“Believe it or not, Chimlin had become a prostitute for her father’s sake. In Thailand, any couple who has a daughter is doubly blessed as daughters revere and worship their parents. For Thai women, one’s parents are to be honored more than one’s spouse and loved more than one’s children. It was in obedience to her father’s wishes that Chimlin was doing “boom, boom.”
“In the end I realized that we were never going to see eye to eye. I had to end our relationship as the idea of sharing my life with a woman who shared her body with other men was distasteful to me. I joined a gang of car thieves who taught me many ingenious techniques. We mostly targeted women, especially women who drove alone. A car, a motorbike and three men were part of this operation. One man tailed the woman in the car while another gang member and I followed behind. When the woman hit a deserted stretch, the fellow in the car would bump into the woman’s vehicle. When she got out to confront the man, one of the bikers would get into her car and speed off. The others would speed off at once. Sounds like something out of a movie, doesn’t it? This, my friend, is the greatest way to steal a car. We would then sell it to a car broker at a throwaway price. After a while, I grew tired of what I was doing, so I contacted a travel agent and went to China. I was lying on the Great Wall one day, smoking a beedi and thinking about the trajectory of my life. Was my birth as a Sri Lankan Tamil the cause of my misfortunes and my homeless state? Would this have been my fate had I been born Sinhala or Chinese?
“It was a full moon night, and that was probably why I lay awake till dawn like a lunatic, all variety of thoughts rolling in and out of my mind. Who was I? What connection existed between me and this Great Wall? What power was it that brought me here from a place thousands of miles away? Was it destiny? If yes, was it the same destiny that made me carry guns at an age when I should have been carrying books? I could never have imagined back then that one day I’d be lying on the Great Wall of China, smoking a beedi.
“From China, I traveled to Russia. It wasn’t easy. First, I had to go to Kyrgyzstan and then to Kazakhstan and onward to Russia. Many people in our group had come to Kyrgyzstan directly from Delhi; only a few like me had taken the roundabout route from Thailand to China. We had no plans of staying on in Russia, but it offered the easiest way to smuggle ourselves across the European border. We traveled to Alma-Ata by plane and from there we took a bus to the Russian town of Petropavlovsk. Some folks who come thus far have a regular passport but no entry-visa for the transit countries. Such people have a harrowing ordeal in store for them.
“There were twenty of us in Petropavlovsk, all Sri Lankan refugees. Refugees are usually given a place to stay, but when we reached, there was already another considerable group from Afghanistan. So, we had to spend the first night under the stars. The place was terribly cold. The agent had warned us several times but we paid him no heed. What did we know of minus-ten degree weather? A sweater, a cap and a muffler were simply not enough to withstand the chill. Two people died that night and one man lost his arm. At sunrise, we trudged to a restaurant to find something to eat. One man opened the hot-water tap and put his hand beneath it. His hand went numb and he was told that it would have to be amputated. Later we learned that one’s hand should be massaged until it reaches a certain temperature before it is thrust under hot water.
“Finally we reached Moscow where we waited for our next visa. There were five of us and we rented a flat in an apartment complex. People warned us not to carry too much money when we stepped outside because if we were robbed, even the cops wouldn’t come to our help. Apparently, even the cops might rob us. There were many like us in Russia – refugees who didn’t have a work permit. For this reason, the locals didn’t care about us brown-skins. We also got lost once while returning home in the snow. We sighted a police car and asked the cops for directions but they wanted to check our IDs and passports. They pronounced our documents forged and demanded money. We gave them the fifty rubles we had on us but this didn’t satisfy them one bit. They patted us down, feeling around our necks and checking our fingers and wrists. We realized they were looking for gold jewelry. Kanthan was wearing a gold ring with the words Om Muruga engraved on it. He couldn’t remove it when the cops asked him to hand it over. It was stuck. One of the cops casually extracted a pen-knife from his pocket, chopped off Kanthan’s finger and put it in an envelope. Then they got back into their vehicle and drove off.
“Two weeks after Kanthan lost his finger, we were out walking when a Russian hooker accosted us. I ignored her advances as I’d had a bizarre experience with a young Russian prostitute just the previous week. The girl, who looked like a goddess, had turned out to be a twelve-year-old boy. That day, my companions had gone to meet some friends who had recently arrived from their country. Finding myself alone, I took a walk and happened to find myself in a toshka, a red-light district. It is a stretch of road where hookers stand around soliciting customers. If you pick up a hooker in Russia, she is required to stay with her client till six the next morning. In Paris, they leave immediately after their job has been done. Even Bangkok doesn’t offer the clients this facility. Anyway, this young hooker had floored me. She was beautiful, with green glow-in-the-dark eyes that invited you to get lost in them. When I asked her age, the mamoshki told me she was sixteen. Only after I brought her to the apartment did I realize that my ravishing “girl” was in fact a twelve-year-old boy! He had a long story to tell but I will save it for another day. I can tell you one thing though – he was sold by force. The brand on his thigh said more about his plight than words ever could.
“This is why I didn’t want to take the other hooker home. My companions ended up bringing her home. I didn’t approach her as I was not interested in having my go at her, like guys taking turns to use the toilet. After they had all used her, she slept in our flat and left the next morning. The same morning at ten, we heard a knock at the door. It was the hooker, and she’d brought company – three burly men carrying sticks. Clearly, they hadn’t come to socialize with us. I realized that they were a band of thugs and I fled to the toilet. One of my companions jumped off the balcony and the other three beseeched the thugs to take whatever they wanted but to leave them alone. They took the TV, the tape recorder and practically everything else. They were pathetic; they even took our lungis. Vincent said they’d use them as tablecloths. The fellow who jumped had broken an arm and a leg. Thankfully he’d jumped from the first floor or he would have been cold. After taking him to the hospital, we went to the police station. One of the cops in the station was wearing a gold ring inscribed with the words Om Muruga.”
Edward ended his story by saying, “If possible, go to Lourdes. It is an incredible place.”
It was now December 22. My money was soon to be over. What I had left would buy us food for another three days perhaps. I promised myself a trip to Lourdes on my next visit. The day after my encounter with Edward, Karuppusamy and I were standing in front of a Tamil bookshop in La Chappelle when a well-built man of about fifty came up to me and introduced himself in a deep voice. His name was Gunaratnam and he had read my books. He had a receding hairline, thick eyebrows, big eyes and hirsute arms. Gunaratnam invited us to spend a few days with him in his home. He insisted that we postpone our return and promised us food and a car to take us wheresoever we wished. Besides, he had plans to visit Lourdes on Christmas Day. “I am not a believer,” he said, “but I do visit the Sanctuary. I’ll admit that St Bernadette has some power. Whenever I go there, I feel this inexplicable energy and emotion surge through my entire being. Lourdes is not that far from Toulouse. The drive is just a couple of hours. The only problem is that we’re going to have to book train tickets to Toulouse which is six hours from Paris.”
The next day, the three of us were on our way to Toulouse by train. Karuppusamy had managed to arrange for the tickets. He had told me once that he had bank deposits to the tune of one hundred thousand. But he was very particular about not spending
a paisa more than what had been earmarked for the trip. However, tempted by the prospect of lingering another week in France, he finally withdrew some money but it was not much so all three of us had to starve. We woke up at the crack of dawn to catch the six o’clock train. We did not drink a drop of water until we reached Gunaratnam’s house at two. Snacks and drinks were being sold on the train but we didn’t buy a thing. While I was dying of hunger, Gunaratnam seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly and Karuppusamy was sleeping soundly. With nothing do to, I glanced out of the train windows and beheld paradise. There is no other way one can describe that breathtaking view – groves of Christmas trees covered in snow. The place looked like a heavenly white forest. Even if only for a minute, my hunger pangs were definitely forgotten. I tried waking up Karuppusamy but hardly did he open his eyes than he fell asleep again. How I pitied him! He’d slept on a ride across paradise.
On Christmas Day, I knelt before the statue of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes. A woman asked me where I was from. When I said I was from India, she enquired about the weather. I told her that the temperature would be about thirty degrees down south.
“Wow!” she said enthusiastically. “That means I wouldn’t have to wear a lot of clothes, right?”
Ah, the burden of clothes! Gunaratnam said, “Back home, if you want to buy a cigarette, you can just throw on a shirt and go to a shop which is a stone’s throw away, but here one has to wear underwear, two sets of trousers, a shirt, a sweater, a muffler, a coat, a cap, gloves, socks and boots. The clothes alone weigh thirty kilograms! And you have to take the car as well.”
If civil war had not broken out in Lanka, he would have still been a professor at the University of Jaffna, leading a happy and peaceful life, buying handsome gifts of gold for his wife and his three daughters, while watching and reviewing masala movies. Once a year he would have visited Chennai to attend a literary festival. But Lanka’s contemporary history had dragged him all the way to Toulouse.
He’d been living in France for twenty years. After working at odd jobs all over the place for a decade, his health had suffered, but he was now living a comfortable life thanks to the generous government dole. Since the government had also undertaken to finance the children’s education, he had no worries on that front. Still, he was not a happy man. “This place has everything a man could possibly need, but it feels so empty,” he said. Assailed by these recurrent feelings of emptiness, he took refuge in liquor. He drank when his friends from Tamil Nadu visited, he drank when his friends from Paris visited, he drank when his friends in Toulouse invited him to parties and he drank when he was home alone. He drank because he could not forget his homeland and the life he’d lived there. It weighed him down, sapped his mind and body of strength, making it difficult even to breathe. Alcohol made his burden a little lighter to bear.
However, drinking was not his biggest problem; he talked like a deranged man. His pictographic memory, his ability to remember things down to the minutest detail inspired me with fear. He would speak as if reading from a book and he would make no errors. He talked continuously from eleven in the morning to midnight. He even talked when he was eating. The only time my ears were given some respite was when he excused himself to use the toilet which, by the way, was decorated with fresh flowers whose freshness the cold weather helped retain. There was a bathtub and even a neatly stacked bookrack. And he thinks he is the most unfortunate man on earth. “To which country do I belong, Udhaya? As a person who cannot cast his vote in any country, can I claim to have a country of my own?”
I was careful not to argue with Gunaratnam, fearing the unending monologue it would trigger.
“Have you seen the refugee camps in Tamil Nadu? The inmates cannot leave the premises and are treated like prisoners serving a life sentence. I’ve known people who were trapped in the same camp for more than ten years. In terms of “accommodation” from the government, the least those people could get was a dog’s kennel and the most they could expect was a cowshed. And the structures are at least twenty years old. The roofs are made of asbestos; some houses just have cardboard. No toilets anywhere, and if one wants to pass urine or defecate, one would have to take a long walk. There were no trees or shrubs in the visible horizon around the Mandapam camp in whose cover women could defecate. They had to walk several more miles to find any foliage that would protect them from the prying eyes and the barbs of the local men. And that journey too came with its own risks. Many women were bitten by snakes in the forest around Mandapam. Drinking water was not available in the camp. Both men and women had to bathe out in the open. Power was in short supply, but that was not something to fret over as the rest of Tamil Nadu also enjoyed electricity for four hours every day.”
Gunaratnam, being a Marxist, would hold forth on his research in Marxist ideology. He talked about China’s fifty-year-old history and quoted extensively from Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China. Then he would digress and speak of the caste system in Jaffna. He would recite the names of each caste and deliver a one-hour speech on each of them. Once he tired of that, he would take out old picture albums he had brought with him from Jaffna and show them to me. Each picture would be discussed for half an hour. “See this photo? This is my brother Gunasekaran.” Then he would dive into his brother’s life story, starting from his birth to his current identity-less life as a refugee in Copenhagen. Then he would point to another picture and say, “This is Gunaseelan; he died in a landmine blast.” The next hour would be devoted to Gunaseelan’s story. Thus, the people who populated Gunaratnam’s world were the shadow figures who filled his picture albums. I don’t really remember what Gunaratnam said about any of them. I would just sit and mutely observe his nostalgic face as he spoke.
Perhaps, unable to put up with this, Karuppusamy left on the third day, saying he would meet us in Paris. There was no escape route for me and I was forced to hear more stories from Gunaratnam about love, loss and his longing for his beloved homeland and all the near and dear ones he’d left behind. Intermittently, Gunaratnam’s wife would peep in and tell me loudly enough for her husband to hear, “I feel sorry for you.” But even this did not dampen his storytelling spirit.
I stayed at his house for four days. There was something that happened on the third night that I am bound to remember with shame for the rest of my days.
I was punch drunk and I needed to pee. My stupor was such that I didn’t even know where I was. Sleepy, intoxicated and in a curious semiconscious state, I felt like a stranger to myself.
My urge was great. I stood up clumsily in a haze.
It was dark and there was this unusual heaviness to the darkness that I had never experienced before; it was almost like I could grab a chunk of it in my hands. Then, everything closed in on me and I stumbled and fell.
I must have hit something for I heard a sound. How many hours had passed? However hard I tried to align my senses, I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand where I was or what I was doing.
Have I been trapped by the fighters who had betrayed me to the army? Am I going to be executed for my treachery? Has the army captured me? What country is this? Who am I? Where am I? What is the name of this language in which I am thinking?
I thought I might pee in my pants.
Please, free me from these walls! I’m a human being with a human urge! I need so desperately to pee! Once I have relieved myself you may shoot me dead if you will. Wait, I am not Pablo. No, I do not wish to die! Please save me from these walls that are closing in on me! I didn’t do anything on my own. I’ll tell you everything you want to know! Let me go! Isn’t it my birthright to live in this world? Please, have mercy on me! Please let me go to the bathroom now! I lie prostrate at your feet. I beg of you. Grant me this one favor, just this one… I swear I’ve done nothing wrong. I was forced to do the things I did. Forgive me, just this one time, and I will do whatever it is you want me to do. If my writing is sinful in your eyes, I shall never write aga
in. I am not a belligerent; I do not oppose you. I shall live my life, unseen and unknown, in a corner like Little Jack Horner, without causing any trouble for anyone. Please, spare my life! Allow me to urinate now. If you let me, your wish shall henceforth be my command. Just this one time… Just once…
But wait… What is this wetness? Am I dead or alive? But if I’m dead I wouldn’t be able to feel the wetness in my pants, would I? Didn’t they take me to the kill-room? Did they allow me to escape? Are they the kind of captors who let their captive go scot-free? Or are they testing me?
Perhaps they have intruded on my thoughts with their nodes and their technology. Oh, mind, think well of them! They are good people – revolutionaries who only desire the welfare of the people. They are going to pardon you. From now on you will work for them. Whatever you do – whatever they tell you to do – is for the benefit of the people. They have given you a second chance at life, an opportunity to correct your mistakes. That is why they spared your life…
I wet myself.
I never met Karuppusamy in Paris. When I tried calling him, his phone was switched off. The few common acquaintances we had were also unaware of his whereabouts. I began to worry. Had something happened to him? Was he dead? I returned home without any answers. Sometime later, I heard from Vincent that Karuppusamy had clandestinely slipped from Paris to London and that he was doing quite well for himself.
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