U.X.O.
by Brannavan Gnanalingam

For such a tiny island – ‘even smaller than the North Island – Sri Lanka has suffered an inordinate amount of bloodshed. A place of great natural beauty and rich traditions, it has a history complicated by colonial greed, politics and ethnic collisions. U.X.O, the ninth novel by award-winning writer (and lawyer) Brannavan Gnanalingam, is an explosive work that explores the riptide of diasporic trauma by focusing on a specific period in Sri Lanka’s history.

U.X.O is a largely epistolary novel, written as a series of drafted but unsent letters from an unnamed Indian Tamil man to his Kiwi grandson Arjun. The letters are part gun-wielding bravado written to impress a child who has ‘to do a project on one of his grandparents’ and part confessional memoir.

I promised Arjun I would write something down, something he would understand. I always liked to write, scribbling in notebooks even if I was never nostalgic enough to keep them. Maybe I’ll write something he’d be able to read when he’s older instead, when he’d be more aware of the complexities of our past lives, more attuned to the twisting of memories into complete sentences.

The narrator recollects his time as a soldier in the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) sent to Sri Lanka from 1987 till 1990 to oversee a ceasefire between the government and Tamil militant groups, primarily the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The civil war results in the mass migration of thousands of Lankan Tamils to southern India, and in pressure on Indian politicians to intervene.

The peacekeepers come, stay for 32 months, then leave. Their tenure morphs from naive deliverance to something much darker. The civil war comes to a shocking end in 2009: the estimated loss of Tamil civilians in its brutal denouement is at least 40,000, but likely much higher. Likewise, Sinhala, Muslim and other communities suffer large losses from guerrilla bombings and governmental crackdowns. In the late 80s, the Marxist-Leninist JVP, mentioned in the final pages of this novel, stage an uprising against the government and the IPKF. Quelling this uprising involves extra-judicial death squads that leave the heads of teenaged Sinhala males impaled on sticks as public deterrents.

The narrator is a low-caste Hindu man from Tamil Nadu ‘doing menial typographical work’ and struggling to provide for his family. The army offers a chance to ‘improve my lot’. U.X.O explores the irony of a soldier who is just human fodder to his superiors and the contradictory, subjective nature of his memories, which detail his surprise at the affluence of Sri Lankan Tamils – ‘I remember thinking these people were living in a war zone, yet they were living better than we were’ – and the casual violence of his fellow soldiers.

The prose ripples with memories that contain forceful narratives and hint at suppressed grief and shame, and the generational undertow of historical accountability. ‘Arjun,’ the narrator writes, ‘we talk about heroes in war, but it’s also just stupid luck.’ His own wrongdoing is conspicuously never mentioned. Even his reading of his new home, New Zealand, is flawed:

I had understood the Army would give someone of my social standing more opportunity. You don’t understand this, Arjun, because New Zealand isn’t the same as India. Here they look at you for your character and how hard you work, not what your name is.

Like the American forces in Vietnam, the IPKF is portrayed as woefully unprepared for the situation in Sri Lanka:

We’d learned the rules of combat, about ensuring our behaviour was impeccable when it came to prisoners and capturing targets. Yet our opponents had no such compulsion to act in accordance with the rules … [They] were the ones who were unpredictable, embedded within the community, using diversions and civilians to blend in, and giving us no opportunity to shake hands and be the best man in a battle. It was perhaps that difference that was the most shocking to us, and showed our training needed to be updated to a different kind of warfare. We were sent over as peacekeepers, after all.

We found our behaviour slowly changing as a result. We became more suspicious. We’d spend longer at checkpoints with the types of people who’d more likely be militants, making sure they were checked by multiple people in case we’d missed anything. We stopped talking about the Tamils in Sri Lanka as people to be saved, but movable objects to be wary of.

The IPKF mission is often called India’s Vietnam, with incidents such as the Jaffna Hospital massacre in October 1987, in which Indian troops killed nearly 70 medical personnel and civilians, and the reactionary violence meted out by the ‘peacekeepers’ to civilians. These events are woven into the narrative and give it chilling resonance.

The narrator notes that he can’t tell Arjun everything: ‘I couldn’t say that I was struggling with the task, that the act of remembering is also the act of forgetting’. But there are moral implications to forgetting, especially when wartime deeds have ongoing ramifications for survivors of the conflict. Each drafted letter becomes darker, more complicated, more contradictory. What is the actual truth of this man’s actions, or the actions of his fellow soldiers? The stark truth of objectively confirmed historical events in this clever page-turner of a novel show us that ‘peacekeepers’ with little training and poor knowledge of the complexities of their deployment can shape-shift, on the turn of a rupee, to become perpetrators.

Did we make a difference? I don’t know. Our Army pulled out in 1990, and the War continued on. Thousands died, and, in the ordinary way, civilians suffered. I found it hard to follow the War once we moved to New Zealand, especially those years in Dunedin when I wasn’t close to much of a Tamil or Indian community, so didn’t receive regular updates. I also didn’t want to keep following the War. One of the reasons we moved to New Zealand was to be away from that, so whenever stories came up about wars in foreign lands, I did my best to turn it off. Despite that, little details found their way to me. I overheard someone say the words Innocent People’s Killing Force, and I knew they were Sri Lankan Tamil and talking about us.

Like the Vietnam-era soldiers in Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried, the narrator struggles with the deep trauma he carries with him across oceans and decades. He barely discusses his traumatic experiences with his wife. He also omits to disclose his past to his new daughter-in-law, Kaushiki, a Sri Lankan Tamil woman. He recalls how one of his fellow soldiers, Pathak, killed himself: ‘No explanation. No letter back home … He’d simply blown his brains out in the washroom’. The narrator felt numb at the time and nothing has changed:

I wanted to cry at the thought of Pathak [his fellow soldier] dying alone when I found him, the calm smile on his face, which belied the mess at the back of his head, but nothing came at the time. Even now, nothing comes.

U.X.O is a well-crafted, moving novel that is a compulsive read. For Gnanalingam the issues are personal: he draws on first-hand family accounts and dedicates the book to an aunt and great-aunt ‘who the IPKF murdered alongside Thambirasa Ratnagopal, Parasakthi Ratnagopal, and Sakthibalan Ratnagopal on 19 October 1987 in Anaikoddai.’ But the story is universal in its relevance. It is a timely reminder that burying the past does not remove the generational trauma that lives on. The narrator of the novel’s final section is by Kaushiki, who intercepts the narrator’s notes. She remembers her own grandmother moving to New Zealand but unable to recover from the deaths and degradation she experienced in Sri Lanka. ‘I never really introduced my few high-school friends to her. She was too sullen for optimistic Pākehā to understand.’

A personal note: my husband and I worked in humanitarian aid in Sri Lanka during the tumultuous ending of the civil war. Since 1989, Sri Lankan Tamils have held a day of remembrance, Maaveerar Naal, on 27 November, for the LTTE fighters who died. On 27 November 2025, here in Auckland, we passed a sports field with rows of small white headstones, the familiar Tiger-emblazoned flag and a poster of the LTTE’s slain commander. There are many people like Kaushiki who ‘even in this far-off place’ are determined to ensure their ‘stories aren’t just one of statistics.’