The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – first edition Aug 2022
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, the second novel by its author, was published in Aug 2022. Its reputation was assured when it won the Booker Prize for 2022 a few months later. The novel is set in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. Maali Almeida, a photographer, though dead is still active in his after-life. His engrossing interest now is to find out how he died. Just one week (“seven moons”) is given him to complete his detective task. In the hybrid world created by the author, Maali Almeida may move freely between the realms of the real world and the limbo world after death. But if he does not discover the solution in seven moons, then even the chance of rebirth will elude him forever.
Photographer with Nikon camera
The secondary quest in which Maali Almeida engages is that of finding what happened to the stash of negatives of photographs taken with his Nikon camera when he acted as a photo-journalist working for number of news agencies. He also worked at times as a fixer who could arrange meetings between the warring parties of the civil war that raged and terrorised Sri Lanka till the end of 2009. His pious hope had been that these photographs recording the barbarity of civil war would reveal its true ugliness and the crimes that were being committed by all the parties – not just by the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE) headed by its notorious chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran.
During the seven moons the reader is exposed to real-life characters, thinly disguised, often maintaining the same name as the actual commanders and politicians they represented. The reader begins to appreciate the selfish agendas of the numerous actors in the Sri Lankan civil war and why it was fated more or less, to end in the large-scale atrocities that were ultimately heaped on civilians who happened to be living in Eelam controlled areas in the North-east of the country.
Strangely for a novel pretending to write historical fiction, Shehan Kaarunatilka nowhere lays bare that it was Chinese weapons that helped the Sri Lankan military’s bloodbath. Thousands of trapped civilians died in 2009 as government forces decimated the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in a brutal military campaign, which resulted in the killing of twenty thousand civilians and a forced ethnic cleansing of Tamils while a mute UN Secretary General (Ban-ki-Moon) watched.
Sri Lankan Air Force JF-7 fighter jets
Chinese Jian-7 fighter-jets (a licensed production version of the Soviet MIG-21), anti-aircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other supplied weapons played a key role in the Sri Lankan military successes against the Tamil Tigers. After a daring 2007 raid by the Tigers air wing wrecked 10 government military aircraft, Beijing was quick to supply six warplanes on long-term credit. Such weapon supplies, along with $1 billion in Chinese aid to the tottering Sri Lankan economy in 2008, helped tilt the military balance in favour of the government forces.
What is equally shameful is how the UN under the weak leadership of Ban Ki-moon enabled the Sri Lankan government’s ethic cleansing of the displaced Tamils and then refused to investigate the human rights violations. For the real history behind this you may read the paper by Matthew Russell Lee – Sri Lanka's ‘Bloodbath on the Beach’ Made the UN's Ban Ki-mute Moot.
In the end we learn who the killer of Maali Almeida was, and why he was killed, but the elusive question of where the explosive negatives have vanished and whether they can be traced remains unanswered. The wandering spirit of Mail Almeida in the next world cannot rest.
