He finds one in Kairo, who is “vaulting towards” his teens while simultaneously waiting for “childhood’s demons to die.” Here he is Jay, a wealthy boy with an unusual vocabulary and a penchant for violence as indicated by the bowie knife hanging from his belt, who is on the lookout for an acolyte. Soon after that, Ravi emigrates with his family to America and vanishes from the pages of “Reef.” But a version of him reappears in “Suncatcher,” Gunesekera’s latest novel, set in 1964 in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known). “Once he got me in the head: a good quarter-inch of nail into my skull making a hole I can still feel in moments of stress,” Triton says. Ravi introduces Triton to the American Wild West, cages parrots and mynas in his house and shoots arrows tipped with flattened nails. In Romesh Gunesekera’s 1994 novel “Reef,” we catch a fleeting glimpse of a boy named Ravi, who lives next door to the book’s protagonist, Triton.
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