The present world in which I am writing this review is vastly different to the one in which I began reading Vanni: A Family's Struggle Through the Sri Lankan Conflict – a graphic novel focused on the final stages of the Sri Lankan civil war and its devastating human cost.
I first opened this book many moons ago on a packed train to work in Colombo from the outskirts of the city. Within days, the government declared an all-island curfew. Fear of death gripped me as the number of local cases of COVID-19 mounted. I abandoned my sister, who is a doctor, and sought the relative safety of my aunt's house to reduce my probability of contracting the virus. In my paranoia, I even contemplated stocking up on oxygen cylinders in the event that I became severely ill. I did not get around to writing the review for three months because (I felt) I was not in the right mental space to undertake the task.
The Ramachandrans and the Chologars – the two families from whom the main characters of Vanni are drawn – could not, unfortunately, make such calculations when the war uprooted them from their world of relative peace and contentment.
By May 2009, between 300,000-400,000 Tamil civilians in the Vanni – a resource-abundant, forest-covered and thinly populated region in the northern reaches of Sri Lanka – had already spent the better part of the preceding two years under lockdown. They did not have multiple safe locations to choose from as the fighting between the Sri Lankan military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) escalated. As the battle drew to a close, the Sri Lankan government declared 'No Fire Zones' – purportedly for sheltering civilians – but then rained artillery fire on these locations. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded widespread damage to civilian infrastructure and loss of civilian lives in an extensive report on alleged human-rights violations during the last stages of the war. The Sri Lankan military, however, insists till today that it only targeted rebel guns inside the No Fire Zones.