In Funny Boy the destruction of paradise is assigned precise dates and an exact span of time: it starts at 9:30 A.M. on July 25, 1983. It is only a few hours since the novel's teenage narrator and his family have learned that "there [is] trouble in Colombo": the night before, a mob has gone wild after a funeral for thirteen slain soldiers and many Tamil houses have been burned. At 9:30 A.M. the family begins to ready itself for a hasty departure from its own house. "We are supposed to bring a few clothes and one other thing that is important to us. I can't decide which thing to take." But the boy's mother has already decided; not the least of her provisions for the uncertainties of the future is the preparation for the coming age of sorrow: "Amma is taking all the family albums. She says that if anything happens they will remind us of happier days."
All through the day, the family waits in the once-beloved home that has now become a prison. As the hours pass, the narrator seeks consolation in his journal, recording rumors and reports. He hears that the government has distributed electoral lists to help the mobs locate Tamil homes; he is hugely relieved when he is told that a curfew has been declared, and is therefore doubly dismayed to learn that the announcement has made no difference, the mob is still on the rampage. He hears of the police and army watching in silent indifference as a Tamil family is burned alive in a car. At 11:30 P.M. the boy writes: "The waiting is terrible. I wish the mob would come so that this dreadful waiting would end."
The next entry is written a little more than half a day later, but in that brief span of time the world has become a different place. Nothing will ever be the same again; the boy's childhood has become a place apart. This is the moment when history, the connection between time past and time ahead, has ended and memory has become an island that is severed forever from the present and the future. "July 26, 12:30 P.M.: I have just read my last entry and it seems unbelievable that only thirteen hours ago I was sitting on my bed writing in this journal. A year seems to have passed since that time. Our lives have completely changed. I try and try to make sense of it, but it just won't work."
What has happened is this: the long wait has come to an end soon after the writing of the penultimate journal entry. On hearing the chants of an approaching mob, the family has taken refuge in a Sinhala neighbor's house. Huddled in a storeroom, they have listened as their house is burned to the ground.
The morning after, they have looked over the remains of the house. The sight has made little impression; it is almost incomprehensible. The boy notes that his vinyl records have dissolved into black puddles, that the furniture has cracked open to reveal the whiteness of common wood. "I observed all this with not a trace of remorse, not a touch of sorrow for the loss and destruction around me. Even now I feel no sorrow. I try to remind myself that the house is destroyed, that we will never live in it again, but my heart refuses to understand this." It is only later, on being told of the destruction of his grandparents' home, that he is able to grieve: "I thought about childhood spend-the-days and all the good times we had there. These thoughts made me cry. I couldn't cry for my own house, but it was easy to grieve for my grandparents' house." A precocious prescience has led the boy to grasp the precise nature of his grief: he ascribes it not to the immediacy of his own experience but to the memory of better times — to that act of remembrance than which, as Dante's Francesca da Rimini tells us, there is "no greater sorrow": that is to say, in the recollection of better times.
This depiction of the violence of 1983—and to my mind Funny Boy is one of the most powerful and moving accounts of those events — was published in 1994 in Canada, where Shyam Selvadu-rai's family had settled after leaving Sri Lanka. I draw attention to this only to underscore two facts: that Funny Boy was written by a recent immigrant to North America and that it is an act of recollection that tells the story of a departure. These facts appear unremarkable, yet there is to my mind a puzzle here, and it lies in this: an immigrant's story is usually a narrative of arrival, not departure. And nowhere is this more true than in North America.
North America is famously peopled by immigrants, and nowhere else on earth is the experience of immigration so richly figured as it is here: in popular culture, literature, film, and indeed every aspect of public life. In photography, the emblematic image of this experience is that of a family of immigrants standing on the deck of the ship that has brought them across the Atlantic. In these pictures the immigrants' eyes are always turned in the direction of the waiting shore, toward the Statue of Liberty and the towers of the shining city ahead. Many of these immigrants have suffered terrible hardships, yet we would search in vain for similarly powerful images taken at the hour when they boarded the ship: that moment holds only passing interest in this story. This is because, classically, narratives of immigration to North America are stories of arrival, not departure, stories of suffering but not sorrow or regret; they are stories of hope, founded on a belief in the redemptive power of the land ahead. The vitality of these stories derives in no small part from the obvious parallels with the Biblical story of the Promised Land, which is, of course, equally a story of hope and of arrival. Those who followed Moses out of Egypt did not linger to cast glances of melancholy longing upon the Nile. They looked only ahead; their memory of Egypt was of unmitigated suffering; there were no times of joy there to be recalled in wretchedness. The mark of an exodus lies in the direction of these eyes, looking ahead toward the far shore, confident in the belief that the bonds of community will not perish in the process of migration. But this is not the direction in which Selvadurai's narrator has turned his gaze. Here is the novel's penultimate sentence: "When I reached the top of the road, I couldn't prevent myself from turning back to look at the house one last time." And this is how he ends his story, with the narrator looking back, through the rain, at the charred remains of a home that was once filled with happiness.
It is the direction of the gaze that identifies this as a story not of an exodus but of a dispersal, the story of an irrevocable sundering of the dual bonds that tie members of a community to each other and to other like communities. In the experience of an exodus there is an unspoken ambiguity: the sufferings of displacement are tinged with the hope of arrival and the opening of new vistas in the future. A dispersal offers no such consolation: the pain that haunts it is not that of remembered oppression; it is rather that particular species of pain that comes from the knowledge that the oppressor and the oppressed were once brothers. It is this species of pain, exactly, that runs so poignantly through the literature that resulted from the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. We know, from that line of Boethius which Dante was later to give to Francesca da Rimini, that among fortune's many adversities, the most unhappy kind is to nurture the memory of having once been happy.
This is where recollection turns its back on history, for it is the burden of history to make sense of the past, while the memory of dispersal is haunted always by the essential inexplicability of what has come to pass; by the knowledge that there was nothing inevitable, nothing predestined about what has happened; that far from being primordial, the enmities that have led to the sufferings of the present are new and unaccountable; that there was a time once when neither protagonist saw the other as an adversary — a time that will be irrevocably lost with the dissolution of the history that made it possible for many parts to be a whole.