Revisitng Sri Lanka in a travelling Van: The Noon Tide Toll (Romesh Gunasekera)

The writing world to a reader often seems like the Wonderland that Alice tumbles into--full of mysteries, gossip and that elusive thing called charm of story telling which most of us want to take back and make our own but fail miserably. Romesh Gunesekera is one writer who every aspiring writer as well as any other kind should be incredibly jealous of because he makes all these look as easy as opening the MSWord document file. In a publishing society where authors are disintegrating into entrepreneurs as they churn out novels like the chefs at a roadside dhaba catering to as many people as they can, Gunesekara has no qualms about saying that he is an extremely slow writer and more often than not has to go through a personal battle trying to decide whether he should let the story be a short one or take the more rigorous course of making into a novel. His novel Noon Tide Toll finally learns how to bring truce to this.

Noon Tide Toll came out last year in January, the same time that another Sri Lankan writer was talking about similar issues of post-war Sri Lanka and its effect on the people. While Nayomi Munaweera in her novel chronicled the journey of the island from the pregnancy of the war to its death, Gunesekera takes up what happens after the camera lights have been switched off, the journalists have gone home and the world now has some other inane war to take vicarious pleasure in. The novel is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories but rather traverses a region somewhere in between much like its narrator, the shadowy Vasantha the van driver who conspicuously remains in the peripheral space lest the reader might become too curious about him. Vasantha begins the book as a pragmatist. "The past is what you leave as you go. There is nothing more to it." It is this pragmatism that helps him keep an objective stance as he refuses to judge any of his passengers, let it be officials, soldiers, tourists with their hankering for stories or the empty van that often echoes the questions of the readers about his own past. What remains interesting is even though the novel charts its way through his voice, his 'I' is as distant as the cold eyes of the restaurant owner who hides her scars and her past behind the benign facade of peace.

Gunesekera clinically divides the book into two halves, the North and the South, chronicling the journeys that Vasantha takes with his tourists to these places. However, by the time one finishes the novel, it is difficult to tell the two parts apart as both carry within them the same calmness that overwhelms post death and the sheer perseverance of the human heart to still survive, There are no climactic moments in the book, rather it makes the reader feel disconcerted by its very lack as he keeps waiting for something that he would now be privy to on account of surviving through the novel. But Vasantha refuses to give such moments of clarity as he belongs to a world which hinges on the translucent space of ever lasting arguments that makes one oblivious of the truth that it hides. 

Each of the characters that Vasantha transports in his van are embroiled in a search, sometimes for that of a war criminal like in "Mess", for a place in the new order like the soldiers taking management training in "Fluke", the pregnant couple looking for the picturesque island that the holiday brochures promised in "Roadkill", the man coming back to reclaim his lost home and childhood and pass it on to his son in "Deadhouse" or the tourists looking for remnants of the war in "Folly". However, just like the epigraph to the novel, Kerouac's lines "There was nowhere to go...so keep on rolling under the stars" none of the characters are given the satisfaction of an ascertained end much like the island itself.  

Sri Lanka in the novel hinges on the antagonistic narratives of investigating the history or burying it, claiming responsibility or  being the objective outsider, look towards the future or unravel the present past in a forever moment of stasis. These diverse voices contest to become the monopolizing voice in the story and Gunesekera's as well as his narrator Vasantha's triumph lays in the fact that they refuse such forces of homogenization to kidnap these stories. The stories are replete with symbols, like the white van of Vasantha which reminds one of the numerous such vans which were used during the war for kidnapping, but these are symbols which only talk to the reader who has painstakingly unfurled the plastic white bandages to see the wound within. 

While certain questions do bother the reader, it specially bothered me that Vasantha seems too educated and erudite to be a van driver or the fact that his character is too shadowy for the reader to feel any sort of allegiance to him, but these are just small glitches in an otherwise poignant and extremely personal novel that look at the island through the lenses of conflicting voices that refuse to die down. 

Is it the most definitive work of Gunesekera till date? Of course not. I still believe his Reef is insurmountable. But it's a story that needs to be read, acknowledged and understood; a history that demands to be heard before we can actually hope to move on and make a new country of our own. 

till the next time

keep it bookish

the bookbug