The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Summary

Set against the backdrop of the civil war, the story chronicles the challenges and ethical dilemmas of a war photographer tasked to solve his own murder mystery. It is a story of a ghost trapped navigating the afterlife and coming to terms with his life, his work, his relationships and his death.

Structured as a whodunit, the story follows renegade war photographer Maali Almeida, who is tasked with solving his own murder. Embroiled in red tape, memories of war, his own ethical dilemmas, and his awkward relationship with his mother, his official girlfriend and his secret boyfriend Maali is constantly interrupted by the overly chatty dead folks breezing through the afterlife, as he struggles to unravel his own death.

The author set the book in 1989, as this was when “The Tigers, The Army, The Indian peacekeepers, The JVP terrorists and State death squads were all killing each other at a prolific rate.” A time of curfews, bombs, assassinations, abductions and mass graves seemed to the author to be “a perfect setting for a ghost story, a detective tale or a spy thriller. Or all three.”

Quotes

Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder.

How else to explain the world’s madness? If there’s a heavenly father, he must be like your father: absent, lazy and possibly evil. For atheists there are only moral choices. Accept that we are alone and strive to create heaven on earth. Or accept that no one’s watching and do whatever the hell you like. The latter is by far easier.

You think of the lottery of birth and how everything else is mythology, stories the ego tells itself to justify fortune or explain away injustice.

You think of dead lakes overflowing with corpses, of police stations where the rich lock up the poor, of palaces where those who follow orders torture those who refuse to. You think of distraught lovers, abandoned friends and absent parents. Of lapsed treaties and photographs that are seen and forgotten, regardless of the walls they hang on. How the world will go on without you and will forget you were even here. You think of the mother, the old man and the dog, of the things you did, or failed to do, for the ones you loved. You think about evil causes and about worthy ones. That the chances of violence ending violence are one in nothing, one in nada, one in squat.

Being a ghost isn’t that different to being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror. As action-packed as your post-death party has been, most of it is spent watching people staring at things. People stare a lot, break wind all the time, and touch their genitals much too much.

All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.

Thoughts

I didn’t know Arthur C Clarke would be considered a Sri Lankan author. Maali in the book struggles with naming famous Sri Lankans, and it’s telling the author he chooses is someone who only started living in Sri Lanka at 40 and represents the sort of cultural imperialism that plants itself in foreign culture and sucks the nutrients out of all surrounding culture, and the only thing that can catch a single ray of sunshine is the aping mimicry of the British literary tradition.

Another mirroring that happens is that Maali starts the story dead and unable to influence the very real day-to-day of the world without him. As a war photographer, he needs to stat neutral, and yet, on one of Maali’s last jaunts, he gives the cyanide pills he found on a dead soldier to a mother who had lost her child and a dying dog, after a bombing in the city he is in. This all mirrors Shehan, the author, who was 14 when the semi-fictionalized events of the novel took place, and likely frustrated at his teenage inefficacy in getting through life, let alone easing the suffering of those around you as they are embroiled in the swamps of war.

The book is strongly magical realist, and reminds me of Master and Margarita or Mayazaki a la Spirited Away. Maali finds himself in a spirit world with it’s own logic and rules and governance, and no one cares to explain it to Maali.

The novel wrestles with questions of what we owe our fellow man, how we find peace with the action or inaction we take, whether we can let go of the petty that when held on to can only fester into catastrophe. Maali finds peace in his afterlife, in his realization that life has no path, and the choices you make are what in turn make you, no more, no less.