Whenever I visit a place, I try to read up about it. But some places are visited so often that this no longer cuts it. In that case, I would pick up a piece of local literature, and I did just that when I found myself in Sydney yet again late last year. Walking down a familiar but changed Newtown, I dropped by a few bookstores and ended up picking up Chai Time at Cinnamon Garden by Shankari Chandran.
The novel took me on a journey well beyond Sydney. Set in a fictional Sydney suburb, it is a story of Sri Lankan immigrants who fled a country engulfed in a civil war between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority that lasted for more than 25 years before ending in 2009. The narrative jumps back and forth between Sydney and Jaffna (and occasionally Colombo), which was a treat because I had visited both Sri Lankan cities just seven years after the war ended. In Jaffna then, I appeared to be the only foreigner around, and many buildings still had walls pockmarked by bullets. Jaffna felt morose and reconstruction was barely noticeable. This was unlike in Colombo where there was a construction boom thanks to Chinese investment. My travels in Sri Lanka and my time in Australia gave me a richer context for the novel than I would otherwise have had.
I did not know about the novel’s expansive geographical and temporal reach when I bought it, and its early chapters started warmly enough that it seemed like a breezy read about friends, community, and multiculturalism. Oh, was I wrong about the book being a heartwarming, easygoing one.
The novel gets dark quickly by its midpoint. What the book is really about is the difficulty of living in a multicultural society. The author tackles racism in Australia, but even more so the trauma that the Tamil people suffered during the Sri Lankan civil war. The war ended bloodily with the defeat of Tamil fighters. There are scenes of torture and death in Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.
The pages describing the 1981 burning of the Jaffna Public Library are probably the ones I will remember best from this novel. The library was the most important institution preserving Tamil history and literature in the country. It was targeted as a symbol of Tamil cultural identity and nationalism in Sri Lanka. I visited the rebuilt library while I was in Jaffna and did not find it impressive at all then. Had I known about its history and its burning, I might have been more sympathetic and in greater awe.
After this, I think I will boot up the portable drives where I stored the thousands of photographs I snapped while in Sri Lanka and look more closely at the pictures of the library.
