Vv Ganeshananthan Quotes

Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.

You can’t just stay in the house studying. You have to see the world yourself—don’t let others tell you what it looks like.

A working-class girl who narrowly escaped assault filed a complaint,” Anjali wrote. “For her bravery and honesty, much of Jaffna thanked her with rumour.

Turn a dead boy into a militant and his death is excusable, you see. Every Tamil boy born in the year I was born was acceptable collateral damage.

Evil is not limited by what you personally can imagine.

I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes.

You must understand: There is no single day on which a war begins. The conflict will collect around you gradually, the way carrion birds assemble around the vulnerable, until there are so many predators that the object of their hunger is not even visible. You will not even be able to see yourself in the gathering crowd of those who would kill you.

... governments call men terrorists to erase their reason, to make them crazy. Some of them are, and some of them are not.

I go only to return," I said because Tamil has no words for last goodbyes.

We were not from the same place or the same community, but she understood me so well that with her, I had neither to explain nor conceal myself.

So we were not friends at first, although he had already been more intimate with me than any other boy I had known.

But then the lights winked out across the peninsula, as boy after boy I had known and loved was extinguished or gone.

Don’t ever say that again,” she said. “That you’d rather die. I had five children, and only two of you are with me, and God knows where your father is, so when I tell you to do it, Sashikala, you had better get in.

Many people have died there: some killed by the Sri Lankan Army and the state, some by the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and some by the Tamil separatists, whom you know as the terrorists. Many people, of course, have also lived.

But it’s easy for someone to look at what is happening and say that in the same situation, they wouldn’t do the same thing. Who knows what they would do in such a situation?

Do you know how many people are in the No-Fire Zone?” I asked him. “The government is shelling although they know civilians are there, and the movement is holding people hostage.

As the Aragalaya movement continues, and as people struggle to live in Sri Lanka, I write in solidarity from Minneapolis.

The British are known for their tea, but honestly, it was awful. Strange, considering they get the export quality. Do sit down.

my grandmother left, we became unable to talk to each other, perhaps because we had nothing to say except to blame each other and ourselves for what had happened.

Of course the Tigers wanted the Indians to leave. They had never intended to disarm or to abide by the terms of an agreement they had not negotiated directly.

I can’t tell people to be responsible for their choices and then make yours for you.

But we could no longer bear the discrimination of a government dominated by the majority Sinhalese, the Tamil politicians declared: no more second-class status for our language, double standards and quotas for Tamil students, government-run Sinhala colonization schemes in traditionally Tamil areas, no more government-fomented anti-Tamil violence. The 1958 riots had taken place ten

The Tamil civilians, who had originally welcomed their arrival, quickly realised that rather than finding relief from the Tamil militants and the Sri Lankan forces, they had invited yet another antagonist into the room.

First Aran had wanted me not to support the militants, and then he had wanted me to protect myself, to be his sister before being an activist, and in both parts of my life I had failed him. I could not apologise. Still he came for me, and I understood that after all, he loved me.

I had first come to appreciate precision as a form of love during my time as a zoology student, under Sir's tutelage, but since those days I had found it in other, unexpected places, I saw it in that room, in that girl. Her attention to each devasted mother was total, her eyes huge and focused.

I have no affection for the dramatic, and so I describe it to you plainly, as it was: a man in a grey building, behind a desk, as ordinary-looking as so many other men and so many other desks in New York, telling me that tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent people were going to be killed, and that there was nothing either of us could do, even though neither of us had any greater purpose than standing in the way of such a thing.

There are no microphones, no stage, no crowds, no priests, no clear signs of what has taken place here, except for all the survivors who know it did. You must understand: this is not the book for which Anjali died. You can find that book in your library. This is the one next to it on the shelf. I can promise you there will be another, and another. Whose stories will you believe? For how long will you listen? Tell me why you think you are here, and that will be as true as anything I can say.

... Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. They would blow themselves up to take others with them, targeting symbols and representatives of the state; they would attack civilians and eat cyanide to avoid imprisonment. They would kill other Tamils who did not agree with them—other rebels, politicians, and even civilians. They would fight against a government that shelled, starved, and tortured its own citizens. They would renounce their families and bring children and women into their ranks. They would be called terrorists. They would enter into a world in which no one was right.

I learned to believe that a government could kill its own and drive them to commit unspeakable crimes. That no one would be right, but that some would be more wrong.

We had been taught to think that Tamil children should only be that obedient to their parents, and it was strange to see another loyalty. And were the two of them perhaps loyal to people who treated them poorly?

How seamlessly we had moved into the space of censoring ourselves around those we loved the most.

If you cared about what was safe for me, you wouldn’t have brought him here!” I exclaimed. “If you cared about what was safe for you, you wouldn’t have let me in,” K said.

I think the movement was wrong to kill Sir,” I said. “That is not how we should be treating our own people. You wanted to be a doctor, and now you’re with a movement that will kill people for disagreeing.” “I’m with a movement fighting for

None of us asked which struggle she meant. It seemed that not having read the book was not going to prevent her from participating.

I do too,” he said earnestly. “Our country cannot afford to lose people like you.

The pro-Tiger protestors of the Tamil diaspora waved their flags in cities around the world and failed to acknowledge that the militants were complicit in civilian death. The government and its supporters alleged that any grief for Tamil civilians was only a ploy to stop them from defeating the terrorists. Calls for international intervention or a ceasefire yielded nothing.

Sri Lanka has come to a crossroads. In the wake of disastrous economic mismanagement by the government, the country is running short on fuel. Low-income communities are bearing the brunt of current hardships, including massive price hikes on essential goods. In response to these conditions,

leaving in their wake peoples divided by colonial powers, ancestral angers, and bullheaded pride.

Our people talk as if your life is over if you are not a doctor, or an engineer, or an accountant. So much pressure to be the same things! But look at him—or look at Appa. There are plenty of other ways to live.

During that time, I realised how little I had known my brother, and how much I wanted to know his friend.

I liked the idea of being able to heal with some plants and substances and protect myself from others;

A family house is for family, your grandfather would have said,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “Thanking your family is not necessary. Come, Dr. Niranjan, and eat.

Even in Jaffna, we knew how the government had brutally killed so many members of that southern insurrection. The bodies of young Sinhalese men had floated down rivers. The state controlled what it wanted to control.

pressed their feet into the sands of India, which trained them, gave them guns, and sent them back to wage war.

It’s not your fault,” Amma said, with some difficulty. “My sons make their own choices.” “K would have convinced them,” Neelo Aunty said, and reddened more.

Why should I go for such a request?” Aran asked when my mother brought it up. “What right do they have to be detaining people in such a fashion?

No militant group should be able to claim credit for it or to use it to promote their own slogans or causes. One woman who had come with a sign for Tamil Eelam argued with Mrs. Premachandran for a while and then left.

You studied your whole lives for the chance to go to school. And you gave it up without thinking.” I had never heard her say something so direct to them. Usually, it was Appa who reminded us of the importance of education.

My mother cut Gandhi’s picture from the newspaper and garlanded it and put it in our family shrine, next to a photograph of Periannai.

Now we knew that the government was willing to do more than just detain us; they would kill us and say that we were with the movement. People who had at first been sceptical of the groups began, slowly, to speak of them with more sympathy. I was one of these people, even as I feared what the movement could do.

So your movement will kill someone, but deliver the news kindly?

Didn’t K owe me more than this? Niranjan and Dayalan gone; Aran isolated at twenty, ducking the militant groups and waiting to enroll or leave; Seelan all but lost to me.

When they came to enforce the accord—and especially the Tigers’ disarmament—many soldiers from the IPKF found that we Tamils did not exactly match their idea of people who needed saving.

all of Jaffna will see you. The government will see you. The Indians will see you. And the movement will have succeeded in putting you where they want you.

See how others have come to enslave us! The Dutch, the Portuguese, the British, the Sinhalese, the Indians—their accords and promises cannot stop our liberation. The banner of Tamil freedom will fly over this fort. The Indians must go.

This fast is nothing more than an act of instigation!” Mr. Dixit said. “You are trying to get the Tamils of Sri Lanka to rise up against those who were sent to protect them.

His dying made him no more saintly than he had been in life, which is to say not very. This made it worse to mourn him. And while in many ways he did resemble the boy who had been my friend, in its hunger and thirst his body had travelled a great distance from its previous self.

chance

If you are quiet, like Dayalan, no one asks you to be accountable for much.

Women were especially suited to nonviolence as a strategy, Gandhi opined, because of their ability to withstand suffering. I don’t want to withstand suffering, I wanted to shout back at the page, and I don’t want my mother to withstand it either.

Unlike men, they were not interested in credit, only success, and laid their plans accordingly.

What can I tell you about being in the presence of such a warm person? No one looking at the sun thinks about how swiftly it can be eclipsed.

If you have ever told such a lie, you know that when dreaming of another self, you will reach first for the name of someone you love.

FOR TWENTY YEARS IT was like that. I delivered a stream of information to the United Nations, and they listened

You won’t read about that anywhere,” the driver says. “That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

In this country of grief, the best kind of shelter is to be understood, to have someone stop next to me and, without asking anything, put their umbrella over us both, between us and the rain.

His chest rose; his chest stilled, and once more I anticipated its descent. I waited, and the space of that wait grew infinite.

Still, like so much else about our war that I wish were implausible, it remains true, regardless of who believes it or not.

In the Colombo refugee camp, I had longed for a book to remove me from reality. With every chapter I read now, I felt not removed but partially returned to a safety I had thought entirely lost. I tethered my interior life to the pages, which the people I loved had turned in different times and places.

Now the language of instruction was Tamil; although I spoke excellent English, I could not say a word in Sinhala. My future depended on a language I did not know, no one wanted to teach me, and, on principle, I did not want to learn.

In the years since those days, people have asked me not only to remember the riots but also to explain them. How can I explain? I want you to understand: leaving my grandmother’s house was the first choice I made without my brother, the first choice I made alone. I decided how to proceed, but how little I remember, how little I know for certain. I have tried to retrace my own steps, to find where I made mistakes, to repair them. What could I have done differently to travel once more with my brother, to see Rajendran smoking at the top of the lane, to keep Nanthini Chelliah from becoming a widow? You must understand—or someday, I must understand: there was nothing I could have done.

He was reckless with his intelligence, I guarded mine.