Nihal De Silva's novel opens at the Elephant Pass camp, the narrow isthmus guarding the approach to the Jaffna peninsula, during the war in the North. Captain Wasantha Ratnayake of the Sri Lanka Army is ordered to escort Kamala Velaithan, a member of the LTTE who claims to be carrying information worth hearing. An attack on the camp and an ambush on the road leave the two of them on foot, with no transport and no escort, somewhere they cannot afford to be seen.
What follows is a walk south through rebel-held country and then through the Wilpattu forest. Poachers, elephants and the ordinary hazards of the jungle press on them as hard as the war does, and each of them begins the journey convinced the other is lying. The novel gives most of its weight to that: a soldier and a woman from the movement he has spent years fighting, forced into a dependence neither wants, with distrust wearing down a little further each day they stay alive together.
De Silva wrote the book in English and it was published in Colombo by Vijitha Yapa Publications. It won the Gratiaen Prize, the award for creative writing in English by Sri Lankan writers, and was later nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award. It was adapted for the screen by Chandran Rutnam, released in Sinhala as Alimankada; the film's ending departs from the one in the novel, which is worth knowing for readers who have seen it first.
The setting is handled with a surveyor's attention to ground — distances covered, water found or not found, which route can be risked in daylight — and the Wilpattu sections carry a particular interest in the forest itself, its animals and the people who move through it illegally. Readers who come to the book expecting a war novel will find that much of it is a survival story in which the war is the reason the two characters are where they are.
Nihal De Silva also wrote The Far Spent Day and The Ginirella Conspiracy. This remains the novel he is most read for, and it is one of the better-known works of Sri Lankan fiction in English to take the conflict in the North as its subject while keeping the story at the scale of two people trying to reach safety.
Suited to readers of Sri Lankan fiction in English, to anyone interested in writing that came out of the war years, and to visitors who have travelled the A9 or spent time in Wilpattu and want the landscape in narrative form.
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