The Seasons of Trouble (37 page)

After they’d come to Point Pedro, Mother had visited Prashant at his detention centre in the Chettikulam school. Mugil still remembered the news Mother brought back for its resounding peculiarity. Her brother had apparently been excited about being assigned kitchen duty, because it gave him access to more chicken than he otherwise got at meals. He had also told Mother that the inmates had been served the auspicious Sinhalese dish
kiri bath
on the anniversary of Prabakaran’s death. He had sung to Mother the Sinhala-language national anthem, which he had been taught there. After that, he had been sent to take a short ‘leadership’ course in the dreaded Boosa prison complex in the southern city of Galle. The family hadn’t heard from him since then. To Sri Lankans, Boosa was synonymous with torture and indefinite detention, and Mugil worried about her little brother.

It was almost three o’clock and the snacks were cooling in the kitchen. Mugil washed her face and changed, getting ready to pack the
vadais
, buns and rolls in the newspapers she had been poring over. The packets had to be delivered to the shops by four—teatime. Before Mother left to pick up Maran from school, she told Mugil that she had heard of some neighbours hiring a mini-van to visit the Poonthottam detention camp. ‘You can share the cost and go with them to see your husband,’ Mother said. ‘Boys need to see their father,
ammani
.’ Mugil nodded and left on her bike. She had deliveries to make.

21.

July 2011

INDRA LAY IN
bed watching the fan turn at its lowest speed. July in Nuwara Eliya didn’t warrant fans, but the hum helped her sleep. A childhood in tea estates was not cosy, but it made you a weather snob. Her family complained far too much when it was warm.

The last time she heard from Sarva, he had called from the Riyadh airport. He had just arrived from Colombo, and his first words on the phone were about the tremendous heat. ‘Yes, you’re a prince straight from
Ing-Land
,’ she’d teased. He hadn’t called again after that, and she had no number for him.

Indra turned to the window. A fog hung low on the tea bushes outside. The purple dawn was turning pink. The steady drizzle was a hush on the kitchen’s asbestos roof. She tried to recall Sarva’s hurried words from that last phone call.

It had been afternoon for her. ‘Each call is costly, Amma,’ Sarva had said. ‘But I am all right, there are twenty-five of us in this batch.’

She had asked him if things had gone smoothly at the immigration desk at Colombo. ‘The officer had been fixed, but I still had to give him 100 dollars extra.’ Sarva had borrowed these dollars from Shirleen, who had waited outside Colombo airport till he boarded.

Indra had asked if he’d eaten. ‘On the flight. I had two non-veg boxes!’ He seemed giddy with expectation. He didn’t know where
the group would go next, only that it would be constantly on the move. ‘I’m out of the wretched country, that itself is amazing. Now my luck will change, you’ll see. I’ll come for you soon, Amma. Our time will come.’

She had started to cry, saying she was praying for him. ‘Take care, child. Eat well, child. Your mother is fine, don’t worry about me, think of your health and safety. Everything will be fine, be careful’—she had spoken in loops. He said he had to hang up, others had to use the phone. ‘Try not to cry all the time, okay?’ He was teasing, but that had set off more tears and they didn’t stop all day. She forgot to cook lunch, and when John asked about it, she sent the maid out to buy chicken lunch-packets.

Indra now sat up on the bed. She had been worried about Sarva but wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d been gone. On the wall a calendar displayed a grinning tea picker with a big nose ring and bad teeth. Flipping back two months, Indra pressed a finger to 4 May, the day Sarva left. Ideally, she would have crossed out the date as a reminder, but she didn’t want to leave a clue for the TID. She had been careful not to note the date down anywhere. Was that why she had lost track of time?

The days were a blur, the events embarrassingly fuzzy. For a month after Sarva left, plainclothesmen had visited repeatedly, demanding to know where her son was. Fed up, she had gone to her aunt’s house in Jaffna. She had planned a round of visits to temples and family but was instead mired in a dispute with the tea estate company over a house lease. She was drowning in debt from Sarva’s trial and departure. Waiting for a bus one day, she had suffered a stroke and been hospitalised for weeks. Her aunt had helped with the bills, but eventually John had Indra discharged before she had fully recovered. They could not afford more expense, and hoped rest and prayer would heal her. She was on stronger blood pressure medication now, but did not trust her health anymore. She called it a cursed time. Body, mind, spirit—all were failing.

It was early July now. Two months and not a word from Sarva. Indra went to the kitchen, grabbed some holy ash and smeared it all over her forehead. She prayed furiously, ‘
Pullaiyar appa, Pullaiyar appa
,’ rocking back and forth. Her eyes were shut tight.
She chanted till the words drowned out her fear, till her blouse was drenched in sweat.

She finally leaned back on the kitchen counter. Her shoulders slumped. All the energy seemed to leave her body, dissipating like the fog outside. She was sure something had happened to her son. She sensed a dread, solid and pulsating in the pit of her stomach, calling her to action. It was all too familiar.

JOHN OFTEN SAID
Indra spent more time saving Sarva than raising him. It wasn’t easy to rear a good child in bad times, she would reply. She had rescued Sarva from disease, riots, the police, and the ravages of a country always on edge. But there was one incident she rarely brought up, although the memory of it had plagued her since Sarva’s detention. It was the unspeakable reason for his arrest in 2008, and it continued to be an obstacle in her attempts to prove his innocence. All the NGO men and women she met had asked about it, noticing a gap, something that didn’t add up. She had answered them vaguely, remembering what not to say.

It was 2002, the year of the ceasefire. Sarva had just finished his naval engineering exam. While he waited for the results, his brother Deva asked him to help at their video centre in Negombo. Deva was due to get married in a few months and wanted Sarva to fill in for him while he was busy with the wedding plans. Indra was relieved; if Sarva had stayed in Nuwara Eliya, she would have had to foot the bills for his aimless motorbike trips.

The Negombo video centre and Internet cafe was in the main market, and was doing reasonably well. The brothers shot weddings, parties, store openings, and child-naming ceremonies. The month after Sarva joined, another young man, Sujeevan, turned up asking for a job. He was from Vavuniya—a cousin of a friend of a friend of Deva’s—and was on the run from the LTTE’s clandestine conscription drive during the ceasefire. He begged them to help. He didn’t want to be snatched off the streets by a white van, he said, and be forced into training. He was the same age as Sarva, twenty-four.

‘We can’t afford him,’ Deva said. ‘We can’t save everyone.’ But at Sarva’s coaxing, Sujeevan was employed at half salary as a
camera assistant. He turned out to be a fast learner and, as a bonus, cooked fabulously. The brothers congratulated themselves on this perfect hire.

After three months, Deva went off to prepare for the wedding. Sarva joined him a week later, leaving Sujeevan in charge of the shop. On the night after the wedding, Sarva received a phone call from the tea vendor near the video centre. ‘Your cameras and computers are being taken away! Sujeevan says you asked him to do it. But he’s loading them in a car, so I felt suspicious.’

Sarva rushed to Negombo, but it was too late. All the equipment, worth about 800,000 rupees, was gone. His brother squarely blamed Sarva for the robbery—he was the one who had convinced Deva to hire Sujeevan, befriend and stupidly trust him. He was the one who left a thief in charge.

Sarva filed a police complaint and a few days later the police used Sujeevan’s vehicle registration to track him down in a lodge in Negombo. When Sujeevan opened the door of his room, the Tamil inspector swung hard at his face. ‘Stealing from your own, are you, you ungrateful bastard?’ In Sarva’s presence, Sujeevan confessed that he had sent the equipment to someone in north Vavuniya. He said it was to pay for his freedom from the Tigers. As soon as he mentioned an LTTE connection, the police made excuses and backed off. ‘This is not our jurisdiction,’ the inspector said. Sarva didn’t entirely understand what Sujeevan meant by ‘payment for freedom’, but he took the man’s details—name ‘Thiru’, dark, fat nose, short, sometimes wore spectacles, close to LTTE commander Paulraj—and decided to go retrieve the equipment himself.

Indra forbade him: ‘There’s only a slim chance you’ll get the stuff back, and there’s a greater risk of something happening to you.’ But Sarva felt too guilty, and too upset that his trust had been betrayed. Indra begged Deva to accompany Sarva, and when he refused, she decided to go along herself.

In Vavuniya, a town in a southerly section of the north, Indra and Sarva stayed at his schoolmate’s house. For days, they searched in vain for Thiru. Gradually, Indra began to regret coming; it had been rude to leave Deva’s new bride at home alone. When Sarva put Indra on a bus back to Nuwara Eliya, she made him promise to
stop his search in a week. On each of the next five days, he called Indra with nothing to report. On the seventh day, Sarva’s friend called. ‘Kutty is missing,’ he said, using Sarva’s school nickname. The friend had gone to the police, who guessed that Sarva might be at the LTTE base camp—that was where most missing boys were found in those days. The police couldn’t do much to help.

Indra rushed to Vavuniya with her youngest son, seventeen-year-old Carmel, in tow. From the bus stop, she went straight to the LTTE base and demanded to see her son. The men in the office were nonchalant; they had heard such parental demands a hundred times. They said they would check and asked her to return the next day. The following day, they sent her away again. This went on for a few days until Indra snapped. Before she could think about the consequences, she was sitting stubbornly on the red earth in front of the office gate, leaning on a wooden pole and abusing the Tigers. She asked every passer-by if he or she had seen Sarva, her son, an innocent boy these people had gobbled up. She cried openly, beating her chest, refusing to drink water or eat. When exhausted, she slept face down on the mud. Carmel stood by silently, protesting with his mother. Some people tried to give Indra some glucose or lemon juice, but she pushed it aside. Several Tiger members begged her to stop creating a scene, but to no avail. After almost two weeks, Mohan, a senior leader, came and sat next to her. ‘Your son came to us willingly,’ he said.

‘Nonsense. I know my son,’ Indra shouted.

‘Stop telling everyone this is “forced recruitment”. Your son is the one who came looking for commander Paulraj.’

He spoke calmly, sure of himself, as if he knew Sarva better than Indra did. She had heard about the Tigers’ sense of entitlement, their blindness when a person refused to serve under them. She already despised Mohan and his indifference.

She said Sarva had not come to join the Tigers, but to find some stolen video equipment.

‘He was hungry, and we fed him. He was talking to some Tigers, maybe he changed his mind. Many young men do this, they want to serve their community.’

She did not care if Sarva changed his mind, she yelled, she did
not care if he joined willingly or by force. She wanted her son back in her house. ‘I will die if you don’t give me my son back,’ she swore.

Mohan sighed, saying that Sarva had already begun training in Kilinochchi. ‘There’s nothing you can do now.’

Straightaway Indra went to Kilinochchi, relaunching her hunger strike and public shaming at the camp office there. If Sarva had joined the Tigers voluntarily, she wanted news of her raving in the streets to reach him, to wreck his resolve. She wrote letters addressed to Sarva and asked young Tiger cadres to hand them to her son if they saw him. She wasn’t sure if any of the notes reached him because there was never a reply. Many families had suffered this way when their children were snatched from them. Indra had dreaded this catastrophe for years—every Tamil mother did—yet she could not believe that it had struck.

The Sri Lankan government and the LTTE had signed a ceasefire agreement with Norwegian facilitation in February 2002. It threw open the A9 highway, and gave journalists, NGOs and government officials a glimpse of the fortified Tiger-held regions for the first time. But, as Indra realised when she came to the Vanni to look for Sarva, there was no real pause in the fighting. As peace talks were being arranged, the LTTE staged assassinations, used the loosened border controls to rearm itself and, most aggravatingly for Tamil families, recruited massively. The forced conscription of children spiked alarmingly.