Lunch with Shehan Karunatilaka

“I think let’s take Table Mountain off the table — which I have,” concedes Shehan Karunatilaka as he settles into an outdoor seat at MRKT, the coffee shop at the Onyx Hotel on Cape Town’s Foreshore where the Booker Prize winner and his family have been staying while in the city.

Our lunch date, initially scheduled for 1.30pm, has been brought forward by two hours in the hope that Karunatilaka would be able to join his wife and two young children up the mountain before their early-evening flight to Johannesburg for the final leg of his almost two-week SA tour.

Karunatilika doesn’t like rushing to airports and has graciously suggested we not try to speed through the interview to accommodate his attempt at sightseeing. This has left us between a rock and, well, a mountain. None of Cape Town’s better restaurants open before midday. Nor is there, as he inquires, “a decent pub nearby” in the Mother City’s business district.

The vowelless — and slightly soulless — MRKT (pronounced “market”) it is then.

Karunatilaka has also just taken breakfast with his family: the daily berries with yoghurt, honey and homemade muesli followed by MRKT’s Mediterranean scrambled eggs with spinach, Danish feta and olives.

He jokes that I can pretend to have watched him eat breakfast as we both dither awkwardly over the menu. “I’ll have a glass of red, its past 12 ... almost,” he says, deadpan. The receipt shows Thabiso, our waiter, put through our drinks order at 11.43am. We both choose glasses of cooler-climate pinot noir from Elgin. Karunatilaka goes for The Valley; I try the Smuggler’s Boot.

It’s difficult to find fresh questions to ask Karunatilaka, who has been on the international literary circuit almost non-stop since winning the 2022 Booker Prize for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. This current tour started in Copenhagen in early September and after taking in swathes of the US has stopped off in Abu Dhabi en route to SA, where he headlined the Richmond Literary Festival a few days previously. Our interview is in early November.

One of the sessions at Richmond focused on cricket and Karunatilaka’s previous novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (2010). It is a hilarious story of an old soak of a cricket writer who, faced with his encroaching death, decides to seek out an eccentrically talented spin bowler from the 1980s who appears to have been erased from the record books.

The novel also explores the notion of the “maverick” in Sri Lankan society, which seems to have filtered into the conveyor belt of unorthodox cricketers the country has produced. These include Muttiah Muralitharan, the only bowler to take 800 Test wickets and who also endured allegations of chucking — he was scientifically cleared — because of a bowling action incorporating an unusual hyperextension of his congenitally bent arm. And Sanath Jayasuriya, the explosive counterattacking batsman who helped redefine batting in the limited overs game during Sri Lanka’s march to the 1996 World Cup crown.

I suggest this points to an indigenisation of cricket in Sri Lanka that we rarely see in SA, with young cricketers’ orthodoxy — and value systems — being burnished at elite schools with long-standing white and colonial histories.

Karunatilaka reflects for a bit and considers the widespread love of cricket on the island and “the flair Sri Lankans have” and the reasons for that, including having to adapt to playing conditions on beaches and streets rather than on formal turf wickets. This, he says, has contributed to producing players like Jayasuriya and Lasith Malinga, the fast bowler nicknamed “Slinga Malinga” for his idiosyncratic round-arm action.

“The slinging action of Malinga comes from having to skid a tennis ball on a beach, right. Or you’re playing in the coconut fields and on the street mostly … Maybe these strange actions, these strange un-coached ways of hitting like Sanath Jayasuriya as well, where you’ve got to scale the coconut trees and all of that. So maybe there’s something to that magical thing. But we also tend to use that as a crutch, saying that, ‘OK, maybe we don’t have proper systems, we don’t have this and that, but we can hit a six on the last ball and win the game.’ And we do produce these magical moments.”

The 1996 World Cup appeared to have had a unifying effect on Sri Lankan society at a time when the civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who were fighting against the Sinhalese majority government for an independent state for the Tamil minority in the north and east of the island, was intense. A mutual friend, the ESPNcricinfo correspondent Andrew Fidel Fernando, has written of how the war was paused as people gathered around communal television sets to watch World Cup matches. Such was the dedication to the team that people in rural northern villages would charge generators connected to television sets by cycling on stationary bicycles, according to Fernando.

It was a temporary ceasefire, however. The war would end only in 2009, brought to a bloody conclusion by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa. The UN estimated that 100,000 people were killed up to 2007. The report of the UN secretary-general’s panel of experts on accountability in Sri Lanka claimed that about 40,000 civilians were killed by Rajapaksa’s government in the final phase of the 26-year war, mainly through indiscriminate bombings of targets like hospitals and other “no-fire zones”.

So does cricket have the power to heal, in the way South Africans like to believe the Springboks’ rugby success has done for our own reconciliation project?

As a 15-year-old in 1989, Karunatilaka had, together with is family, moved to New Zealand to escape the violence in Sri Lanka. He pauses for a second: “I think it certainly does. It certainly does. I mean, Chinaman was about the 1996 moment where a bunch of amateurs kind of conquered the world from this war-torn country. And it was a fairy tale. It meant something. At least it meant something to little me in New Zealand, where I was embarrassed to tell people I was from Sri Lanka because no-one knew what that was or where. But after ’96, everyone knew where Sri Lanka was.”

But, Karunatilaka concedes, “it will take a lot to heal Sri Lankans”, especially in the north of the country where people remain traumatised and were allowed to memorialise their dead for the first time only in 2018, or for the tens of thousands of families whose relatives were “disappeared”, tortured and killed by the government, the LTTE or the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) during its murderous insurgencies in 1971 and from 1987 to 1989.

We are meeting a few weeks after JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected president of Sri Lanka. Dissanayake had previously apologised for the JVP’s bloody history, which Karunatilaka compares to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

Karunatilaka believes the election result flows out of Sri Lanka’s 2022 popular uprising, the Aragalaya, when ordinary citizens, mainly young people, took to the streets in protest against food and fuel shortages and toppled the government of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the brother of Mahinda. Gotabaya was apparently instrumental as secretary to the ministry of defence in the government’s bloody ending of the civil war against the LTTE. Both Rajapaksas led Sinhala chauvinist and authoritarian regimes.

He sees the election result and the ushering in of a group of people who aren’t linked to established political dynasties or the Colombo elite as a break with traditional politics and a refreshing consequence of the Aragalaya, an uprising “against those bastards who spat in the face of the poor”.

Almost on cue, a man walks past with a cardboard placard around his neck decrying the City of Cape Town’s anti-poor strategies against homeless people: “The bastardly government of prostitutes and criminals fight and strike the face of the poor! What a bastardly sick society this is!” Photographer David Harrison, who has been documenting the city’s pavement politics, identifies the “crier” as Dean Ramjoomia, an activist and founder of Nehemiah Call Initiative, which works with homeless communities.

“There has been much clutching of the pearls by the Colombo elite, warnings from my own family that the Commies will come for my guitars [Karunatilaka is a bass player] and conspiracy theories of international powers being behind the uprising, but the truth is the youth had had enough, and it’s a new generation reconfiguring a new politics in Sri Lanka,” Karunatilaka says. “We’d like to think this is the end of communal politics now that we’re not voting by racial blocs any more. But you know, one election doesn’t make a democracy.”

He feels that Sri Lankan cricket’s predisposition for “fairy tales” and “magic moments” to win matches is similarly transplanted into the political arena.

“I see that in our politics as well,” he says, “the idea that the guy [Dissanayake] is gonna, you know, change things by hitting a six off the last ball. We are in the honeymoon period but we believe in the big six even though Sri Lanka’s maladies, like cricket’s maladies, require systematic, boring change to solve. But this idea that someone can come in and whack a few sixes off the last over and save the day, we still have that fairy tale.”

Another glass of wine arrives for Karunatilaka. The waiter, who previously quipped that the author’s wine glass appeared to have a leak in it such was the pace of it being emptied, has also mistakenly brought me another. We finally order food. Karunatilaka decides to “go hipster” and has the avocado hummus on toast with soft-poached eggs. I order the beef wrap with fries. Drinking on an empty stomach is taking its toll.

Sri Lanka, with its communal politics, is as complex to navigate as SA with our race politics and Karunatilaka feels “allowing the dead to speak” in his novel Seven Moons was an apt device to explore the past with a degree of humour, while still being respectful to the dead. Some of the characters in Seven Moons are based on people assassinated in real life, including human rights activist and academic Rajani Thiranagama, who was a Tamil killed by the LTTE for being “too moderate”, and Daya Pathirana, a student activist alleged to have been killed by the JVP.

Humour is essential to resilience and speaking truth to power, or what cannot be spoken about, Karunatilaka suggests. Which is why he chooses characters like “drunken old uncles obsessed with cricket [Chinaman] or this catty kind of closet queen who is going to these dangerous places doing important work but also sees the absurdity in all of it [the eponymous protagonist in Seven Moons].”

As our time winds down over another glass of wine Karunatilaka enthuses about a “hardly used Fender acoustic bass” he picked up in Ohio during this tour. He plays in a “midlife crisis band” in Colombo but relishes playing music for his dad, who is suffering dementia. There is a wistful sense that he wants to be home soon.