Author(s): V.V. Ganeshananthan

Fiction

'In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first towards the second. 'Among the categories that bleed outside these two carefully delineated boundaries: the Self-Arranged Marriage, the Outside Marriage, the Cousin Marriage, the Village Marriage, the Marriage Abroad. there is the Marriage Without Consent. There is the Marriage Under Pressure. There is even Marrying the Enemy, who, it turns out, is not the Enemy at all.' Reverse a family tree and branches of blood are whittled down to one person - in this case, the young female narrator, Yalini - composed of all the women and men who came before her; the result of many marriages. Parents want nothing more than to prevent their children from colliding with inevitability: that in a different world, there is a different kind of marriage.Yet Tamil and Sinhalese parents - particularly after the great ethnic violence in Sri Lanka in 1983 - watch helplessly as their children cut themselves free of the need to please their ancestors.