Introduction

310
Sonja Lehmann
This is very different from Anil’s story as she downright rejects national belonging
soon after she has left Sri Lanka. While at first feeling alienated and lost in
England and so homesick that she marries another Sri Lankan (AG 142), little
later she deliberately tries to break her connections with Sri Lanka without showing
clear reasons for doing so. As long as her parents are alive she still has some
feelings of connectedness to Sri Lanka, which are superficial, though: “her only
real connection was the new sarong her parents sent her every Christmas (which
she dutifully wore), and news clippings of swim meets” (AG 10). This remnant of
belonging to Sri Lankan culture is more obligation than her own freel will, though,
since “dutifully” engaging in a cultural practice hardly indicates belonging by
choice. She “courted foreignness” (AG 54), stopped speaking Sinhala and “turned
fully to the place she found herself in” (AG 145). However, this place is not a
country or a culture but science (AG 145). The scientist community she becomes
part of appears to her to be its own “world” with its own culture, which Anil is
fascinated with (AG 147). It is also the only larger group which she connects to
emotionally. She admits that she “would always love the clatter and verbal fling of
pathologists” (AG 148), “loved their rituals” (147) and took part in their “old
tradition” of listening to music while working (AG 146). She is clearly very attached
to it, identifies with it and probably feels she belongs there.
This scientific community is transnational in its own right since its members
come “from all over the world” (AG 36) and are bound together by the same
interest. It is what Appadurai would call a “community of sentiment” which exists
independent of national boundaries, without any particular affiliation to specific
nations (8). This, however, makes it more postnational than transnational as the
geographic space of this community seems completely interchangeable as can be
seen in Anil’s vague responses to where she lives. She feels at home in the world
of science, which is not limited to a particular place while admitting her affiliations
with nations only in the vaguest terms. She “now travelled with a British passport”
(AG 15-16) and resides in the West (AG 36) but any emotional attachment to a
country as a whole that would show that she understands herself as part of it is
strangely missing (see also Danyte, qutd. in Woznialis 280). 29 Thus, while she
could be identified as British, her self-understanding would most likely differ.
Even when she contemplates returning to the “adopted country of her choice”
(AG 285) at the end of the novel one cannot be quite sure whether she means the
country whose passport she carries or the one in which she lives. Her lack of
specificity in this perfectly reflects what she says she likes about the West: anonymity
(AG 72).
29 Nevertheless, she feels attached to certain localities, such as Oklahoma, which she loves because
of its deserts (AG 149). This is immediately contrasted with the flowering, green Sri Lankan
landscape in which “she could spit on the ground and a bush would leap up” (AG 148). Her
love of deserts is thus another instance of deliberate disconnection from Sri Lanka.