Arudpragasam shows human perseverance and the depth of the mundane. Excreting, touching, eating, sleeping or the lack of it forms the backbone of the novel.
“There were plenty of other naked body parts scattered around the camp of course.”
Anuk Arudpragasam’s first novel The Story of a Brief Marriage opens with a jarring event: that of a little boy being amputated at a Tamil camp in North Sri Lanka. Dinesh, the protagonist, is a scrawny young man who derives some purpose in aiding the local doctor in a makeshift hospital. He treads between bodies, body parts and customary deaths every day.
The Sri Lankan Civil War between the government and the Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam which started in the 1980s was one of violence, displacement, and horrors. Arudpragasam, however, focuses on human perseverance and explores the depth of the mundane. Excreting, touching, eating, sleeping or the lack of it, forms the backbone of the novel.
One morning, Dinesh is seen carefully covering his faeces with sand on a beach with decomposing human bodies strewn in front of him. It is these moments in the book that trap the reader between defeat and hope. It depicts the extent to which violence has been normalised.
An elderly man marries Dinesh to his daughter Ganga in the camp, thinking that marriage will somehow protect her and his paternal duty will end. Dinesh and Ganga’s marriage is brief, unfulfilled, and one that touches the heights of happiness before plunging into nothing. They are together for just a day before the shelling kills Ganga. But before her demise, Dinesh finally finds a safe space in Ganga’s character. The space he needed to come to terms with war and loss, and his own impassiveness.
It is a heartbreaking moment drowned by the sounds of bombs dropping around them. Two newly married people with no future and no escape out of a stagnant camp.
Arudpragasam’s novel does not rush to tell the story of the Civil War, but instead breaks down the tiniest molecules of time and holds it for the reader in a petridish to mull over. Dinesh eating a proper meal after days, Dinesh and Ganga holding each other, Dinesh scrubbing himself clean after ages with soap, take up whole chapters. It is almost as if the reader is a voyeur into the most private moments of their lives. Nothing is a banal exercise during war.
The Story of a Brief Marriage is delicate, unsparing, and depicts the Sri Lankan civil war through the lens of the mortal human body.
This book won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, 2017 which was announced on 18 November, 2017.
Read reviews of other books shortlisted for the prize: