The Seasons of Trouble (25 page)

A handful of trusted associates had earned his trust by demonstrating intense loyalty, a crucial test of which was keeping quiet. When Divyan had trained as Annan’s bodyguard and spent most of the day tagging along with the leader, he was sworn to a code of silence. Even to Mugil he had allowed himself only two anecdotes, both adding to the leader’s aura of power and benevolence. One was about the time when Annan, in bed with a fever and headache, asked Divyan to bring him some headache tablets. Fumbling with the foil packaging, Divyan dropped a pill on the dusty floor and began to extract another one. But the leader stopped him. ‘Someone must have risked his life to smuggle that pill into the Vanni,’ he apparently said. ‘Let us not waste his sacrifice. Give me the Panadol that you dropped.’

On another occasion, Divyan was called to accompany Annan to an impromptu meeting. As the bodyguards ran in, the leader’s wife said they had not eaten lunch. Divyan would describe how the leader had taken the plate of rice and curry, balled it up into mouthfuls and fed his bodyguards ‘with his own hands’. ‘I felt like Annan was my mother,’ he would say.

Mugil wondered if Divyan, wherever he was, knew about 19 May. He would be heartbroken. Those in the camp who struggled most with the news were conjuring conspiracy theories about a faked death. The tales of Prabakaran’s escapes to India when he was hunted in Sri Lanka were resurrected to illustrate how he always had a trick up his sleeve. A woman in the camp’s water queue told Mugil that her son believed Annan would spring a surprise and turn up in a foreign country. For thirty years he was not even caught, the son said, now suddenly he is killed? A generation that had known only one leader believed he was invincible, gifted with unmatched military cunning, even divine foresight. Bhuvi’s cousin, a boy from the political wing, pointed out that since the global proscription of the LTTE in the nineties, Prabakaran had been a wanted man. ‘Even India and all the western powers couldn’t catch him. How can this new Rajapaksa and his army do it?’ The cousin was sure Prabakaran had escaped, tapping into the legendary intercontinental network of LTTE supporters and covert sponsors.

A song called
Thalaivar sahavillai
—the leader is not dead—was all over the Internet. Many Tamils were arrested just for listening to the song. Mugil had received the song on her phone, the powerful words and rousing tune playing over file pictures of Prabakaran. It came with an instruction to ‘forward and delete as soon as you watch’. Another photo became a popular meme: originally published in an Indian Tamil magazine, it showed a laughing Prabakaran watching a report of his death on TV. It was captioned, ‘Far away in an unknown location, he laughs. The leader is not dead! Long Live Tamil! Long Live Eelam!’

When the inchoate theories grew into rumours that Prabakaran had escaped in a secret tunnel from Mullivaikal to India and that the dead body left behind was a secret double, Mugil was disgusted. ‘They are all talking as if this is a movie!’ she complained to Amuda,
who was weak with wheezing and counted on Mugil for all the latest updates.

Mugil, in turn, relied on Bhuvi and schoolmaster Sanjeevan, whom she called ‘newsreaders’. At every opportunity they were glued to their radio transistors, tuning into the BBC, India’s NDTV, and several Tamil stations. They ignored the frequencies playing music except when they tuned into one during the news bulletin. Their email inboxes and phones were full of articles and reports, and Bhuvi was so well connected to his government colleagues in Vavuniya and Colombo that Mugil was sometimes afraid he might be a spy. On the day he showed her the UN satellite map of the no-fire zone and the craters caused by shelling, however, she banished any such doubt. With Prashant away, Bhuvi easily filled the role of Mugil’s younger brother. She did not share this familial intimacy with Sanjeevan, who taught mathematics in the makeshift school, but he had impressed her with a sullen demeanour that would not tolerate nonsense. He was a useful person to know.

Weeks passed and the camp expanded. In the wider world, only shreds of information floated around about the last stages of the war, and even less was known in the camps. In fact, different groups—the Sinhalese and Tamils, the English-reading and the vernacular-reading Sri Lankans, the diaspora Tamils and the Tamils still in Sri Lanka—were consuming their news from completely different sources, rendered in their native language and each with its own bias. Among the cacophony of denials and argument between the Sri Lankan government, the UN, and global human rights groups, divergent narratives of the war’s end emerged.

Bhuvi and Sanjeevan, with their obsessive lapping-up of news, were able to fit some pieces of the puzzle together. In May 2009, by the Nandikadal, in an area only slightly larger than a football field, Prabakaran and some top LTTE leaders had hidden in bunkers holding thousands of civilian Tamils hostage (the UN estimated 5,000, but the number is always debated). They were cornered, with the army to the north and south, the navy on the eastern coast, and the lagoon to the west. After the military captured the rest of the Vanni it encircled Mullivaikal. This third no-fire zone was identified as a Civilian Safe Zone, a technical change of nomenclature that
legally allowed the army to attack it. Here, the Ministry of Defence launched what it called a humanitarian rescue mission to evacuate the civilians. Simultaneously, the army rained shells into this tight circle. The Tigers resisted with suicide attacks on the army’s 59th Division in Karayamullivaikal and Wadduval shore. Hundreds of civilians died in the mortar shelling and crossfire, and thousands burst out and left the area by sea, going to islands near Jaffna or to Mullaitivu beaches, from where the army took them to the camps. Meanwhile, a group of Tiger leaders raised white flags in surrender but were shot nonetheless. A team led by Prabakaran’s son Charles was shelled. Finally, Prabakaran, with a number of leaders, including the political wing head, was killed while attempting to escape in an ambulance via Nandikadal. As one of the only surviving Tigers close to Prabakaran, the surrendered Tiger spokesman Daya Master was flown into Mullivaikal by the air force to identify the body. A tag marked 001, a T-56 rifle—the same kind Mugil had lost in Kilinochchi—two pistols, a satellite phone and a canister containing diabetes medicines were found along with the body.

About 282,000 Tamils from almost five districts were now housed in Manik Farm and a few other camps. Families were separated across camp zones, but the army maintained its ban on travelling between them. On 28 June 2009, Sanjeevan participated in a massive protest against this prohibition; his sister was among those trapped in Mullivaikal and now in Zone 4. Despite Mother having forbidden her, Mugil went along with Sanjeevan to the demonstration. Shouting slogans by the barbed wire between zones 2 and 3 and then again in front of the camp office, she saw her quiet friend yell till he was red in the face. Each time he shook his fists in the air, his anger was renewed and his soft voice went up in pitch. ‘I feel like I’m hitting my head against a wall,’ said Sanjeevan. She, too, felt a tightness in her chest, as if she were suffocating. If Sanjeevan needed to see whether his sister was safe, if he wanted to meet her after months of separation, why should the army stop him? Everyone in the camp was a survivor. They had seen horrors and lost loved ones—some dead, some left behind, some missing. Tears had been shed and replaced with the burn of helplessness and a collective desire for closure.

After the protest, the rules were mildly relaxed. Zone 4 remained a high-security area, but sometimes, on the army’s whim, relatives would be allowed in. By this time, soldiers were also taking bribes to bend the rules. In mid-July, Sanjeevan was finally able to meet his sister—he had paid 10,000 rupees. Mugil saw him sitting with Bhuvi the next day, wearing his silence like armour. She waited for a week before she asked him how the visit had gone.

‘My sister has lost an eye,’ Sanjeevan said. ‘She wishes she had lost her life.’ The Tigers had kept high earthworks around them and shot at the civilians who tried to leave. His sister’s husband and their daughter had not survived. ‘I know we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,’ Sanjeevan said. ‘But if our leader needed to use innocent people to protect himself, then he was dead long before they killed him.’

14.

May 2009

COLOMBO HAD BEEN
transformed. The passengers on the bus seemed less burdened, more relaxed, as if it were a holiday. Relief was writ large on their faces. People looked at each other and smiled knowingly. The demons had been conquered. The lurking tension of the everyday was gone. There would be no more suicide bombers on school buses or trains. Airports and markets were safe.

Indra’s own days were unchanged, most of them spent between home and prison, in a perpetual state of suspension. From the bus on the way to see Sarva one day, she saw some middle-aged men pump the hands of young soldiers stationed at checkpoints that had been there for years. They were thanking them for their service, perhaps also hoping to see less of them in their city from now on.

Months after the killing of Prabakaran, Indra saw more Sri Lankan flags flutter on storefronts, rooftops and lampposts. Patriotic songs went on sale and were played incessantly on loudspeakers. Pettah market sold toy soldiers dressed in Sri Lankan army uniforms alongside military guns and kids’ clothes in camouflage prints. We love our country, everyone seemed to be saying.

Sri Lankans had suffered conflict after conflict since independence. The first insurgency occurred in 1971, in response to an economic crisis. Unemployed Sinhalese youth formed a socialist
militia called the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or JVP. They led an armed revolt across the rural south and central provinces, but in three weeks the government cracked down, killing around 15,000 insurgents, many of them poor teenagers. By the eighties, militants had emerged in the north, too—young Tamil men and women demanding a separate state. The 1983 riots which Indra had narrowly escaped—when urban Sinhala mobs ran amok, killing more than 3,000—were the beginning of the bloodiest decade in Sri Lankan history.

By the late eighties, the Tigers were locked in a struggle with the Indian army, which had been deployed to disarm Tamil militant groups. At the same time in the south, the JVP struck again; over two years, the militia and the army butchered thousands of Sinhala Buddhist peasants and young lower-middle-class men. Every group in the conflict engaged in revenge killing, and youths all over the island were murdered in gruesome ways. It was common to see corpses dumped in rivers and beheaded bodies publicly displayed. Boys were chased in broad daylight and their throats slit. Families found bodies with burning tyres around their necks. Indra’s sister Rani, who lived in Colombo then, had seen three Sinhalese boys hanged from a tree in the city centre. Uncounted young men had disappeared, thousands were murdered and more than 10,000 thrown in jail under terrorism charges. Violence and destruction had become mundane. Even after the Sinhalese militia was subdued in 1989, the Tigers kept up the violence, ruling the north and terrorising the south. The Sinhalese public abhorred them doubly for this.

The perpetual state of war incrementally polarised the country. Through the bloody years, successive governments fanned ethnic hatred and even the surviving JVP socialist leaders turned their outfit into an ultra-nationalist Sinhala Buddhist political party. Tamil complaints about discrimination and their call for autonomy found no support among most Sinhalese, who had endured checkpoints, economic instability and a culture of fear for too long. So when the LTTE was eliminated in May 2009, the people on the streets responded by embracing an era of hope and rejoicing that an ethnic war had finally been won.

The festive mood in Colombo made Indra uneasy. She, too, was rid of something that had wrecked her life, but she did not share the elation of those around her. The celebrations were alienating. Somewhere in the texture of the victory was the tense fibre of her defeat. She sensed it among the revellers but also felt it twist inside her. She felt exposed, more vulnerable than before.

In prison, the women in the visitors’ queue discussed the end of the war. They brought up what they read in the papers or heard from relatives about the thousands killed, about the bullet through Prabakaran’s forehead, about the zoo-like refugee camps. They analysed what it meant for their loved ones inside jail: release, detention, a life sentence. Or did it change nothing? There was much to say, but when guards passed, they changed the subject. It was dangerous to express doubt or question the cost of victory.

Indra could not even imagine how it would be inside prison. She was told only in August that the Tamil prisoners, during assembly a day after Prabakaran’s death, had attempted to observe two minutes of silence but were admonished and forbidden to do so. They had finally done it a week later at night, in their cells. Indra often advised Sarva to keep a low profile and not agitate the guards. He had a stock reply: my behaviour has nothing to do with how they treat me.

In August 2009, when the journalist Tissa was charged with terrorism and sentenced to twenty years in jail, Sarva plunged into depression. He had tied his fate to Tissa’s, the prisoner he thought most likely to bust his way out and throw the gates open for the others. When Tissa was sentenced, Sarva was inconsolable. ‘They really spare no one,’ he told Indra.

Around the same time, the TID accused him of having been a member of the Tigers’ intelligence wing; they claimed he had confessed to his involvement. When Sarva’s trial began, his lawyers argued that he had been tortured in custody and that the TID had no evidence to support their allegations. Indra gave a statement that her son had been forced into the LTTE. Even though she followed nothing of the exchange between judges and lawyers, she went to every hearing in court. She had relinquished nearly all
her possessions to pay the lawyers and she only hoped they were making some progress. Showing up was all she could do.