War & Peace Quote by Michael Ondaatje

There is a quiet provocation in how casually this “path” gets laid out, as if a life can be reduced to a neat itinerary: origin, exile, education, return. Ondaatje’s line works because it sounds almost like plot summary, but the flatness is the point. It mimics the bureaucratic tone of institutions that turn human lives into dossiers and mandates, especially when the subject is “war crimes” - a phrase so standardized it can numb. Against that administrative coolness, you can hear the moral heat trying to break through.

“Fate or chance” is the hinge. It refuses the comforting narrative that Anil’s return is heroic destiny; it might be accident, or it might be history’s gravitational pull. Either way, the choice is framed as partly stolen from her. That ambivalence carries the book’s larger tension: when a person leaves a country shaped by violence, do they ever really leave, or do they just become differently implicated?

The context matters: Sri Lanka’s civil war produced not only atrocities but competing stories about them. Anil returns under the banner of the Human Rights Commission, a vehicle for truth-telling that also signals danger - international scrutiny, local resentment, political obstruction. Ondaatje’s subtext is that “investigating” is never neutral. The educated abroad investigator arrives with tools and language forged elsewhere, then must apply them in a place where evidence is buried, literally and socially. The sentence maps a trajectory, but it also sketches a trap: the closer you get to truth, the more you become part of the conflict you’re trying to document.