the lives of an estimated 100,000 people.īut the Melbourne-based writer had trouble figuring out how to integrate the family and the bigger picture. Rajith Savanadasa had written a few drafts of his first novel, and it wasn’t working. Photo: Pat Scalaīy Jane Sullivan, ‘Sydney Morning Herald, July 9, 2016 Rajith Savanadasa: A little bit of him in each of his characters.
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