The Seasons of Trouble (23 page)

From every batch of civilians the army received in the no-fire zone and brought to the refugee camps, it first sifted out the combatants. Many men and women gave themselves up. As the families sat on the ground under the eyes of the army, the former combatants hugged their relatives, stepped away from the crowd and placed themselves in front of a soldier.

Mugil watched, knowing her husband, too, would do this soon. She sat next to Divyan, who held his thigh with one hand and Tamizh with the other. His mind was made up even before they reached Putumatalan. As hundreds surrendered now, he seemed to be talking himself into it once again. Mugil searched the soldiers’ faces for the expression she had seen in the mango orchard, when they kicked the LTTE girls. She looked for signs of hate or condescension, but she saw only fatigue.

The battle continued within earshot; the Sri Lankan armed forces were still fighting the Tamil Tigers. To change sides, the combatants had to overcome a reality formed over generations in less than a day. Mother supported Divyan’s decision to surrender. Like many at this time, she no longer trusted the Tigers to take care of them. Those who had been beaten up by the LTTE cadre while trying to cross the Nandikadal shook with disillusionment and anger. ‘Those we knew and trusted have failed us!’ a man cried. ‘What do we have to lose now?’

‘I don’t want to say it, but everything is over anyway,’ Father said softly. ‘We should accept this defeat.’

He said he didn’t remember the last time he had felt cornered like this. The Tigers were behaving like thugs. So many Tiger leaders had died. Innumerable stories were doing the rounds: about where Annan was, what he was planning, whether he was alive. But none of them were credible. And now their bravest were giving up. What could this be if not the end?

Prashant, too, decided to surrender along with Divyan. ‘Why should I hide?’ he said. ‘There is honour in surrender.’

Mugil was taken aback at his hypocritical turnaround. When she had wanted to leave on the boat to India, Prashant had demanded adherence to the LTTE at any cost. ‘Oh, now it is honour!’ she shouted. ‘What happened to your great loyalty?’

‘Do you want me to be ashamed of having fought for Eelam? Why should I hide it?’

‘You just want to be a big hero!’

Prashant shrugged.

‘You are the traitor now,’ she said.

Prashant smiled cloyingly. ‘Go and tell that to your husband first.’

Mugil wanted to slap the smirk off his face. ‘You are small, tiny, an insect in front of Divyan. Don’t use his name!’

‘Let him go,
akka
,’ Amuda said, pulling her away. ‘If he doesn’t surrender, he’ll be found out in two minutes.’

Father was saying that Divyan and Prashant could look out for each other. Perhaps it was better there were two of them now.

‘Yes, he’ll give keep me company on the way to hell,’ Divyan added, as a weak joke.

‘If they’re going to shoot all of you point-blank, just push this idiot in front of you,’ Mugil replied. They laughed nervously. This was the way they used to banter before an operation—belittling imminent danger, belittling their own fears.

Finally, Divyan pushed Tamizh to Mugil, looked her straight in the eyes and said, ‘Look for me if you hear nothing for a long time.’ He then walked up to the soldier, and Prashant followed.

Mugil would recall that moment for years. The sky glowed orange on the horizon, a woman’s voice behind her pleaded with someone not to go, and Tamizh was digging his nails into her neck. Divyan’s instruction filled her with dread. Find him if she heard nothing.

Prashant’s words, too, left a bad taste in her mouth. He didn’t want to hide who he was. But she would have to hide. As the surrendered combatants were taken away, Mugil joined the wider stream of families being led by the military to buses that would take them to the civilian camps.

She was going on as a civilian with her sons, while Prashant
and Divyan would be the soldiers of a cause, even though they had surrendered. This is how it would go down in history: she was the parent; they were the fighters. She understood why she had to do it, but nevertheless her indignation was as real as the wound festering in her leg. They claimed honour in surrender. She would have only the ignominy of hiding.

MORE THAN A
month later, on 19 May 2009, a day that would change her life forever, Mugil skipped the camp’s afternoon queue for lunch and hung back in her tent. In summer the camp was so hot a broken egg would fry on the ground. Although May temperatures were not new to her, never had she felt so helpless before this onslaught. It was like something immovable, solid and invisible, weakening not just body but soul, too. She didn’t know which was worse: the shaded slow cook inside the oven-like tent or the blaze outside. Red dust coated everything: the grass, the tents, the food, even the people. When Mugil licked her dry lips, she felt the soft grains on her tongue. The halo of Amuda’s unruly curls glowed red. The ends of most children’s hair were blond, their eyes a dull yellow. With their rust-red dry skin, they looked like small mud devils.

Mugil’s family was taking shelter in Ramanathan zone, better known as Zone 2, in a white tarpaulin tent with eight other people. That morning, like every morning, her parents, sister and all the four children had woken to hunger an hour before breakfast time and left to secure a place in the line. And now it was lunch. The queue would be unbearably long.

With 76,000 people when Mugil got there, Zone 2 was the largest and most overpopulated of the eight zones that made up the 700-acre Manik Farm camp run by the Sri Lankan army just outside Vavuniya town. Much of the area was once forest, and growing up, Mugil had known it as Karadipokku, the Route of the Bear. Not a tree was in sight now, all hacked down to shelter thousands of Tamils pouring out of the combat zone. From the Vanni, the army took people to closed camps in Mannar, Jaffna, Trincomalee, and mostly to Manik Farm. In just the last ten days of April 2009, about
110,000 people had entered Zone 2. Soon they replaced the vegetation entirely. Mugil had rechristened the place
ahadi-pokku
, the Route of the Refugee. ‘How long will we be here?’ Amuda had asked a soldier less than a month ago when they entered the camp. He was writing their names down, and they had realised that the camp was ringed with barbed wire. Their induction took place at the end of a long disorienting bus journey with the army from Putumatalan. The official had continued to fire questions about their native town and the size of the family. Another refugee behind them had repeated the question in broken Sinhala. ‘How long here? How long?’

When they had boarded the bus in Putumatalan, they were relieved to say goodbye to the shelling, displacement and starvation. But as they drove through destroyed villages occupied by army battalions and a desolate shoreline of discarded bicycles, chairs, bags and slippers—so many slippers—they felt nauseous with something like guilt. When they were stopped at five army checkpoints—the same checkpoints the Tigers had used earlier—for full-body searches by uniformed soldiers who had just hours before rained ammunition on them, Mugil felt the first sting of humiliation.

‘You’ll be here just till we figure everything out,’ a soldier at the camp office had finally replied, with a weak smile. ‘What, what did he say?’ someone behind them asked, his question echoing among the other arrivals. The soldier’s manner was reassuring but his words meaningless.

The real answer—and it was likely even the soldier did not know it—was this: beyond getting the Tamils into the camps, there were no plans. Mugil learnt this only two weeks in, on the day Aunty Sumathi visited her from Vavuniya with some fresh clothes for the family. As they waited their turn outside the visitors’ centre—shouting across the barbed wire (‘How are the children? Is it very hot? Have you eaten?’)—Mugil noticed a middle-aged man in expensive clothes. He wore sunglasses and stood near his imported SUV, a few steps from the press of visitors. Other inmates seemed to have noticed him, too, and they craned their necks to see which internee he might have come to visit.

When it was Mugil’s turn in the centre, she barely listened to her aunt from behind the wooden bars. Only waist-high tin sheets separated the inmates, and a private conversation was impossible. To Aunty Sumathi’s left was the well-to-do SUV man, speaking to an elderly woman on Mugil’s side. He addressed the old lady as
amma
, and from the way he spoke about her grandchildren, in tender respectful Tamil, Mugil guessed he was her son. But how could it be? The old lady looked like she was squeezed dry, her sparse grey hair leaping off her scalp and her hands shaking involuntarily. Her sari was faded and tattered from the Vanni months. A bloody bandage covered her ear. Like most other inmates, she was barefoot.

The son cried softly as his mother babbled about having been in the toilet when her name was announced over the loudspeaker and how she had almost missed hearing it and seeing him. He then looked at the soldier standing by and asked in authoritative Sinhala about the procedure to take his mother home to Colombo. The soldier waved his hand in the air dismissively. No one could leave, he was saying. Not even if they had homes and family outside.

That was when it finally dawned on Mugil; it would not be a few weeks or months here. They would keep them in this enclosed space patrolled by armed guards for as long as they could. Many requests of transfer to relatives’ homes in Jaffna, Vavuniya, Colombo and even abroad had been rejected. The camp for civilians was no different from an open-air prison.

The ways of the camp became easier to comprehend once she understood the situation. Ten or more people occupied each tent, assigned to their beds by camp officials. Food was served three times a day, and you had to queue alongside thousands of men, women and children waiting with their plates and cups. Inmates got thirty litres of water per day for washing, bathing and drinking, but if the water truck didn’t bring enough one day or you couldn’t collect the water because you were lining up for medicines, your loss would not be compensated the next day.

Pit latrines, separate ones for men and women, lined the corners of the zones. Some hundred people would use a latrine meant for twenty. They were always blocked and rarely cleaned. When the
summer sandstorms blew mud into the air, the tang of urine and faeces wafted throughout the camp on the wind. Flies buzzed everywhere, and mosquitoes bred in the dirty drains cut along the tent rows.

Complaining about all this was impossible; in all the applications, forms and affidavits they had to submit, all the permits and passes they had to get, there was never any space for complaints or feedback. Communication went only one way. When the speaker boomed with orders and instructions, people responded mockingly, ‘God’s voice! Listen!’

Speaking directly to a soldier was inadvisable. One enterprising neighbour had created a spot of shade in front of his tent with spare wood poles and a piece of tarpaulin. It stood for barely two days before a soldier kicked it down, saying the pathway between rows of tents had to be kept clear.

‘Why are you doing this? I only wanted some shade, and all of us used it,’ her neighbour argued.

As Mugil watched, the soldier’s eyes bulged. He took a menacing step towards the man and bellowed what sounded like rules in rapid Sinhala. The neighbour stared blankly for a bit and then looked at his feet. For the next few days, the soldier would swing by to check if anyone had dared raise the sunshade again. ‘Why couldn’t you just shut your mouth?’ Father asked the neighbour. ‘Every time he comes, he’s checking us out to see if something else is amiss.’

Visitors could not enter the camp. They could meet inmates, as Aunty Sumathi did, at the visitors’ centre by the camp entrance, the cubicles separated by tin sheets, for not more than twenty minutes, and under the watch of an armed soldier. When the workers from the UN Refugee Agency or World Food Programme came with aid packages, you couldn’t talk to them or ask for what you really wanted: sanitary napkins, milk, medicines, a clean toilet. Mobile phones were banned. Inmates were allowed a three-minute telephone call from the landline in the camp office, but the wait for this often lasted two days. Also inmates were not allowed to travel between zones; zones 2 and 3 were separated by a gravel road and a high barbed-wire fence. If there was one rule people defied most,
it was this. The barbed wire was repeatedly breached all along the fence. The army thrashed someone for it every few days.

Mugil sometimes wondered why she didn’t feel more grateful for what the Sri Lankan government gave her. For a moment—when she thought of the battle raging just two hours away by road from where she stood and remembered that thousands were still trapped in the conflict—she would acknowledge that there was food, water and shelter in the camp, just as promised. Her family was together, all alive; they didn’t have to move home every few days, and there was a shed school for the children. The Bank of Ceylon had opened a branch inside the camp, and she had been able to deposit 6,000 of the 10,000 rupees that remained with her family. The aid agencies were not being kept away as they had been in January. Mugil whined about their under-salted, undercooked, insufficient meals, but when she heard others complain, she was embarrassed. Did she too sound that petty? She had heard that the NGOs would soon bring dry rations and allow people to do their own cooking. Perhaps the government did care about their health.