He first sent his mom back to Colombo and now smartly packs off the gospeller trio. Evangelists, who had managed to make certain advances into the old soul with their successive visits where Mama treats them with oriental courtesies, finally face a snub-from none other than her son: a seasoned Canadian Lankan. Such an opening account sets the kind of intended humour, which sustains suitably with the progress of the story. Mama (or mother, as the character is referred to) is “baffled” that, say, no device or facility at her new home in the continental-climate country has locks-something so essential to the gates, doors, table-drawers and storage-boxes back in her Colombo. Yet, she somewhat smoothly adapts to the conditions of the new country she seems destined to live in. ‘After Yesterday’ is far from misery-and chiefly portrays a woman, who is elderly as well. The title-name short story has its main character-again a Lankan Tamil in Canada-contrasting in its character(s). The Toronto-settled Sri Lankan Tamil’s collection has recently been published by Delhi’s Ratna Books as After Yesterday, translated by Chenaiite Padma Narayanan. ‘The Good Earth’ is among 19 such stories by Appadurai Muttulingam, who was born five years after an American novel by the same name won the Nobel Prize in 1932. He finally had a piece of land that truly belonged to him.” The story ends thus: “Seelan’s snow-covered body, which was born in Mayillidi, Yazhppanam and which escaped Mullivaikkal and reached here via Thailand, was now laid to rest in Toronto. Weeks later, the ex-Tiger yet again disappears. Such ways annoy his mother, who later poses a question that further irks the son: “What did you do on your days-off?” For, armed fighter has no holidays-anywhere in the world. Chilly Canadian April is when he still goes out to stare at the sky and “listen to the sounds” of the month that is pleasant in tropical Ceylon. The parent expects the son to assist him in the factory, but Seelan shows no signs of even acclimatising himself in the ‘foreign’ country. The mansion his businessman-father has built in Canada astounds Seelan. From there, he has been flown into the multi-ethnic trans-Atlantic country, the world’s second-largest by area.
Then, after the civil war for an Elam ended unsuccessfully for its fighters in summer 2009, Seelan was located in a rehabilitation camp. As Seelan went missing and his parents lost hope of tracing the boy, they migrated to Toronto.
It had been a combat-riddled routine for the man right from his late teenage when he joined the militant outfit that was formed in 1976 to secure an independent State for the Tamils in the north of the island-nation. Seelan’s stray statement during a conversation with his mother in Canada where he has just landed functions as the key for the author to narrate the protagonist’s past life as an LTTE soldier back in the family’s native Sri Lanka. For someone who has carried a gun for 20 years, it feels “strange” to be without one.
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