“Two of them have come from a lot further. From Holland in Europe.” Kanna laughs again. “But not from Hague, no?”... How a small Dutch town like that on the edge of Europe became the conscience of the world is a mystery to me. We could all learn something from that.
Vasantha is a driver who takes tourists around Sri Lanka in his van. “I preferred being behind a wheel — going somewhere — than behind a desk. That’s why I started this business with the van the moment I retired from the corporation.” (He was earlier a chauffeur to the Coconut Corporation’s deputy governor’s wife.) He is Sinhala, but this is never explicitly mentioned. There are only clues about his identity especially, in his acquaintance with the languages. He is more at ease with Sinhala though not particularly bad with Tamil, all though outside his van he never quite knew his place.
His clients include people like Mr. Patrick, Englishman; Mrs. Cooray with her two Dutch tourists; Dr. Ponnampalam who left in 1952, returning to see what is left of the “nightmare” accompanied by son Mahen, expats from England; four Chinese executives; Mr. Wahid, a Malaysian; the seven-months pregnant Mrs. Arunachalam and her husband going to Jaffna to review a property deal; Mr. Desmond, a Sri Lankan, “who know things and can do things or at least get them done”; three Russians; Mr. Weerakoon from Singapore; Giorgio, an Italian photographer, accompanied by Sanji, Italian of Sri Lankan origin and his team; Eva and Pavel from old Communist Czechoslovakia; Brigadier Bling; two Iranian New Age anglers; Miss Susial and her husband Colin from England. Vasnatha travels to the North and South of the country; he visits a military base near Jaffna called Samanala Camp, Mullaitivu, Kilinochchi (capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for years), Dambulla and Ambalangoda ... He prefers to take foreigner tourists around “because it gives me a glimpse of a place that is different in touch, taste, smell, sound and look from the place I am stuck in. I watch how they sit, how they walk, how they talk, and I try to see what they want to escape from and then return to.”
Noontide Toll is divided into two parts — North and South. Each section is a collection of stories set in different parts of the Tamil-dominated and Sinhala-dominated towns. Vasantha never engages in beyond what is necessary with the locals or his passengers. He is careful about what he says; his introspection is sharp with only the reader being privy to his thoughts. He observes that “language plays hell with our politics. Always has.” He discovers fairly early that using words like ‘guerrilla’ doesn’t help and ‘terrorist’ is a word that always seems to be cause more complications than it is worth. A war-ravaged land that is limping back to normal faces a number of challenges. It could range from contending with the ‘loose memories’, the nightmare of those who were children during the war. It is a trait that seems to be universally experienced judging by Vasantha’s conversation with Eva — “What good could possibly come from such bad happenings. We thought at least we won’t have to talk about it here.”
There are other alarming nuggets of information about war hidden in the text. For instance the number of people rescued from the landing at Dunkirk was 350,000 — a “helluva big operation” — was equal to the “350,000 to contend with too, in the humanitarian operation after the final fight” during Sri Lanka's civil war — 70 years later. Irony is when equipment was not very sophisticated nor warfare a business as it is today. Everyone was rescued safely from Dunkirk, whereas the Sri Lankan government and military is still trying to manage internally displaced people. It dawns upon Vasantha that “there comes a point when you don’t want to know.” Despite this gloomy atmosphere, there are moments of hope as he witnesses the young couple in the library; the girl is Tamil and the boy, who speaks Sinhala, remarks “she, like me, has no family left alive here.”
For a book that deals with war, it is surprisingly very calm. Yet it is a detached and meticulous documentation of civil strife and its management. Of course there are politics deeply embedded in the stories as with the reference to IPKF by Sanji who seethes with rage “when the Indians came, the politics became bloody Machiavellian...Indian bloody Peace Keeping crap. It was a game I didn’t like. Something had gone wrong. I could see that right at the top people had their own ideas. Personal interests.” Good literature is inextricably mixed with politics. Romesh Gunesekera told me during a conversation that writing has to and will outlive war. Noontide Toll is a remarkable piece of writing.
Noontide Toll;Romesh Gunesekera, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Books India, Rs.499.
