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Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Penguin India, 2022.

Nearly the first impression you get in The Seven Moon of Maali Almeida is that not only are the dead many, their ghosts are even more numerous. They hover around, creating moods and whisper thoughts in the ears of the living.

A war photographer, Maali Almeida has been killed and awakes in the afterlife, a kind of celestial transit station full of creatures filled with despair. His dismembered body is sinking in Beira Lake in Colombo and he has no idea who killed him. Payback by a death squad, a suicide bomber or hired goons are all possibilities. He has “‘seven moons’ (seven nights) to find out who killed him and contact loved ones so they can find a cache of photographs that will shock Sri Lanka.

With the aid of a “Helper” (a volunteer soul who has visited the Light, opting to come back to help the confused dead) and other ghosts, Almeida floats around eavesdropping on the living, attempting to whisper thoughts to those who can help solve both mysteries.

It all sounds “dark”, but Almeida, the living, and the other residents of the afterlife are also comical, contemptuous, unsentimental, and ridiculous about their situation. Humour as a coping mechanism perhaps, but this also reflects the matter-of-factness of people where atrocities are the everyday. The novel is genre-complex: it is at once a whodunnit, a thriller, and an existential fable. I’ve also seen it called an “afterlife noir”. Almeida being a gay man living during the AIDs crisis of the 1980s against the backdrop of a communitarian-driven civil war adds another dimension to the novel.

A first-person narrative told in the second person—“You felt yourself split into you and the I, and then the many yous and the infinite I’s that you have been before and will be again”—has both a distancing and reflecting effect, helping our protagonist to look at his own life bit more dispassionately, a bit more about how he used the hand he was dealt with.

Almeida has only seven moons “to wander to recall past lives” so it’s a race against the clock and then to forget, “because when you forget, nothing changes”. Whether you consider Almeida’s quest successful or not, nothing will bring an end to the violence of the wicked nor make the innocent secure. Despite this, he concludes that the “kindest thing” you can say about life is that “it’s not nothing”. Still, we can still try to let innocent voices speak as this novel does.

Almeida says, in understated fashion, “You have one response for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts.” Delete “Colombo”, insert “Rwanda”, “Somalia”, “Syria”…

How to cite: Eagleton, Jennifer. “Wait Till You See it With Ghosts: Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 22 Aug. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/08/22/maali-almeida.

Jennifer Eagleton, a Hong Kong resident since October 1997, is a close observer of Hong Kong society and politics. Jennifer has written for Hong Kong Free Press, Mekong Review, and Education about Asia. Her first book is Discursive Change in Hong Kong (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and she is currently writing another book on Hong Kong political discourse for Palgrave MacMillan. Her poetry has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, People, Pandemic & ####### (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), and Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art (Cart Noodles Press, 2023). A past president of the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society, Jennifer teaches and researches part-time at a number of universities in Hong Kong. [All contributions by Jennifer Eagleton.]

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