Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka on his new book and the worlds he carries within himself

Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka’s first book, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, was released in 2010. It told the story of cynical old hack WG Karunasena’s search for a half Tamil, half Sinhalese cricketer named Pradeep Sivanathan Mathew who shone like a supernova before disappearing mysteriously from the scene. Among the most lethal deliveries in the left-arm spinner’s arsenal was the ‘double bounce ball’, which, when bowled, was akin to “a 5-ounce, spherical, leather-bound object made to behave as a pebble skimming water”. Karunasena’s obsessive search is set against the story of Sri Lanka in the late 1980s and early 1990s, an island infested with terrorism and corruption, and torn asunder by civil war. Chinaman picked up several awards, including the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, in 2012. The rights for the book were reportedly acquired by a major Indian studio early last year. Karunatilaka’s latest, which is just out, tells an equally compelling story. Chats With The Dead, which is set in and around 1989, in the aftermath of the civil war in Sri Lanka, features Maali Almeida, a renegade war photographer, who finds himself confronted with an onerous task – of solving the mystery of his own murder. The Sri Lankan author talks to CNBCTV18.com about growing up in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, his stillborn novel, Devil Dance, and the worlds he carries within himself.

I was a teenager in the late 1980s and oblivious to the carnage around me. The government was running death squads to combat the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, which was using guerrilla tactics to disable the state. Up north the LTTE was battling the Indian Army and catching civilians in the crossfire. And 1990 also brought the killings of journalist Richard de Zoysa and activist Rajini Thiranagama, both middle-class, English-speaking victims who tend to attract more coverage and concern in Colombo. But I, who’d grown up amidst curfews and bombs and assassinations, knew nothing of the above. Schools had shut for weeks, so I was at home watching reruns of Oscar and Grammy shows, which, for some reason, both state channels were playing around the clock. It gave me my introduction to Hollywood, Pop music, and living in a Colombo bubble.

There was much more world-building required for Chats With The Dead. I had to construct an afterlife with rules that worked, a visual palette to describe the ghosts, and had to reconstruct the war zones, the shady hotels and corpse disposal network of 1980s Sri Lanka. I spent a lot of time researching and imagining before I began plotting. For Chinaman, not so much. The idea of a perfect left-arm leg spinner had been with me since childhood. And the bars and verandas of WG (Karunasena, narrator of Chinaman) and Ari’s (Byrd, Karunasena’s friend and neighbour) lives were places I knew all too well.