Readers have asked me whether Martin James is a real person. My response is, “He is my alter ego.” I could have lived his life and met with his fate if I had taken a different fork in the road.
I conjured Martin James to cover the first fifty years of my life and wrote his story in The Ulysses Man, covering the period 1961—2005, set in Sri Lanka and Canada. I am not big on memoirs because life does not happen in a novelistic arc; therefore, Martin told my story of the disappearing Burghers in more dramatic fashion in The Ulysses Man than I could have done in a boring “Story of My Life” autobiography. And I thought, “That’s the end of that,” after the novel was published in 2011.
But no, that was not to be. Easter Sunday in 2019 left me speechless, sad, and angry. Two of the bombed properties, St. Anthony’s Church and the Kingsbury (formerly the Intercontinental), were special to me as they held pleasant, formative memories. The destruction and senseless killing of innocents called for a response, and being half a world away, the only response I could offer as an aging writer was to tell a story. Hence, the birth of When Sirens Beckon.
By placing Martin and his family back in the cauldron, I was able to share in the horror and search for the required answers following an incident of this diabolical magnitude. Early readers cautioned me: “You are a foreigner now. Why do you want to get involved in Sri Lankan politics?” My response: “There is a bit of home remaining in all of us who left only because we ran out of options. And that stake in the game cannot be rubbed out easily.”
I wrote this book in 2019, and it has taken until this year to bring it to publication. Despite this being a work of fiction, recent revelations in Sri Lanka, as justice is sought afresh, reveal eerie parallels between this story and reality. But the coincidences end there—this is a work of imagination, mine entirely.
In the Easter of 2019, and looking back on the previous seventy years of post-Independence drift, the proven solution for Sri Lankans who were not among the elite was to leave the country and flourish abroad. I took that route too, in 1980. And it was the only solution I could come up with for Jamie and Selima: “Leave!” If I were writing this story today or in an indeterminate future, my wish, now that I have seen a shift in governance for the better, would be for them, and all young, bright Sri Lankans, to stay and prosper within their country, an opportunity denied to me and my cohort.
As for Martin James, I can finally lay him to rest. He reminds me that for guys of our vintage, the homing call of the land of one’s birth is like a siren’s call—luring, promising, mercurial. That, like how Ulysses resisted and Martin didn’t, one must not heed its call, however much one desires to. He reminds me that for diasporans, home is not a place, but a state of mind.
