Century of the refugee | Review of Appadurai Muttulingam’s Where God Began, translated by Kavitha Muralidharan

Refugees come in waves and invasions, according to alarmist politicians and the “natives” watching and judging from the safety of their own perches. But every refugee’s story is different, and this seems to be the century in which we will hear — in which we must hear — as many of their stories as possible.

In Sri Lankan author Appadurai Muttulingam’s novel Where God Began, translated from Tamil by Kavitha Muralidharan, a young man is packed off by his family to get him safely out of reach of the rising freedom movement in the island nation. His mother sells land and pays an agent to take him out of the country. The idea is to reach Canada, eventually, and Nishant gets there by way of Colombo, Moscow, Ukraine, Slovakia, and Germany, being passed around from one agent to another. Having got there, it takes him years to gain honest employment. Whether it is worth spending nearly a decade taking one step forward and two steps back is a question every refugee must answer for himself. Nishant’s case for leaving his home and family looks flimsy, and if the reality had been explained to them in the beginning, his family may have taken the risk of keeping him home.

But reality is not what agents deal in. And Muttulingam’s style of writing does not aim at novelistic realism, but builds in a chance to tell half-told tales and anecdotes, as the pilgrims do in The Canterbury Tales. Nishant is housed at first with seven other refugees, and his housemates change and change again. They make repeated attempts to cross borders, sometimes being caught, beaten, jailed, only to start over. Many of the pilgrims in this novel make little progress, to our eyes, leaving family and country to wash dishes in an eatery halfway around the world. But, occasionally, a person miraculously breaks through. The scattered storytelling takes away from what might have been a deeper understanding of the protagonist, who emerges as an unformed character who still has a long journey ahead of him.

The reviewer is the author of ‘Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year’.