The Seasons of Trouble (21 page)

So here they all were, paying the price for that indefinable difference. People were dying around her, sometimes in a second, sometimes after excruciating weeks of suffering. The survivors—their
families and friends—moved with the gait of people who knew they weren’t far behind. No longer did Mugil feel that initial frenzied need to survive. She simply wanted it to end.

The year 2009 was supposed to be when her son enrolled in a school. Instead, here was Maran attached to her right index finger, flopping to the ground, holding a single packet of wet biscuits, hearing her yell that he was to eat only one a day. She had left Maran’s new school uniform behind in PTK and also forgotten Tamizh’s milk bottle. Every time they moved to a new place, they had to leave pieces of their life behind.

Mugil had been walking longer than her family, from the mango orchard in Kilinochchi. Her limp was getting worse. At every step, the piece of shell lodged in her shin seemed to come alive and shoot flames right up to her chest. The wounds from before had felt like trophies—bodily commitment to Annan, to a freedom and autonomy her community dreamt of. Even in the scream of the most blinding pain, there had been an equally physical satisfaction: I lost blood for a reason. All those times, she had felt deeply that she had moved everyone closer to the heaven they were dreaming of. She could experience it, swallow it, taste it. She bore each new scar with pride.

But this sharp, alien shard in her shin inflicted a pain that was not attached to a purpose. Maybe that was why everyone around her was screaming so much, wailing like babies. Maybe deep down, everyone knew there was going to be no reward for what was happening. Not tomorrow, not any time.

She wondered if her obsession with her two boys had made her a coward, lowered her threshold for pain. No, no weakness today. Just one more day, she told herself, only half-believing. For months now, she had been trying to silence these doubts, dispel the fog of exhaustion that was blurring the future she had always seen so clearly.

To keep from giving up, Mugil tuned her limp to the rhythm of the pain—short left step, long right step, short left, long right. Tha-dhaa tha-dhaa. It was a tactic her first firearms trainer had taught her. ‘Make it a game,’ she would say. ‘Don’t make it a life-or-death situation when it’s actually happening.’

Her mother would not stop nagging Mugil to go to a hospital. Look around, Mugil kept telling her, look at all these people.
Nondi, kurudu, oonam
—limp, blind, half-human beings. Many more are dead. At least her family was whole, their hearts still beating. Had her mother not witnessed what the army did to PTK and to the people in Thevipuram? Had she forgotten the pregnant girl and her grandmother? There was more danger in looking for a safe place than in running. Mugil knew that at some point she would have to sit her mother down, hold her face, and say slowly and directly to her: we need to run.

From what, they all knew. But where? To what?

MUGIL REACHED AN
earthwork, on the other side of which was Nandikadal lagoon and beyond that Matalan; from there the northern end of the Putumatalan no-fire zone was only a few kilometres away. The army was rumoured to be taking families to refugee camps from there. All along the vertical east of the no-fire zone was the Indian Ocean, from where some refugees hoped to escape on boats to India or Jaffna. Still others were making it across Putumatalan and going further south towards Mullivaikal.

On the thin tract of open land before the embankment, with Amuda’s help, Mugil propped up a tarpaulin tent. Under it they would dig a bunker, just as deep as the shifting sand would allow, just as wide as their family of eight needed to sit. Other families were doing the same, to break the long walk through perilous forests and bombed-out villages before they took to the water. The Nandikadal lagoon lay ahead of them, bloated after the two-month downpour. Straight across it was the only route left to Matalan. The road was impassable; it was being shelled by both the army and the Tigers.

They stayed here for about a week, biding their time and regaining strength before the next bout of displacement. At times, bursts of bullets and mortar shells whizzed around them, and the shudder of explosions shook the ground where they sat. At least one thing was clear: Divyan had promised to join them at Matalan. Again, Mother had asked him if he had reached Prashant at all. The
more certain she became that her youngest was alive, the more she believed she was alone in her optimism. ‘You lot just want to move on, to have one less mouth to feed,’ she berated her daughters. ‘But I’m a mother. A mother never gives up.’

Mugil didn’t pay Mother any heed, and tried in vain to bring the
paruppu
to a boil in the seawater. The vessel was caked with mineral scum, which had to be scraped off every few minutes. Ahead of her, families were swaddling their most precious belongings—school certificates, land documents, medicines, family photographs—in plastic bags, preparing to cross the water. A little further away, Amuda kept an eye on the kids. Kalai was drawing with her fingers in the sand, and the boys were staring at the coal-dark smoke spiralling from the villages they left behind. Explosions lit the sky every few minutes.

Suddenly Prashant ran into Mugil’s line of sight, shouting, ‘Akka!’ Mother was the first to reach him. She hugged him in triumph, as if she had somehow conjured him up. ‘See? I knew my boy would not leave me like that.’ She wiped his face with her palms and kissed her fingertips. Prashant laughed, basking in the attention and taking in his sisters’ stunned faces.

Amuda, not big on goodbyes or greetings, said, ‘Ah, sir has arrived.’

‘Where’s Siva
anna
?’

Amuda gave the one-word answer she had been using to everyone: ‘Kfir.’

His eyes widened. ‘Those savages! We’ll get them back! We’ll kill them all!’

‘Yes, go tell that to all the widows.’ Amuda’s tone was acidic, and she walked away.

‘Poor Amuda.’ Prashant sighed. Mugil pulled her hand back and slapped his face hard. ‘What did I do?’ he yelped.

Mugil was furious. Why hadn’t he bothered to reach out, send one message through Divyan or any of the cadres? The floating boy with the absent stomach had appeared often in her dreams, and he always wore her brother’s face.

Prashant took his favourite sister’s hand and mockingly slapped his other cheek with it. ‘I’m here now, no?’ he said softly.

‘Don’t talk to us like we’re children. You’re not a big hero, okay?’ Mugil shouted. ‘Where the hell were you?’

It turned out that Prashant, whose expertise in the LTTE was building missile and shell cases, had been out of work for a few weeks. In 2007, even before the land forces moved in on Kilinochchi, the task forces and naval divisions had captured three of the LTTE’s floating armouries. The ships carried approximately 4,000 tonnes of military cargo, including dismantled light aircraft, artillery shells, mortar rounds and speedboats. All of it was simply sunk in the sea. Still, there was enough ammunition hidden in other places to last till early 2009. Now, however, as the battles intensified and the Tigers cadres exhausted their bullets and missiles, the engineering wing, too, ran out of supplies to manufacture more. Since December, Prashant had been manning the line outside PTK.

So why didn’t he tell the family this? ‘Selfish, selfish!’ Mugil screamed.

‘I was doing my job, and now I have got permission to come check on my family,’ Prashant said, unfazed. He walked up to the boiling pot. ‘What’s your plan? Where are you headed? Our boys are there in Mullivaikal. You will be protected there.’

Mugil didn’t reply. She doubted if their protection was her brother’s foremost concern. The Tigers’ defences were nearby, and she knew they had built high sandbag walls along some parts of the lagoon. They launched shells from behind these, but the walls seemed to have a second purpose in hampering the movement of civilians. A few days earlier, Mugil had seen hundreds of civilians bound for Matalan clash at the walls with a large group of Tigers. The trouble brewed for hours as the cadres tried to dissuade people from leaving. They appealed to the civilians’ loyalty to the homeland and to the trust they had once placed in the Tigers. They scared them with fearsome reminders of what the army was capable of and the government’s historic discrimination against Tamils. They painted demonic pictures of the majority community the Tamils would have to live with if they left. They talked about how the Sinhalese would make the Tamil children their servants and rape their mothers and sisters.

Tamil civilians had heard these warnings for decades; the Tigers
were playing on justified fears fed by people’s experiences of personal discrimination and violence, and by their disconnection from the Sinhalese by language and geography. But the urgent reality today was the five months of unabated shelling and starvation. It had replaced every other demon.

That day, Mugil watched the argument escalate into violence. People pushed the armed Tigers aside and clambered over the earthworks. The Tigers, in turn, pulled them down, beat them with palmyra branches and chased them back to their tents. Horrified, Mother declared that the apocalypse had come. ‘
Kaliyugam
, this is
kaliyugam
we’re witnessing.’

Mugil suspected that Prashant’s sudden arrival, too, was meant to encourage them to stay. He didn’t have a palmyra stick, of course, but he did have his words.

MUGIL WOKE UP
at dawn while it was just getting light and left her tarpaulin tent to find a quiet spot to relieve herself. Lately peeing had become excruciatingly painful: there was an intense burn and barely a trickle. Severe dehydration had led to an infection.

At this time of day, if there were no air raids, only women tended to be up. Bunker life erased all privacy, so pre-dawn was when women chose to urinate or, if they were menstruating, change the cloth in their underwear. Every time battle broke out, Mugil felt the world forgot about menstrual cycles. As Amuda commented once, with everything else in total disarray, it was a surprise to have anything arrive on time, especially something as inconvenient as a woman’s period. Female combatants on operations took pills that postponed the bleeding. Hospitals stored sanitary napkins for civilians; the UN, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Red Cross had given them out before being banished from the Vanni. But as the war continued and hospitals, clinics and makeshift dispensaries ran out of dressing wool and cotton, they used sanitary napkins to dress wounds. So, like other women, Mugil and Amuda had ripped up the last of their old saris to use as pads.

Mugil didn’t find her quiet spot. Instead, around her, hundreds had already begun their journey to Matalan and Putumatalan. It
was mid-April now, and the water level had fallen slightly. People waded through the muddy water that shuddered as if to consume them. The early crossers used the thin sandbanks as bridges, but there was no room now, and they had to walk through water. Women’s skirts and saris ballooned as they entered the lagoon gingerly. They sank deeper, to the knee, the waist, the neck. Thousands soon pushed their hips against the waves, finding their feet in the sand bed, and found it futile to use their hands for anything but to hold on to what was most precious. Parents carried their children on their shoulders and heads. Adults held hands and groped for shoulders to keep their balance.

Everything else was left behind on the long shore. The mountains of discarded bags, baskets, clothes, motorbikes and trishaws grew. If utensils, TVs, books and bags had made it this far, they were now tied to trees and vehicles in the hope of being retrieved later. Some bicycles and tractors were retained till the very last minute to take the disabled or severely wounded through the water.

The best time to cross Nandikadal was before noon, during low tide. The water level was manageable at this time, but the gunfire was often at its worst. The collapsing shallow bunkers in Matalan were, however, no safer than the water. So despite the barrage from the sky, leave they had to.

The route chosen was behind the most crowded section of the lagoon; the deserted parts were bound to be deeper. At around ten in the morning, Mugil’s family—her father, mother, brother, and sister, carrying the four children on their shoulders—waded into the water. The further they went, the more the water and crowds separated the group. Balls of fire ripped through the air like arrows and fell into the water, diffusing loudly, throwing people off course.