Romancing with the enemy
An absorbing fiction set in the grim reality of the tattered nation that is Sri Lanka, wrecked by war for decades.
The Road From Elephant PassNihal De SilvaVijitha Yapa Publications2004FictionPages: 359Price: Rs 550ISBN: 955-8095-38-9PaperbackNihal de Silva may be a bad golfer, as he himself acknowledges, but he is no bad writer at all!
Spinning fiction out of a living, present-day reality is a difficult task for even a seasoned writer. But Nihal has done it with a fair degree of success in The Road from Elephant Pass - his maiden attempt.
The grim reality of Sri Lanka is that it is a tattered nation, wrecked by war for decades. Nearly 60,000 lives, mostly innocent, have been lost. Another 6,00,000 have been internally displaced with only refugee camps to fall back upon.
The Road from Elephant Pass attempts to get under the skin of the bitter-sweet relationship between the two major communities inhabiting Sri Lanka - the Sinhalese, who are the majority, and the minority Tamils, who are fighting for a separate state led by the ruthless Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the LTTE.
A Sinhalese army officer's assignment to pick up a woman informant of the LTTE, turns turtle, when the Tigers attack the army camp in Elephant Pass, a narrow causeway that divides the Wanni region and the Jaffna peninsula further north.
Elephant Pass has been a strategic military base since 1760 and has changed hands many times. Many battles were fought over this narrow isthmus of land, and thousands have perished in defending or securing it. Finally, in 2000, the LTTE launched Operation Oyatha Alaigal III (Unceasing Waves) and captured it.
This grim incident serves as a backdrop for Nihal's story. The two adversaries -- Captain Wasantha from the Lankan army, and Kamala Velaithan from the LTTE -- travel all the way from Wanni to Colombo on foot braving wild animals, poachers, and not to forget, LTTE sleuths!