“It started ages ago, a thousand centuries ago, but let’s skip all those yesterdays and begin last Tuesday. It is a day you wake up hungover and empty of thought, which is true of most days.”
The use of the pronoun “you” here does not refer to the reader, but rather to the protagonist of the story. The story of a drunk waking up without anything of interest going on inside his head is the story of the protagonist. So, the mystery becomes who is telling the story of the protagonist. A little logic is all that is necessary to work this out. If the storyteller knows everything about the protagonist including what he was thinking about when he woke to a hangover last Tuesday, but the storyteller is not the protagonist, it can mean only one thing as long some sort of magic is kept out of the deal. The protagonist must be dead and the storyteller must be his eternal spirit.
“Being a ghost isn’t that different to being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror. As action-packed as your post-death party has been, most of it is spent watching people staring at things. People stare a lot, break wind all the time, and touch their genitals much too much.”
The protagonist is given the choice of being a ghoul or a ghost and when he inquires as to the difference, all he receives is a metaphor about the former directing the world and the latter blowing with the wind. The evidence from this passage indicates the choice he makes. It also hints that the stories of ghosts portrayed in movies only show the absolute high points of their existence. The comparison to a war photographer is not random. That is the job the protagonist had before his demise. One could extrapolate the comparison and apply it to any number of other jobs. Most of life is about the downtime spent waiting in between high points, after all. True, the exciting parts of being a war photographer might reach a bit higher than that of a teacher or mechanic, but the idea remains the same. If the average person were entertained by a bored ghost and knew it, perhaps more lives would be interesting.
“Because, according to silly old you, the problem was that the folks in Colombo and London and Delhi didn’t know the full extent of the horror. And maybe clever young you could produce the photo that turned policymakers against the war. Do for Lanka’s civil war what naked napalm girl did for Vietnam.”
The protagonist’s job as a war photographer is essential to the central premise of the novel. That premise is that the ghost has seven days to figure out who is responsible for the death of the man. That seven-day deadline is what the seven moons in the title reference. The suspected motive at play here has to do with a secret file of photos taken by the protagonist which could potentially cause big trouble for some very important players in Sri Lanka’s murky political situation at the time. This stash of photos is what is referred to in the quote. “Naked napalm girl” is a reference to a photo of nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc whose clothes were literally burned off her body as the result of a napalm attack by a South Vietnamese plane. Plastered across the front page of the New York Times in June 1972, the image shocked Americans and drove sentiment even more strongly against the Vietnam War. This is what the narrator means by “doing” for the civil war in Sri Lanka what the napalm picture did for the Vietnam War. The very suggestion that one of the photographs kept hidden in a secret stash might have carried this potential is more than enough reason for some very important people to want him the man with the camera dead.
