By IPS Correspondents
AMSTERDAM, May 25 1999 (IPS)

Hundreds of fresh army recruits and rebels dead in battle and scores of civilians killed or maimed by bomb blasts are the horrifying stories that put Sri Lanka on front pages of western newspapers in the ’80’s and 90’s.

The war has created new “war widow” regions in Sri Lanka, and thousands of women have sought employment overseas as domestic workers. It has been easier to lure the children left behind, male and female, into prostitution.

Sri Lanka has also been in the travel sections towards the back of papers, in the columns advertising budget tropical tours. \\In the capital Colombo and at coastal resorts, the party goes on.

The so-called “people’s war” and its painful contrast with “tourists who don’t care” is a recurring reference in Romesh Gunesekera’s novel The Sandglass.

This book was received as “extraordinary”, “his most ambitious book”, and “a brave, beautiful novel” when it was released in 1998.

Gunesekera has been lauded as the most talented contemporary fiction writer from Sri Lanka in our times, and his novel Reef was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994.

The narrator of The Sandglass is a Sri Lankan named ‘Chip’. A reference to technology? Psychological burden? Fragmented inheritance in a society of shattered families?

His ambitions are vague, his profession unclear. His modem and plastic cards are his constant companions on the global road, his microwave is the only source of domestic warmth at his London base.

Chip’s personal mosaic is a saga of detachment: He is a Sri Lankan professional who has opted for life far away from his deeply troubled homeland, “the inferno back home.”

He is a soundboard for stories about characters who are either “leaving their mark” on history, by eradicating someone else’s past achievements, or losing their grip on social and business holdings.

Chip’s childhood fishing memory is from Trincomalee, an idyllic harbour which has since become a “harbinger of death” in the war between government troops and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Army.

The metaphor is Gunesekera’s, the details are not. Gunesekera refers to war and terrorism, death and destruction, but the parties involved remain unnamed. Instead, they hover over lives. They appear to be non- negotiable.

Other major national problems are touched upon as well: alcoholism, which destroys the lives of several characters either through the bottle or in the search for profit; and depression leading to suicide.

There is little mention of Chip’s own family. Instead, it is his connection with the family of his friend Prins that provides the plot.

Prins returned to Sri Lanka from the UK years before, leaving Chip as the frequent companion to Prins’ mother Pearl, who has been in London for decades.

Chip is repeatedly troubled by the thought that people disappear as they fade from others’ memories, and many an evening is spent drawing elaborate recollections out of Pearl. She has lots to tell about her late husband Jason’s struggle for economic success.

These stories are populated by two rival families, the Ducals and the Vatunases. As “time runs out” on colonial society, the Vatunas’ family estate is carved into sandglass-like plots, and the Ducals buy their way in.

The bitter rivalry gravitates around Sri Lanka’s pre- and post- independence transfer of economic reins into local hands.

This did not happen without a fight. Left- and right-wing visions, Sinhala and Tamil, British, American and Japanese concerns – the politicians and the tycoons, says Pearl, are content to have the armed battles go on.

“Sinhala kids, Tamil kids, it’s all the same. Fodder for the politicos. On every side the rich are scheming and the rest are reeling.”

This is Prins’ main concern: uncovering the true circumstances surrounding his father’s suspicious death. Was father Jason an unethical opportunist, or was he a man of integrity, a victim of schemers?

Prins has been sleuthing in Colombo with both families. He not only sleeps with but even marries the enemy, and he shares just about all of this with Chip, who hangs on his every word.

One of Prins’ discoveries is the verse of an “unorthodox renegadeèself-proclaimed monk” whose “highly suspect rhyming couplets” provide front-page copy for Colombo newspapers: “To be enlightened is not to be dead, nor to put a bullet in your head.”

Humourless Chip moves along in melancholy – the only relief is provided by Prins’ sardonic tone, and Pearl’s irrepressible giggles as she regales Chip with tale after tale.

But Prins vacillates in his search for information and stability. Eventually he appears to abandon both. His mother Pearl has been frozen in exile for decades, content to knit, chatter over the sound of her favourite movies on TV, and cook buttery curries for the younger generation.

Prins and his peers do not share her comfort in being identified as a nation of people always on the move – they feel uprooted and adrift, unable to settle in new surroundings, unwillingly severed from a country that appears to be self- destructing.

Fortunately for the reader, Ducal and Vatunas family trees are supplied at the beginning of the book. It’s a needed reference page as the story weaves in and out of the past.

The Sandglass conversations about these family histories take place in the early 1990’s, when there was talk of a negotiated peace in Sri Lanka. By 1998, these efforts had broken down. Three-thousand government soldiers died in just two assaults by the Tamil Tigers that year.

In 1999, the success of the Sri Lankan cricket team is perhaps the only source of good news for some: the ongoing violence has scared off foreign investors; 50,000 people have died so far in the war; another 30,000 have disappeared.

Gunesekera’s novel is a journey through the minds of people trying to make a go of it, at home and abroad.

Excerpt: