The crime for which Kuttimani had been arrested, the robbery of eight million rupees from a People’s Bank in Jaffna in March 1981, had not, in fact, been his first. In 1969, when he was probably in his early twenties, he’d formed, together with Thangathurai, an informal separatist organization that later became the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization or TELO, an armed separatist group that funded most of its activity through the smuggling of contraband and the robbery of state or state-affiliated institutions. He’d been arrested by Indian police in 1973 while seeking a safe haven in Tamil Nadu, and after being deported at the request of Sri Lankan authorities had been imprisoned in his home country without trial till 1977, when he was finally released due to foreign pressure. He rejoined the insurgency, organized increasingly more daring attacks and robberies that culminated in the 1981 People’s Bank robbery in Jaffna, leading to a vigorous manhunt by government authorities. He was arrested off the coast of Jaffna by the Sri Lankan navy only two weeks later, on a small motorboat trying to make his way with Thangathurai and Jegan to Tamil Nadu, where he’d been hoping to hide once more till the search for him died down. The trial, which took place at the Colombo High Court over a year later, was packed with journalists and members of the interested public, and was followed throughout the country with intense scrutiny. Kuttimani was charged with murder—there had, apparently, been people killed in the course of the robbery—and wanting no doubt to make an example of him to other separatists, the court had sentenced him to death. The judge asked whether he had any final words or requests that he wanted the court to hear before it was adjourned, and in response to this suggestion, according to the article, Kuttimani had proclaimed to the court that he was guilty of no crime whatsoever. He was an innocent person, taken into custody by the police and forced to sign a confession after months of unbearable torture. The court’s verdict, he went on, which nobody in the country would find surprising, would only add new urgency to the separatist movement growing in the northeast, would only give new and more compelling reason for the establishment of the new state of Tamil Eelam. More and more Tamil youth would be arrested on false charges, and as this went on the movement for Tamil liberation taking hold in the northeast would only further be strengthened. He ended his speech by asking that he be hanged not in Colombo, where the trial was taking place, but in his ancestral village in Jaffna, that his vital organs be given to Tamils who needed them, and that his eyes in particular be donated to a young Tamil boy or girl who could not see, so that even if he himself never had the opportunity to see Tamil Eelam, as he put it, his eyes at least would one day have the chance.
Reading of Kuttimani’s capture on one of the small boats that militant groups had used throughout the war to smuggle arms, money, and people between the northeast coast of Sri Lanka and the southern coast of India, Krishan had remembered another image he’d found on the internet, an undated color photograph taken somewhere on the northeast coast much later, probably at some point in the nineties. In the foreground of the image were two Tiger cadres standing at the edge of the beach, both barefoot, wearing shorts that left much of their thighs exposed, the shorter, thinner man on the left wearing a baggy button-up shirt, the taller, stockier man on the right wearing a camouflage T-shirt. Both of them were holding AK-47s, the man on the right with a magazine of bullets slung across his left shoulder, and both were looking out intently at the still, golden sea that stretched out from their feet. About thirty or forty feet from the shore a small motorboat sat quietly on the still water, inside it the small, blurred outlines of three or four seated men, while wading through the knee-high water, just disembarked from the boat, four more figures were making their way toward the shore. They were, most likely, returning from Tamil Nadu, where they’d gone either for some kind of military training, or to procure arms that they could smuggle back to the island. The two armed men standing barefoot on the edge of the shore had probably been stationed there to await their arrival, though they didn’t seem to have much interest in the boat or in the men making their way back from it, such arrivals and departures probably being extremely routine. They seemed, instead, to be gazing to the northwest, across the enormity of the motionless sea, toward that line in the distance where the edge of the silently bright water became indistinguishable from the bright, cloudless horizon, a point so distant from their small section of beach that it could only have been on or near the Indian coast. It was while looking out at that same convergence of sea and horizon, Krishan couldn’t help imagining, that Kuttimani had been arrested on his way to Tamil Nadu, and perhaps it was even because he’d been distracted by the sight of that distant meeting point that he’d let himself get caught. There was something so freeing or fulfilling about looking out across such distances, after all, such a feeling of freedom even in the act of stepping out under open sky, where one’s eyes were no longer hemmed in by walls and roofs and could range, without constraint, over earth and sea. It was precisely for this reason, Krishan couldn’t help feeling, that Kuttimani had asked for his eyes be given to a sightless child, so that they too might look into the horizon, so that they too might look across the distance at the land that belonged to them and the possibilities it contained. The freedom that Kuttimani desired, the freedom that perhaps all liberation movements sought, was not just the freedom that came when one could move freely over the land on which one’s forbears lived, not just the freedom that came from being able to choose and be responsible for one’s own life, but the freedom that came when one had access to a horizon, when one felt that the possible worlds that glimmered at its edges were within one’s reach. It was only when looking at a horizon that one’s eyes could move past all the obstacles that limited one’s vision to the present situation, that one’s eyes could range without limit to other times and other places, and perhaps this was all that freedom was, nothing more than the ability of the ciliary muscles in each eye—the finely calibrated muscles that contracted when focusing on objects close by and relaxed when focusing on objects far away—nothing more than the ability of these muscles to loosen and relax at will, allowing the things that existed in the distance, far beyond the place one actually was, to seem somehow within reach.
Kuttimani was moved, on being sentenced to death, to Welikada, the maximum-security prison built by the British in Colombo in 1841 and still, seventy years after their departure, the largest prison in the country. Krishan had never been inside Welikada, but he’d passed its imposing façade on Baseline Road plenty of times, the dominating white wall emblazoned with the crest of the Department of Prisons at the top, below it a long, beaten copper mural depicting the different stages of the rehabilitation of criminals. The mural began on the left with images of men committing crimes like murder and theft, followed to the right by downcast, penitent figures standing trial in orderly courtrooms, then by inmates engaging in manual labor of various sorts, laying bricks, painting, and shoveling, ending, finally, with scenes of joyful, sober individuals walking out of the prison under the watchful but caring eye of the guards. The mural, together with the large text printed below stating that PRISONERS ARE HUMANS, gave the impression that Welikada was a humane and progressive environment, an impression that Krishan always suspected to be false and that was discredited beyond doubt as he learned more about the massacre of Tamil prisoners there in July 1983. These massacres, which according to the government were simply the result of Sinhala prisoners getting out of hand, had taken place during the larger anti-Tamil pogrom that occurred in Colombo that month with the collusion of the government, leading to the destruction of eight thousand Tamil homes, five thousand Tamil shops, and the death, on some estimates, of up to three thousand Tamil people. The prison killings took place on two separate days in the midst of this pogrom, on the twenty-fifth of July and then again on the twenty-seventh, and were, according to the book Krishan read in the hope of learning more about Kuttimani’s death, far from accidental or unplanned. Fifty-three Tamil inmates, all of them political
prisoners, were killed, and the government story that the killings were the result of Sinhalese prisoners getting out of hand was, according to the authors of the book, patently false. No prison guard was killed or hurt during the violence, which almost certainly would have been the case if they had made any attempt to stop the Sinhala prisoners. Armed military personnel stationed within the prison grounds took no action to stop the killings either, apparently on orders from above, and after the attacks these same personnel refused to allow the still breathing Tamil prisoners to be taken to the hospital, which led eventually to them dying of their wounds. The conflicting evidence given by prison guards and officials made it clear, the authors of the book argued, that the killings were politically motivated at the highest levels.
Kuttimani had been housed, apparently, in a prison building named the Chapel by the British because it was shaped like a cross, with four rectangular divisions on each floor and a central lobby on the ground floor. The seventy-four Tamil political prisoners held there had been jailed in three divisions of the ground floor, while the fourth division on the ground floor as well as all the upper floors housed Sinhala prisoners convicted of murder, rape, and other violent crimes. Kuttimani was held in an eight-by-eight cell together with his associates Thangathurai and Jegan, according to the book, and it was in this cell presumably that he spent the large part of his sixteen months in prison. Reading this detail Krishan couldn’t help wondering how Kuttimani passed his time there with his two comrades, during all those long days and nights before their unscheduled killing. Probably they’d talked about news relating to the war, which must have come to them in bits and pieces through prison guards, and probably they’d discussed and debated the separatist movement and the political situation, not only among one another but also, during mealtimes and the recreation period, with the other Tamil prisoners, most of whom also belonged to separatist armed groups or political parties. The TELO were explicitly anti-ideological, in the sense that they had no specific ideas or proposals for what kind of country the people of the north and east would live in when the freedom struggle was finally won. Their first and only demand was for a Tamil homeland—all other matters would be considered after their homeland was won, they argued, since doing so beforehand would only be a distraction. Other groups, such as EROS or the PLOTE, were more strongly ideological, most of them socialist or Marxist, with strong anti-imperialist stances and distinct social and political visions of what the Tamil homeland would look like. These more abstract, intellectual articulations of the future were eventually destroyed by the Tamil Tigers when they annihilated or violently assimilated all of the other armed groups in the years that followed, less because of ideological differences—the Tigers too, like the TELO, believed that ideology was mostly a distraction—than simply to consolidate their position as the most powerful separatist group in the north. The prisoners couldn’t have discussed politics all day, of course, especially since their news of what was happening in the world outside must have been limited, and Krishan wondered how Kuttimani must have spent the rest of his time in prison, whether he read, or wrote, or exercised, whether there was a window in his cell from which the sky could be seen. He liked to imagine Kuttimani looking out through a window, liked to imagine that he spent time looking into the distance even if there was no actual window, even if the cell contained no light, for even when you were fast asleep it was possible, Krishan knew, to dream of wide landscapes and endless roads that led all the way to the horizon, so that waking up it was as though you’d spent the last several hours in the outside world and not in a cramped cell with your eyes tightly shut.
What actually happened on the day Kuttimani was killed was unclear, but according to the book the attack of the twenty-fifth started around two in the afternoon, when some four hundred Sinhalese prisoners escaped their cells, no doubt with the help of some of the prison guards. Gathering in the lobby of the ground level they obtained the keys to all the Tamil cells, then attempted to enter the three sections of the ground level that housed the Tamil prisoners. Feeling a loyalty to the Tamil prisoners inside the section he guarded, one Sinhalese prison guard apparently told the mob they would have to kill him to enter, in response to which the mob left that noble guard unharmed and entered the other two Tamil sections, where the guards in charge gave them free entry. It took the disorganized mob some time before they were able to work out which keys opened which cells, and this allowed the Tamil prisoners to organize some resistance to the attackers. The Sinhala prisoners vastly outnumbered them, though, and were armed with weapons that, according to the text, could only have been procured for them by the guards. Entering the cells one by one they cut down and battered the occupants, leaving most of them dead and the rest seriously wounded. The mob was no doubt aware who Kuttimani was—accounts of what he’d said during his trial the year before must have spread through the prison—for when they entered the cell he shared with Thangathurai and Jegan, the attackers made sure not to kill him immediately. It was reported that after knocking the three occupants to the ground several of the attackers had held Kuttimani fast on his knees, while another used an implement of some kind, most likely a knife but perhaps also a key, to gouge out, one after the other, both of Kuttimani’s eyes. The process must have taken some time, Krishan knew, each eye must have been scored out slowly and clumsily, losing its delicate integrity in the process rather than being scooped out whole, and when the eyes were removed they had probably been crushed in the carver’s hands or trampled under his feet, for it was difficult to imagine the prisoners leaving them as they were.
Leaning out of the train door as the hot, dry wind buffeted his face and the train wheels pounded heavily over the tracks below, Krishan felt he could see, with stark clarity, the figure of Kuttimani kneeling down in his grimy prison cell, two dark wounds in his head where previously his eyes had been. It was strange how sometimes scenes one has never witnessed could appear before the mind’s eye more profoundly than memories from actual life, but looking out over the flat, arid landscape rushing before him, its far edges flickering in the distance like a mirage, the same landscape Kuttimani had no doubt imagined so many times from his cell, Krishan had the strange sensation that what he was seeing now was not exactly his own vision but the superimposition of Kuttimani’s upon his own, the superimposition not just of Kuttimani’s vision but the vision of all those many people from the northeast whose experiences and longings had been archived or imagined in his mind. He had the strange sensation that the images he was seeing were a product not just of the light entering his eyes from outside but of all the various images he’d come to associate with the northeast over the course of his life, the firsthand images from his childhood visits and his two years living there as an adult, the secondhand images from all the photographs he’d seen in books, newspapers, and websites, the images he’d constructed in his mind out of all the things he’d read and heard, idyllic images of rural life and horrific images of war, images depicting a life he might have lived had history been just a little different, the faint traces of these countless images all projected now over what his eyes actually saw as the train raced north. He could see the leafless thickets of brush rushing past in the foreground before him, the white-hot horizon melting into the cloudless sky in the background, could feel the thin steel floor vibrating beneath his feet and his shirt billowing in the wind, but standing there leaning out through the door of the train, knowing that soon he would be arriving in Kilinochchi and that soon he would be in Rani’s village, attending the funeral of a person he still could not quite accept was dead, he couldn’t help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he’d traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he’d been advancing not from the island’s south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.
BURNING
8
It was a little past four in the
afternoon, the light softer now and more diffuse, the intensity of the day’s heat beginning to wane, and standing by himself in a corner of the garden Krishan was observing the people gathered in Rani’s house for the funeral, somewhat unnerved, after his long and meditative journey, by how quickly he’d found himself in this place so different from his point of origin, this setting that, despite conforming to all his abstract expectations, had nevertheless managed to catch him off guard. The sense of calm, peaceful self-containment he’d felt on the train had remained with him on the two quiet buses from Kilinochchi, and it had persisted too on his long walk from the bus stop, as he made his way slowly along the network of paths that ran through the noticeably deserted village. The properties on either side of the lanes were marked off by low fences of dried palm fronds thatched together with wire and rope, most of them fronted by small, well-cultivated gardens, each with its own little vegetable plot and an assortment of trees—drumstick, banana, coconut, curry leaf, as well as others he couldn’t identify. The houses themselves were simple and unadorned, the larger concrete ones containing a kitchen and one or two rooms, the smaller ones consisting of mud walls and thatched roofs and no more than a single all-purpose hall. He’d taken his time noting and regarding everything he passed, as if he’d come for no other reason than to discover what effect the surroundings had on the trajectory of his thoughts, and it was only as he turned into the lane where Rani’s house was located, as he heard the low, irregular beat of funeral drums rising up from the end of the lane, that he began to realize his journey was over, that he’d finally arrived at his destination. He wondered suddenly how he should comport himself, what he should say to Rani’s daughter when they met, how he could give her his grandmother’s money without drawing attention to himself, questions he’d had the whole day to consider but had avoided thinking about till then. Approaching the house he saw first the band of drummers standing just behind the palm-leaf fence, four men aloof from everyone else in the garden, looking at one another intently as they rapped the small, flat, beautifully constructed drums that hung from their necks—members, he knew, of one of the most marginalized castes in the northeast. In the garden behind them a large crowd had already assembled, two or three hundred people at least, almost all of them people from the village it seemed, which explained perhaps why the village had felt so quiet on his walk. Some of the attendees looked desolate or forlorn, some merely bored, but most of them were talking in low voices, as if using the gathering as an opportunity to discuss whatever matters were on their minds, the women wearing black, gray, or white saris, some of them in pale, unobtrusive colors, the men wearing mainly shirts and formal white sarongs. The band began to drum louder and at a faster tempo as he made his way toward the gate, giving, Krishan realized with discomfort, what was in effect a kind of announcement of his arrival. Walking through the garden he did his best to ignore the curious faces of the people as they turned and looked at him, all of them aware no doubt that he was not from the village, most of them probably able to tell from the way he was dressed, from his trousers and dark blue collarless shirt, that he wasn’t from any of the neighboring villages either. The house was on the larger side of the houses he’d passed on his brief walk through the village, with white concrete walls, an untiled asbestos roof, and smooth red cement floors, and climbing up the two short steps to the veranda, where the crowd was more concentrated and nobody seemed to notice him, he took off his sandals, left them by the collection of footwear near the entrance, and went up to the threshold of the front door.
A Passage North Page 18