The Seasons of Trouble (36 page)

This was why, when Mugil mounted her bicycle, she kept her legs together, her eyes on the ground. She did not argue with men. She shrank. She acted frail for the comfort of others.

And so it was that Mugil chose what she felt was a traditional woman’s job. In May, she and Mother started a small business with their neighbour Sangeeta, making snacks. Mugil, as the worst cook but fastest talker in the group, made deliveries to the market on a bicycle donated by the Dutch Refugee Council. The kind cool-bar owner was their most dependable customer, and he recommended their delicious fish rolls and patties to other shops, too. They made between 500 to 1,000 rupees every day. Some of this they set aside to keep the business running, and the rest they split evenly between them. At first they naively bought groceries at retail, but in time Mugil cut wholesale deals. Some evenings, she scoured the shops for day-old vegetables or oddly cut fish that sold at half-price and tasted just as good.

Her pretence of innocence made Mugil feel like a criminal. ‘I’m acting so much like a helpless mother that I forget that I
am
a helpless mother!’ She felt hemmed in, but the snack business worked.
She earned just about enough and, given the circumstances, it was the most feminine, unthreatening job she could be seen doing.

Amuda had something marginally better on the horizon. An international NGO had offered her an interest-free loan, and she was considering setting up a knick-knack shop. With the loan, she would be able to afford a solar panel and a used fridge, so she could stock milk and yogurt. ‘And I could chill soft drinks and water,’ she declared, knowing the demand for cool beverages in households with NGO visitors. ‘Nothing like a chilled glass of Necto or Sunquick to get hot and bothered people into a giving mood.’

Mugil, too, had applied for the loan; she didn’t like not being chosen. When Amuda signed the papers a few weeks later, Mugil read the certificate. ‘Special Livelihood Loan,’ it said at the top of the page. In the checklist of borrower eligibility, there was a tick next to ‘Disabled’ and ‘Widow’. Mugil swallowed the resentment that rose like bile in her throat.

Later, she asked Mother why Amuda was always the more deserving one. ‘She has always got stuff because of her limp, and now she’s a widow, too,’ she said.

Mother didn’t look at her. ‘She is your sister,’ she said.

Mugil continued: ‘Fine, I guess she deserves help, but why are others like me left out? I’m also alone, without my husband.’

A few days later, their snack business partner, Sangeeta, arrived to settle the previous week’s accounts. She went straight into Mugil’s kitchen and made two tumblers of black coffee. Not finding any sugar, she added more water to make the brew less bitter.

They sat on the porch. Mugil sipped, and let out an appreciative sigh. ‘You added coriander seeds?’

‘You like it?’

Mugil nodded vigorously and sipped some more. She could never make coffee like this. ‘What was I
doing
in the past?’

‘Again this? It’s okay,
akka
, you can change now, start anew,’ Sangeeta said.

‘How? They won’t even give me a loan.’

Sangeeta cocked her head. ‘I didn’t get one either,
akka
.’

Mugil was not surprised. For all her optimism and toiling, twenty-nine-year-old Sangeeta was a difficult one for NGOs to slot.
She had been living in Point Pedro for a decade, having moved here after her marriage to Daya, a fisherman. The woman wore too much powder on her face, and too much oil in her glorious long braid. She had three boys. Her youngest, six-year-old Madhusan, was the one who had told Mugil his father was dead. In time, as the two women struck up a friendship, Sangeeta told her how Daya died. She remembered that day as a series of pictures and sounds, the connections and context emerging from years of retelling the story to the police.

In January 2007, Daya had stopped at Point Pedro market after work to buy kites for his sons. The army had already begun to capture parts of the Vanni, and security had been ramped up in all Tamil districts. The military dotted every corner of the market. One soldier asked Daya for his ID, glanced at it and handed it back. Daya came home and gave the older boys their kites. Remembering something else he wanted to buy, he decided to go back to the market on his motorbike. Madhusan, then two, asked for a ride, so Daya put the boy on the petrol tank in front of him and drove off.

Within minutes, Sangeeta, who was inside the house, heard gunshots. She ran out the door and down the street. Daya was on the road, lying on his side. The bike was on its side, too, still whirring. A few people rushed out of their houses. Sangeeta saw a stunned Madhusan in a stranger’s arms. She threw herself down near Daya. Under his head, a puddle of blood was growing. His eyes were half open, his breathing sketchy but definitely there. She tried to stem the blood, but his curly hair was thick and she was panicking. She couldn’t find the bullet hole, and the red just kept flowing. Under him, under her, under the bike. She suddenly heard the revving of a motorbike in the distance. When it reached them, she saw it carried two helmeted men. They rode around her and Daya, circling like vultures. People made noises, waved their fists. That was when Sangeeta found her voice. ‘Why don’t you shoot us, too!’ The men sped away.

Some of their neighbours took Daya to a hospital, but the doctors could not save him. The police had taken days to respond to Sangeeta’s complaint, and when they finally took the body to conduct a post-mortem, they refused to share the report. The
police buried the body, despite Sangeeta’s request for a family ceremony and a Hindu cremation. Madhusan had been inconsolable, speechless for days after and then crying for weeks. His cousin distracted him by spinning a 2-rupee coin, the only way anyone was able to get through to the boy.

That was four years ago, but the experience still haunted Sangeeta’s family. The couple had never worked for the LTTE, but since Daya’s killing that fact mattered little. After the case was transferred to the army for investigation, a team had raided Sangeeta’s house. Locking her in, they had demanded to know who she thought shot Daya. With armed soldiers in her house, she had been unable to say she suspected the army. ‘It’s the LTTE,’ they had insisted, asking her to say the same in a statement. She had refused. They asked her to identify the killers from farcical parades of criminals. Even now, every few weeks she was summoned to the army camp, often after dark. She went with her mother or uncle each time, which some soldiers said they didn’t like. Once, they’d sent her mother home and kept Sangeeta for hours, asking repeatedly about the Tigers but never saying anything about Daya’s murder. Madhusan was on her lap, but they’d said she was still young, and that if she ‘cooperated’ with them, as they put it, they would let her off lightly. After a few hours, she pinched Madhusan hard. His bawling gave her an excuse to scurry home.

Now, as they sat in Mugil’s house, Sangeeta said, ‘Sometimes I think that I’m worse off than a widow. Same situation, more problems, but no help from NGOs or anybody.’ She was used to it now, she said.

In the north, there were around 59,000 households headed by women like Sangeeta, Mugil and Amuda. They included widows, women with incarcerated husbands and several who were not even sure if they were widows because their husbands had simply disappeared.

‘How many women can the NGOs help?’ Sangeeta asked almost to herself. ‘We’d better look out for ourselves.’

She opened the school notebook they used as an accounts ledger, in which Mugil had noted the expenses on the left-hand page and sales on the right. Sangeeta added up carefully, counting
on her fingers as always. They had made more than usual, thanks to a new snack recipe Sangeeta and Mother had come up with the previous day. They had stuffed spiced sprats and caramelised onions into sesame-dusted buns. All seventy of these were sold, and they had received more orders. She asked Mugil to start charging 25 rupees instead of 15 for each piece.

Mugil laughed. ‘You plan to become a millionaire with this business or what?’

When Mugil slept on her straw mat at night, with Tamizh splayed on her stomach and Maran snoring softly next to her, she sometimes wondered how things would be if her kids were raised by Divyan, if their roles were reversed. Would Divyan have been able to keep them healthy and fed? Would he, too, feel like he was pretending to be someone else? She asked Sangeeta if she thought her husband would have been a good single parent.

‘I’m dead or I’m in detention?’

‘You’re off. Dead.’

‘Then he’d struggle. Widowers don’t get any compensation or help, do they?’ she asked. ‘Which doesn’t make sense. We know how men are … they are more helpless than us.’

Looking at Sangeeta’s animated face, Mugil found herself wishing again that her own sister were more like this young woman, bright and full of life, engaging in conversation. But there was never a discussion with Amuda that wasn’t peppered with complaints about insomnia or exhaustion. Since they were girls, Amuda had been expected to be weak and Mugil strong.

‘I guess some people just make better victims,’ Mugil said.

Having finished with the accounts, Sangeeta went to the kitchen to knead the batter for the rolls and crumb some bread. Mother would join them soon, and in two hours the prepared
vadais
and tuna rolls would be wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine. The house was always quiet at this time, with Maran still in school and Tamizh napping. On such afternoons, time slowed down, and the women worked in silence. As Sangeeta and Mother cooked and the aromas of spice and jaggery peanut balls wafted through the rooms, Mugil tended to things that had nothing to do with being a mother. She combed her hair, did her laundry. She read the grimy day-old
newspapers the cool-bar owner gave her—it was a ritual that she felt nurtured the part of her everyone else wanted gone.

Sangeeta cynically called her friend’s reading unproductive ‘timepass’, but it helped keep Mugil’s mind sharp. In some elemental way, it connected her to the world where real life unfolded. Her own existence was a tightly knit routine of work, eat, worry, sleep. Elsewhere, people protested, went to court, fought elections, wrote poems, reunited with their families. Men got visas, women married them to get visas, politicians lied, children died. Even the circus of geopolitics fascinated her: India was confused; China was the new ally; the US and UK were diplomatic enemies of Sri Lanka, passing resolutions against it; the UN threatened the president with an international investigation into war crimes; the president booed and promoted his brothers in government; his brothers looted the country and abused the UN. The newspapers said which areas had been demined, where a new army camp had been established, where Buddhist monks had attacked mosques, where the defence secretary cut ribbons for newly built ‘ancient Buddha viharas’, where a startled soldier had shot a child. In another time, men would have been sitting around in tea shops discussing these events, trashing politicians and sharing news. But this was the era of cameras and spies, so the tea sessions were replaced by brooding silence.

She read out some important stories to Mother. Prabakaran’s childhood house in the Valvettithurai coastal town, which he had left as a teenager, was found destroyed. The house had been badly damaged in army and Indian Peace Keeping Force operations in 1987, four years after the family had left. The army had been guarding it, and the newspapers speculated that the soldiers had been gradually demolishing it, a rumour that grew quickly after the war ended, when southern tourists thronged to see the house. The army denied the accusation, but some generals mentioned wanting to avoid the house becoming a shrine for Prabakaran. Mother said the papers only showed how the country was becoming more hellish, but Mugil wanted to know what was happening. Every day threw up an unforeseen challenge, and she wanted to know how each of these events came about.

If not for the papers, Mugil would not have known why Divyan, who was supposed to come home the previous month, never arrived. What she learnt was that the Sri Lankan prime minister had made a statement to the media that the police in the South Indian town of Trichy had found several lorries full of ammunition, which they had linked to a Tiger sleeper cell. The prime minister had declared this to mean that the LTTE was regrouping, a ‘serious security threat’. Immediately, plans to release former combatants were shelved. A few weeks later, the Trichy police denied finding any such ammunition or LTTE sleeper cells. Soon after, the Sri Lankan prime minister said he was ‘mistaken’. Divyan’s release, along with that of all the other detainees, however, remained cancelled.

Sangeeta often asked when Mugil would go to see Divyan. The couple spoke on the detention landline every other day, but Mugil hadn’t been to see Divyan since she had moved to Point Pedro. The bus fare to Vavuniya was around 400 rupees each way, and there were always other pressing expenses. But the real reason was that she didn’t feel much need to see him. Mugil couldn’t admit this to Sangeeta, who sorely missed her late husband. Days would go by without Mugil once missing Divyan, except perhaps when she wanted to tell him a funny story or use him as a sounding board. Neither of her sons had asked about their father since they left camp.

For two years, Mugil had made all the decisions for her family. And they were not led by Divyan’s obsessions: loyalty, vengeance, duty. Without the structure that stitched these concepts to her life, she was running free. She was doing things her way, and despite the creeping fears and daily insecurity, she felt strong. Her choices were her responsibility; she didn’t have to convince anyone else or follow some moral code. Her home and the relief of coming back to it every day and deciding the shape of her hours were things she had never had before. Not during the war, not before it. These were days of rebuilding. There was much to fight against but also a lot to work for. She was a single parent, and she focussed on her children like never before. When Tamizh had nightmares, she consoled him with a song, but never any songs of the revolution. The old
tunes filled her brain, their lyrics enchanting, bleak, romantic. But her sons would not hear them. She kept them, and herself, away from former cadre. Maran was now in the first grade and Tamizh had grown three inches taller. They did not need the weight of the past on their shoulders. The cycle had to end somewhere.