Book review: Noon Tide Toll by Romesh Gunasekera
Noon Tide Toll by Romesh Gunasekera (Penguin Books).
If it`s Romesh Gunasekera, you know you are in for a dashed good read, a moving read, and this book is no exception. Using the driver of an old Toyota vanVasantha as his mouthpiece, Gunasekera crafts 14 short stories of Sri Lanka as it is today.
Vasantha drives a blue van with a silver V in English on the side; to drive a white van would not do, given that many of the disappeared disappear into the interiors of white vans. Vasantha is a curious mix of hope, and cynicism and caution. He knows there is the constant need to check one`s rear view mirror but also that one can`t be looking back all the time. The past is what you leave as you go, he says.
Lanka looms on both sides of the roads that Vasantha travels on. A country that has been independent for 65 years after having been colonized for 300 years, practiced Buddhism for 2,500 years… and saw 30 years of war. It’s a nation of separation, one where all every road seems to lead to a hospital, a wounded country where even the sky bleeds every evening. A place where damage to man and land becomes part of the surroundings eventually, a situation leached of all irony.
Vasantha drives fast and well but the book is paced out, reflective. Sentences taut with meaning jump out at the reader. The humour is a constant but sly presence, one that has the reader quirking her lips in appreciation and no more. It was a big job, Vasantha muses, ending the war, shepherding people. But he also knows he finds it hard to believe anything, so ends up knowing nothing. A woman is described as having her grey hair tied in a bun and dressed in sporty clothes like a Galle Face jogger on a suicide mission; another time, Vasantha sits by a swimming pool; this was where the Sea Tigers used to do their workouts and is now an outdoor cafeteria. Still later, he ferries a brigadier who had a face that `clearly brightened only for camera and preferably after a cocktail had eased the pain of snuffing chaps.`
Of course, the passengers Vasantha takes north on the A9 to Jaffna, and south of the island too, form the backbone of the story; he thinks he is being non-judgmental about them but the reader gets a very clear idea of just what he thinks of each and every one of them. There are NGOs on a working visit to a library that a burned `in an act of pure malice` in 1981. The Head Librarian requests poetry books and the reader swallows a lump as `Mr. Desmond` dismisses the request with a `Who at a time like this is going to want poetry books?`
Elsewhere, rich tourists go whale watching in waters that saw major battles between the Tigers and the Lankan navy. Then there is the fashion lingerie shoot which leads Vasantha to muse on how nothing is evidence of anything any more, everything could well be doctored. He of course, is talking about how the photos will be touched up before they appear in the Italian fashion magazine but the sentence is poignant in its double entendre.
There are new entrepreneurs looking for war debris, scrap metal, and that is chilling in itself. There are families looking for their houses amidst the rubble of the north`s killing fields. There are young men and women working everyday jobs who may or may not have been on the `other side` a short while ago. There are army men with affable peace-time faces, quite unsettling in their normalcy.
At times, Vasantha`s hopeful view of the future that seems to hang just beyond the horizon seems one-dimensional, bordering on the naïve, but the reader ends up rooting for precisely that view. Vasantha keeps a still tongue in his head most of the time being a prudent soul but his perceptive nature comes through startlingly yet convincingly. He says he believed, along with many Lankans, that when the war was over, a line could be drawn between the mistakes of the past and the promise of the future. One was the place you had been the other was the place you were going to. As a driver, he should have known better because, to go from point A to point B, you need a road and the road is nothing if it doesn’t connect. And therein lies the whole tale of the situation.
I stumbled upon one false note though. Vasantha looks at a young maimed ex -soldier and thinks a man might prefer the `Versace-laced electric funk of a topnotch nightclub to the stink of soldiering in a swamp.` Really? Would a driver really reference Versace?
This is a road novel of an entirely different kind. Read it.
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Book review: Upon a Sleepless Isle by Andrew Fidel Fernando
Book review: Elephant Complex by John Gimlette
Sheila Kumar • July 30, 2015