37 pages • 1 hour read
Nayomi MunaweeraIsland of a Thousand Mirrors
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
The novel opens with a postcoital reflection from a first-person narrator. The narrator remains unnamed in the single-page Prologue, although by the Epilogue it is understood that Yasodhara is this narrator. Here she lies in the cave of her lover’s body, listening to his fluttering heart as he whispers her sister’s name in his sleep.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
The setting is 1948. The British are leaving a newly independent Sri Lanka, called Ceylon while under British rule. The British are described as “retreating” as the flag of the new nation is raised: “a stylized lion, all curving flank and ornate muscle, a long, cruel sword gripped in its front paw” (6).
The narrative is told from the perspective of Yasodhara Rajasinghe and recounts her father Nishan’s childhood growing up in independent Ceylon. Nishan and his sister Mala are raised by their mother Beatrice Muriel and their father, a doctor who took on a new surname to disguise the economic limitations of his low-caste family origins and “win both medical training and a wife” (11). Mala has darker skin than Nishan, and Beatrice Muriel looks at her as “the stain of low-caste origins” (10).
A shift in the narrative takes readers to the childhood of Yasodhara’s mother Visaka Jayarathna, who grows up in a privileged household in the capital city Colombo. Visaka’s father is a judge, placing Visaka in a wealthy and privileged social class full of pressed school uniforms, chauffeurs, and regular piano lessons. Her mother Sylvia Sunethra preserves colonial ways through her adherence to Victorian-era fashion and daily insistence upon proper English tea daily at five. This proper social order is disrupted when Alice, a distant relative with a hunched back and questionable background, arrives and is taken in as a household servant. Sylvia Sunethra recognizes that Alice has been shamed for bearing an illegitimate child. The chapter closes with Dilshan, Alice’s infant son, joining the household to be raised at his mother’s side.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Beatrice Muriel forces Nishan to focus on his studies while Mala is generally overlooked. When away from her mother’s strict eye, Mala dominates neighborhood cricket matches and plays on the beach. At home, Mala quietly endures her mother’s constant attempts to lighten her skin and smooth her hair. There are rumors of violence against Tamils in Colombo, but Nishan doesn’t notice increasing signs of fear and unrest around him.
On the train to school one day, armed men storm the carriage and assault a young Tamil schoolgirl. A teacher intervenes, insisting the girl is Sinhala to save her. The mob leaves, but the violent incident haunts Nishan into adulthood. The chapter closes with a narrative shift foretelling the rise of a future army leader, a Tamil boy from the north.
Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 2 Analysis
The Sri Lankan Civil War lasted from 1983 to 2009, but the foundations of the ethnic and religious tensions between the Sinhala and Tamil populations are deeply rooted and explored from the moment of the nation’s independence in this novel. The imagery of “war-like lovemaking” and the roaring of a “fierce and relentless ocean” (1) bring violence into even the most intimate moment shared between individuals. The detailed and connected images of the Sinhala lion and the Tamil tiger prepare the reader for “a war that will be waged between related beasts” (7) at the domestic and national level.
The contrast between Nishan and Mala sets the two as foils. The twins grow up in the same household, yet they are different in every way, from their skin color to their gender, which immediately sets them on different trajectories in their development and perspectives. While the siblings symbolically oppose one another, the two mother figures, Beatrice Muriel and Sylvia Sunethra, share a common desire to adhere to a colonial-era social order that places them closer to society’s upper castes. The Ayurvedic doctor and the judge, both father figures identified primarily by their careers, represent the expectation that men in this society provide economic and social upward mobility for women who value caste order, although Beatrice Muriel and Sylvia Sunethra both resent their husbands for the hints of lower-caste ethnicity they display, such as the doctor’s insistence upon socializing with local fishermen and the judge’s “unbearable shame of brownness” (15). Alice’s arrival and Sylvia Sunethra’s unspoken understanding of Alice’s circumstances reveal that the colonial propriety is only surface-level; there are deeper shared experiences that will shatter individuals’ attempts at social order as the novel progresses.
Constant violent imagery in the Prologue and Chapter 1 foreshadows the violence in Chapter 2, solidifying the parallel between the narrator’s story and the island’s history. Yasodhara sets the stage for this parallel early in Chapter 1 when she describes the story of her family as “also one possible narrative of my island” (7). This connection between the narrator’s family chronology and the events leading to the civil war is further developed through cycles of violence and family influence as the novel continues.
