The Seasons of Trouble (22 page)

In minutes, her family had scattered. When Mugil ducked into the water to avoid the gunfire and emerged, Amuda was way ahead of her, Mother to her right. Maran had lost his balance and almost took another woman’s hand by mistake. Mugil began to panic. A matter of seconds was enough to break up families. Some days earlier, she had seen a woman trying to cross the chest-high water with a toddler on each shoulder. The woman lost her footing and
crashed into the water, surfacing with only one of her sons. She screamed, whipped her head around, begged people to go under and look for her baby. Some did, but it didn’t help. The wailing woman had to give up and cross to save her other child.

Mugil tied Tamizh tightly to her chest with a sari and her hands gripped Maran’s ankles tight to keep his body fixed on her shoulders. Throughout the six long hours it took to reach the expanse of sand before Matalan, she could not stop thinking of the drowned toddler.

At the shore, Prashant propped up the blue tarpaulin again. Near it, Mugil and he struggled to dig a bunker. Trying to build one in the sand was like sailing against the wind. With the lagoon only a few hundred metres away, the groundwater leached in quickly, destroying the walls.

Just as they managed a shallow trench and sat down to rest, Divyan arrived. Maran and Tamizh ran to their father. Mugil noticed a hobble. The armoured jeep Divyan drove had been thrown into the air by the force of a mine blast. He had landed on his back and dislodged a few discs. A white rope, which doubled as a sling for his left arm, securing it into his shoulder, was layered with coagulated blood and mud. His left thighbone had a hairline fracture. He had been recovering in the Matalan Tiger dispensary and had come straight from there. He was still unable to walk straight and was in a lot of pain. A strip of hair on the left side of his head was shaved off, exposing an ugly stitch. His boys wanted to be carried, but Divyan sat down slowly and told them, ‘Appa is hurt. He will carry you once he is better.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Maran asked.

‘No, not so soon!’ Divyan laughed.

‘Day after, then?’

‘You tell me when it is the day after tomorrow, and I’ll carry you,’ he said, to Maran’s satisfaction.

Mugil asked her husband when he would have to go back. He said he would not; he was here for good.

The small tent had only enough space for the children, Amuda and Mother. After dark, the others lay down outside, the wet sand soaking their clothes. Mugil stared at the night sky, at stars she
knew well and had counted on whenever she was lost. Between the stars, explosions glittered and lightning flashed. Immense fires burned beyond Nandikadal. Smoke and the smell of gunpowder and burning flesh stung her nose.

Suddenly, sharp whistles and crackles foregrounded the thuds and hums. Mugil moved fast and woke Divyan. The attacks were coming closer. Amuda shoved the children into the bunker and the rest of the family jumped in. Between the long whine of shells, they could hear cluster bombs detonating.

Mugil had first seen a cluster bomb go off in PTK a few months ago. She had looked up from eating a roti in the bunker and stared, mesmerised by how pretty the explosion was. In time, she’d learnt that this bomb was like any other when launched. But about a thousand feet from the ground it let out a loud soda pop–like sound, throwing out bomblets. This made a para-para-para noise, like a drum roll, before the multiple blasts.

In Matalan, people who were just settling down to sleep had heard that same popping. They ran out of their tents and into the water and bunkers, screaming, ‘
Kotthu gundu
! Cluster bomb!’ This rarely helped. It was near impossible to avoid being hit. Each cluster bomb contained eighty-eight or seventy-two bomblets—depending on the type—and they travelled up to a kilometre from where they were discharged from the cluster.

Soon after the drumming stopped, people crawled out of the futile sand bunkers where they’d been cowering. People were holding burst cheeks or bleeding feet and arms. The survivors knew that after every ten minutes of onslaught, there would always be a ten-to-fifteen-minute gap. This breather was their only chance to dart from tree to tree, go grab some food packets, or pull into the bunker a lost child or wounded man frozen in fear. In contrast, Divyan shuffled rapidly to one of the scattered bomblets.

When he was in the Putumatalan clinic, he had seen a teenager with a bomblet lodged in the back of her thigh. The doctors had amputated her leg at the hip and the nurse had run out to discard the limb far from the hospital. Since then, he had been curious to see what these bomblets looked like; he needed to understand them and what they could do.

He peered closely at the one on the sand, careful not to touch it. It was bell-shaped and smaller than his palm.

He looked back at their tent and hurriedly called Maran and Tamizh over. Mugil ran over, too.

He pointed. ‘Do you see this?’ Maran instantly tried to grab the shiny thing. Mugil held his hand back.

‘That is exactly what you should not do, okay? Will you listen to Appa? This is bad, it will go boom, and then you will die. You will see these everywhere, but don’t touch them, kick them or pick them up,’ Divyan said. ‘It is not a ball.’ The boys nodded. ‘He called it the machine gun of bombs.’

When they rushed back to the bunker, the attacks resumed. The children nodded off but woke startled when the cluster bombs rattled.

During a lull, Divyan spoke softly. ‘Mugil, maybe I should just surrender.’

Throughout the journey from PTK, the loudspeakers guiding, instructing and ordering the displaced had also been urging the Tigers among the Tamils to surrender. ‘Give yourselves up!’ the army said. ‘Why do you women want to wear trousers and hold guns when you can wear a beautiful sari, and have bangles and flowers in your hair? Why do you men not want to have a peaceful life of business or farming? Choose peace. Surrender!’

Mugil was sure her husband would consider it. Still, she was taken aback. ‘Why? Are you not able to walk anymore? Is it hurting that much?’

Divyan didn’t answer.

‘Have you forgotten what you are capable of?’ She reminded him that he had once run with shrapnel peppering his body and that, another time, he had stayed on the front line with a busted kneecap.

‘Each time makes you weaker, not stronger,’ he said.

She offered to rebandage his wounds. ‘I’ll carry the boys from here on, or we’ll hire a tractor.’ She was using every argument she could think of.

He shook his head, saying that their leaders, too, had started surrendering or leaving the country. Others were trying to reach the
UN through the Norwegian foreign ministry to negotiate a ceasefire. But Divyan didn’t think it would work. ‘No one is coming, even the aid agencies are gone,’ he said.

The bombing had ceased—they could hear loud talking outside.

‘I say you should take a boat and leave for India with the kids.’ The commotion almost drowned his voice. He seemed to imply he wouldn’t join her.

Even as they spoke, people were leaving the island, choosing the dangers of sailing a small boat on a rough sea over enduring the war. A boat journey to India could take days, even weeks, and navy patrols were looking to apprehend refugees. Long stretches of swimming were often required, too, because the boats couldn’t get all the way into shore. The boatmen would not allow food or any supplies on board, wanting to fill their vessels with as many people as possible to maximise their profits. Divyan was weak and would probably not survive such a journey. The circle of red on his bandages had now spread from his thigh to his hip. ‘You take the kids and your parents,’ he said.

‘Is it right to leave at this time?’ Mugil asked.

‘Stop it! None of that matters now,’ Divyan said, getting up. ‘I’m going to ask how much it costs to arrange a boat. Are you coming?’ This was not the man Mugil knew. This man, always the voice of morality in his family, always reassuring with his black-and-white principles in the greyest of days, was too weary even to think through the biggest decision of their lives.

As the night darkened Mugil looked at the mass of people running madly into the warm black sea. The shelling had stopped for a while, but it was on everyone’s mind. They were scrambling onto the nearest boats. Some were toppling over, pushed, pushing. Water flooded everything: their eyes, mouths, bags, boats, engines.

Mugil would have to run to the boats, too, to join those going to India. There were thirty people in a boat that usually held ten, sailing away, fleeing. The going rate was 60,000 rupees per head, but they knew a boatman, a handicapped ex-fighter. She could give him Divyan’s gun, some kerosene she had stashed and 30,000 rupees.

Should she really go? Divyan repeated that he wouldn’t survive a night-long motorboat ride, even to Jaffna. He assured the family that his best chance of survival was to surrender. It was risky, but the army had promised to be lenient to those who gave themselves up. The family should go on, he insisted. After a few years, they would find each other. It wouldn’t do to let the children see their homeland in this state. He spoke fast, but every word seemed to have been rehearsed.

Divyan fished in his shirt for some money. ‘You should go now, while the shelling’s stopped,’ he said. He would take Mother and the others across the lagoon and then surrender.

Mugil couldn’t think clearly; her mind was flying far into the future and yet unable to dig out of the clamour around her. It was the first time she would ever leave Sri Lanka. She would go first to Rameshwaram in India, and then from there to Malaysia, then maybe seek asylum in Canada. People had done it before. When her childhood friend Shakti had decided to leave the country seven years earlier and Mugil had asked her why, the girl could not answer. ‘Perhaps because I have the chance,’ she had said. But later, when she wrote from Germany, raving about the generosity of the people but missing coconut and spice in her food, she had recalled Mugil’s question. ‘I know the answer now, my sister,’ she wrote. ‘Here, I can stop caring about others all the time. I can be happily self-centred.’

Perhaps this was not a bad idea. Mother was encouraging her to go, Amuda said she had been considering it herself, Father reminded her of extended family in India. Prashant, however, threw a fit. ‘How can you leave?’ he yelled. ‘You’d abandon your people?’

His indignation cleared Mugil’s mind. ‘I have children, Prashant,’ she said calmly.

‘You’ll be a traitor if you leave,’ he growled. ‘If all of us leave, there will never be an Eelam. All the people who died for it will have died in vain.’

‘This is not the time …’ She stood up to go to the water’s edge.

‘Then when? When you’re sitting on a sofa with your belly full, in an air-conditioned room in America?’

Amuda tried to help. ‘Look, we’re all so hungry.’

‘Food. All you people can think about is eating! What about all those years when Annan fed us? Are you going to turn your back on the people who cared for you?’ He looked at Divyan, who was quietly packing a polythene bag. ‘Divyan
anna
, why aren’t you stopping your wife?’

Mugil took the bag and started to walk towards the sea. Maran followed.

Prashant grabbed Mugil’s elbow. ‘Is this what you’ll teach your son?’

‘At least he will be alive!’ She was almost running now, with Prashant following.

‘If you try to go, I will take a rifle and shoot you, you
throhi
!’

Mugil felt the water lap at her feet, and Maran holding her finger. Her parents rushed to her with Tamizh. Amuda followed behind them. Divyan watched in silence. If Mugil left, didn’t it have to be with all of them? Did this make sense? Leaving Divyan behind with the army? Taking on a long journey they might not even see through to the end?

Prashant continued to curse her. ‘Traitor! Go! That’s what you were anyway, a traitor! Go, all of you! Go then! Where is my rifle?’

Mugil had done as she was told for most of her life; she had sworn on the Tamil soil perhaps a million times. She had worked for something she loved and hoped that it would make sense later. By the light of faraway bombs, hundreds were running haphazardly towards boats bobbing in the water. The horizon was bathed in darkness. It made her stomach churn. It felt endless. Circuitous, spiralling. A tiring, nauseating forever. Guilt-ridden, she turned back.

PART TWO

claustrophobia

13.

April 2009

IN PUTUMATALAN, MUGIL
was unable to tell which way the war would swing. There was every sign that the Tigers were losing, but their supporters remained hopeful. What stood out, however, was the new, quiet confidence of the army. It frightened her.

As thousands of Tamils crossed the Nandikadal lagoon, Sri Lankan soldiers came to help them out of the water into Putumatalan. They took the children by the hand and carried the elderly. People filled the narrow beach, sitting with barely an inch between them. Soldiers distributed food to eager refugees. ‘We will take all civilians to a camp until the battle is over,’ they said over the loudspeakers. ‘But anyone who has spent even a day in the LTTE should surrender to us first. We will take them to another camp. Come of your own accord, it will be better for you.’ They didn’t say
Kottiya
, or terrorist, as they usually did.

Everyone was given bananas, biscuits, a meal packet, and a cup of black tea. There was rice, the tea was hot, the bananas were ripe: luxuries after five months of living like animals. It seemed to promise an end to their trials.

The young soldier ushering them around referred to Mother as
amma
and Father as
ayya
.

‘These boys are so respectful,’ Mother said, at once suspicious and pleasantly surprised.

‘They give you tea, and you instantly change sides, old woman?’ Father scolded. ‘The real test is how they treat their enemies.’