Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  But then other governments have a hard time telling the Sri Lankan government to negotiate with the Tigers, because the Tigers obviously have also engaged in other activities. They've attacked civilians, they use suicide bombers—they use tactics that are politically very touchy. Of course they're also dramatically outnumbered. I'm not saying that that justifies it—but they're a smaller force using rather extreme tactics, which then makes it hard for another government, the United States, for example, which has condemned terrorism, to say to the Sri Lankan government, Well, you should really be negotiating with this group to achieve some sort of peace. And of course the Tigers have also been responsible for killing a lot of Tamils who didn't agree with them.

  SM:When did your family leave Sri Lanka, and what part of Sri Lanka do they come from?

  VG: My parents are Ceylon Tamils, which means that my mother's u�r and my father's u�r are both in Jaffna. My parents came to the United States in the 1970s, and there was quite a wave of immigration then. That's very anecdotal, but my father, and my father's classmates from medical school, many of them emigrated around that time.

  SM: How does the diaspora of the Sri Lankan Tamil community worldwide—there are a lot of them all over Europe and America—how do they carry on the memory of what has been lost? How do they deal with this not being able to return? My accountant is a Jaffna Tamil and he keeps describing a lost Eden . . .

  VG: That's similar to how I feel about it, and I wasn't born there. It's interesting, in Toronto where the narrator is for most of the story, there are actually assemblies on Black July every year, and the Tigers were relatively recently declared terrorists in Canada, so it's become a little bit touchier to talk about which of their goals one might support even if one doesn't support their tactics. It becomes very politically complicated for people in the diaspora, and also, the diaspora has been criticized for funding the Tigers in a variety of ways because people overseas are making money that their kin in Sri Lanka are not. A lot of the diaspora, particularly in Canada, left Sri Lanka after 1983, and so they haven't been there for the majority of the war. They haven't seen it as it's been fought in Sri Lanka, and so a popular criticism is: You left. You took your children, we're still here, we're fighting, and either you're funding this war that's killing our kids while you're safely overseas, or You're overseas, so you should support us. That can be spun any number of ways. You owe us because you got out, versus, You owe us to stop the war because you got out.

  SM: Has the war affected your family?

  VG: I can't think of many Sri Lankan families the war has not affected. Sure, the war has affected my family. My father in particular comes from Jaffna, and Jaffna has of course been incredibly affected by the war. My father left Sri Lanka because he anticipated this violence. But those who are really affected are those who were left behind.

  SM: Do you still have relatives living there?

  VG: Yes. Often I don't hear from them. I remember I mailed a letter to a cousin whose birthday it was one month, and she got the letter five months later after her birthday. And that's a pretty mild example of what I mean.

  SM: How do they live there? How do your relatives actually live there? Day to day with all the bombings and the kidnappings? How do they go to school and shop for groceries? How do they do all the things that people do in cities?

  VG: For them it's been that way for such a long time. I don't think that means they take it any easier, but they are not surprised, perhaps, any longer. I went to Sri Lanka last in 2005, and very shortly after that, the village that I visited was evacuated so my whole family was not there. They pick up and go when they have to. I know that one of my cousins' schools was used to house refugees. Electric current in Jaffna is very inconsistent, and one of my cousins was, I think, six years old before he ever saw electricity. There's a thousand inconveniences, and I think they just have stopped adding them up because if they did—What useful purpose would that serve? And at the same time they haven't known it to be any other way.

  SM: An entire generation that's grown up knowing nothing but war.

  VG: Exactly, and some of those people are my relatives. I actually went when it was relatively peaceful, just in the post-tsunami window when it was calm, and I think in different villages the security situation is different. I'm sure that if you're a girl it's probably different. For a long time in Sri Lanka, earlier, in the '80s—it was very risky for young men, because either the Tigers would recruit you or the Sri Lankan Army would assume the Tigers were recruiting you and would harass you or kidnap you or whatever, so especially to be a young person there is very risky.

  SM: What's your impression of the Tamil Tigers? Now they're considered a terrorist group by the States and the European Union. And mainly people in the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka and among the Tamil diaspora—not just Sri Lankan Tamils but also Indian Tamils consider them freedom fighters. What's your impression of this group?

  VG: That's one of the things the book tries to address and says that you can choose to be a moderate in that battle. It's an unfortunate situation. The Tigers at their very beginnings had and still have some legitimate grievances against a government that commits human rights violations. At the same time the Tigers have done incredibly horrible things . . . and have really been ruthless in saying: if you're Tamil and you don't support us, we are not going to brook any dissent. It's really sad that this political grievance has led people to do things that are morally reprehensible on both sides. If you're going to talk about it you have to acknowledge that both sides have done things that are horrifying.

  SM: This is a very complicated political stew. How do you take all of this and turn it into literature? How do you deal with politics like this and have characters who are political without turning didactic, which your novel clearly is not? How do you pull that off ?

  VG: It was really hard, and there are certainly things I wish I could have included that somehow didn't fit. If it wasn't organic to the narrative, it didn't necessarily happen. The family in the book is a Jaffna Tamil family, and so there isn't, for example, really the voice of the Sri Lankan Muslim in the novel.

  Rather than sort of pursue a political agenda, first I think that the point is to have good fiction, and if some sort of statement about morality emerges from that, that's great. But my priority was to make a story that revealed something, and I didn't necessarily want what it was revealing to be so plain.

  The book was checked by a couple of PhD students in anthropology who are my friends, and I listened to them insofar as I could. And in a couple of cases they suggested that I be more specific, but for the good of the narrative, I chose not to. Maybe the point wasn't when a specific riot took place, but rather that there were riots all the time, and maybe it doesn't matter when they took place because they were so ubiquitous.

  SM: And this is your first book, and obviously it's a deeply personal book because the path that your own family took is apparent in it. Novelists voyeur into invented worlds so it should not be read as biography or memoir—

  VG: I hope not. [Laughs]

  SM: What's your personal stake in the book? It comes through, the passion that you have, the feeling for the characters. How necessary was this book for you to write?

  VG: For a book to be good, from my point of view, it has to be necessary. It was very necessary. I started writing it as my senior thesis in college, but it actually changed quite a bit after that. It started as a story that was really about a family and it became a story that was about a family in politics and a family that was choosing to be active in politics as opposed to a family that had politics happen to them. Although both elements are still in the book, and I do think that the political dilemma of the narrator is one that I personally think is important for me as someone who was born and raised in the U.S. but still, in classic Roots fashion, feels a responsibility to where my parents came from. It's important to engage politically. Even when it's extremely complicated. Even when it's inconvenient. Even whe
n it's politically hairy. The more I learned about the war the more that I felt that I was compelled to say something about it, not in the voice of an activist, but in the voice of an artist.

  Reading Group Questions and Topics

  for Discussion

  1. At the beginning of the novel, Yalini befriends and then breaks off her friendship with an unnamed male. What do you think draws her to him in the first place? Why does she break off the friendship? What does the relationship tell you about her character?

  2. There are several obvious doubles in the novel—Yalini and Janani, Kunju and Tharshi, Murali and Kumaran. Why do you think pairs are so important? How do these relationships compare and relate to each other? Can you think of any other significant pairs?

  3. Why do you think Ganeshananthan chooses to write in fragmented vignettes?

  4. Father-daughter relationships are important to this book. How does Murali and Yalini's relationship compare with Kumaran and Janani's relationship? How is Yalini's budding relationship with Kumaran different from her relationship with Murali?

  5. Yalini describes her family as “globe-scattered” (See “In this global-scattered Sri Lankan family . . .” Chapter). How is setting important in the novel? What do you see as the places that are most important to Yalini's family story? How, in particular, is Toronto significant? Jaffna? America?

  6. Violence plays a large part in this story—some incidents are personal, some political, and some accidental. Yalini's great-grandfather's murder, various sets of ethnic riots, the violence between Rajan and Harini, and the burns suffered by Kunju all mark milestones in the novel. How do incidents of emotional violence accomplish something similar? Do they?

  7. When she meets Kumaran, Yalini becomes the unofficial family historian. Later, she says that, in order to do so, she had to learn to think in the first person. Why is it so important to Yalini to tell her family's story?

  8. Why do you think Ganeshananthan chooses the title Love Marriage? How is it important to each of the relationships that she writes about?

  9. After trying several times to stop Janani's wedding, Yalini comes to a realization. She says: “She was doing it for him, because she thought he would want to see tradition preserved, if not in the form of a Tamil country, then in the form of a Tamil daughter” (See “Kumaran had grown up with my mother . . .” Chapter). Do you agree with Yalini about Janani's motivations? How do they set her apart from Yalini? Do you believe that this is what Kumaran wanted for his daughter?

  10. Even after the attack on the wedding site, Janani still marries Suthan. How does this choice affect or implicate Yalini in political violence?

  11. At the end of the novel, Yalini asks herself whether she, if faced with the same situations as Kumaran and Janani, would have acted similarly, saying: “governments call men terrorists to erase their reason, to make them crazy. Some of them are, and some of them are not. What does that make me?” (See “After my uncle died, I returned . . .” Chapter). How do you think Yalini comes to terms with Kumaran's actions? Do you think she too would have joined the Tigers had she not lived in America?

  12. Tharshi's daughter Uma does not fit into the marriage categories that Yalini lays out on the first page. Instead, Tharshi says that her daughter was “Too Special to Get Married.” Later, Yalini confesses that she has much of Uma in her. Do you think that Yalini will ever get married? Or is she, also, Too Special?

  V. V. GANESHANANTHAN received her BA in 2002

  from Harvard, where Love Marriage

  began as her senior thesis. She graduated from

  the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2005,

  served for a year as the Writer in Residence

  at Phillips Exeter Academy, and earned an MA

  in journalism from Columbia University in 2007.

  Love Marriage is her first novel.

  She lives in New York City.

  Her website is www.vasugi.com

  Love Marriage is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Random House Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2008 by Vasugi Ganeshananthan

  Title page map courtesy of antiqueprints.com

  Reading group guide copyright © 2008 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  RANDOM HOUSE READER'S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBARAY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN -PUBLICATION DATA

  Ganeshananthan, V. V.

  Love marriage : a novel / V.V. Ganeshananthan.

  p. cm.

  1. Sri Lankan Americans—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Family—Fiction. 3. Intergenerational relations—Fiction. 4. Tamil (Indic people)—Social conditions—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.A455L68 2008

  813'.6—dc22 2007024120

  www.randomhousereaderscircle.com

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-689-4

  v3.0