Every once in a while there comes along an author, whose expert fingers peel life like an orange, pulling apart the skin, deftly separating the clingy pith to reveal sections of the luscious fruit within. It is with such delicacy and skill that Akil Kumarasamy probes memories, experiences, pain and grief in her short story collection, Half Gods.
The interlinked narratives are primarily about exile, the desperation, the tremendous loss, and the everydayness of living with this agony. There is no escape from the deeply etched horrors of the civil war in Sri Lanka. ‘Why do a few sad events have to make a whole life unhappy?’cries Nalini. No one is spared. Not the grandfather whose life is one long remorse at leaving the country unscathed, not Nalini, his daughter, who escapes the country with her father after her mother and twin brothers are killed in riots, nor her sons Arjun and Karna, whose only misdemeanour is to be born to parents in exile.
The Sri Lankan Tamil history is one long story of uprootedness where death is the only certainty. Whether it is starved or scorched to death in their arid native land, bloated to death in the open sea, or the slow daily death in the ‘pungent hills’ of a tea estate. In the new world they are once again forced to ‘shed skin’and reinvent themselves. But it’s not just Sri Lankan. It is the immigrant experience. There is the immigrant from Bihar, Botswana, China, the Dominican Republic, each struggling to make sense of what life has dished up.