The Seasons of Trouble (44 page)

MARAN DECLARED THAT
he wanted to go ‘out’. This was code for him to go to the beach after sunset with Mugil, just the two of them. They held hands and crossed the main road, across which stretched yards of white sand and moonlit ocean.

There was nobody else around. Mugil sat on the sand while Maran dug holes he said were bunkers for crabs. He never went into the water, so she let herself relax, staring into the purple sky streaked with retreating orange. It was late in the evening, and she heard fishermen launching their boats beyond the sea wall, heaving and pulling between rhythmic grunts and song. It was May 2012, exactly three years after the end of the war, and the fishing restrictions had finally been lifted in this area. Hearing fishermen call out after all this time and seeing their boats bob in the distance on the waves was reassuring, a return to an ancient profession and the beginning of hope for some.

When Maran was done playing, they went to a nearby shop and bought cotton candy. Maran always ate two: the first one flattened into a finger-sized ball and swallowed like a toffee and the second eaten in all its fluffy glory, the pleasure drawn out till they reached home, before Tamizh could see his brother’s treat and throw a tantrum. It amazed Mugil to see how much joy and contentment just two rupees could buy.

They were walking down the long street home when Maran spotted his grandmother ahead. Mother was returning from the bus stop where she now sold rolls and buns from four in the afternoon till the last minibus stopped there at eight in the evening. The snack business had slumped several months earlier—the items cost more to make than the shops were willing to pay. Since the women didn’t make enough profit for three, Mugil quit. Since then, Sangeeta cooked and Mother hawked at the bus stop closest to her house. She sat beside the plastic stool on which stood her basket of snacks, next to another woman selling tea from a flask. This was clever teaming: a bite of a spicy roll made the customer yearn for a glass of tea, or the sweetness of the tea would call for a salty bun. They made about 200 rupees a day, but it upset Mugil to see her aged mother become a street vendor.

‘Paati!’ Maran yelled and ran to his grandmother. He took the stool she was carrying. It was his height, but he lugged it home chivalrously. When Mugil caught up, Mother handed her the last oily tuna roll.

‘Apparently that tea lady’s daughter found a husband in England,’
Mother said. ‘She is enrolled in English classes now.’

‘Is he a citizen?’ Mugil asked, smiling at Mother’s revived interest in neighbourhood gossip.

‘She says he got asylum eight years ago. Looks genuine, but you never know.’ Mother was wary of weddings that doubled as emigration plans, especially after her niece had gone off with a one-way ticket to marry a Tamil man in America, only to discover that he was an illegal immigrant.

Mugil asked when the wedding would be.

‘This fellow can’t come back to Sri Lanka, so the girl will go after three months, have a wedding ceremony there and stay in England.’

‘Lucky Aunty can go to England for the wedding.’

‘Where? She can’t afford to go. This is as usual, give your daughter away, get a photo album.’ When Tamil refugees abroad got married, parents in Sri Lanka made all the arrangements, often also choosing the bride, but could rarely afford to attend the wedding, which had to be conducted in the foreign country because the groom couldn’t re-enter Sri Lanka. The parents would receive pictures of the celebration by post or email.

‘How much is she giving as dowry?’

‘One and a half million only, because the girl is fair, quite pretty. Also, they bluffed that she knows English already.’

They reached Mother’s house, and as Mugil waited for her to pack some leftover gooseberry curry for dinner, Amuda hobbled out of her nearly defunct shop in front of the house. The solar panel was shot and her fridge ruined by sporadic power cuts and wildly fluctuating voltage. She kept the store open now only to sell off the dusty stock of stationery and biscuits and to show the loan NGO that she was trying—and failing—to repay the debt. Seeing Mugil in the yard, Amuda looked surprised. ‘Why aren’t you home?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Divyan Atthaan and Prashant are holding a memorial at your place. I thought you were also part of the plan. They came and took lots of candles and chart paper from me.’ Mugil still looked confused, so Amuda repeated herself. ‘They are holding a memorial for, you know—today is 18 May. You didn’t know?’

Mugil sighed. ‘No. They didn’t tell me.’ It was the three-year anniversary of the end of the war. The men were commemorating the death of thousands, including Prabakaran. She shouted to Mother that she had to go. Dragging Maran, she marched to her house.

When she barged into the living room, the scene was set. Stuck on her wall was a familiar image drawn with her sons’ crayons: a pair of large eyes with teardrops. Under it, in Divyan’s hand, were the Tamil words
Eela Tamizh maaveerargale, ungal thyaakam endrum unarvom
! Martyrs of Tamil Eelam, your sacrifice will be forever remembered!

Under it were two lists. On the left, names of their closest colleagues in the Tigers who were no more—Mani, Mugil’s first unit friend, was at the top. On the right were civilian friends and relatives who died in the war—Father headed the list.

‘I hope I haven’t left anyone out,’ Divyan said.

To the side of the lists, Prashant had attempted to sketch Prabakaran’s face, but the only recognisable features were the stern moustache and the camouflage cap. Around the face he had written a lengthy poem about the leader. Another poster showed a hand-drawn map of Eelam in red, black and yellow, with the roaring tiger and AK-47s of the LTTE symbol at the centre. All of them had etched this tiger perhaps a hundred times as children, and it was as accurate as if it were traced. Tamizh was on the floor, setting small birthday candles around three tall ones, ready to be lit. ‘One for each year that has passed,’ Prashant said.

Mugil had burst in to stop the memorial, but she didn’t feel the parched-mouth panic anymore. In the three years since the war, this was her first remembrance ceremony. The friends on the list, whom she had avoided so much as mentioning all this time, were not simply colleagues but her compatriots from a time that felt more real, more theirs. A year or even a few months earlier, she might not have recalled these times so fondly, but remembering itself was considered an act of terrorism these days and she had grown weary of criminalising her thoughts. She did not want to fight again, but she wanted to cry aloud for the ones they had lost.

This was not allowed in the country they lived in today. That morning, Divyan and Prashant had been called to the army camp along with other former combatants. It was another head count, a reminder that they lived under surveillance. When, at dusk, they were finally allowed to leave, the men came straight home to defy the rules. ‘If they won’t let us do it publicly, we thought we would just do it in private,’ Prashant said.

The government had christened 18 and 19 May, the dates of the end of the war, as Victory Days. The anniversaries were public holidays, celebrating Sri Lanka’s second independence, its freedom from terrorism, a moment of glory for the troops. In the army barracks all over the north and east and in Colombo, they installed twelve-foot billboards to memorialise the young soldiers killed in the war, and congratulated their parents with garlands at large public events. TV channels played patriotic songs all day.

Meanwhile, private funerals for Tamils killed in the war were not permitted, and Tamil commemorations got people arrested. Thousands were aching for closure, but the military police turned down requests for group prayer or community memorials. Any gatherings—political, social or religious—were banned in the north during the holiday, and at whim on other days. The army cracked down on a meeting of Hindu temple trusts in Jaffna organising a special
puja
on the anniversary. Mugil’s Amman temple priest was told that coconut smashing was not to be performed on 18 and 19 May. A church in Mannar had organised a service on 18 May, but soldiers arrived early that morning to prevent any prayer or service.

The government was bulldozing graveyards and banning Tamil memorials to the departed as it set up Sinhalese ones. It removed the tombstones from an enormous Tiger war grave near Kilinochchi, turning the land into an army football field. At the Mullivaikal lagoon, the site of the last stage of the war, a memorial marked military victory. On blocks of granite, a triumphant soldier stood holding a gun over which a dove flew. His other hand held the Sri Lankan flag. The granite base was guarded on each side by a stately stone lion, the national animal of Sri Lanka and the symbol of the Sinhalese race. The lagoon was now out of bounds, taken over by the army, which was building a posh eco-resort there.

All the landmarks of the Vanni as Mugil knew it were either being erased or converted into tourist destinations. In Mugil’s PTK, where former residents were still not allowed to resettle, an open-air war museum had been set up about five kilometres from the junction. Soldiers guarded it, and former residents were told the area was still riddled with mines, so Mugil had never visited. If she had, she would have seen, arranged under a long tin shed, captured Tiger weaponry: torpedo shells, experimental submarines, mid-sized amphibians, GPS devices, smart mines, and assorted guns. Rusted parts of a tank displayed on the dust; a row of ‘suicide bomber boats’ gleaming under the sun. She would not have been able to read the legends under each exhibit because the museum was curated solely in Sinhala. This ramshackle museum was intended to demonstrate to southern tourists the calibre of the enemy their army had been up against for thirty years and had finally outsmarted.

Beyond the museum, as far as the eye could see, were ruined houses and beheaded coconut trees, the only remnants of a bustling town. Tourists were not permitted to see the demolition, and were hustled to another shrine to victory close by. On the road from there to Mullaitivu, a four-storey-deep bunker used by Prabakaran was one of the first to be open to tourists. Smartly dressed soldiers gave guided tours to Sinhalese groups, pointing to the ‘bulletproof war room’, the bathroom, the tunnel that led to the back of the building and into the forest. Nearby, a less popular attraction was a swimming pool in which the Sea Tigers, the naval wing, supposedly practised diving. ‘Olympic-size pool!’ the guide soldier would announce with a flourish.

In this environment, a Tamil memorial to loss or silent grief was deemed a travesty, as something unpatriotic. But how long could they pretend that the war killed nobody, stole nothing?

As Divyan and Prashant sang LTTE songs, Mugil lit the candles. She felt she finally understood why her men wanted to record, cherish, and talk about the past, about the Vanni all the time. They were afraid of forgetting. As survivors, they felt the burden of proof, the need to carry sights, sounds and events lest history erase them. That night, when Divyan and Prashant told her sons stories of the Tigers, she didn’t stop them.

25.

August 2012

OF ALL THE
time he had spent as a child at his grandparents’ Jaffna house, Sarva remembered the summer afternoons best. On those languid days, the heat seemed to expand the hours. Lunch done, Paati would clean the kitchen while Thatha would relax in the curve of the wooden easy chair in the foyer; meanwhile Sarva would follow ants and chase lizards in the back garden. Only Paati’s promise of
saami kadai
—Hindu myths of heroes and gods—brought him indoors. For him, they were great adventure stories and, for his grandmother, the perfect fairy tales to lull a child to sleep. She would lie down on the polished black floor, glassy and cool as the surface of a lake, and her gravelly voice would tell the stories of baby Krishna and his mother, Yashoda; Prince Rama and his wife, Sita, exiled in the jungle; Shiva and his shape-shifting wife, Parvati. His grandmother narrated with her eyes closed, and Sarva listened, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, his head luxuriating in the soft homeliness of her cotton sari. Majestic lions, trampling elephants, verdant forests and cascading waterfalls crashed into the room. Seas were swallowed, mountains lifted like umbrellas. Deer turned into men, horses flew. The quiet house burst with otherworldly magic.

Paati preferred to tell epic stories of powerful gods and goddesses, but the ones Sarva recalled most vividly when he was older were
short tales about minor characters: the giant warrior Kumbakarnan who fell into a sleep so profound an army could not wake him; the demon Raktavija, who could not be slain in battle because from every drop of his blood rose another demon; the boy Ekalavya, who loved archery so much he cut his thumb off for his teacher. They were not typical gods or heroes, but people and demons whose odd powers and obsessive desires led them into surreal situations that were as riveting as they were tragic.