Chinaman (Shehan Karunatilaka, 2025)
I first encountered Shehan Karunatilaka’s work when his book, Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the Booker Prize. I picked this one up during a half decade long reading slump and figured the trippy cover would open up to a story just as spectacular. I wasn’t wrong. It was easily the most acerbic piece of writing I’d read all year and this in turn triggered a reading habit that I’ve acquired again, now in my early thirties. Upon finishing the book, I spent a week revelling in the afterglow of its writing, reflecting upon the themes, and in between all that shuddered to think about the real characters upon which the book was based. After this, in what should appear as a serious lapse of basic modern internet etiquette, I moved on to the next book without so much as a cursory glance at the author’s oeuvre or a shallow wiki-search for information regarding the Jaffna struggle. I’d found my reading stride and onwards I went.
It was only until a month ago when a friend from Sri Lanka, overhearing me profess my love for cricket at a type conference no less, asked me if I ever heard about this author called Shehan Karunatilaka.
Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman, has the same satirical bite as his second. Both books are set against the decrepit bureaucracy of the Sri Lankan government, and the trauma of the never-ending-war. Both are first person narratives by protagonists who struggle to stay cogent on account of either boozing (Chinaman) or being dead (Seven Moons). While I appreciate Karunatilaka’s sophomore outing as it is a more mature and well edited work of fiction, I enjoyed the first a lot more. Partly because Chinaman deals with cricket — another rekindled pastime — and mainly because this feels like a raw unencumbered book even with, nay, especially because of all the trappings and excesses that comes with being a debut.
The premise: our main man WeeGee (Wije as he is known amongst friends) is a brilliant, drunk, thus socially maligned sportswriter. ‘Unlike life, sports matters’ he proclaims, this despite confessing that he adores his wife Sheila and would take a bullet for his drifter of a son Garfield. Alas, his arrack lined liver has given him less than a year to live and thus faced with his mortality, he dedicates the rest of his life to the sole purpose of solving the mystery of the greatest cricketer that never was: The Tamil Sri Lankan Chinaman bowler Pradeep Sivanathan Mathew. According to the legend, he bowled not just left arm leg spin but also right arm pace, could mimic any bowler he saw, bowled the rare spinning double bounce ball (which, for those who do not follow cricket, is illegal and impossible) and possessed the ability to bamboozle even the great Australian batsmen of the time.
In a country like Sri Lanka obsessed with cricketing success it would seem odd that a paragon of excellence such as Pradeep would go missing, undocumented even. But, Wije and Ari — his neighbour and best friend — know he exists because they are sure they have seen him bowl, even when the scorecards suggest otherwise.
And it is this act of witnessing, remembering and sharing that animates this quest. The plot follows Wije and his friends blunder across the Sri Lankan cricket bureaucracy, their suspects and informants ranging from a cantankerous midget living in a colonial era bunker underneath a stadium to the warlord sequestered away in a cul-de-sa-turned-witsec-housing. Throughout the book Wije parlays his convivial albeit abrasive company for insider information only to confront the reality that neither Pradeep nor the men and women who once peopled his life want this story known.
Wije wears his cynicism lightly; he colours with humour his standoffs with a turgid cricket bureaucracy and even employs the same sardonic tone while describing the conflict that hums on in the background. This conceit works because Wije represents that particular strain of borderline apolitical middle-class for whom the war isn’t blood and bullets but unfortunate power cuts and rigged cricket matches.
The writing is styled as half remembered jottings and evokes the episodic manner in which he experiences life in between and sometimes through drunken stupors. The irreverent ramblings and meandering passages of play reveal that Wije is indeed an unreliable narrator. But the kicker is: no one is reliable. Not Ari, not Sheila, not Garfield nor their close friend Graham Snow, nor the suspects or informants. But neither are they painted as outright liars. And, in what appears as a rookie flourish, the novel commits to this bit till the end and this is what endears me to the book. The cocksure writing is a very go-big-fuck-home move that works because the novel is able to rise beyond the basic mechanisms of the plot or the central enigma of sporting greatness. It speaks to the essential nature of sport in society; not why we play, but why we watch.
In Netflix series Pretend It’s a City, the sardonic author and culture critic Fran Lebowitz spends the entire runtime of the fifth episode utterly baffled by the phenomenon that is sport. Her conversation with Spike Lee, part spiritual patron and part mascot of the New York Knicks, has left him huffing, gasping and gulping as she thuds point after point arguing the case against sport, the debased nature of it all. Of course her argument is not against sport, but its outsized importance in society. Why are taxpayers willing to pay for the upkeep of a stadium and not a concert hall? (A valid critique especially if one considers the state of the arts in the world today). She calls fans identifying with a team senseless and is shocked by their lack of awareness that all this is a corporate manufactured reality. On these points Lee begrudgingly concedes — and so do I — but I was surprised by how, as a movie maker, Lee did not speak about sport as story or as conduit for one. He does allude to the sport as a political platform but his argument seems blunted either by his shock or the edit room.
Sport, unlike a film or a novel, does not come story shaped. Sure, bodies sweating over props in a field are the main attraction, but this is hardly the complete picture. The attendant appurtenances are just as crucial if not more. It is the spectators’ gasp and the kid with clasped hands, the camera flash and the tv static, the watchful eye of the analyst and the oracular remarks of the commentator that conduct and complete the symphony of the experience. Sport isn’t just the act. It is the witnessing of sport that constitutes sport. Sport is communion. It is collective meaning making and thus myth making. Despite the archival might of the internet, sport lives on in oral culture. The public is the custodian of sport. Sport is what happens when you talk with your friends about what you felt when you witnessed a buzzer-beating three in an untelevised game in college. It is about watching Harsha Bhogle regale 10 years later, the feeling of watching Sachin abstain from a cover drive enroute to a hundred at the MCG. It is reading David Foster Wallace describe a Federer backhand.
Sure, cricket, in Chinaman, is an allegory for the state and the civil war. But it also serves as a canvas to meditate upon notions of legacy not as fact but through these little acts of witnessing. In the context of the subcontinent cricket is a colonial legacy, an instrument of the British Empire to ‘civilise the heathens’. But this instrument has been blunted, beaten into and wielded as a weapon against the very same English representing postcolonial rage. So what is the legacy of the sport? Pradeep Mathew’s mad genius abraded against an establishment that erased him from public records, and yet does his legacy not reside in the memory of those who witnessed his genius? Does legacy only reside at scale, in public consciousness or does it also reside in the private quiet? Does Wije’s legacy only live on in the book he wishes to write? Or is this a desperate attempt to doctor history in his image? Can we ever control our legacy? Who are our witnesses and what are the stories they will tell about us?