Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats With The Dead opens with the awakening of photographer Malinda Almeida in the afterlife. The year is 1989 and ...
Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats With The Dead opens with the awakening of photographer Malinda Almeida in the afterlife. The year is 1989 and the place is Colombo, Sri Lanka – circumstances in which it is not unusual to die before one’s time. Known to everyone as Maali, the thirty-four-year old whose clients included the army, LTTE and the foreign press in Sri Lanka has no recollection of how he died.
The country’s civil war has been raging for six years at the time and Maali has photographed each gruesome aspect including government and LTTE atrocities, the role of the Indian army, the inefficacy and corruption of the foreign press and more. The list of people who might want him dead is lengthy and he must rely on the afterlife’s middle men and fixers to access the world he has left behind in search of answers.
The bureaucratic and chaotic afterlife in which he finds himself is filled with his city’s dead. Some faces are familiar to him – subjects in his photographs – but there is no idyllic community forged by death and waiting for him in this plane. These are people who shouldn’t have died, who would rather rejoin the living. As the novel...
