Paper Plane A Haunting Debut by Nifraz Rifaz

BY TINA EDWARD GUNAWARDHANA 

Young author Nifraz Rifaz announced himself as a compelling new voice in contemporary Sri Lankan fiction with Paper Plane, a lyrical and deeply unsettling debut that examined identity, displacement, and the heavy cost of silence in a fractured society. Drawing from lived experience, collective memory, and national trauma, Rifaz has written a novel that moves fluidly between Sri Lanka and London, following a protagonist shaped as much by expectation as by the unspoken weight of history. At the centre of the novel is Zed, a frustrated, musical, and profoundly human character navigating the contradictions of modern life. In Zed’s world, home had once been neutral territory—a place of fragile peace, provided one kept quiet. His family’s expectations for him were simple and non-negotiable: build a respectable future in business, marry the girl chosen for him, and bury everything else. His doubts, his music, and the parts of himself that resisted conformity were meant to remain hidden, safely out of sight. But London never allowed the past to lie still. When Zed met Maya, a sharp, perceptive diasporic woman who saw through his carefully curated performance, the foundations of his self-deception began to crack.

Their connection pulled him into a reckoning he could no longer postpone. The war he believed he had left behind followed him across borders, resurfacing as unrest back home and suspicion abroad. As his half-truths and silences began to unravel, Zed was forced to confront a reality he had long denied: belonging did not come from silence, and safety was not always worth the price it demanded. Set in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks, Paper Plane explored how a single act of violence shattered trust and disrupted the rhythms of daily life across Muslim, Sinhalese, and Tamil communities. Told through a Muslim lens, the novel offered a rare and intimate perspective on fear, resilience, and the quiet courage required to rebuild community. Rifaz also drew nuanced parallels with the unresolved wounds of Sri Lanka’s civil war, suggesting that trauma lingered long after the violence ended, continuing to shape identity, relationships, and communal memory. Zed’s journey unfolded across landscapes both familiar and foreign—from the multicultural calm of Galle Fort to the restless streets of London, including Soho, Camden, and Shoreditch—before circling back to a Sri Lanka gripped by grief and suspicion.

His estranged friendships, proximity to extremist influences, and conflicted romantic choices mirrored a nation wrestling with its own fractures. Throughout the novel, the image of a paper plane drifted above the chaos, a fragile symbol of dreams, fears, and untold stories weighed down by race, religion, and inherited responsibility. Music played a vital role in the emotional architecture of the book. Each chapter was titled after a song by M.I.A., the British musician of Sri Lankan descent whose uncompromising voice and defiant artistry informed the novel’s exploration of expression and resistance. Her presence served as a quiet compass, guiding characters through grief and doubt toward the possibility of hope and self-expression. Haunting, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest, Paper Plane stood as a powerful meditation on what it meant to be whole in a world that demanded silence. For anyone who had lived between cultures, languages, or truths, Rifaz’s debut offered recognition—and the courage to make one’s inner life visible.