Saree

by Su Dharmapala

  ‘Isn’t it worth it? To sacrifice your life for Eelam? To live like free men?’ Kadal, Vannan’s youngest brother, asked eagerly.

  Vannan’s mother struck like a cobra, pouncing to twist her youngest son’s ears. ‘Don’t you even dare think about joining those hoodlums! Low caste thugs with no brains or education! Hasn’t my heart been broken enough?’

  ‘Owww!’ Kadal yelled. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Leave the boy alone, Chelvathy,’ the gamanayaka said. ‘You would not be able to stop him if his heart was set on it anyway. But let me tell you something. The LTTE are living in a fool’s paradise. We Jaffna Tamils are less than twenty per cent of the population,’ he said. Murgan tried to interrupt, but the headman held up a silencing hand. ‘Yes, still less than twenty per cent of the population, even if we include the plantation Tamils. It is stupid to expect that the Sinhala government will give us two-thirds of the coastline. Especially when there isn’t enough space for the Sinhalese either.’

  ‘So what do you expect us to do? Take all the injustices they heap on our heads lying down? The land that Mahinda’s family farms used to belong to the Krishnapillay family and it was taken from them!’ Kadal said furiously, all decorum forgotten now. ‘They took our land! They have no right to be here!’

  The gamanayaka shook his head sadly. ‘My family have been on this land for over twenty generations. Before the Krishnapillays lived there, a Sinhala family lived there and a Tamil family before them. There have always been Sinhalese living in the north, just as there have been Tamils living in the south.’

  ‘But what are we to do? How can we change things if we don’t fight for our rights?’

  ‘The Mahatma brought the mighty British empire to its knees by doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. We, as Hindus, are not worthy of his legacy if we cannot learn from him. All the top engineers, doctors, lawyers and public servants in this country are Tamil. The British made it that way. They gave us Tamils a better education. What do you think would happen if all our Tamil brothers stopped working? The island would stop too and the Sinhala government would be forced to take notice of us!’

  ‘It is an old man’s way!’ Murgan mocked.

  ‘It is an old man’s wisdom. Mark my words, the bullets the LTTE turn on the Sinhalese, they will just as soon turn on us. Killing one man is the same as killing another,’ the gamanayaka said. As he left to go home he looked weary, his movements stiff and slow.

  ‘When Krishna comes home I am going to give him such a thrashing,’ Vannan told Mahinda. ‘I can’t believe he would do this to our mother – and it’s his fault Kadal was talking that way to the gamanayaka.’

  ‘But tell me about your meeting with Shivani’s family,’ Mahinda insisted. ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘It all started well enough. Shivani’s parents were quite welcoming. It was clear that we liked each other, and my aunty found that her husband and Shivani’s uncle worked at the Jaffna council together. It was a bit of a surprise to Shivani’s aunty what my family’s caste was.’

  ‘Such polite and respectable people and in the government service,’ the old windbag had kept repeating over and over again, looking somewhat taken aback.

  Neither side could ignore the fact that their children were clearly smitten with each other. Shivani was a deep shade of beetroot as she sat looking out the window and Vannan could not stop sneaking little peeks at her. It was clear that it was love at first . . . er . . . sight . . . or something like that, anyway.

  So it surprised no one that after about three quarters of an hour Shivani’s father made his first observation on seeing the glow of joy that so became his only daughter. Her eyes shone so bright that they paled the glistening jewels at her ears and throat. A gentle smile that he’d never seen had settled on her lips. Before long the families found themselves talking about the wedding, as if the other details had all been agreed. ‘I suppose we could have the marriage services in both a kovila and the church, to satisfy both faiths,’ Shivani’s father had said.

  ‘So, what happened next?’ Mahinda asked.

  ‘We were talking about a suitable time to fix at both the church and kovila when Shivani’s brothers appeared, those stupid overgrown apes. They’d been off gallivanting somewhere and they laid into us straight away.’

  ‘All three of them at once?’ Mahinda said.

  ‘Yes,’ Vannan told him. ‘And they weren’t impressed to see me there.’

  ‘I’d rather my sister be a spinster than be given in marriage to this Sinhala-loving dog!’ Geevan had said, as Rajan muttered something about sullying their bloodline.

  ‘But this is the only proposal she has liked,’ Shivani’s mother had pleaded, thoroughly embarrassed. ‘This is what she wants. Let it be. Your father and I are happy for her.’

  ‘And what will you do when this fool whores your daughter out to Sinhalayas? Will you be happy for her then?’ Theevan had demanded.

  ‘Which was when I felt it appropriate to stand up and punch the fool in the mouth,’ Vannan admitted a tad sheepishly. ‘That’s when things really exploded. Insults were hurled all around, lots of pushing and shoving. Theevan said my family were uneducated farmers with dirt for brains, and that we weren’t good enough for his sister. That’s how Krishna got his black eye. Nimal scarpered and ran all the way to the bus halt – I’ve never seen him move so fast. And my parents sobbed all the way home.’

  ‘So what now? What are you going to do?’

  ‘Shivani got a message to me while we were still in Jaffna. She will run away sometime in the next week or so. We can get married and return to Nayaru and live far way from those apes.’

  ‘Tell me when you need me and I’ll go to Jaffna with you,’ Mahinda said. ‘As long as it’s not tomorrow,’ he added, a small smile playing on his lips. ‘I have to go back to Trincomalee.’

  ‘So the trip was fruitful?’

  ‘More than fruitful. The spinning master has offered me a job.’

  ‘What?’ Vannan asked incredulously.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it either. He wants me to come down again tomorrow to discuss the possibilities. A government agent will be there and they want me to work with them to build a project around my production technique.’

  ‘But what about university?’ Vannan asked. ‘The whole village is depending on you. Your father is depending on you.’

  ‘But this may be something more. Something that no one else has done before,’ Mahinda said.

  ‘No one in this village has been to university before!’

  ‘I know, but I love this. I love silk farming. I’m happy taking care of my silkworms, I love spinning silk yarn and I’m really excited about this opportunity! I thought you’d understand,’ Mahinda said.

  ‘No, I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you’d sacrifice everything for some cockamamie idea!’ Vannan told him. Mahinda heard the anger in his voice.

  ‘But you helped me! You encouraged me all along!’

  ‘I’ve also encouraged you to steal kurumba from the village across the lagoon and taught you how to swim, but I didn’t expect you to make a life out of either!’

  ‘But this is more than a dream now. It’s really happening.’

  ‘Just stop. Stop now. It’s just a dream – leave it at that. I’ve had to sacrifice so much for you. I could have been you! I could have been an engineer and married Shivani. Shivani’s brothers would not have dared to treat me and mine like dirt if I’d got a place at university. So don’t you dare! Don’t you dare think of running off to Trincomalee!’

  ‘But Vannan . . .’

  ‘Mahinda, you listen here. When you came back from Jaffna after . . . well . . . I stepped aside for you. I am at least as smart as you.’

  ‘But I didn’t want you to step aside. When I came back I was ready to—’

  ‘What? Grow silkworms?’

  ‘Yes, to become a farmer like my father. I was ready to do it. I have never been hung up on becoming an engineer!’ Mahinda p
rotested fiercely. ‘I told you, I told the gamanayaka and I even told my father. But no one listened to me!’

  ‘How could we? You’d just lost your mother. You weren’t thinking straight. This whole village is depending on you now. I am depending on you. Give up this childish dream and do what is right! It is what your mother would have wanted you to do!’

  It was a quarter to midnight and Mahinda started to panic. He ran up and down the darkened main bus halt in Trincomalee in search of a bus but could not find one. Not a single one. He could find buses headed south, he could find buses going inland west, and he even found a bus that was going to take the circuitous route from Trincomalee down south to Batticaloa then on to Galle and Colombo. But he could not find a single bus headed north. Not one to Kumpurupiddi, not one to Nayaru and certainly not one to Jaffna. It was as if all roads to the north had been closed.

  ‘What’s going on? Why aren’t there any northbound buses?’ Mahinda demanded of one bus driver after another.

  ‘Heard the weather is turning bad up north . . .’ a few muttered before going back to their game of booruwa. Yet the air was still and there was no hint of a storm. The crows were nesting comfortably in town and hadn’t returned to their homes in the mountains.

  In desperation, Mahinda tried hitching a ride on one of the many lorries that carted vegetables and other essentials from the harbour in Trincomalee to Jaffna, but again he had no luck. All the truck drivers seemed to want to go around the long way, through Vavuniya to Jaffna. Mahinda would normally have agreed, as the road was quite good that way, but he wanted to get back to Nayaru sooner rather than later.

  At a little after one in the morning, he walked from the bus halt and stood at the fork where the road veered off to Mihindapura. There were plenty of cars heading up north, but again no one was willing to give him a ride. Maybe it was the rather large sack of silk yarn he had strung across his back. All twenty pounds of it.

  A few of the drivers heading up north through Vavuniya carefully looked him over before tossing out helpful advice if they judged him to be Tamil. ‘Thambi, we’ve been told to avoid heading up north tonight. Everybody is saying that our brothers are planning on giving the Sinhalayas in Kumpurupiddi a taste of their own medicine. Shipping them all back south on buses.’

  ‘Just the Sinhalayas in Kumpurupiddi?’ Mahinda asked in his best Tamil, shrinking into the shadows of the street lamps. ‘No talk of it in Nayaru?’

  ‘Do you have friends in Nayaru?’ some asked. ‘The gamanayaka in Nayaru is strong. LTTE will not go there!’

  After several hours of waiting at the crossroads, Mahinda gave up. Maybe he could sleep in the doorway of the mercantile store across from the junction and try to catch a bus at daybreak. He opened his shoulder satchel to stuff his sack of silk in it and could not help but smile at the crisp white shirt contained therein. He reached out to touch it. His first brand-new shirt. Fresh out of the packet. Maybe he could wear it to Vannan’s wedding.

  Mahinda had arrived back in Trincomalee that Monday morning not knowing what to expect. ‘Thank goodness you are here early,’ the guild master had said, coming out of his office. ‘No, this won’t do,’ he said looking Mahinda over. ‘Here, try this,’ he’d suggested, tossing Mahinda a brand-new shirt from his cupboard. ‘Come quick, the government agent is waiting for us next door.’

  What had happened next meant that Mahinda’s head was still in a spin a good ten hours later.

  ‘Come, young man, come,’ the government agent had said, graciously inviting Mahinda into a room full of other officials. ‘Tell me about what you are trying to do.’

  ‘Err . . . I . . .’ Mahinda had stammered, feeling rather overawed. He was a village boy, more used to ploughing fields than talking to powerful government officials.

  The guild master stepped in. ‘As I said, this young man has been able to cultivate silk moths. And we all know how difficult that is. The Bombyx mori moth is notoriously difficult even to keep alive. They are prone to disease and can die from drafts. But this boy has done it. He has successfully cultivated a whole crop of them and has the cocoons as proof, see!’ He pulled a handful of Mahinda’s pods from his pocket.

  ‘Well done!’ the government agent told Mahinda. ‘We tried getting something like this going in Matale a few years ago and all the moths died after a cold frost in the mountains.’

  ‘Didn’t they also start a project a few years ago in Hambantota?’ the guild master asked.

  ‘That failed. The entire breeding stock was wiped out by a flock of swallows.’

  ‘What about the other project in Hatton?’

  The government agent sighed, whipping off his glasses to rub his eyes. ‘The watchman confused mulberry leaves with casa casa leaves and an entire generation of caterpillars died. Then we had this nasty storm and the rest of the moths were blown somewhere else.’ He looked at Mahinda again. ‘This is what we’ll do, son. You can sit with our chief sericulturist and explain to him what you’ve done. He can take over from there. This may well be the beginning of a viable sericulture industry in Sri Lanka!’

  ‘And we have the expertise now to spin the silk too,’ the guild master had gloated. ‘This young man showed us how to get even the smallest fibre out of the cocoons.’

  ‘Shah! Well done! Not that the short fibres matter. You just boil the cocoons whole and reel the silk directly from the pods.’

  ‘No,’ Mahinda said in a quiet voice.

  ‘Yes, the finest silk is that reeled directly from the pods,’ the guild master said, not quite hearing him.

  ‘No,’ Mahinda said a little more loudly.

  ‘Excuse me, putta. What did you say?’ the government agent asked.

  ‘I won’t teach you how to raise silkworms if you are going to kill them for the silk,’ Mahinda said firmly.

  ‘And why not? Silk has been thrown for thousands of years by boiling the cocoons,’ the guild master retorted.

  ‘I won’t give you my breeding stock if you are going to kill the moths to get their silk.’

  ‘Can you explain to me why?’ the government agent asked. He raised a hand in the air, signalling to the guild master that he should wait to hear the answer.

  Mahinda explained how he’d started and why he wanted to create the silk without hurting the moths. He went into detail about how Nimal raised them, keeping them warm overnight and feeding them every two hours so that they grew up healthy and strong.

  ‘We, all of us, cling to our lives. What right do we have to kill silk moths just for their cocoons?’

  ‘Do you have a name for this type of silk?’ the government agent asked. Both he and the guild master were impressed by the boy’s passion and knowledge. While Mahinda was a boy from the village, it was clear that he was about as shrewd and intelligent as they came.

  ‘Err . . . ahimsa silk,’ Mahinda replied in a confident voice.

  ‘Well, I think we can find you some money for this enterprise,’ the government agent said. ‘We’ll give you two lakhs for the first year to get everything together and 2500 rupees a month for you to set it up in your village in Nayaru. The gamanayaka there is a wise man. He’ll support you with this project, I’m sure – it will benefit the whole district.’

  ‘Two thousand five hundred rupees?’ Mahinda whispered softly. Senior doctors in the public service didn’t make that much money.

  ‘We’ve just received a large amount of money from the government to develop sericulture here in the north-east and you came along at the right time. I understand you’ve been offered a place at the university in Colombo, though, so you’ve got some decisions to make. You can’t do both. This project will be a full-time job. So, go home and think about it. I know what I’d do if I were you, though. Not many engineers get the opportunity to do work like this – and it’d be ten years before you’d be anywhere close to making this kind of money.’

  Mahinda had barely been able to farewell the man, his head had been in such a whirl. He spent the rest o
f the afternoon spinning silk with the guild master before heading off to catch a bus home. ‘Talk it over with your parents. They’ll see that opportunities like this don’t come along every day,’ the guild master said as he left.

  He wasn’t quite sure how he was going to break it to his family that he wanted to become a silk farmer instead of an engineer. But he knew in his heart that was what he wanted to do. He could already hear the howls of protest from his father and see the disappointment in the gamanayaka’s eyes. He was still standing there by the road absent-mindedly feeling the cotton of his new shirt and thinking about this problem when a truck carrying a load of rubber tyres came past.

  ‘Thambi! Heard you were looking for a ride north. To Nayaru? Hop in. I’m on my way to Jaffna! I have to get there before midday.’

  Lulled by the gentle rocking of the old truck, Mahinda fell asleep, using the satchel slung on his back as a pillow. His last thought as he drifted off was that he really didn’t feel ready for the war he would have to fight when he arrived home.

  It was the harsh sound of a rifle being fired that awoke Mahinda. The sound ripped through the early morning air, cool and sharp. He jumped out of the back of the truck without stopping to think and hid in the ditch beside the road, his satchel still on his back. It was half-dark, the sun not yet over the horizon. He knew he was back in Nayaru because of the smell of tobacco flowers mingled with sea spray, but there was something in the air that was altogether different. Something burning . . . what was it?

  ‘These tyres are promised to a modalali in Jaffna!’ the lorry driver protested loudly. ‘I can’t give them . . .’ The rest of his words turned into a gurgle as Mahinda heard someone draw a knife across the man’s throat.

  He lay flat on his back in the ditch frozen with terror. The unthinkable had happened. The LTTE had struck Nayaru! What was happening to his family? His father? His grandmother? He lay there, breathing hard, unable to move. Then he heard a voice he knew. Krishna, Vannan’s little brother. ‘Get those tyres. We’ll need to build a bonfire.’