Nishan and Visaka react by moving to America, where their daughters soon assimilate. The children live there in innocent bliss until 1983, when Mala’s husband is brutally murdered by an angry mob during increasing Tamil-Sinhala unrest. Yasodhara’s closest playmate and soul mate is Ravan’s son Shiva. Ravan and his new wife live upstairs while Nishan and Visaka move in downstairs, where they raise daughters Yasodhara and Luxshmi. Visaka’s mother has recently had to rent out the upstairs of her house, and Nishan does not know that Visaka marries him while pining for Ravan, one of her mother’s Tamil tenants. Nishan, an engineer, is deemed acceptable to marry aristocratic Visaka, the daughter of an Oxford-educated Sinhala judge, only because the judge’s expenditures while renovating his home shortly before his death have left his family financially strapped. Free spirit Mala falls in love with another student and marries without traditional arranged nuptials. Nishan and his twin sister, Mala-children of an ambitious Sinhala teacher and a laid-back doctor of uncertain bloodlines-leave their coastal village to attend university in Colombo. The Sri Lankan civil war’s traumatic effect on the island nation's people-and one family in particular-is the subject of this verdantly atmospheric first novel.Īfter a graphic post-coital prologue, Sri Lanka born California resident Munaweera begins her family saga in 1948, when the British leave their former colony Ceylon, where the Tamil majority is looked down on by the lighter-skinned Sinhala ruling class.

Nayomi munaweera