Living their lives in the backdrop of war
View(s):A recently released book which is dedicated to the doctors and nurses of the Burn Unit of the National Hospital in Colombo, is written by Sri Lankan-born Roderic Grigson who now lives in Australia. It’s a well-crafted and well-written story of three very different people, their lives winding around each other like strands of barbed wire through the tragedy of a vicious civil war, by the choices they make in their lives.
As the stories unfold, a man at peace with himself, sits quietly in a beat-up old car outside the central bus terminal during rush hour in the market suburb of Pettah. He has driven for days across the country, on a mission of vengeance, which he is about to complete. Devastated by what’s happened to his young family, Nadesan doesn’t want anyone in Colombo to ever feel safe again.
Not far away in the busy General Hospital, a compassionate and dedicated young doctor works on a burn victim with severe second degree burns to her upper body and arms. Many of the women who came into the burn unit had, Amanthi learnt during her residency, caused their own injuries through self-immolation due to marital problems, stress or helplessness through loneliness and poverty.
In the maximum-security prison a few miles away, a former soldier sits in a cramped cell contemplating the next few years of his life. Tilak had been in prison for over five years, convicted of manslaughter for shooting the leader of a Marxist uprising in the south. He had been at Officer Training College when the bloody uprising took place. The army, who were short of regular officers, ordered him to go with an under-manned platoon of volunteer soldiers and clear a southern district of insurgents. He had taken his orders to clean up the mess literally and shot the female insurgent leader when she’d spat at him and insulted his family. The government renounced his actions and after a lengthy hearing, Tilak was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison.
Will Nadesan accomplish what he set out to do after his family were shot and killed? How will Amanthi deal with the pain and suffering created by the carnage caused by these terrible explosions. Will Tilak use his military training to find and kill the men responsible for setting off car bombs across the country.
The author of “After the Flames” was born in Colombo, where he was educated and lived till he was 21. His family were Burghers, descendants of the Portuguese, Dutch and British colonials who ruled the island nation for 450 years.
With no prospects in the former British colony of Ceylon, Rod left the country of his birth in the early seventies with a few dollars in his pocket and entered the United States on a tourist visa. He found work at the United Nations Headquarters in New York where he worked for the next twelve years.
After studying information technology at New York University, he volunteered and joined the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in Egypt and Lebanon, serving on the Suez Canal during the signing of the Israel Egypt Peace Accord and in South Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War.
After spending two years in the field, Rod came back to New York in 1980 and joined the UN Technological Innovations team. He spent the next six years helping develop and implementing office information systems in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese in UN global and regional offices around the world.
Rod migrated with his wife Mena to Australia in 1986 where, over time, he became a senior executive for a global IT company where he worked for almost 15 years. As the Head of Asia Pacific Channels and Marketing, Rod was responsible for overseeing a vast territory which included the fast-developing markets of China, South Asia and India.
Rod retired from corporate life in 2013 and attended a six-month creative writing course to develop his skills as a creative writer.
‘After the Flames’ is Rod’s second book. His first book ‘Sacred Tears’was released in 2014 and is available for purchase on Amazon and at the Barefoot bookstore in Colombo.
| Book facts | |
| After the Flames by Roderic Grigson |