Shivan plans to return to Colombo to rescue his grandmother from the rundown house she now resides in and which had been once her pride. The novel stands out as an evocative blend of history, politics and religion negotiating immigrant anxieties with love and longing for the homeland. The grandmother’s love is of the ‘hungry ghost’ seen in the common human desire to smother our dear ones, an emotion literally depicted in the turmoil in Sri Lanka that is brought about by the love and struggle for one’s nation state. The deeply personal with all its raw human longing is underpinned by the tragedy of the nation. Selvadurai knits a Buddhist myth into the narrative of his story by borrowing the idea that the dead can be born as hungry ghosts if born greedy in their present life, devoured by an unquenchable desire to possess land, wealth along with an authoritative control over people, a reflection of the struggle for power visible in the nightmare of Sri Lanka’s Tamil and Sinhalese havoc. In this context, it is clear that cultural difference is essentially ambivalent, liminal, and full of ironies and aporias. It would, therefore, be an appropriate point of departure to take up these issues and examine the immigrant who corrupts the purity of a cultural ethos and at the same time contributes to the idea of multiculturalism and plurality. However, the diasporic state throws up an opportunity to think through some of the vexed questions concerning religion and politics, belonging and distance, insider and outsider space. There seems to be no cultural sanctity left any more and the agitated quest for home and belonging continues. People have moved across spaces through history. But there is no one moment for studying this. The existence of spectacular subcultures, of migrants, of asylum seekers, continually opens up those surfaces to other potentially subversive readings. The intention in the novel is not to mount a defence of diasporal space but to focus on constructions of identity and culture, on the contradictory voices within transglobal locations. The Hungry Ghosts is a non-linear novel of dislocation moving from Colombo to Toronto and Vancouver with the gay protagonist, Shivan Rassiah, going through the travails of shedding the painful memories of his turbulent past in Sri Lanka, a past where he seems almost consumed by the obsessive love of his grandmother.

The hungry ghosts by shyam selvadurai