One day in June, the Toronto Globe and Mail carried a news photograph showing a man, naked to the waist, surrounded by police officers. The man´s hands are handcuffed behind him. A police officer is pulling at the man´s pocket with both his hands, and on the other side another policeman, of lower-rank with a submachine gun hanging from his shoulder, has his left hand inside the prisoner´s other pocket. The caption reads: "Police search a man shortly after a suicide bomber killed 21 people in Sri Lanka yesterday, including a cabinet minister, during a function to raise funds for families of slain soldiers. The assassination shattered the country´s first War Heroes Day."
When you look back at the photograph, you notice how the Tamil man´s mouth is open. When you look into the eyes of the police officers around him, you perhaps get a sense of the silence of that open mouth and its dryness. Will they take him to a prison and break his jaw so that afterwards he can´t even ask for water?
The photographer, in making the suspect the centre of attention, has not been able to hide his diminutive size. His skin is dark. The slim torso is arched because he is being pulled from two different directions. Inches above the man´s left nipple, is the circular, metal mouth of the police officer´s gun. He, the prisoner, could not be more than 20 or 22.
When you look at the photograph, if you have already read Ondaarje´s book, you might be reminded of the line about how "the victims of ´intentional violence´ had started appearing in May 1984". "They were nearly all male, in their twenties, damaged by mines, grenades, mortal shells." When you look at this photograph, of course you need not have read Ondaarje´s novel to be reminded of another fact. That someone turned himself into a human bomb. The half-naked prisoner´s life—rather, what I immediately think of as his impending death—makes me also wonder about all the other deaths.