By V.V. Ganeshananthan

A Tamil boy, not yet my father, was born in a village in the Tamil town of Jaffna, Ceylon, in 1944. Everything in the village looked beautiful to him then: it was peaceful, full of coconut and palmyra trees, and not far from the sea.

When the boy was only four years old, the country won independence from its British colonizers. One day that same year, his older cousin took him down to the shore and put him in a boat. The cousin rowed out into the waves, and the boy splashed in the sea.

They were not very far out when they neared a circle of other boats. The older boy jumped out. He brought their boat closer to the circle, and the little boy saw, suddenly, an island of flesh rising out of the water, inside the ring of people. The whale was massive, half-beached and lifeless. Perhaps it was the first time he had seen something dead. The whale’s body stretched out above him, seeming impossibly large, much larger than himself.

Ceylon became Sri Lanka. Before the arrival of the British, various peoples had coexisted in relative peace there. But as the boy grew, so did trouble between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority. Sinhalese became the national language, and Buddhism, the faith of the Sinhalese, the state religion; universities set different, higher standards for Tamil students trying to matriculate. The government sent Sinhalese settlers into traditionally Tamil areas. Discontented Tamil youth formed pockets of rebellion as peaceful protests failed. The boy loved his village, but he left it, because he saw that the future of Jaffna, a Tamil town, was dark. Later, after he became a doctor, a plane took him even farther away, to America, where he met and married a Sri Lankan girl, who was not yet my mother.

My brother and I were born in the United States. We visited my father’s village only once after that as a family, in 1982. The year before we visited, members of government security forces burned down the Jaffna Public Library as government officials watched. The year after we visited, Tamil rebels killed 13 Sinhalese soldiers. Sinhalese rioters in the Sri Lankan capital attacked Tamil civilians. For days, the government did nothing to stop the violence. In the riots’ aftermath, many Tamils sought asylum in other countries. Like my parents, they loved their homes, but left them.

After that, there was only war. Tamil rebels blew themselves up and killed the Sinhalese and each other. Sri Lankan soldiers occupied Jaffna in the name of order, killing innocent civilians and destroying private property. Indian troops intervened, and did the same thing. Landmarks were burned and bombed. Tamils involved with the rebels disappeared to fight. Tamils not involved with the rebels became suspects and disappeared as they were investigated.

And the country disappeared, as the war was born. I do not remember that last visit in 1982, but there is a memorable picture: my brother and I planting flags in castles made of white, white sand. The older I got, the more I thought that we looked happy in that picture, in that place I did not know or remember. I wanted to go back there, to meet my father’s earlier self. My father refused: Sri Lanka was a dreamscape and not a destination, because it was not safe.

I do not see Jaffna again until more than twenty years later, after the December 2004 tsunami has reminded people where Sri Lanka is. People who long ago stopped asking about the war are moved once more to inquire, Are your relatives all right? My parents’ home is not all right; it has not been all right for more than twenty years, and this has nothing to do with the tsunami. We mourn for Sri Lanka’s dead in this instance, as in many others, but the sea has done what people could not: brokered a real if tentative peace. And so in July 2005, the boy, no longer so young and finally my father, cedes. He brings me once again to Jaffna, a place I already love although I have no memory of it.

The tsunami has not touched this village; decades of war have ravaged it. The house where my father grew up is different now. One of the largest in the village, it cost my grandfather too much; it was the first modern concrete building there. A dreamer, my grandfather planned it with ceilings high enough to allow for a second floor, which was never built. The Sri Lankan Army occupied the house for part of the 1990s. When they left, they stripped it: not even a switch or wire remained. Even my father’s medical school class photo, which he had given to his family when he left for America, is gone.

Outside the house, too, is changed. The small boy, not yet my father, took his baths from a well in the backyard. The army ruined the well, putting trash and batteries inside it to prevent the spread of mosquitoes in stagnant water. They did this because they did not see a future in which a person who mattered might live in the house, and need a drink. My cousins, who live in the house now, have built a new well on the other side. They have also replaced the gates; the army removed the originals to use the grates as grills for meat. The army flag stand remains in the front yard.

The house used to be near the train station. Now the tracks, fallen into disrepair when the Sri Lankan Army invaded Jaffna, are overgrown with grass and barely visible. As a child, my father had loved a peaceful village, full of coconut and palmyra trees. Around the corner, my aunt has returned to her house, which both the Tamil Tigers and the Army occupied at different times. Her coconut trees, full of bullet holes, no longer bear coconuts. Not far from either of these is a building where the Sri Lankan Army used to detain and torture Tamils in the name of its war on terror.

A cousin I never met drowned in the tsunami. He had gone to Batticaloa, in the eastern province, far away from our family’s village. He was at the temple. When I heard that, I thought, So much for God. But maybe I was wrong, and he was lucky. He fell into the sea, a sea in which my father had splashed as a boy. The tsunami was, as another cousin said, a natural disaster.

I thought I was owed a family history, and I came to Jaffna to find it. Natural disaster made that possible. But unnatural disaster has destroyed the place that small boy knew. Home is a place to which you can return, but no one can leave Jaffna and truly promise to come back. War, not the tsunami, has made my father a tourist in his own home. It has made me a daughter who needs a Jaffna guidebook.

And leafing through one, I find a listing for the archaeological museum. When we arrive, the inside is dim and lovely, full of statues, relics, enthusiastic docents, and careful students who stare at us. But it is the outside that interests me.

Just beyond the museum’s threshold is the skeleton of a whale. My father thinks he recognizes it. He asks one of the men about it. They speak Tamil so rapid that I do not understand until my father turns back to me. I do know this whale, he says: I saw it die. Almost sixty years later, its bones have come to meet my father here, in this place full of dead things that are still loved.

Contributor's Profile
V.V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in New York City. She is a graduate of Harvard College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has two novels forthcoming from Random House. The first, Love Marriage, will be published in April 2008. Both books are set partially in Sri Lanka.
This essay first appeared in translation, in the Spanish-language magazine Etiqueta Negra.