Spun by Murali

Diaspora8217;s dilemmas and a man8217;s life decisions become clear in the cricket stadium

AFTER HIS LAST NOVEL, the dark, ominously computer-game-inspired Heaven8217;s Edge, Romesh Gunesekera could not have sprung a bigger surprise. The Match gathers in its twists and turns all the preoccupations of his fiction, themes that so lyrically drove his first novel, the Booker-prize nominated Reef, as well as the more capacious The Sandglass: exile, ethnic divisions in his na-tive Sri Lanka, ideas of home, identity, family.

Where it differs is in the luminescence that ac-crues with the story8217;s progression. It is not so much that Gunesekera takes any less intensely his inquiry into questions of home and of be-longing. The book8217;s magic lies in how imper-ceptibly playful it becomes. Till at story8217;s end, you are left wondering: what was it all about, this homage to that most beautiful of all games, cricket?

It would not be giving the story away at all to disclose that The Match swings on the hap-penings at the Oval, at a one-day match be-tween India and Sri Lanka in the summer of 2002, that summer when a fragile peace was being sighted in Sri Lanka. It is on that day that Sunny8217;s life comes together, all his past and the circumstances of his present are con-nected in the drift of play so clearly that they show him which way his future must go. That moment in the game gives Sunny, a London-based photographer of Lankan origin, his life8217;s quest, articulated in his distant early adult-hood: 8220;A perfect picture, where the whole world holds its breath.8221;

Sunny and his varied games of cricket have in any case knitted together his life, from his childhood in the Philippines in the care of a single father eager to make his way into the nascent globe-trotting professional class of the seventies, through his university days in England, then into his own stint as father of a creative boy and partner to a woman deter-mined to strike life8217;s decisions on her own terms, and through it all with sustained8212;and dashed8212;attempts to know his country.

But as he leaves behind the informally played and observed games in his life8217;s many isles, as he is drawn into the plays of the na- tional side, which once you walk into the cricket stadium seems to be not so much com-manding the spectators8217; interest as existing specifically to follow the collective, unspoken commands of those in the stands, it is then that clarity strikes.

In that distilled moment, it is tempting to see The Match as a comment on the globalised spectator society, in which technology ena-bles the formation of collectivities beyond the limited confines of space and time 8212; together so intensely in those minutes but destined to va-porise when the spectacle is past. On that match day, as all of Sunny8217;s world arranges it-self into a comprehensible constellation, his mind wanders to who all, across how many seas, must be bound in the day8217;s develop-ments by spectatorhood. In that fairytale ending, then, there is dark humour in this novel too.

Gunesekera, in fact, seems to be playing games. Menace hovers constantly in his book, and it is his great skill as a storyeller that he manages to keep the reader on edge at every turn of the page.