Summary
Arjie’s father receives a letter from the widow of an old friend from Jaffna. The letter informs him that she is looking for work for her 25-year-old son, Jegan Parameswaran, who has spent the last year working for the Gandhiyam movement. Her son is a trained accountant but currently unemployed. She asks if Appa can find her son a job and includes a “souvenir” of Appa’s friendship with her late husband—a written oath to protect each other’s families, dated from his childhood.
The children find it difficult to reconcile the childish nature of the oath with their serious father. The father explains that he lost touch with his friend when his friend became an Orientalist scholar and he became a banker. Arjie’s father worries that the Gandhiyam movement is in league with the Tigers. He agrees to meet the boy but only after he quizzes him to determine he has no history with the Tigers. Through this new window of his father’s relationship with Jegan, Arjie gains more insight into his father.
Jegan arrives at their gate a few days later. Jegan looks very much like his father and Arjie’s father immediately becomes overcome with nostalgia and forgets his earlier concerns about Jegan’s political past. He even cuts Amma off when she tries to question Jegan by saying, “Why if the Tigers had such fine chaps I’d be the first to support it!”
As he meets Jegan, Arjie keenly observes Jegan’s well-formed, muscular body. Through his observation of Jegan, Arjie feels insecure in his own body and hopes these insecurities will be resolved at the end of puberty.
At dinner, Arjie’s father apologizes to Jegan for not coming to his father’s funeral and shares how meaningful their friendship was. He offers to let Jegan live in the storeroom above the garage. Jegan moves in and Arjie is thrilled to have him, filling Arjie “with an unaccountable joy.”
Jegan begins working at Arjie’s father’s office and begins a ritual of drinking in the garden after work with Appa. Arjie listens to these conversations from the veranda. Through these conversations, Arjie starts to see his father differently. He hears his father talk about a past relationship in England and hears Appa advise Jegan on issues at work. Jegan has a fondness for Arjie that his father appreciates because Appa worries about Arjie’s “tendencies” to play with dolls and behave in other peculiar ways. Jegan defends Arjie saying he thinks there’s nothing wrong with him.
A few weeks later, the family confronts a man who posters a wall in favor of the upcoming referendum. Amma explains that the government is trying to extend their term through a shoddy referendum instead of a proper election. Appa asks the man to take down the poster. When he doesn’t, Jegan twists the man’s arm and throws him to the ground and tells him not to poster. Appa advises Jegan that they need to be more discreet. Arjie is both in awe and slightly frightened by this new side in Jegan.
Jegan does well at work and gets promoted. The family visits the hotel and Jegan is surprised to learn that many foreign men seem to be paying the local boys for sex and using rooms at the hotel. Arjie’s father shrugs it off; the foreigners will just take their business somewhere else if he doesn’t allow it.
The next day, Jegan and the manager of the hotel run into an issue. Arjie’s father explains that the situation is volatile between the Tamils and Sinhalese and Jegan needs to filter his feedback to the staff through the Sinhalese manager. Arjie’s father shares that during the riots, the mob came to the hotel but because of the Sinhalese staff they left without destroying the property. Appa shares that a local elite, Banduratne Mudalali, is very anti-Tamil and his people have done horrible things like beating and lighting Tamil families on fire. Appa explains that since Jegan has been promoted there will be inevitable resentment from the staff and now is the time to be a man and not cling so hard to his ideals.
Jegan catches Arjie eavesdropping on his conversation with Appa and they go for a walk. Jegan shares that he had a friend in Jaffna whom he loved, but the friend was tortured and eventually left for Canada for safety. After that incident, Jegan joined the Tamil Tigers. Jegan is no longer a Tamil Tiger because he did not like how he could not question their authority, but says “it’s small choices of rotten apples,” implying that the situation for Tamils is bad either way.
After the trip, Arjie and Jegan grow closer and start going on runs together. On one run, two Tamils run behind them and say something to Jegan. A state car is parked nearby. After that incident, Arjie and Jegan change the park they run at. Later that week, the police send for Jegan. Jegan reveals to the rest of the family that he used to be a part of the Tigers but not anymore. Arjie’s father and Jegan go to the station where the police keep him overnight under the “Prevention of Terrorism Act.” Arjie’s father says that the police have accused Jegan of being a Tiger because he was spotted speaking to two Tigers in the park who later attempted to assassinate a politician. Arjie’s father starts to question Jegan’s veracity and distances the family from him. The next day, the papers run Jegan’s name as a “key suspect” in an assassination plot. This leads to hate calls to the office, threats, and hate mail for Arjie’s father.
Once Jegan returns, Arjie’s father suggests Jegan take a small holiday back to Jaffna to recover, but Jegan refuses, instead insisting that hard work is the best remedy. Arjie’s father worries about the rest of the staff, especially the Sinhalese’s perception, but Jegan continues to assert his innocence and refuses to back down. Jegan goes back to work and scolds a low-ranking staff worker but the dynamics of the office have changed since his arrest. Now the rest of the staff, including Arjie’s father, sides with the worker. Arjie overhears his parents discussing the issue that night and the difficult position of his father being Tamilian and needing to tread lightly with his staff. His mother suggests that the Tamil Tigers might not be so radical in their call for a separate state.
Jegan goes to the hotel for the next inspection and Arjie’s father and Sena Uncle decide to accompany him along with their families to show unity. At the beach, a group of boys threaten the women and children by calling Jegan a “Tiger” and throwing a bottle at them. Once they return to the hotel, Arjie’s father finally tells Amma about the violence against Tamils during the riots inflicted by Banduratne Mudalali’s men and Amma suggests emigrating. She says it might be the best idea for the safety of the family but Appa refuses because of how the family would be forced to live in poverty elsewhere.
That night after dinner, the family discovers that someone has written “Death to All Tamil Tigers” on Jegan’s window and ransacked his room. The family determines the act must have been committed by one of the staff members. The other staff cannot help clean up because they don’t want to be targeted next by whomever committed this act, so Amma and the children clean up the writing and move Jegan to a different room. The guests are spooked and begin checking out of the hotel due to a rumor that the writing means there will be a bombing that night. Jegan is upset that he will soon be fired.
The next day, the women and children go to the beach, and it is clear Amma has been crying. Once the inspection is over, Arjie’s father must let Jegan go. He offers him a different position in the Middle East but the reality that Jegan is being fired is not lost on Jegan. When Arjie tries to connect with Jegan, he dismisses him as “just a boy” and Arjie grows angry. Once they return from the hotel, Jegan leaves while the kids are at school without saying goodbye. The next day the referendum is held but thugs stuff the ballot boxes and rig the results. Amma brings up the need to emigrate again but Arjie’s father won’t hear it.
Analysis
Jegan becomes another important ally for Arjie, defending the boy against his father’s concerns that Arjie is different. This chapter marks the third instance of Arjie finding acceptance from an adult outside his immediate family. Radha Aunty, Daryl Uncle, and Jegan all help Arjie come to terms with himself as they accept the differences that his father rejects in him, like his proclivity for dressing up, the Little Women books, and playing with dolls.
Jegan’s presence brings Arjie a great deal of joy, but he struggles with placing his feelings about the young man working for his father. First, Arjie finds himself paying particular attention to Jegan’s physicality: “what had struck me was the strength of his body. The muscles of his arms and neck” (156). Arjie tells himself that he just admires how he hopes his own body will soon transform, but his feelings for Jegan indicate his burgeoning sexuality as well as the confusion he currently feels about his body. He also picks up on the ambiguity in Jegan’s comments about his friend, for Arjie “watched him closely” (171) as he called the young man who was tortured a “very good [friend]” (171). Arjie felt seen by Jegan, who “was the first ever to defend me” (162), a fact which made him “even more devoted to [Jegan]” (162).
Jegan’s presence makes Arjie unavoidably aware of the tensions in his country, building on what happened with Radha Aunty and Anil and Daryl’s mysterious death. Prateek identifies this blurring of lines between the personal and the political: “Time and again, the political keeps breaking the confinements of the personal narrative of Arjie, who fails to understand this untimely eruption, to blur the difference between the image and the reflection. This helplessness of the narrator is registered well by the writer to underline how the political activities of the heterosexual world do not make any sense to the gay narrator.”
Another related way to interpret “Small Choices” is that it unites concerns of repression, both sexually and within the country. Louis Lo writes, “The chapter opens with the unveiling of a childhood friendship followed by a series of events which reveal Appa’s potential sexual funniness; it ends with political oppression, intolerance to a Tamil, and ethnic ‘funniness,’ which Appa refuses to admit. Arjie’s suffering and the family’s exile are actually both caused by the repeated repression of some version of funniness.” Lo posits that the friendship between Appa and Buddy may have also been characterized by “funniness,” noting, for example, that Appa was the only one who did not laugh when the family found out about Arjie and the wedding dress—as if he was more disturbed given his own “tendencies.”
Arjie, Jegan, and even Appa’s (potential) queerness are mirrored in the repression of Tamils in the country, which ranges from economic and political marginalization to threats of (and actual) physical violence. “Small Choices” shows the reader the reality of living in Sri Lanka during the years leading up to the official outbreak of civil war in 1983 at the same time as it reveals the similarly circumscribed conditions of queer people in the country, more of which is explored in the subsequent section, “The Best School of All.”
