The Seasons of Trouble (39 page)

Every other period of Sarva’s life was investigated, and was wide open to scrutiny, but the LTTE years were locked up in a pact between mother and son. They told one story but, between them, there existed several layers of truth. When Shirleen or Jehaan asked her about it directly, or other sceptics needed clarification, Indra would look at her feet, and evade, deflect, swallow. She believed it was the only way to protect Sarva. If she admitted to his having spent one and a half years with the Tigers, forcibly trained and bordering on voluntary service, the state would not spare him. They would not care that she had almost starved herself to get him out. The activists would not—could not—have helped as generously as they did if they’d had to put ‘received arms training under LTTE’ in his file. She was petrified that they would be indifferent to the state’s torturing him in 2008 because he was sullied by militancy. Worse, they might think he deserved it.

Even in the greyest of conflicts, systems and people tried to put matters into black and white, for moral comfort, for their own safety. Without assurance that her son would get a fair trial or humane treatment in Sri Lanka, Indra had produced a palatable narrative that might evoke the easiest empathy for Sarva, and therefore a chance of survival. She didn’t know when she could discard the weight of distortion, when or to whom the whole truth could be told.

As she waited for Sarva to call her from another airport in 2011, on his way to the US, Indra was afraid that the storm had engulfed him after all. He had left Sri Lanka in May. It was July now. He had called once. Perhaps a Tiger spy had snared him, or a TID officer, or some criminal gang. What could she do from Nuwara Eliya?

Indra had known the risks of sending Sarva abroad with an agent of human smuggling, but she had drawn courage from the
many young men who had made the trip successfully. So many of them had reached the US and, albeit after a great deal of struggle, had become foreign citizens with happy, wealthy households. But nobody mentioned the months of impenetrable silence before they got there. By miserable experience, she knew that when her son went incommunicado, trouble was close at hand.

22.

August 2011

IT WAS AN
ordeal to coordinate dates, times and money with fifteen women around Point Pedro, and Mugil was not surprised that once she’d agreed to visit the detention camp with this group, she would be the one stuck with the logistics. She was good at maths, she didn’t have a time-consuming infant to deal with, she knew people, she owned a phone—there were myriad reasons for them to leave it up to her. Sangeeta’s brother offered to drive them to the camp for half the market rate, but she would have to arrange a van.

Most people she asked seemed to have SUVs which they leased to international NGOs at unaffordable international NGO rates. Owners of private minibuses plying through Point Pedro didn’t see any profit in carrying only fifteen women when they could make much more by packing in fifty people each way. Bigger private buses were available, but they were sixty-seaters. Mugil could easily have mobilised that number, but she didn’t want to manage that large a group. The army would then get involved; emergency regulations were still in place and large gatherings had to get army permission.

Seeing Mugil flailing, the cool-bar owner gave her a number for a van rental company that usually catered to tourists. They would have vans for fifteen people, ‘but the owners are Muslims,’ he said apologetically. ‘Make sure you bargain properly.’

There was a popular perception among Tamils that Muslim traders and businessmen had become the largest profiteers after the war. In truth, however, the government-driven economic revival of the north largely benefited those with political connections—Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim. Among the less connected, more Muslims than Tamils appeared to have obtained licences or set up shops in the north; this was because Muslims had not been recently displaced, many spoke both Sinhala and Tamil, had a cultural affinity for certain trades that were now flourishing in the north and, most significantly, possessed capital, thanks to Colombo businesses and decades of foreign remittances from relatives in the Middle East. Most Tamils, on the other hand, traditionally preferred agriculture, fishing, government work, or employment in the legal and banking sector.

The less trade-oriented and now war-affected Tamils simply put the relative success of many Muslims down to racial shrewdness and opportunism.
Rendu muham kaatuvangal
, people tended to say: the Muslims are two-faced. Mugil was prejudiced, too, but believed she had a valid reason. For months, she had noticed truckloads of rusty wheels, bicycles, trishaw parts, engines, doors and windows being carried along the highways. One day, seeing a child’s dress entwined in a wheel, she realised that the trucks were carrying the things her people had desperately discarded in Mullivaikal at the end of the war, before crossing over to the army. The Mullivaikal area was a high-security zone now, and few Tamils—from across the north and east—had recovered their belongings. Those who did manage to enter saw a bleak scene: the possessions of hundreds of thousands being divided into mountains of metal, wood and perishables. The place was being cleared of evidence and the scrap dealers were largely Muslim. Mugil could not forgive them this callousness. ‘Grave robbers,’ she called them.

So when she called Yaqub Ibrahim—the name on the visiting card the cool-bar owner gave her—she did not expect help. Yes, they had vans, Yaqub said on the phone, but if she had her own driver, she would have to pay a deposit.

‘Why? I’m not going to vanish with your van,’ she said, infuriated already.

It’s just to be on the safe side, he said, and then asked, ‘You’re all women?’

Mugil told him they were all going to the Poonthottam detention centre and immediately bit her tongue. She had not thought of it before: why would this Muslim help the families of former Tigers? This Yaqub sounded young, one of his office addresses was in Puttalam, so she guessed he must have been one of the 75,000 Muslims the Tigers expelled from the north in 1990. He would have been a child then.

There was a long silence. Mugil was about to hang up, when Yaqub replied. ‘Okay, I can make an exception. If you come back in five hours, you don’t have to pay the deposit.’

Surprised but trying to push her luck, she asked for a discount on the day rate. Yaqub refused initially but then spoke to someone behind him and finally slashed the cost by 10 per cent. ‘One of our friends in Jaffna will give you an old van. Don’t turn on the AC,’ he said.

The next Sunday, when the women left for Poonthottam, one of them noticed on the windshield a sticker carrying an inscription from the Quran.

‘Muslim vehicle,’ the lady sighed. ‘They own everything nowadays.’

Mugil didn’t respond.

AT THE DETENTION
centre, the women’s IDs and bags were checked and they were asked to wait in the visitors’ hut. Mats were laid on the floor and the women sat down in rows. Mugil had worn an ankle-length skirt and a long-sleeved blouse. She always worried that her arms were too muscular. Tamizh was on her lap, his arms tight around her neck; all the uniformed soldiers made him tense.

Divyan walked in with the others. He looked as if he had been sleeping and had hurriedly thrown on his shirt; he had buttoned it wrong. He wore a washed-out sarong. He also had a thick beard.

They were told they had fifteen minutes. Divyan sat opposite Mugil. Tamizh crawled onto his lap and hugged him.

He misses his father, she said. She gave Divyan a new shirt and shaving kit. He took them, hardly looking at her face.

‘You didn’t bring Maran,’ he said, part question and part complaint.

‘He won’t sit still. I thought we could talk.’

‘Mmm.’

She ruffled the plastic bag in which she had brought his clothes. ‘Are you eating well?’

He shrugged. ‘
Naaku seththu pochu
.’ My taste buds are dead.

It was the same answer he used to give on the phone through all the months he had been in detention. She had expected a different conversation when they sat face to face. Around them, the other families seemed to be chatting away, using every second in those fifteen minutes to provide detailed updates about extended family, house issues and money problems.

‘How are you, Thambi?’ Divyan asked Tamizh, who smiled shyly. ‘Are you being naughty and troubling Amma?’ Tamizh shook his head, and said his brother was the one always being naughty.

Divyan asked if Maran was doing well in school.

‘He’s good at maths, but his Tamil and social science are very poor.’ She didn’t care if he was doing badly, he was in the second grade. They were talking about everything but the things that mattered.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.

‘Why? Nothing. We can’t talk about it here.’

Next to Mugil, a woman hugged a young boy and started crying. In the far corner, a man who looked about Divyan’s age held his newborn close and repeatedly offered his index finger for the baby to clasp. Every time the infant’s hand gripped him, the man grinned at his young wife.

‘How is your snack business doing?’ Divyan asked.

‘It’s okay. Sangeeta … have I told you about her?’

‘No.’

‘She’s a smart girl. The army shot her husband,
paavam …’

Divyan finally looked her straight in the face. ‘Don’t speak like that here. I am the one who has to go back inside,’ he snapped. ‘I will be released, who knows when, but sometime soon I hope. We will talk at home.’

On the way back to Point Pedro in the van, the road was lashed with the kind of downpour they hadn’t seen in weeks. Mugil slid the window shut and stuffed a handkerchief along the sides to prevent the rapid dripping from flying onto Tamizh. The child was asleep, and she wished she could be as content as he looked. She had the impression that Divyan was angry about her visit. He had never been a talker, but he had practically growled at her this time. Even in 2009, during the worst period of his detention, he had been reserved when she visited from the refugee camp but always affectionate, never on the offensive as he had been today. He had spent two years in detention now; perhaps it was getting harder to focus on freedom.

Some of the other women in the van had had better visits and were sharing what their brothers or husbands had said. There had been a ‘mental’ major general until six months ago, and since he had been replaced, the number of violent interrogations had dwindled. Still, there were monthly interrogations of some inmates, whom the army encouraged to spy on others.

They had morning assemblies, where an inmate would read the headlines from a newspaper. A woman’s brother had described the news as ‘what the president said, what he did, who he met’. They would sing the national anthem in Sinhala, stumbling through the words. The rest of the day, they sat around talking, sweeping, sleeping. There were some old magazines and dailies to read.

Most of the time, they watched pirated CDs on an old television set, Tamil movies made in south India and shot in Chennai, Switzerland or New York, love stories with uncontroversial heroes and curvaceous fair-skinned heroines. One of the men had told his sister, ‘All those
scenes
are also there, so many
scenes
.’ He meant sexually suggestive dialogue, shots of midriffs and cleavages, as well as innuendo, which had always been edited out by the LTTE censor board in the Vanni’s makeshift cinemas. The man had said that
Boys
, a raucous movie about four oversexed teenagers, featured a hot girlfriend character who had been entirely removed in the Tigers’ cut. During a satirical court scene where the boys are let off terrorism charges, the inmates had apparently hooted and clapped. One of the inmates had stupidly asked the soldier in charge for
Ezham Arivu
, an Indian movie renowned for its Tamil nationalism; that had not gone down well. The inmate was isolated for a week. The men also watched Bollywood movies with the soldiers, neither group really understanding the Hindi dialogue but enjoying the landscapes and songs.

‘Yes, very good,’ one of the women said wryly. ‘We are breaking our backs building houses and raising our children and they are sitting and watching movies.’ She announced that the detention camps, or
thaduppu
, had now been renamed ‘rehabilitation centres’, offering a new life, or
punarvazhvu
. In keeping with the nomenclature, workshops in carpentry, welding and construction were offered in addition to Sinhala language lessons. Computer classes were in the works.

But one element remained unchanged: no NGO or civil body was allowed inside, and all the classes were administered by the army. There was no trauma counselling or psychological therapy. The ICRC made many requests for entry, but all were rejected. Some men had admitted to feeling humiliated by the basic skills being imparted. ‘My husband was a bike mechanic and farmer, you know?’ a woman said. ‘Just because he was in the movement, these fellows think the only thing he knows is how to lob a bomb.’