NOON TIDE TOLL: The blood flowing in the veins of Sri Lanka

What happens to a nation when a war that has raged on for thirty years comes to a full stop? What do people do with the sudden silence, the blank peace? What happens to a place that has been wiped out by a tsunami? What do people do with the ‘clean’ open spaces? Romesh Gunasekara takes you on a ride aboard a van across the north and south of Sri Lanka, picking up tales, dreams and heartache in the wake of events that make lives collapse.

Noon Tide Toll reads almost like a collection of short stories, strung together by the voice of Vasantha, the van-driver who carries people of all colours and shapes across the country to their respective destinations. The book is divided into two sections—North and South—and begins with ‘Full Tank’, ending with precision at ‘Running on Empty’. The chapters have curious, beckoning titles that echo in your mind as you finish one after another… ‘Deadhouse’, ‘Scrap’, ‘Roadkill’, ‘Ramparts’, ‘Turtle’, ‘Humbug’…

Every single story carries a wealth of meaning and an ocean of emotion. More appropriately, a mutli-hued universe of emotion. The characters are as varied as a Chinese delegation looking for ‘economic avenues’ and their young translator; a priest and an acolyte-who’s-really-a-reporter hunting down a war-criminal, a soldier who has killed his sweetheart’s brother in the war and his haunted by the act forever, a nightwatchman who is ‘lucky’ because he survived the tsunami…even as all twenty-two members of his family perished. You can’t really choose your favorite section from the book, because every one of them will linger on in your mind like a distant, unforgettable aroma.

However, I’ll be a bit partial and point to ‘Scrap’ as the one that astonishes the most, with descriptions that you’d scarcely ever read, much less ever see. It is the ‘scrap’ that the Chinese executives are interested in, which is really whole fields full of confiscated vehicles from the LTTE. “If architecture is said to be frozen music, then what was before us was frozen pandemonium. Cars, vans, lorries, cycles, scooters, every kind of vehicle jumbled up and abandoned in creeks and ditches”…. “It seemed as though the transport of a nation has been gathered here and turned to scrap.”

The chapter ends with a scene at the beach, at a wrecked ship captured by the Tigers earlier; but the most astonishing image is that of a pop-video being filmed in the foreground. That’s Gunasekara’s metaphor for you; the future being created on the rubble of the past. How the scrap of the past gets recycled into a shiny future.  But, and this is the little voice that runs through each of the chapters, asking the nagging question: can the past really be erased? As Vasantha asks himself, can there really be a clean slate? Can you really, like Dr Ponnampalam who returns to his country—after almost half a century—with his son Mahen, reconcile yourself and create life anew amid the ruins of the old?

These are questions that he leaves for you to answer. Neither despondent nor overly hopeful, Vasantha is a man who reflects and observes, and has a hundred questions he wants to ask…questions that Gunasekara waves as reflection points for his reader. His pen moves in simple, serene strokes. With a steady, silent rhythm like a van’s moving wheels, the story is like an actual roadtrip for you, steadily swaying from side to side as you take in what the road has to offer.

Gunasekara chooses to end with hope. Mr Van Man, bring me a dream….

TOMS RIVER: The small town that drank poisoned water

How would you feel if you were told that the water you’ve been drinking every day for several decades contains toxic waste from a nearby factory? And how would you feel when you’re told that this was known by the companies in question but nobody bothered? And then, how would you feel if a child in your family is born with brain cancer because his mother drank the water while she was pregnant? This, in short, is the outline of the skeleton that tumbles out of the closet in New Jersey’s small town of Toms River.

A Pulitzer Prize-winner is a book that needs no other recommendation. But even so, a book like Toms River is a treasured possession nonpareil. On the face of it, it’s the story of one town’s battle for answers—answers to why the dreaded tentacles of cancer were enveloping its children at a starkly alarming rate; a battle against toxic dumpers and apathetic state agencies. But this isn’t the story of one town. It’s the story of the world we are living in, it’s a story that is much more chilling than any supernatural horror tale or gory serial-killer saga, because it’s the kind of slow, invisible horror that could attack anyone anywhere.

This is amazingly in-depth investigative journalism by Dan Fagin, which traces almost the entire evolution of cancer research and the case-study of clusters to correlate the causes, along with the sixty year saga of polluting of a town’s river, soil, air and groundwater by callous industrial behemoths —Ciba Geigy and Union Carbide— who refused to comply with state regulations or build waste-treatment plants because those things would incur huge costs and eat into their profits. That the cost of these profits would be borne by children getting blood, brain and spinal cancers was a point that didn’t seem to matter.

Among the industrial ‘villains’ that feature, Union Carbide is a name that Indians can never forget – for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The book highlights the very tragic reality that under cover of providing ‘mass employment’ and ‘economic growth’, industrial giants are allowed to get away—literally—with murder.

Fagin hits you in the gut with the tons upon tons of stomach-churning details, but never a dull page would you find. Every line is worth poring over, because Fagin’s astonishing writing prowess alternates so superbly between the emotional, the medical and the criminal. Every chapter is replete with facts and research yet has the quality of a fast-flowing page turner.

But sadly, unlike a regular thriller, there is no retribution at the end. The families battle it out, waiting for scientists to establish that the companies’ pollution did indeed lead to their children’s suffering. But statistical tools and scientific research prove inadequate and whatever little progress is made is outshouted by lobbying and business clout.

There were, of course, victories: like the clean-up operation which treated ‘343,000 cubic yards of soil’—“enough to cover twenty seven football fields with six feet of tainted dirt”, the charging of Ciba at various counts and the “the largest legal settlement in the annals of toxic dumping.” Yet, the feeling at the end is that of rage and helplessness. 

You read the book with eyes popping out and mouth contorted, wondering how much of this could be happening in the place you call your own. Particularly when time and again, the book says that dye-making operations—complete with killer gases and carcinogenic wastes—have moved to Asia on account of cheaper labour. It ends, in fact, with exactly the same happening in South China. You and I have reason to shudder, especially when the blackened Toms River reminds you of the scarred Yamuna frothing sickly at the mouth…

This is a book that simply must be read, if only to shake us out of our ‘growth-induced’ stupor.