My mother heard us from where she had been doing dishes.
Why don't we all go, she said, coming forward, drying her hands.
Janani met her eyes, and that was the first time I had seen anything there approaching kindness, or gratitude. Not her mother, but a mother, still.
Someone should stay with Appa, she said. We'll go.
JANANI, YALINI, RAJIE: THREE girls together in a sari shop, in a grocery store, in a jewelry store, looking at the kinds of wedding chains available. Janani looked at the spread of materials, the richness of the gold, with hungry eyes, and then looked away, as though she were ashamed. I saw it, but it was Rajie who said:
So, Yalini tells me that you're getting married. Do you have a place yet?
It will be at least a year from now, Janani said.
You need to plan in advance. Why don't we go and see some of the places where you could get married?
We got back in the car and drove around in that big circle. I sat in the back so that Janani, who had a much better sense of direction, could see where we were going. When Rajie pulled off the highway this time, we entered a winding road and then went to a quiet neighborhood, where Tamil children were playing on the streets.
You could go for a long time here without seeing a white person, I said, almost to myself.
Rajie turned around and grinned at me and then turned back to Janani.
That place there, she pointed, is the Tamil community center that your fiancé supports. People get married there. You could get married there.
Can we go inside?
We walked up the sidewalk to the big hall, which was empty. There were new, fake-looking wooden floorboards, and a small stage. I could imagine how it would all fit there. How Janani would be Married to this man, Suthan, and his politics. And how a few decades earlier, my father had walked into a similar hall with his friends and built, from scratch, the altar in which he would Marry Vani. Not yet my mother.
[anju]
KUMARAN
WHO STOOD BETWEEN THEM
.
Although the elephant has a large body, and a
sharp tusk, yet it fears the attack of the tigers.
— TIRUKKURAL , chapter 60, line 9
CONFLICT WAS ALL AROUND VANI,WHO NOT YET MY mother. It began with her brother Kumaran, the sibling to whom she was closest. He was the second of the three children. In the early 1970s he had gone to England for a brief time. He was in the midst of studying for his engineering degree. He was a very good student, very quiet and serious, with a habit of smiling and then stopping himself from smiling. He went to England a quiet person and came back an even more quiet person, and everyone saw that something in him had changed. He had met someone. Perhaps it was a lover? They wondered. A girl he wanted to marry? This was not the case: Kumaran was in love, but he was in love with a cause, and with the rhetoric of a person who spoke for a cause. In England he had met the founder of the Tamil New Tigers, Victor Rajadurai. Kumaran's family had hoped that he would find a job in England, perhaps stay there and finish his engineering degree, perhaps even sponsor the rest of them to leave. But Kumaran, who had left, came back. This was something none of the rest of them had done or would do: he had purposely chosen to stay in Sri Lanka, although he knew his situation was not going to improve. In 1975 when the mayor of Jaffna was killed everyone in the family was stunned silent, and Kumaran, who was normally silent, went to his room and closed the door, lay down on his reed mat on the floor and stared at the ceiling. No one thought anything of it. Kumaran already knew or suspected who was behind what had happened, and he was not sure how he felt about it.
In England he had met other young men like himself, who had come to England wanting to study and then return to Sri Lanka. They were all uncertain now that this would be a good life for them, and yet it truly did not occur to Kumaran that he might stay in England. To him that would have been defeat. He had been born in Sri Lanka, and he wanted to die in Sri Lanka, in Urelu, where his mother was, and where he thought the mother of his children would probably be. But he had learned to love London too—Sri Lankan London, Tamil London. Young men with long hair read socialist philosophy and talked to one another about how to make change at home. As though—like my father's tea leaves—it could be wrapped in brown paper and taken through the airport. Sometimes mornings found them asleep at a university library, or in the basement of someone's flat, cigarettes burned down to the tiniest stubs after discussing the state of their faraway nation.
And he did go back to Sri Lanka. He was still a young and unmarried man when the rebellion began over the shooting deaths of the Tamil men at the Jaffna conference. There were riots again, as there had been when my mother was ten, and although she did not say so to her family, she thought that she would like to leave, at least for a little while. Until the country became quiet again. Her contract to teach in the United States was for two years and she thought that after that she could come home again. After that, she thought, the climate in Sri Lanka would be better. She could return home and be Married. She could grow old here.
As my mother was preparing to leave, her brother, Kumaran, was preparing to stay. He was still an engineering student in Jaffna, and he had watched his friends die next to him on the streets of his city, and they had been slain by soldiers who belonged to his government. He was a student, a very young man, and this meant that he was revolution-ripe. About to vanish.
KUMARAN: HE WAS A STUDENT. He had grown into a skinny and tall boy with glasses, black rectangles with rounded edges that clung to his nose and framed his narrow-planed, sharp face. He did not look like a man who could go to war, and this was what made him perfect for it. He did not look like someone who would fight, and this was what made him want to do so. He was part of the beginning of the rebellion that grew into the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. By the time the busful of relatives came to kiss Vani good-bye, he was no longer on the bus. She left, anyway. There are certain tickets you cannot buy twice, because the price is too high. So she did not say good-bye to Kumaran, because he was not there to hear her say it.
Kumaran: he later became very famous in certain circles, but only in an anonymous way: the press accounts rarely—if ever—named him, although his family recognized him from some descriptions, and there was some mention of him in most stories. Vani began to read about him as though he were a stranger, in the newspapers, which never told the whole story of how the Tamil New Tigers turned into the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist movement in the northern part of the country where my parents grew up. My parents have never condoned violence as it is practiced by the LTTE. Sri Lankan Tamils are not a violent people; they are a people who have had violence imposed upon them. This is what my aunt, Kalyani, says.
Imagine that you are in a room, and there are ten cats and one large dog. They are fighting. Who will win?
The dog, of course.
She nods: right, right.
The cats are smaller. Of course in the end they will lose. They will die. But they will do everything they can to hurt the dog before they are killed. They will do as much damage as possible. This is what the Tigers are doing.
This doesn't mean that what they are doing is right. But it's easy for someone to look at what is happening and say that in the same situation, they wouldn't do the same thing. Who knows what they would do in such a situation?
And perhaps this is why my family removed itself from the situation. Something even opened a pathway out for Kumaran. But first: his way in.
KUMARAN REALLY DISAPPEARED FOR the first time in what would have been spring of 1976. It was not the spring of 1976, because Sri Lanka does not know what spring is. At first no one realized he was gone. His mother thought he was at university. The university thought he was ill and had gone home for the term. But he was in neither of those places. Kumaran became someone who was defined mostly by what he was not. Now, at this time, by where he was not.
In England, or France, or Canada, or
the United States, it would have been spring, but for the members of Vani's family who were still in Ceylon it was summer, because in Ceylon—which was what the British had named it, and something they sometimes slipped and called it still—it is always summer. Kumaran was gone and no one realized this until one day his mother asked everyone at dinner: When did you last hear from Kumaran?
They were all silent, thinking.
Because, she said, he hasn't called me in about a week, and he always calls. You know Kumaran.
But none of them did. Except Vani, and she was already gone.
KUMARAN: IN THE NOT-SPRING of 1976 when he went missing he was very tall, rangy, and fair-skinned. He was not handsome, but he was attractive, and he looked like his father, and he carried himself like his father. He walked with the memory of his murdered grandfather. He had long brows that very nearly met in the middle, and although he always looked angry he generally was not. Rather, he was thoughtful and deliberate, always speaking slowly. Although his hair was black, like everyone else in his family he went gray young, and so his eyebrows were darker than his hair. He would have looked almost entirely severe, except that his ears stuck out slightly. He was still a boy, even if he did not look like one.
His face had once been round but by this time he had lost that particular sign of youth. His face was narrow and thin and getting thinner. He did not have high cheekbones, like the ones Vani had under her young plumpness, but his cheeks were more hollows than cheeks, and this made his face look like a sculpture beginning to erode. He was composed of exceptions. One: his mouth was very thin and ungenerous, except when he smiled. He was older than my mother. What no one realized: he was dying anyway. Any way.
KUMARAN: OVER THE YEARS his face became more ferocious. As he himself became more ferociously loved and hated. He was a civil engineer by training, something that he chose and that chose him. He loved to assemble things and for pleasure would piece together any physical puzzle or machine. His mind parsed each place into possibilities instantly.
He wanted his job to be real. How could a man tell others how to build if he had not done it himself ? On his summer holiday before his final year at university for his engineering degree, he took a construction job at a site in Trincomalee. It was the first time he had done such work, and he was not a very big man. The others on the site were mostly men who worked on construction for a living. They were undaunted by the heavy loads, the wheelbarrows full of concrete and the carts full of bricks. They quarried stone and did not quail. He admired them silently, because they were not the sort of men you admired aloud. They were taller than he, and more muscular. They watched him, to see if he could keep up. He was determined to keep up. Each man had an allotted share to do every day; if he did not finish his he would stay far into the night to do so, rather than carrying the remainder of the work over to the next day. The men would leave one by one, watching him. He knew he was being measured to see if he was wanting. Every night he stayed on the site until he had finished his work. He often returned to his hostel in the slow hours of the morning and left again before anyone else awoke. The hostess always left a generous plate of rice for him on the table, and he ate alone every night and every morning and returned to work.
He was fascinated to watch himself change over the course of a season. As though he could go outside himself to admire the vanity of a consciously spare life. He had arrived a thin and rangy man, tall enough but not sturdy. Now his body was acquiring the muscle of a laborer, like those workers whom first the Tamils themselves and then the British had disdainfully called coolies. This was a word that to most people still connoted a lower caste, a smaller way of living, a lesser humanity. A class system that some people deny ever existed in Sri Lanka. But to Kumaran, his coolie body now became a badge of honor, as he worked among these men who were called by this name. He had always been a student and had looked like a student. Now the midday sun had made him dark, and he was stronger. He had never looked like this, and he observed with a dispassionate interest the change in the way he was treated by passersby. They thought he was something he was not; they thought he was of a lower class. And Kumaran learned to hate not only what the British had done to his country, but what his people had done to themselves.
THEY WERE BUILDING A SHORT wall of differently shaped rocks. The stones were very heavy. This is how he met his Tiger contact: one night, he was staying very late to finish his work. It was hot, even though the sun had gone down; he was working in a caram, what the English would call a sarong, and he was perspiring heavily. As usual, one by one the other men completed their work and left to go home to their families. Kumaran wiped his face on his shoulder and thought about the plate of rice waiting for him, the book of Tamil history he was reading, which had been sent to him by his friend Victor. He was just beginning to set another row of stones when he felt a gentle touch, like that of a cat, on his shoulder.
The man who had touched his shoulder was a dark-faced fellow, with a mustache and a white, white smile. His eyes were dark and soft, like velvet. His hair and face were damp from the day's exertions. He handed Kumaran a dipper of water.
Aday, he said. You never finish your work on time.
Kumaran took the dipper of water from him and drank half of it, pouring the other half on his head. It dripped down his neck, down his back, splashing the other man. Sorry, sorry, Kumaran said.
He grinned. That's all right.
Kumaran studied him, this solitary cat's face with its secretive eyes. He had not seen such an easy grin in many months. He already knew who this man was. I finish my work on time, he said finally. I stay here to finish my work on time. I haven't learned how to fit the stones together as well as the rest of you.
What is your name, scholar?
Kumaran.
I am Nadarajan. I will show you how to fit the stones. It is a matter of instinct.
His name was not Nadarajan, Kumaran knew instinctively. He looked very much like a man his friend Victor had described in a letter, and this was the sort of man who would hide in plain sight, disguise himself, lie coolly. He took the trowel from Kumaran's hand and dipped it into the mortar, spreading a thick line on top of Kumaran's last row of uneven stones with a quick, efficient motion. Kumaran watched him set the row, leaving a small space in between each stone. He seemed to instinctively select the piece that would fit best in each space. When he lay down the next line of mortar, it sloshed into the gaps, sealing the wall. He did all of this in about half the time it took Kumaran to set the same number of stones. He handed the trowel back to Ku-maran with a gesture: you do it. Kumaran set the next row, leaving a gap in between each pair. For the first time, each stone seemed to slip easily into place. Then he laid down the next line of mortar. He did this all as swiftly as the other man had done. The man who called himself Nadarajan—at least that day—saw the ease with which Kumaran had learned the new motion and made it part of his thinking. He saw the deceptive strength of Kumaran.
Where are you staying, scholar? At a hostel, no? All right, then, you can come for a meal with me.
KUMARAN BEGAN AS SOMEONE who planned to put places together, and he became someone who planned to blow places apart. After the conference at which some of his young Tamil friends died, Nadarajan began to gather around him a group of men to fight the government. When he met Victor Rajadurai, who had started a group in England, the Tamil Tigers were born. Their goal: the restoration of the northern Tamil homeland as they thought it had been before the British came. No more discrimination or negotiation with a government they saw as infinitely corrupted and corruptible. Their scholar-negotiator: Victor. Their motivator and military tactician: Nadarajan. Someone who was going to fight, anyway. Someone who gathered the most promising people around him without any kind of discrimination, even the kinds that are considered moral. Women. Children. People are the only real weapons. You tied yourself to dynamite, you swallowed cyanide, you hurled yourself into buildings and onto cars. These were honors. Befor
e the battlefield the most elite—young Tamils who believed their chances for a future were dying—ate their final meals with Nadarajan. Later, my aunt would compare the situation to a dog backing a group of cats into a corner. This interpretation of Nadarajan makes him out to be a man who always thought that he was going to lose and did not care.
I have read about Nadarajan, and I no longer believe this to be true. I think that he always thought that he was going to win. Now, some twenty years after he first began striking against the Sri Lankan government, he is named among the most prominent international terrorists. Wanted (glamorously?) by Interpol. Al Qaeda learned its methods from Nadarajan, people say, and there is a curious and bitter fascination in this: there was a war, and it killed over sixty thousand people, and no one stopped to notice. No one even knows if that number is right. And now no one stops to ask why. A country with no oil. A country full of people who were Of Color. A country from which my mother had moved away. She began to miss it before the busful of relatives had even pulled away. My mother and her brother, Kumaran, whom she loved even more strongly than other members of her family, moving as far apart as people connected by blood can go.
Kumaran fell in love with everything that Victor represented. He had already begun to think about the issues of class in Sri Lanka, but all his life he had recognized the lack of parity for Tamils in this country. What is terrorism? Many Tamils do not think the Tamil Tigers are terrorists; just as many, who have had money extorted from them, hate the Tigers. What is self-defense? What of the slow invasion of life in the northern part of the island? Their lives began to disappear, slowly, drained from them, like an insect burrowing inside a mango. We are taught that some things are sacred, some things are never done, some conventions of war must be observed. I think that the Tigers thought of themselves as a private army, the army of a people without a nation, that perhaps they thought of themselves like the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II, who flew suicide missions and knew that that was what they were.
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