A Deepavali "Carol" in Singapore

Review of Anittha Thanabalan’s The Lights That Find Us (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2019)
By Aimee Liu

Deepavali (also called Diwali) is the Hindu festival of lights. Each year on this day, celebrants illuminate candles and oil lamps to repel the forces of darkness, symbolically reenacting the legend of Lord Krishna’s victory over the demon king Narakasura. Alas, as we’re reminded in Anittha Thanabalan’s debut novel The Lights That Find Us, not even the power of tradition and ritual can vanquish the darkness that lurks within. Like Scrooge on Christmas Eve, those whose spirits have been extinguished must rekindle the light inside before it can shine again.

The invocation of Scrooge here is not accidental. Thanabalan has taken Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol and spun it into a young-adult mash-up of Bollywood, sitcom, and fantasy fiction, set in modern-day Singapore with a powerful Hindu twist. Instead of an aging and miserable Ebenezer, we have the sorrowful 16-year-old Shreya, who blames herself for the disappearance of her big brother Dhiren, gone three years when we first meet her. In lieu of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, Thanabalan conjures three Hindu celestials to lead young Shreya through her personal transformation. And rather than shivering through one ghostly Victorian Christmas Eve, we lean into Singapore’s humid heat while revisiting a series of 21st-century Deepavalis.

The message common to both Dicken’s and Thanabalan’s books is summed up by Shreya’s father’s stern remark: “I should not have to tell you that welcoming light into the home is necessary.” Shreya, however, begins the novel pushing away that light of love, hope and family away on the very day that celebrates it. Unlike Scrooge, however, she doesn’t do this with a “Bah! Humbug!” but, rather, with a sense of profound emptiness and loss.

Shreya readily admits that she’s miserable. “I don’t know how to be anything but sad or angry or hurt,” she says. “I did such a horrible, shameful thing.” Her remorse makes her sympathetic, but it also creates a narrative problem. We know from the beginning that the matter relates to her brother, Dhiren, who has become an absence in the family, but the specifics of what Shreya did are not revealed until midway through the novel – a delay that creates more impatience than suspense. For far too long, the reader is left in the dark as to whether Dhiren has died, emigrated, or simply turned his back on the family.

Readers will be quick to suspect Shreya’s father is at least as responsible as his daughter for “the little pulse of unhappiness” that threatens to darken the celebration. Shreya counts the minutes as her appa stands outside Dhiren’s closed door when he thinks no one is watching. She notices how his normally “ramrod straight posture” sags, how he shakes his head and flees if detected, but refuses to speak about whatever it is that happened. Underneath the veneer of hospitality, this stubborn silence holds the family’s soul captive and contributes to Shreya’s confusion over her own volatile relationship with her father.

That said, the family’s determination to carry on with Deepavali does signal that all is not yet lost. When we first meet them, the house is filled with “the intrusive scent of butter thosais and the sounds of cheery Tamil pop music,” and Shreya is bracing herself to be “engulfed by a sea of colourfully attired relatives.” The atmosphere is more festive than funereal, and after three years, it seems the gods have grown weary of the impasse. On this Deepavali, as Shreya stands before their altar to offer thanks and prayers, she begins to weep:

She could hear her mother saying something and the sound of her father’s feet as he marched over to her. She ignored them all, blocking everything out. Her hands and forehead still firmly glued to the floor, she imagined Dhiren, tall and handsome as always, walking down the stairs from his room as if nothing had happened, getting slapped on the back for doing yet another incredible thing… Shreya willed her prayer into the space before her and out into the universe, somehow knowing that this amount of energy would not go unnoticed:

Please bring him back to me, please bring him back to me, please bring him back to me.

And then she faints, only to awaken in a timeless, dreamlike “Limbo.”  Cue the arrival of Apurva, the celestial musician, or ghandarva, who will guide her through her visitations of Deepavalis past. Ghandarvas, Apurva explains, have the ability to “look into your past or present and tell you things that only you will know.” Later, in Christmas Carol fashion, Ojaswi—a female spirit, or apsara—will give Shreya a new perspective on Deepavali Present. Then their Head Teacher will oversee her mind-bending visit to Deepavali Future. After each excursion, the spirits accompany Shreya back to Limbo for an interstitial debriefing to help her make sense of her observations.

As “messengers between the gods and sentient beings,” Thanabalan’s mystical creations have much more wit and sparkle than Dickensian ghosts, and the Limbo sessions allow them to develop an appealing rapport with Shreya. Apurva, for example, appears “tall and topless and covered in gold and jewels,” yet is curious about Google and other earthly tech developments that Shreya takes for granted. He also is patient and gentle with his young charge’s obstinate unhappiness. Ojaswi, by contrast, possesses great beauty, effortless grace, and a brusque, no-nonsense personality. As eager as the reader for Shreya to acknowledge the true source of her unhappiness, Ojaswi warns Apurva, “Don’t expect me to mollycoddle her like you’ve been doing.”  Even in Limbo, she seems to say, tough love has its merits, and time is of the essence.

As if to illustrate that last point, the transitions through time are executed with all the special effects of a Star Wars videogame. There are descending “pillars of light,” rippling voids, floating cushions, and such speeds of change that “it was as if she had been strapped to the nose of a rocket headed straight for the moon.” But the effects are a somewhat misleading distraction, since the real purpose of all this time travel is to re-connect Shreya with the singularly mortal experience of familial relationship. Her journey to the past, for instance, reminds Shreya of both the love and the rivalry that once bound her to her brother. It also exposes the favoritism that sparked that rivalry. Her father always seemed to love her brother best. And young Shreya’s stubborn, outspoken, and immature pleas for her appa’s affection only drove him further away from her.

The anger Shreya feels toward her father now blends with shame as she learns just how wrongly she blamed Dhiren. Apurva reveals that Dhiren actually tried to reason with her father on her behalf, but to no avail.  The emotions these insights arouse in Shreya will feel painfully familiar to any reader who’s vied with a sibling for parental attention. Thanabalan’s sympathetic depiction of adolescent angst and confusion is the novel’s strong suit, and young readers universally are likely to respond.

What is more specific to the culture of this story is the family-centric context in which it plays out. Shreya and her brother are anything but rebels. Both are stellar students who want only to please their parents. Shreya’s father, Mr. Ramachandra, reveres his mother, who lives with the family. His brothers and their families live nearby, and the relatives gather every Deepavali without fail. This closeness has a double edge, however, as the story makes clear. In a culture where family means everything, a broken family will end up with nothing if it can’t mend itself. Even Janaki, the middle-aged domestic worker who had helped raise Shreya, tells her, “No matter what, family should be together on Deepavali.” As a servant, Janaki admits, she’s had to sublimate her own need for family, but she nevertheless insists, “I am only apart from mine because of work and distance.” What Janaki claims to be even more painful than geographic separation is the darkness at the heart of Shreya’s family. “Every home carries a light that is nurtured and built through the years. Laughter adds to it. Joy adds to it. Good food. Good people. And love.”

But love is not missing. It’s evident in the abundance of food that fills these pages, especially the sweets that Shreya adores – “jalebis, murrukus, kaesaris, ladoos, barfis, pineapple tarts, chocolate muffins and all the rest.” The women of the household rise before dawn to prepare these delicacies. As Apurva explains, food is “how we show love and respect and, by extension, ourselves. Particularly, how we welcome people into our homes and make them feel cared for. It helps us connect with each other.” Love is present also in the music that this celestial musician represents and in the veena that Shreya identified at age nine as her “calling.” The veena is a stringed instrument, related to a zither, used in classical Indian music. “The veena gave me a sense of belonging,” Shreya recalls. Yet she turned her back on this source of love, just as she withdrew from the kitchen, in her brother’s absence.

The job of the celestials is to show Shreya the error of her ways. She is stuck in a Limbo of her own making, they suggest, because she keeps telling herself the same story over and over, and that story, which pins the blame exclusively on her, is false. They counsel her to suspend judgment, forgive herself, focus on what can be done rather than what has been done, and recognize that she can choose to change her future. In essence, they are there to teach her the basics of mindfulness and cognitive therapy. This connection is not lost on Shreya, who complains, “You sound like a self-help book.”  While the pseudo-therapeutic Limbo scenes tend to bog the story down, they also deliver its ultimate message: Shreya learns through them to overcome her guilt and anger and stop settling for easy and obvious explanations for her family’s unhappiness. By glimpsing the perspectives of other members of her family, she gains a new appreciation for the complexity of their dynamics and for the pain caused by their respective blind spots. And gradually she charts a plan of action. Thanabalan thus presents a model for personal empowerment and self-awareness that will serve younger readers well.

The most affecting scenes in this novel are Shreya’s memories of her struggles with and against Dhiren. They are each other’s allies and adversaries, both fellow champions and competitors. Anyone who harbors enduring guilt over an act committed in childhood will cringe and perhaps tear up at the eventual revelation of young Shreya’s cardinal sin. If only we all could muster mystical therapists to help with our family’s “unresolved issues and anger and hurt” as the older Shreya does.

She does not let herself off the hook, nor should she, but her guides reveal the many aspects of the situation that she could not possibly see at age thirteen. Just three years later, she’s capable of grasping the larger context, reassessing the consequences, and mustering the courage to belatedly change the outcome. Learning that it’s never too late is a critical coming-of-age lesson here.  

The Lights That Find Us is a “spirited” yet deeply earnest tale of familial love, betrayal, and forgiveness. It’s easy to see why it was selected as a Finalist for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize. Anittha Thanabalan is a talent to watch.


Aimee Liu is the author of the new novel Glorious Boy, as well as Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face and many works of nonfiction. She also writes on Medium @authoraimeeliu Her website is aimeeliu.net