Now, stuck in the underworld, he has only seven moons – one week – to get in contact with his friend Jaki and her cousin, persuade them to retrieve the stash of photos, and share them throughout Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city, in order to expose the profoundly violent nature of the conflict. Those photos are stored underneath a bed in his family home.

Photos that could stop wars.” He has shot “the government minister who looked on while the savages of ’83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants”, and taken “portraits of disappeared journalists and vanished activists, bound and gagged and dead in custody”. Working for newspapers and magazines, his ambition is to take photographs “that will bring down governments. Maali is a witness to the brutality of the insurrections in Sri Lanka. The novel also depicts the victims of Marxist group the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation party, who similarly waged an insurrection against the Sri Lankan government, and killed many leftwing and working-class civilians who got in their way. Many of the people he meets in this bleakly quotidian landscape are victims of the violence that plagued Sri Lanka in the 80s, including a Tamil university lecturer who was gunned down for criticising militant separatist group the Tamil Tigers. Other souls surround him, with dismembered limbs and blood-stained clothes and they are incapable of forming an orderly queue to get their forms filled in. It’s no Miltonian pandemonium for him, “the afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate”. But no: he really is dead, and seemingly locked in an underworld. He thinks he has swallowed “silly pills” given to him by a friend and is hallucinating.

The seven moons of maali almeida kindle