I thought of what my father had said about turning out "funny." The word "funny" as I understood it meant either humorous or strange, as in the expression, "that's funny." Neither of these fitted the sense in which my father had used the word, for there had been a hint of disgust in his tone.
The innocence of Arjie’s childhood is observable in these lines. He doesn’t know what his father actually means by “funny.” The tone of disgust signifies his father’s, and in fact the entire society’s, aversion towards homosexuality—which is not normative. After the incident with Kanthi Aunty, he is both surprised and dejected by the sudden change of attitude in his parents. He doesn’t know what precisely has happened, but after listening to his parents, he knows things will never be the same again.
I would be caught between the boys' and the girls' worlds, not belonging or wanted in either.
After Arjie quarrels with Tanuja and Ammachi, he runs away to the nearby beach. There, he ponders about his predicament after what had happened at his grandparents' house. The torn sari lying nearby symbolizes the end of his life in the company of girls. He can no longer play Bride-Bride with them after what he had done. The future spend-the-days will be boring and lonely as he will probably be forced to play with the boys. His heart will be in the girls' world and his body will be in the boys' world—not belonging or wanted in either.
I was in a Sinhala class at school and my friends were Sinhalese. My parents’ best friends were, too. Even our servant was Sinhalese, and, in fact, we spoke with her only in Sinhalese. So what did it matter whether Anil was Sinhalese or not?
In the above lines, Arjie expresses his confusion about the conflicting attitudes of his elders. His parents are progressive on the grounds of ethnicity and they adapt to the scenario of modern Sri Lanka. They send their children to a Sinhala school and teach them Sinhalese. Since Tamils are a minority, they must know the culture and language of the Sinhalese people if they want to live successfully.
Ammachi, on the other hand, is orthodox and extremist in her way of thinking. She despises the Sinhala community. Her father was killed in the riots of the 1950s by the Sinhalese, which makes her hate them even more. She even supports LTTE, a Tamil militant group. Her rejection of Radha Aunty's friendship with Anil, because he is a Sinhala, is shocking to Arjie.
"These days one must be like the three wise monkeys. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
Appadurai, who is a former civil rights lawyer, understands that the entire system of Sri Lanka is corrupt. He advises Arjie's mother to stop investigating Daryl Uncle’s mysterious death. The politicians, military, and even the police are involved in the persecution of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Apparudai says that if one wants to be safe, one should keep away from harm’s way. One should act like the three wise monkeys, refusing to see, hear, or speak about the evils that are happening in Sri Lanka. He tells Amma to give up the investigation as it could prove costly to her and her family.
The world the characters lived in, where good was rewarded and evil punished, seemed suddenly false to me.
Along the path to maturity, Arjie faces several such moments of realization. His little bubble of a fairy-tale world bursts after he realizes Daryl Uncle will never get justice. The evil will not get punished because it is stronger than the good. The same realization occurs when he gets to know that Radha Aunty and Anil will not marry, even when they were in love with each other. All these events that Arjie experiences make him more mature and help him to understand the real world.
“These days, every Tamilian is a Tiger until proven otherwise.”
Jegan is brought into police custody for being a suspected terrorist. The entire family is disturbed and afraid of this event. They know Jegan is innocent, but because of the prevailing anti-Tamil atmosphere in Sri Lanka, they are forced to take precautionary measures. Life will get tough for them if someone gets to know what has happened (and life does get tough for them). The Tamils are subjected to constant threat and pressure by the Sinhalese government, the military, and the police. Even a slight suspicion or turbulence could get them killed, and what happens with Jegan foreshadows the events at the end of the novel.
“Once you come to The Queen Victoria Academy you are a man. Either you take it like a man or the other boys will look down on you.”
The above lines are said by Diggy to Arjie to make him aware of the environment of his new school. The description of the school makes Arjie both fearful of and disgusted by it. These lines also underpin Arjie’s father’s original intention for changing his school. His father is worried about Arjie’s peculiarities and thinks he might turn out to be “wrong.” So he shifts Arjie's schooling to the Queen Victoria Academy, which he believes will mold Arjie into a man. It sheds light on the mentality of a society which continuously tries to correct Arjie’s homosexuality.
For the remainder of the night, I tossed and turned restlessly in my bed, torn between my desire for Shehan and disgust at that desire.
Arjie’s conflict stems from his sexual attraction towards Shehan and his crushing sense of betrayal of his family. Until this point, he had only indulged in fantasies related to sex, but after having his first sexual encounter, he is disgusted by it. He feels he has broken the trust of his family. He thinks about the warnings of Diggy against a friendship with Shehan, and about his father’s disapproving look towards Shehan. However, he still dreams of Shehan at night which makes him horrified about the desire within him, and foreshadows how eventually he will have to come to terms with the fact that what he wanted and did was not shameful but natural.
Those spend-the-days, the remembered innocence of childhood, are now colored in the hues of the twilight sky. It is a picture made even more worse sentimental by the loss of all that was associated with them. By all of us having to leave Sri Lanka years later because of communal violence and forge a new home for ourselves in Canada.
Arjie uses the twilight sky imagery to evoke childhood as the beginning of life, or the beginning of the day, and how that day eventually came to an end with the Tamil-Sinhalese civil war breaking out and the family's choice to emigrate to Canada for safety. By inserting this into the very beginning of the novel, Selvadurai lets his reader know the general arc of Arjie's young life and how the idylls of childhood would soon be eclipsed by the troubles of war.
She smelt of stale coconut oil, and the diamond mukkuthi in her nose always pressed painfully against my cheek.
In describing his grandmother, Arjie evokes a sort of bittersweet, nuanced portrait. Her kiss in pleasant but her beautiful nose ring pokes him, and he is able to recognize how multifaceted things can be, both painful and beautiful at once.
