Tania James in the New York Times:
In Tamil, farewells are never final. As Akil Kumarasamy pointed out in a 2017 interview, the Tamil equivalent of goodbye is poyittu varen, meaning “I’ll go and return.” These are parting words especially suited to the refugee: ever running away, ever looking back.
Kumarasamy poignantly illustrates this tension in her debut story collection, “Half Gods.” Across decades and continents, her characters are haunted by catastrophic violence, their emotional scars passed from one generation to the next.
Wisely, Kumarasamy takes a muted approach to the violence. In “The Office of Missing Persons,” a Sri Lankan Tamil father engages with the police to find his teenage son — this during the final and bloodiest phase of the nearly 30-year Sri Lankan civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the separatist Tamil Tigers. From the outset, it’s obvious that Jeganathan, an entomologist beloved for his research by the Sinhalese government, will never find his son, and so the story’s momentum feeds on a growing dread that is crystallized when “the officer asked for Jeganathan’s son’s name and he knew it was a trick. He needed his name to find him and then have reason not to find him.” Between those lines exists an entire world in which killing a man is as easy as erasing his name from a ledger of missing persons.
More here.