Six year-old Shivan is boarded up in his grandmother's mansion in Sri Lanka.
“There is also a calm within me now, the inner stillness of someone who has finally given up, who has stopped clinging to the ridiculous notion that he, or any of us really, can avoid our fate.In Buddhist myth, those that have desired too much in life may be reborn as “hungry ghosts”- spirits with a stomach so large they can never be full. Shivan, believing he has a good, loving relationship with a young man in Vancouver, finally understands it offers no real salvation. Even Dickens allows Pip in Great Expectations to vanquish the legacy of Miss Havisham and win the love of Estella. Yes, we all have nasty agents in our lives, but do we want to wallow in someone else’s despair? It takes enough of our own energy to close the lid on our own destructive spirits. That’s what makes The Hungry Ghosts so hard to plow through. Clearly in this novel, fortitude of spirit is not a ghost busting attribute. Maybe that is Selvadurai’s intention since the grandmother is, after all, a hungry ghost. Shivan believes he eventually gains the upper hand in his relationship with his grandmother, that she “miscalculated her power over me.” But his certainty that “the life that has haunted and misshaped us all” has ended is unconvincing.
His new home in Toronto is shown as an emotionally grey place where he must occupy a basement bedroom, sleeping on a bed with a “scratchy, synthetic brown-and-white comforter.” There is barely a glimmer of happiness to sustain each character and Shivan’s efforts to turn away from his former life, to escape his mother by moving from Toronto to Vancouver, to put aside the specter of his grandmother, prove troubling.Įven the landscape of Sri Lanka seems to weep as Selvadurai describes the violence between the Sinhalese and the Tamils that Shivan witnesses during his time there. Grandmother’s great expectations are destroyed when she discovers Shivan is gay and her bitter reaction leads to the murder of Shivan’s lover, an event that emotionally maims her grandson’s life long after he has moved to Canada. This includes not only her servants, her tenants, and Shivan’s mother, but eventually Shivan himself, her prized and only grandson who is expected to inherit all her property. Like Miss Havisham, Aachi’s anger is the guiding force in her life, and she treats those who dare to cross her with brutality. The hungriest ghost haunting Shivan’s life is his wealthy, implacable grandmother - a character to rival Dicken’s Miss Havisham - who lives in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, in a mansion that begins to crumble as she ages. This is the burdensome lesson Shivan Rassiah, the protagonist in Shyam Selvadurai’s novel The Hungry Ghosts, must learn as he moves with his mother and sister from a civil war torn Sri Lanka to a beige Toronto suburb. No matter how hard you try, it is impossible to shed your past.
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