![]() Selvadurai plays a sly trick on the reader. The book takes its title from the Buddhist parable told to Shivan by his Sinhalese grandmother, of perethayas, or "hungry ghosts": People who ask for too much from life, and are therefore reborn with enormous bellies, but minuscule mouths, so that they'll never be able to satisfy their hunger. Selvadurai's long-awaited new book, The Hungry Ghosts, is the story of Shivan Rassiah, a young gay man, and his dysfunctional Tamil-Sinhalese family living, at first, in Sri Lanka and, later, in Canada. ![]() His family-mother Sinhalese, father Tamil-also left Sri Lanka for Canada in 1983, and the scars of that experience are one of the themes that run through his works, right from his first, precociously brilliant Funny Boy. There was a similar trauma in Shyam Selvadurai's life. The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai Penguin Price: RS 599 Pages: 373 Between the coversĪmasterlywriter with a gift for marrying the personal with the political and cultural, Selvadurai paints a painful portrait of not just the protagonist, his familyand his love life,but also of Sri Lanka in the 1980s. ![]()
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