The Seasons of Trouble (16 page)

SHE WAS WOKEN
by Maran’s soft crying. Between thunderclaps, Mugil heard explosions. Behind them was the continuous crackle of small arms, some of it close. She peeped through the periscope-like tunnel, from which one could see the ground above. White streaks of fire whizzed through the purple sky. People were running, crying, searching for each other, wild with confusion. The old man and her father hurried to the bottom floor. No one talked while her mother’s fevered chant of the
kandhar shashti kavacham
prayer wrapped itself around them. This was the bunker’s circle of trust, the space they could understand and return to every time the world above turned into a blur of bullets, fire and falling men.

For the next three days, PTK was under siege. The Tigers were engaging the 58th division of the army marching from Viswamadu. The cadre had reverted to guerrilla ways and was constantly changing position, firing at the army and immediately moving to another location. When the army responded with missiles, they would hit only ill-informed villagers. The army was equipped with long-range missile launchers, and as it closed in from the west, it loosed them continuously.

The missiles fell round the clock. On the second day, a piece of red-hot metal nearly sliced open Maran’s eye. On the third, the
old man went outside during a lull and did not return. Mugil had known him for barely two days. On the fourth day, his granddaughter would not stop saying, ‘They will kill my baby.’

At one point, while everyone in the bunker hid their faces between their knees to avoid the flying embers and the shrapnel, a man dove into their huddle, screaming. The children shrieked. His leg was on fire, and he seemed so stiff with panic that for a second Mugil thought he was dead. They scooped some wet sand from the bags and threw it on his burning limb till he fainted. As the smell of burnt flesh filled the bunker, Mugil realised that the man’s dive had left a gaping hole in their bunker roof.

When he came to, the man broke down—he was looking for his children and aged parents. He had lost them a few days earlier and had been sure they would be in PTK. Mugil told him to stay in the bunker until the firing ceased; he was now part of their circle. For two days, they nursed his wounds as best they could, but they could not stop his weeping.

As PTK continued to be pulverised, on 21 January, the government announced a no-fire zone along the A35. It was a thirty-five-square-kilometre triangular patch of land, and its points were Suthanthirapuram junction, a yellow bridge and Thevipuram colony. Heavy fighting surrounded it, but the army promised civilians safety there. As the announcement boomed in Sinhalaaccented Tamil from the army jeeps fitted with loudspeakers, the burning man didn’t wait a moment to announce his decision to leave.

‘Will you make it?’ Mugil’s mother asked, pointing to his rotting leg. She had used her last spare sari to bandage his thigh, and the fabric was soaked with a yellowish secretion.

‘I don’t want to think about that,’ he replied. ‘I can’t sleep, eat or breathe. You are all fortunate you’re still together.’

The burning man left their bunker early the next morning, after touching Mother’s feet. Mugil would never know if he made it out PTK.

AFTER SEVERAL WET
days, sunshine lit the bunker in patches. No bombers had come that morning, nor had the rain. For the first time in months, Mugil heard birds sing. After sunrise, on 29 January, the Sri Lankan government had announced a forty-eight-hour safepassage window to allow civilians to move into the Thevipuram no-fire zone.

The streets filled with families, bicycles and motorbikes, tractors, trishaws and bullock carts loaded with possessions double their weight. It was almost impossible to move, and time was ticking away. In half a day, most people travelled just a few metres. Simmering impatience exploded into futile fights: a story did the rounds that a man had slit the throat of a motorist who ran over his foot.

People were desperate to get out of the town, but most couldn’t. Tiger units forbade them to seek protection from the army. Mother wanted to leave for the no-fire zone, fearing she would go the same way as the old man, but Father could not make up his mind. If they left before Divyan got in touch, it would be difficult to find each other later. Others in the bunker were ready to cross over to the army’s side, but it was clear that first the pregnant girl would have to be calmed down. She was now borderline hysterical. She was sure her child had died inside her womb. ‘See,
akka
? See? There is no movement. Touch and see!’

Mugil decided to take the girl to the town hospital and have her own badly infected shin examined. Mother asked her to get food on the way, or at least water, lemon and salt. The children were wilting with dehydration. Kalai was sucking her thumb and clawing at Amuda’s dry breast.

The road to the hospital was not as treacherous as Mugil expected; the firing had stopped for a few hours and the town was streaked with bloody sludge. Families leaving for the no-fire zone had removed mud-caked bodies from the road and placed them by the side, so their tractors, vans, bikes and cycles could pass. Almost skidding on an abandoned slipper, Mugil had an odd thought—that there must be twice as many desolate slippers as dead people.

The PTK government hospital looked like a crowded market for wounds and flies. There were people moving through the gate,
through the compound and up the steps. Others had spread straw mats or saris and lay on them in the heat, waiting for a doctor to call or come by. Insects buzzed everywhere. A toddler was sitting on a bench outside, his left eye bandaged, his right teary. Someone had given him some candy, which he ate dreamily.

She had expected there to be blood everywhere, but all she saw were several colours of infection. Very few had fresh wounds; most were days, weeks, months old, often with fraying temporary bandages. The usual hospital smell of antiseptic was overpowered by the putrid stench of decay.

When they entered the corridor, they saw a grieving man throw himself on a small shrouded body. A child’s feet, wearing thick silver anklets, stuck out from under the dirty bed sheet. A woman crouched next to the child, looking away. A doctor, his once-white coat smeared with many shades of rust, stood with a pad and pen in his hands. A man and three women were hassling him, pulling him in different directions. He walked to an old woman sitting below a window, her eyes closed. He sat down next to her, holding his back as he did so. That’s when Mugil noticed a long piece of bark lodged in the woman’s side. Her abdomen seemed to have closed in around it, as if trying to digest it. Mugil watched the doctor talk continuously to the woman in Tamil while his orderly yanked the bark out in one motion. Anticipating the woman’s scream, Mugil clapped her hands to her ears and turned away.

Doctors were operating in open rooms or right there in the corridors. There was no electricity, so large vats of water were being boiled in the backyard on wood fires. The medical staff just dipped the steel clamps, knives and other surgical implements in cloudy hot water before plunging them into people. They were already rationing supplies of gauze, asking people to rip up their own clothes and use them as bandages. As hundreds came for treatment every day, the doctors worked for long stretches without sleep, sometimes forgetting to take a break or eat until they fainted.

Behind Mugil was a doctor whose fingers poked inside a man’s forearm. A woman who acted like a nurse but wasn’t dressed in white fed the patient a few spoonfuls of glucose. Mugil went up to her with the pregnant girl and asked if she could tell whether the
baby was dead. When she was done with the male patient, without a word, the nurse touched the girl’s belly and put a stethoscope to her wrist and neck.

‘It is alive, but the heartbeat is very faint. Maybe it has twisted itself in the umbilical cord. Leave her here, we’ll see,’ the nurse said.

Mugil looked at the pregnant girl, who nodded that she would be okay in the hospital. ‘Just send my grandmother here when you get home.’ She’d referred to the bunker they’d shared as home.

Mugil then pointed to her own shin. ‘I can’t walk. Will the infection spread? Will this go away?’ she said to the nurse, trying to speak fast and clear.

‘Is there something inside?’

‘I felt around. Something might be there. I’m not sure.’

‘You have some antiseptic or hot water? Or sugar?’ the nurse asked.

Mugil smiled. ‘No, I only have an X-ray machine in my bunker,’ she said.

The nurse responded with a tired smile. ‘Okay, here,’ she said, handing Mugil half a strip of headache tablets. Mugil asked if she really had nothing else. The nurse swivelled her head, inviting Mugil to look around. ‘Army is not letting the ICRC or UN people bring in the proper medicines,’ she said. The government didn’t want the Tigers accessing emergency painkillers like ketamine for their battle-injured fighters. Because of the embargo on fuel, cold storage sections in the hospital were not able to preserve blood or store oxygen either. The nurse hurriedly showed Mugil how to place a splint on the back of her leg and tie it on with a bandage. ‘It’ll help you walk. There’s nothing else I can do for you.’

Outside, for a few hundred rupees, from the Tigers’ cooperative lorry, Mugil bought a piece of pumpkin, 100 grams of milk powder and a bottle of supposedly clean water, which had tiny things floating in it. The supplies came from the UN and the Indian government, but somehow it was the Tiger cadre that was distributing them. They didn’t have any lemons. A handful of salt, dirty and wet, was 1,000 rupees. Mugil wished she had kept the Tiger tooth. It was gold-plated.

She hobbled back to the bunker and sent the pregnant girl’s grandmother to the hospital. They hugged and said they would meet sometime soon, when all this was over.

The next day, on 1 February, the Sri Lankan army rained artillery shells on the PTK hospital for more than four hours.

9.

February 2009

NO ONE WAS
held responsible, no one was punished or even questioned. After all, everything could be denied.

Sarva had written a letter describing the prisoners’ attack on him, begging to be moved out of the CRP; he had posted it blindly to ‘The Honourable President Mahinda Rajapakse, Sri Lanka’. Two months later, Sarva had been finally shifted to the Welikada New Magazine Prison on the outskirts of Colombo city. It was the largest in the country. He couldn’t be sure if this was in response to his request or simply the turning of the system’s unseen wheels. In any case, the transfer hadn’t come a day too soon.

The G Cell of the H Ward, where he was now, was exclusively for political prisoners: social workers, politicians, union leaders, protesters, even some army deserters. But the majority were suspected of being Tamil Tigers or their sympathisers. When Sarva was escorted inside, the inmates were lining up to go back to their cells after yard time. He saw most of them take their slippers off outside their cell gates. He felt weak with relief.

Among these men, Sarva spoke in Tamil freely, even to excess. An ageing prisoner from his cell once asked why Sarva ‘jabbered away like someone had turned on a tap inside him’. The places the prisoners came from, their schools, their wives’ villages, their
favourite foods—anything would suffice for Sarva to find a connection. During the very first week in his cell, he swapped notes with twenty-nine-year-old Rooban about their idyllic childhoods. The stealing of mangoes in summer, the anger on losing one’s precious marbles or wickets to a bully, the devouring of stories in Tamil literature textbooks even before classes began. Rooban used to work in a rice mill. He had a handsome face and lustrous hair, but it was his timidity that was his most pronounced physical characteristic.

When Sarva was brought to the cell, Rooban saw him wincing while sitting on the floor. ‘I can’t sit down either,’ he said. ‘Is it only your lower back or your feet, too?’

‘Feet also,’ Sarva replied.

Rooban said he was from Valaignarmadam, in Mullaitivu in the north. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Nuwara Eliya,’ Sarva had said first, but then added, ‘My mother’s side is from the north.’

Like Sarva, Rooban had been pulled off a street, but in Vavuniya, a city in the north that was under government control. He was detained in a cow shed for about six months along with three strangers he had not heard of since. When his bladder had ruptured from a severe kicking, he was moved to a hospital in Colombo and then to the TID basement. He was cagey about the details of what happened to him there except for mentioning once that he was suspended from the ceiling by his ankles for half a day with a bucket of petrol evaporating slowly beneath his head. His interrogators had asked him to sing the national anthem in Sinhala, and he had only known the Tamil version learnt in school. It was a state-approved Tamil translation of the Sri Lankan anthem that government schools all over the north taught, but in a dark room with the anti-terrorism police, nothing was innocuous.