Books
S. Shakthidharan
Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath
In the 1940s, a family builds a home. Its bookshelves contain “the Ramayana alongside Agatha Christie”. The family, playwright S. Shakthidharan’s great-grandparents, are farmers from Jaffna, descendants of people who have lived for centuries at the northern tip of Sri Lanka, just above the Sinhalese majority.
Shakthi’s great-great-grandmother sends his great-grandfather to receive an English-language education. Within a generation, mornings spent trudging to the well transform into mornings treading boarding-school floors. Shakthi’s great-grandfather becomes the only Tamil member of the post-independence government in Ceylon, and moves the family to Colombo, the metropole.
Alongside the family’s political and socioeconomic fortunes, their house grows, keeping pace with the zeitgeist – the ’70s see it clad in matching velvet and brown veneer. By the beginning of the ’80s, the Tamil minority is under siege. Riots overtake the city in 1983 and the clan scatters: cousins turn to New York, others to Auckland. Shakthi’s father goes to Singapore. A gulf grows between those who stay and those who leave.
Shakthi’s family ends up in Sydney, dedicated to dreaming everything up again – the doors, deities, pettagams and kavichchis of their old home are gradually shipped over. Shakthi feels a pressure, as the family’s only son, to provide. He lives with his mother, helping her pay the bills and create budgets. He becomes a kind of filial ledger-maker whose copybooks often begin, “amount owed”. (This ledger is rarely paid off.) Eventually, he realises his filial responsibility requires accepting that the ledger might never be cleared.
In an almost epistolary fashion, Shakthi uses the second person to address his coming-of-age and the family members who shaped him, his tone traversing elegiac and lyrical registers. He recounts his mother’s formative years becoming a dancer, poised for a life of celebrity in ’70s Paris. It’s not to be: concerned by the advances of men, her mother shepherds her home, where she marries Shakthi’s father and becomes a housewife in Sydney. Divorce soon follows, with her own need for independence. She starts a dance company while putting Shakthi through school. Shakthi, not knowing the extent of her sacrifice – the layby and credit cards, her sense of injustice as a single mother in a foreign country an “internal incandescence” – wonders at the ignorance of his younger self.
The parties Shakthi recalls throwing as a teen are a way of establishing memories, worlds of his own atop the hundreds of years of family history he has been born into. As an adult, another layer arrives: Shakthi’s desire to tell the story of his family and Sri Lanka in his first play, Counting and Cracking, whose writing necessitates asking questions his mother has long feared. The play acts as a go-between, a way of staging private conversations publicly. Indeed, throughout Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath, ordinary activities reveal themselves as intermediaries, ways of communing between people who have trouble otherwise sharing their emotions. When an uncle tells him Shakthi’s mother is in debt, the pair are busy digitising a playlist of celebratory tunes. With his mother, opportunities for emotional vulnerability often involve elongating their shared domestic spaces – sometimes by simply spending a little longer washing the dishes in conversation with her.
Later Shakthi and his partner return to the family home to live with his mother. It is another layer, a new calibration in his relationship with her. Setting boundaries with family while discovering the boundaries of his own – a partner who worries she is losing her agency, her identity, her trajectory, inside the limits of Shakthi’s clan – becomes part of how he learns acceptance. Maintaining their home while the work Shakthi does is publicly acknowledged, celebrated and wanted, his partner chafes at her invisibility. Acknowledging his responsibility for this, Shakthi realises his need for love.
It is a need he did not expect. He is trying to unlearn patterns of guilt, the sense of failing to be present for his family, a clan whose love often comes with guilt attached. Vigilant against bringing intergenerational hurt and familial resentments upon his sons, he tries not to deflect his hurt or pain onto those closest to him.
Frank and meditative, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath is a personal investigation of familial bonds. The book’s epistolary-like mode works like a tuning fork – a way for someone who is aware they have not always been able to reveal their feelings, even to themselves, to sound out new possibilities for doing so. In this, it expresses the need for love, both from oneself and others – mothers, fathers, partners, children – while realising that, although survival is hope, survival is not life. Shakthi needs to learn to live.
The book’s opening scene, in which Shakthi talks to his son about life, death and family, serves not only as a device for enclosing one generation’s story within another but for self-accountability. As a son, Shakthi has long felt the gaze of his own family upon him. Now he is on the other side, he understands how children monitor and observe the adults in their lives: their peculiarities, the things they normally do or fail to do, their habitual patterns. Listening, they are also watching, registering, taking notes.
Thus, a son invites his father to speak. The father reciprocates. A new story begins.
Powerhouse, 304pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 20, 2025 as "Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath".
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