The Seasons of Trouble (30 page)

‘And I should speak only for a few minutes each time, right? Three minutes, no?’ Sarva asked, perking up, recalling some trivia about phone tapping.

Randy guffawed. They had discovered ways around that now, he said, ‘But yes, do that if you want. Or just text, man.’

Sarva wasn’t sure later if it was the phone that had normalised his life or if he had adjusted to anonymity. He began to wake early and go for a walk within the campus to exercise his weak spine. He learnt to associate food with sustenance rather than taste, and his appetite improved. He called his family every morning and night. His littlest nephew was starting to speak and because he was told his grandmother lived in Nuwara Eliya, he called her Noorie. Sarva’s younger brother, Carmel, was into Snoop Dog and Jay-Z and wrote Tamil hip-hop songs about girls and gangs.

Although Sarva loved hearing their voices, the conversations with his parents always upset him. The plainclothesmen still came. His father had quit his job and found another as manager in a small private tea estate in Maskeliya. Amma was in the process of moving there, spending time between the two houses. Thus, fortunately, it was often the housemaid who answered the door to the TID or police. Amma had instructed her to say, ‘I don’t know’, ‘Amma has gone to town’, ‘I will tell them you came’, alternating between the phrases, and never to open the chain lock on the door.

The men continued to visit Aunty Rani’s Colombo house, too, and once even forced open her front door. Typical of Aunty, she narrated it vividly enough for him to picture what happened: she had been at the post office and her middle-aged tenant had called her, flustered and high-pitched. Some men had shoved around the apartment building’s watchman, taken the elevator to the seventh floor, and burst into the house. The tenant had screamed for several minutes and then fainted. Before that, she had registered this much: there were six or seven well-built men wearing crew cuts and sky-blue shirts tucked into grey trousers. They had asked for Sarva and Indra. Aunty said she was now noting the dates, times and details of all raids on her home in a diary.

Almost four months had passed since Sarva had been acquitted and the release papers sent to the TID, but the situation was now well beyond documents and courts. He was helplessly wracked with guilt about his family’s continued harassment. He often wondered if he should have just stayed in prison till the paperwork was
complete, but his unending backache reminded him why he had bolted. The pain had grown and spread to his legs. A doctor prescribed some painkillers over the phone.

Sarva also had unexpected blackouts and would come to with bloodshot eyes. It burned when he peed, and every few days there were drops of blood in his urine. Shifting between sitting and standing was agonising. Sarva needed to visit a doctor for proper treatment, but the NP had been unable to convince a government doctor to see, much less treat, Sarva.

‘Any bloody doctor will be able to tell that your injuries are from torture, and the fucking cowards don’t want to get involved.’ When Randy was frustrated, expletives poured out. ‘Even if they’ll treat you, the bastards are too scared to put their signature on a damn certificate.’ The NP needed such a certificate for the asylum application, and it was proving impossible to get. It was urgent because soon the baton marks and chain impressions on Sarva’s body would fade. For now, the NP had given the Swiss embassy photographs of his injuries and his medical report from the prison attack.

Sarva spent afternoons on his phone, reading interviews with the lucky few who had escaped from the north and made their way to England or Canada. Within Sri Lanka, former combatants were arrested or had surrendered; the government had close to 11,000 men and women in detention camps, but gave no explanation for the 15,780 missing. Sarva’s life had led him along a different route: torture, trial and an acquittal. He had privileges—his distance from the war, a middle-class family with access to lawyers and some money, and a bilingual mother. Even so, his future was uncertain.

More than a year had passed since the end of the war, and the re-elected president was amassing more power. Rajapaksa had won six million votes, handily defeating General Fonseka, whose four million votes drew in most of the electorate in the minority-dominated northern and eastern provinces. The very next month, the president had Fonseka arrested for ‘military offences’. Over 100 military policemen burst into his house, threatened his family and dragged him away. It was the start of a stronger clampdown on all opposition, including the muzzling of press freedom.

Censorship and the threat of violence hung heavy over the media. Murder, kidnapping, violence against property and journalists, financial restrictions and control—all these techniques were employed to limit what could be published or broadcast. The government-run TV channel and papers ran propaganda and, fearing harassment, much of the private media learnt to practise self-censorship. Sri Lanka sat 162nd in the index of press freedom compiled by Reporters Without Borders, making it the lowest-ranked parliamentary democracy.

On websites and in foreign media, undercover journalists and activists published front-line reports and eyewitness accounts of the army shelling no-fire zones, using cluster bombs, grabbing land and harassing freed combatants. A year after the end of the LTTE, the missing pieces of the war gradually emerged, unveiling the fabrications of a government eager to claim victory but keen to deny the number of fatalities. Every time the state claimed the army caused zero casualties and that all killings were the LTTE’s responsibility, the Sri Lankan diaspora, including covert Tiger sympathisers, accused the state of sponsoring genocide. The truth lay in the gulf between claim and counterclaim. In the cacophony of different accounts, attempts to measure the cost of the conflict—the counting of the dead, lost, disappeared, raped or displaced; their names and addresses; the dates and locations of war crimes; the number of soldiers deployed, killed or injured; the battle methods of the army and the LTTE—became fraught with motives and desired ends. Propaganda eclipsed facts, denial extinguished compassion. The war’s end produced two aggressive parallel narratives, which ran fast and strong, never meeting, like the dual histories of the warring peoples themselves.

Sarva was far away from all the action. Yet he felt a kinship with the Vanni Tamils, a shared suffering. He envied them their closure. The long war had torn their lives apart but had also ended in front of their eyes. What he fought with were the ghosts from the same war: how long would they haunt him?

Sarva read Tamil and Sinhalese dailies cover to cover, including the obituaries, with a growing dread of finding the name of someone he knew—a classmate Malainathan from Chavakacheri
or cycling buddy Frederick, who had moved to Mullaitivu—until he realised that such deaths would be kept out of the papers. People disappeared; they did not die.

After a while, he stopped bothering with the Sinhalese papers; they were filled with excited bloviating and overwrought praise for the president. Their optimism and convenient blindness made his blood boil. They wrote about the inauguration of new Tamil-language schools in the Vanni but didn’t mention that the earlier school buildings had been bombed. His own high school had been shelled and his primary school turned into a camp for the displaced. By and by, the helpless pathos of Tamil papers wore him out, too. His life was no different from that of the millions of Tamils they wrote about; his fate was inextricably linked to theirs.

The more he thought about this, the further Sarva sank into himself. Beside a small stream behind the Batticaloa seminary, he watched tortoises flop around, paddling into the water, onto the mud, into the water, onto the mud, a game without end, until the twisting current pulled them away.

If someone had told him how much longer he would have to stay at the seminary, Sarva might have fared better. Instead, the incremental extension of this period of hiding chipped away at him, the uncertainty leaving him breathless. What he didn’t know was that the months ahead would be a blur of locations and new identities. He would be desperate to be visible, numb with solitude, and constantly on the verge of nervous collapse, until an unexpected love affair, irrational and all-consuming, would resuscitate him.

PART THREE

refuge

17.

August 2010

‘YOU HAVE AN
interview at the Swiss embassy tomorrow!’ Randy shouted on the phone. He was already on his way to Batticaloa to pick Sarva up.

Why he wasn’t given more notice Sarva couldn’t imagine, but he started to prepare mentally. Four months had passed since he left prison and he was sure his brain had atrophied. He would never forget Inspector Silva, but the other names were fading. At least remember the dates, remember the order, he told himself throughout the van journey to Colombo.

They drove through the night without stopping. Sarva didn’t sleep a wink. At dawn he was groggy and feverish; his nerves were shot. He brushed his teeth, rinsing from a bottle of water, and changed his shirt in the van. They entered through the back gate of the embassy. Later, when he would overanalyse what had happened and superstitiously attach meaning to every minor event, he would consider this the first bad sign, an omen that his life would soon be ruined: you never enter through the back door.

Then he was annoyed about having to give his statement to a Muslim official. They speak a different type of Tamil, Sarva hissed to Randy. ‘He might write things wrong—wrong on purpose, I mean—and misrepresent me!’ The second-largest minority group
in the country, Sri Lankan Muslims also spoke Tamil, and their vocabulary was indeed slightly different from Sarva’s Jaffna Tamil. But so was that of plantation Tamils and Indian Tamils, and Sarva would never have become suspicious so quickly of someone from those communities. This was another of the Tigers’ unfortunate legacies to the Tamils. Even a Colombo boy like Sarva could buy in to this unfair stereotype of the backstabbing Muslim.

Randy just whispered to Sarva that he’d better shut up because he had no choice here. ‘I’m sure the interview will be all right,’ he added, more reassuringly.

The interview couldn’t have gone worse. Sarva’s nerves made him mix up the dates, contradict himself, and forget crucial details. He was a babbling mess, and even as he exited the office, he knew he would not get an asylum visa. He found Randy waiting outside in the van. ‘
Kote vittiten
,’ Sarva said, choking on the phrase, one he used in school when he failed an exam.

‘Leave it!’ Randy said. ‘We’ll go to the office and you can meet Elizabeth,’ he added with a wink, forcing Sarva to laugh.

Elizabeth Ogave turned out to be a tough South African woman, stout and as tall as Sarva, with a manner that screamed efficiency. As soon as he saw her, Sarva felt better. She was the election project coordinator at NP and was confidence personified. She spoke compassionately, and her quick manner shrank any obstacle into a petty nuisance. Sarva imagined she would beat up any number of people for him. ‘What a woman!’ he whistled to Randy when she was out of earshot. By the time it was five in the evening, and Sarva was already falling for Elizabeth, she decided to send him back to the Bataramulla seminary.

‘Is that okay?’ she asked, and he liked her for pretending that he had any say in the matter.

Brother Hendrick was happy to have Sarva back, and threw him a welcome-home party with the rest of the residents. ‘No drinks,’ he said, ‘except tea.’ Sarva told a rapt Brother Hendrick about Elizabeth, exaggerating her good looks and his own smooth talk. He forgot for a few hours why he was there until someone fished out a camera to take photographs; then he left hurriedly with an unconvincing lie about hearing his phone ring.

A few days later, Randy came by with a long face. The Sri Lankan immigration authorities had deported Elizabeth, too. Sarva’s heart sank. The NP was hurtling towards shutdown.

‘You may be out of job soon,’ he told Randy.

‘Yes, man, and you may be dead soon.’

That night, Randy smuggled a bottle of Old Reserve arrack into the seminary, and Sarva got plastered for the first time since his shipping days. The only line he recalled from that night was Randy assuring him, ‘There are others, don’t worry!’ He might have meant other NGOs, but it could as well have been about other women.

And sure enough, in a week, Sarva had reason to feel hopeful. Randy said a local NGO had agreed to take on Sarva’s case, and one of their employees would come to the seminary to meet him. The NGO was Colombo-based and worked on press freedom, illegal detentions and disappearances. It had recently started campaigning for the release of some high-profile detainees.

This was uplifting news, but did he really have to face another interview? ‘They speak Tamil?’ a tired Sarva asked Randy. ‘Will you be coming to translate?’

‘No, the woman is Sinhalese,’ Randy said. ‘Her name is Miss Shirleen. You can talk to her in Sinhala directly.’

‘
Aiyo
, she is Sinhalese?’ He wasn’t sure anymore if this NGO woman was a safe bet.

Soon after his meeting with Miss Shirleen the next day, however, Sarva dialled Randy. ‘I expected an old lady, but who did you send, man?! My eyes popped out!’

Randy burst out laughing. ‘Yes, of course. This is our special treatment for torture victims.’

Shirleen was breathtaking, and Sarva was smitten the minute he saw her walk into the seminary in a stylishly worn sari. That she was also a young lawyer and activist and would be accepting his case immediately made her an angel fashioned by God especially for him. He found her polite and was flattered by how attentively she listened. Throughout the interview he had to hold down a fit of boyish giggles. She called him ‘Sharva’, with an
h
, and he swore to himself never to correct her.