Saree

by Su Dharmapala

  Mahinda gritted his teeth and inched forward on his stomach, using his elbows. His family lived the furthest away from the village. Maybe they had escaped to the island and were safe up in the trees. He needed to get to them. Determination fired him as he crawled along the muddy paddy field, slowly, not making a sound. He climbed over the bunt and looked over his shoulder at the watchtower.

  Badayana Bala lay at the bottom of the tree. Dead. He’d been shot in the head. Mahinda felt sick.

  Making his way across the village was not easy. The whole place was crawling with LTTE cadres – skinny young men dressed in jungle fatigue shirts and sarongs with rusty rifles slung across their shoulders. They looked like young farmers and fishermen, not soldiers. And if Mahinda looked carefully, he knew he’d been to school with most of them, or at least played cricket with them at the district tournaments.

  Stealthily he picked his way around the hamlet’s outlying houses, his near-perfect knowledge of the village saving him from detection more than once. He knew to hide behind the cesspit near the fishermen’s shacks because no one in their right mind would even consider looking for anyone there. Then he skirted around the edge of the shops and wove through the string of palmyra trees that led to the back of the school, near the waterhole. It was there, as he hid behind a clump of coconut trees that had once served as shelter for the science lab, that he witnessed the final chapter of the horror visited upon Nayaru.

  The Tamil villagers had been corralled in the schoolyard. Judging by the state they were in, they had put up fight to protect their Sinhala neighbours. Even Mrs Subramanium was there, looking cowed and terrified. The gamanayaka and the old schoolmaster, Sir Poornaswarmy, were the bloodiest and most bruised of them all, despite their advanced age, both of them kneeling on the ground, their heads bent over in front of the other Tamil men. Marking them as the leaders. They were held in their positions at gunpoint by boys young enough to be their grandchildren. Their wives were sobbing with the other women, all crouched together.

  ‘We’ve got a supply of tyres,’ Krishna announced, coming into the clearing with several other cadres rolling the large tyres they’d stolen from the lorry.

  ‘You filthy thief!’ Vannan’s mother screamed. ‘I should have drowned you at birth. You are no son of mine. From now till the end of time, I will curse your name!’

  One of the cadres came up and hit her in the mouth with his rifle butt. ‘Stupid woman, Eelam is greater than blood. It is greater than your son!’

  Mahinda saw something odd in the distance and squinted in the dim grey light to make out what it was. A pile of loose branches? Coconut fronds?

  No, it was a pile of human bodies. All in a heap. Mahinda could just make out the arms and legs of the Sinhala village shopkeepers and farmers, with the corpse of the vedda right on top. He saw Nimal’s mother’s body, and her husband’s, and Nimal’s brothers and sisters too.

  Men, women and children. All murdered. And in that instant, the sun peeked over the horizon and a ray of sunshine glistened off a bright object that had fallen to the ground. A pair of child’s spectacles. There was only one child in and around the five villages of Nayaru who wore glasses. Mahinda’s youngest sister, Prema.

  He could not stifle his scream. The gamanayaka looked up with everyone else to see where the noise came from. ‘Puttar! Run! Save yourself!’ the old man shouted when he saw Mahinda, using the last of his strength to stagger to his feet and run at the LTTE cadre who raised a rifle in Mahinda’s direction. The old man took a fatal bullet in his chest.

  Mahinda didn’t think twice as he crouched down to grab a few large pebbles and lobbed them in the waterhole. The terrified birds flew shrieking into the air, providing him a brief measure of cover, and he ran.

  Unburdened by heavy weaponry and fired by adrenaline, he easily outpaced the LTTE cadres, running through the familiar streets of the village and past the irrigated paddy and tobacco fields as the morning sun climbed higher in the sky. Even as he ran, he saw dead bodies, the mutilated carcasses of those who hadn’t even made it as far as the schoolyard.

  A few times the cadres took aim at him, but their bullets missed him as he zigzagged across the village and past his home, where the pools of blood in the front garden were the only sign of the evil that had occurred but hours before. He cut around the back of the house, hoping to lose the cadres as he waded across to the island, but they were close enough to see which way he had gone.

  ‘He’s going to the island! We’ve got him now!’ they called to one another, and they splashed through the water holding their weapons above their heads.

  But when they got to the clearing, they could not find him. They tore up the hut, upended all the silkworm enclosures and ripped at the silk yarn drying in the wind. They even shot at the tree canopy, netting nothing more than a few sula sula that were circling nearby. It was as if Mahinda had vanished into thin air.

  Vannan appeared in the clearing. ‘He can’t have gone far,’ he said. ‘You go back through the other way to the village and I’ll take the long way to find him,’ he assured his fellow cadres. ‘We’d better get a hurry on before the army gets here.’

  ‘Not a single sound,’ Mahinda’s mother said to her son, sitting up in the tree canopy with him and Nimal. She held one hand over Mahinda’s mouth, her other arm tight around him as he struggled furiously against her steel grip.

  ‘He’s got to be up there!’ one of the cadres insisted, firing into the trees again.

  ‘Don’t be a fool. There’s nothing up in the trees. Besides, how could he get up there anyway? He’s probably back in the village now,’ Vannan said. His voice carrying clearly through the like island

  Vannan hung around for a few moments as the other cadres took off, splashing across to the other side of beach.

  ‘I know you are up there, Mahinda,’ Vannan called when they were out of earshot. He looked up into the trees. ‘They’ve got Shivani, Mahinda.’

  How could Vannan think he cared about some stupid woman when his whole family had been killed? His friend had betrayed him and Mahinda was maddened with fury, but his mother kept her grip on him, covering his mouth so tightly he could not cry out. Vannan called for Mahinda again, looking up into the canopy, but as the wind carried the first tendrils of smoke over to the island, he took off.

  Mahinda and Nimal stayed up in the trees for what seemed like an eternity, coming down only when the smoke and the acrid odour of burning tyres and human flesh had completely blown away. Mahinda fell to the ground sobbing. ‘What am I going to do, Amma? What?’ he cried.

  She let him sob his grief out in her loving arms, holding him gently for the longest time, until he was calm. ‘The army will be here soon,’ she told him. ‘Actually I hear them now.’

  And she was right. In the distance was the unmistakable sound of helicopters.

  ‘Take Nimal here,’ she advised, ‘and go to my sister in Matara. She is a good woman and she’ll look after him while you are in Colombo. Finish your studies.’

  ‘What about you, Amma?’ Mahinda asked as he scrambled to his feet. Nimal had wordlessly gathered his meagre belongings up and came to stand next to Mahinda.

  ‘My work is just beginning,’ she replied with a beatific smile. And as Mahinda looked across the lagoon, he saw them. Villagers drifting across the water, being pulled to the island by an invisible force, their feet not even rippling the surface. Shocked and bewildered.

  Nimal stared, unable to believe his own eyes until his mother came past, ruffling his hair gently before drifting off to find her murdered children.

  ‘Have you always been able to see them?’ he asked Mahinda as they waded across the lagoon, two living souls moving away from the island as the dead souls moved towards it.

  ‘Yes. Ever since my mother died three years ago, yes. I came back to Nayaru for the funeral and found her here,’ Mahinda told him, not even noticing that had Nimal spoken for the first time.

  As they reached the shore, Mahin
da turned to look at the island for the last time. On the edge of the beach he saw his mother first embrace his father, then crouch to reach out and embrace the children she hadn’t held for so many years.

  The harbour in Trincomalee was a mess. There were boats here, there and everywhere. Refugees mingled with soldiers, sailors, fishermen and Indian traders who’d been turned away from the port in Jaffna. More than one hundred Sinhala villagers had been murdered in and around Nayaru. The survivors, the few there were, were in a state of shock. But the entire Sinhala populace in the north and north-east was on the move.

  The roads inland were deemed too dangerous, so the Sri Lankan government was providing safe passage on its naval vessels to the ports of the south – Galle, Hambantota and Matara. From there people could travel overland to relatives. Restart what was left of their desolate lives.

  Nimal had fallen asleep despite the pandemonium. Not that Mahinda could blame him. They’d hardly had anything to eat or drink in the past two days. Mahinda gently settled Nimal’s sleeping body into a comfortable position, rolling up some old newspaper and tucking it under his head.

  He stood up to stretch, which made him realise he was a great deal hungrier than he’d realised. Yet he had no money. He’d only been able to get a few rupees from his father’s home and the copies of his letter allowing him university entrance.

  He grabbed his shoulder satchel and made his way down to the trading vessels. Maybe he could barter his new shirt for half a loaf of fresh bread. The boats bobbing brightly in the azure blue sea were a strange sight, so at odds with the grey desolation in his heart.

  He had no luck – no one wanted a new white shirt. There were so many people paying for safe passage with valuables such as gold and precious stones that a new white shirt held no currency. Mahinda was about to give up and go stand at the army ration point when he heard a voice call out.

  ‘Hey, young sir! Is that you?’ It was Mustafa Mohamadeen, the trader. ‘How did you go with your spinning? Was the wheel I gave you any use?’

  ‘You remember me?’

  ‘How could I forget? The stupidest thing I had ever heard. To get silk without killing silkworms. I told the story to my friends in Karnataka. Professional silk makers. Sericulturists. They could not stand for laughing!’

  Mahinda opened his bag to show Mustafa the precious silk he’d spun, not harming a single silk moth.

  ‘Well, well, well . . . it is rare that I am proven wrong, young sir,’ Mustafa said. He reached out and took the silk from Mahinda’s bag and weighed it in his hand. There could be no doubt that this was silk of the highest quality, the threads fine and even with a bright lustre.

  ‘Why, this silk is good enough to grace the saree loom of the most skilled Saliya in Karnataka! To be made into a saree worthy of a maharani!’ Mustafa observed reverently.

  ‘It’s no use to me,’ Mahinda replied wearily. ‘I’d trade it all for my family.’

  ‘How about one thousand rupees?’ Mustafa asked. ‘That is all the money I have on me right now, but I will send you another thousand rupees for it when I get to India.’

  Mahinda looked down at the silk. There were no dreams left to dream. He was numb. He reached out a weary hand to take the money and handed the silk over. It would provide him and Nimal with a start.

  The Pleats

  Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu, India, 1983

  I tink I sleep. All my life. I tink I not even alive. I sleep when Appa gives me to Murukananthan from Kanchipuram. He gives 250 rupee he earn making twenty-five new dhoti for Guru Rameshwaran. Twenty-five dhoti take one year to make.

  ‘Pilar,’ he says. ‘Go. I give nuttin more for a girl child. Should have drowned you at birt but your ammaci forgot. Before she knew it you be a year. Can’t kill a child. Dey put you in goal.’

  Murukananthan put brown string around my neck under banyan tree. Like cow. ‘Mariamman’ be carved into tree. ‘We be married now,’ Murukananthan he says and walks away. Twenty miles. To Kanchipuram. I never leave my village. I not know what past de big banyan tree in Guru Rameshwaran banana field.

  We walks. Walks. Walks. My leg hurt. But we walks. We comes to his house before dinner. I too tired to see anytin. I knows it be bigger dan my father house. But my father house in village. Kanchipuram be big town. Houses close together. People close together. Noisy.

  I sits on mat. I no wash my face or hair. I no eats. I hears his father. His mother. Two brothers and his idiot sister-in-law. Dey say Murukananthan gets good money for village girl. I sit den I sleeps. Murukananthan he roll on top of me. Push my saree and he inside me. Dey say I should have screamed. Pain. But I sleeps. I feel no pain. Good dere be blood on my saree or Murukananthan and his brothers kill me. Dey don’t put you in jail for dat.

  But I wakes up. Screaming. Ripping. Paining. Nine months later.

  Dey give me my son. He still covered wit white slippery ting. Skinny boy wit curly hair. Bright eyes. Like god Ganesh.

  ‘He be like de lotus dat come from mud,’ de birting mother she says to me softly. ‘He so fair dat he could be a memsahib child. Magic be in dis child.’

  I looks at my boy. And he be magic. He beautiful. He not even one hour old and he smiles. Now I understand what dey say. Dat mothers love sons more dan God. I looks at my son and I wakes up. Like I see de sun for first time. So I gives him de name Laksman. After god Rama’s brother.

  ‘Oh so fancy name,’ my marmee, Koddi, laugh. ‘It your pooroochen’s job to give name. Not you, stupid girl!’

  I don’t say nuttin. I pretends I sleep. I keeps my Laksman next to me. Murukananthan gone to Calcutta. He put down train lines. It hard work. He gone for two months. Baby must have name. Cannot wait two months. How God know him if he dies? I want God to tink he be his brother.

  ‘Stupid girl,’ Marmee says when she sees I close my eyes. ‘Eyes open but sleep in de head. My boy should got more money for sleeping wife.’

  And money be de problem. See I grow up in village. No money no problem. You eat what you have. If no, you go to jungle and eat what dere. Wild manioc. Leaves of de casa casa tree. Roots. Mushrooms. Tummy full. But in town you buy everytin. You buy old rice. You buy rotten vegetables. You buy rotting manioc. Make you sick. You cannot eat paper money. And you cannot eat what you buy wit paper money. Cheek!

  My boy I keep safe. I feed him my titty. Nuttin else. And giving him titty wake me up. When my milk run into his mouth, I wake up more. Funny pain in my titty. Like tickling. I loves my Laksman. He grow fat and strong. Not like idiot sister-in-law son. She give him rice water. He sick.

  Murukananthan take me when he come back. I not fall wit child. I happy I not got child again. My sister-in-law have four child and all dies. She sits dere wit last dead baby. Baby boy. Dey take baby because it stinks. Like dead cow in jungle. She run after baby. My brother-in-law run after wife. My marcel run after son. Dey all run over by last bus from Madras.

  My marcel get two broke arm. My brother-in-law get two broke leg. My idiot sister-in-law more idiot wit broke head. Dat when Koddi speaks. To me. Nicely. Like I no girl from village.

  ‘Pilar,’ Koddi says. ‘You goes to work. You work or we die.’

  ‘No,’ I says. ‘I no work. Murukananthan bring paper money. I no work.’

  ‘Marcel no work. Ana no work. We be Saliyas. Cannot work wit broke arm and leg.’

  My father-in-law and two brother-in-law make saree like my appa. In de hut next to house. Mornin and night. Click-clack. Click-clack. All day. Everywhere silk cloth.

  ‘I Saliya too. What I care about saree?’ I have two cotton saree. One my father gave day I marry Murukananthan. One Murukananthan bring me from Calcutta.

  ‘Stupid girl. My son paper money not enough. Not to buy medicine. Not to buy food,’ Koddi cries.

  ‘Den you work,’ I says. ‘I not leave my son for you stupid family.’

  She try find work. No one give her job. Dey say she too old. Not strong. She comes home. Sit and cry. ‘My man die! My son die!’<
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  Dat make me sad. I no want my man to die. I die if my son die.

  De man who buy saree come to de hut. In big car. He big man. He wear pants not sarong. I look at him. And I look at him. He fat man. Big belly like he wit baby.

  ‘Shamurgam,’ he says to my father-in-law holding white cloth over nose. ‘If you cannot weave sarees for me, how can I possibly pay you?’

  ‘Only until he mends,’ Koddi she cries. ‘His leg mend and he be best Saliya in Kanchipuram!’

  ‘I run a business not a charity,’ he snaps. ‘If you want money, you must work! I cannot pay you for sitting around all day.’

  ‘But I needs money,’ Koddi cries more. ‘I needs money for medicine for my man and boy!’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to work,’ de man says. ‘My daughter is getting married soon. I need a strong woman to help with the kitchen work. You’re too old, though, Koddi. What about that girl? The one in the corner?’

  ‘She say she won’t work,’ Koddi she spits.

  ‘If stupid girl don’t work, throw her out,’ my father-in-law shouts from bed.

  ‘My man gives paper money! You no throw me out,’ I yells.

  ‘You man gone to Andhra Pradesh for two months. You dead before he back!’

  Now I scared. I not know anyone in Kanchipuram. I cannot go back my village. I not know where my village be.

  ‘But who look after my boy while I works?’ I asks.

  Big Sir sees my Laksman first time. My Laksman smile at Big Sir. Big smile. My Laksman like a snake charmer. Only he use smile.

  ‘Bring him with you,’ Big Sir he says softly. He even move his white handkerchief from his face to look at my boy. Dat is how my Laksman and I start to work every day in Big Sir house.

  ‘Fast, Pilar, fast!’ Koddi yells. It be early morning. It be raining for three days. I takes Laksman while he sleeps and puts in my saree. I tucks my pallu in tight wit him across my chest. I is careful – babies in my village dies cause dere mothers tucks em in too tight. I checks my Laksman. He be breathing. I checks all de time he be breathing. I nots see we leave our street.