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Their progress remained slow, subject to the burden of the body, the wide and gently rolling landscape ahead becoming gradually more verdant, swathed by grasses, plants, and shrubs that burst forth in undisciplined abandon, by clusters of trees weighed down by the density of their branches and leaves. Except for a cyclist who passed by in the opposite direction, easing to a stop as he neared the procession and then pulling over beside the path, there was little sign of human life as they made their way, little movement around them except for the small, weightless white butterflies that flitted in and out of the vegetation as though in slow motion. Krishan had traveled for seven hours from Colombo by train, for three hours from Kilinochchi town to the village on two separate buses, had felt upon arriving at Rani’s house that he’d traveled as far interior as possible within the northeast, but having made his way now to the far side of the village and out into this unexpected space, walking along this unpaved path miles from any main road, he couldn’t help feeling he was entering a sphere of vast remoteness, a place undiscoverable on any map and untouched by any written history, a place that felt, all the same, somehow familiar, as though he’d walked through it in a dream or a previous life. He was still at the back of the procession, the men in front of him, maybe twenty or thirty in all, moving silently and patiently, their gazes directed at the ground in front of them or at the path ahead, the drummers rapping their drums quietly behind the body, their accompaniment serving only to amplify the silence surrounding them. Inside the small, contained space of Rani’s house and the neatly fenced-off boundaries of the garden he had been overwhelmed by all the emotion, by the clamor of the lamentation and the drumming, the sight of the body and the people thronging all around it, but moving out in the open now, the late afternoon sky stretching out before them, these feelings seemed small and almost petty, as though forced into a wider relief, into a contrast with the world’s expansiveness that dissolved them into nothingness, so that deprived of the shared emotion that had united him with everyone else during the funeral he was returning now to his own thoughts once more, remembering once more his own identity.
In the distance ahead the land seemed to gradually flatten, the area to the left of the path becoming a vast glimmering surface that reflected the pale gold of the sky. The butterflies became scarcer, the quicker, more mercurial movement of dragonflies taking their place, and as they drew closer the glimmering surface resolved into what was actually an immense lake, its near banks covered with ferns and tall grass, its distant banks too far to make out, merging silently with what looked like hills or cloud on the horizon. It was hard to say whether the lake had formed naturally or whether it was one of the man-made tanks constructed centuries ago by old kings and chieftains, tanks that had been around so long that they were now an intrinsic part of the ecology, but studying it as he continued walking, the water calm and waveless, lapping softly and peacefully upon its banks, the feeling grew in Krishan that he’d been to this place before, that he’d walked across this same path and sat there by the banks of this same lake. There couldn’t have been many bodies of water this size in the northeast, he knew, and taking out his phone he tried to see if he could find the place on Google Maps, which was unhelpful since there was, he saw, no signal on his phone. He wondered whether it was possible he’d passed it on one of the visits he’d made to the district back when he was based in Jaffna, but he knew for certain that he’d never been to Rani’s village before, and couldn’t remember having spent much time in the general vicinity before either. He could ask one of the men in the procession for the name of the lake, but none of them seemed to be paying it any attention and it would have been out of place to ask in any case, he felt, especially when everyone seemed so lost in their own thoughts. His gaze continued to return to the lake obsessively, as if at a face he’d come across somewhere but for some reason could not place, and it was only when he noticed a few reeds projecting out of the shallows that something clicked in his mind and everything seemed to resolve, when he realized with slight disbelief that the lake was familiar to him not because he’d been there before but because he’d seen it before on the internet, in a scene from a documentary he’d watched several years before in Delhi. It was a documentary he’d rewatched two or three times and which he’d been fixated on for several months afterward, which he’d stumbled across on YouTube not long after his obsession with Kuttimani, in that period when his attention had shifted from the traumas at the end of the war to the longings at its beginning. The film, whose name he could no longer remember, was not much more than an hour long, and though it had been made by a filmmaker from Denmark or Norway or one of those other northern European countries that were hard to distinguish, it had been devoid of the false benevolence common to so many British and European documents of violence and suffering in former colonies, devoid of the knowingness or righteousness so easily conjured up in such materials. The film’s narrative centered around the life of a twenty-four-year-old woman named Dharshika, who he could still vividly recall, a woman who was, at the time of filming, an active member of the Black Tigers. The Black Tigers were the elite, much feared division of the Tigers that specialized in carefully planned and meticulously executed suicide missions—from assassinations of political figures to bombings in public spaces to small but devastating attacks on Sri Lankan army and navy bases—and it had been clear, watching Dharshika talk and move over the course of the documentary, that there was indeed something elite about her too. It was if she had in some way been divinely ordained for her role, not just because of the severe beauty of her appearance, her sharp, almost haughty features and darkly lustrous skin, but also because of the penetrating steeliness of her gaze and the certainty of her posture, the conviction with which she spoke about the brutality of the Sri Lankan government and her readiness to fight and die to protect her people. There’d been thousands of women like her but it was hard not to wonder, listening to her as she spoke, how such a person was possible and how she’d come to be, what experiences and what inner affinities had led her down this path so different from those taken by other men and women her age, a path that was headed so clearly toward death and the total extinction of consciousness it brought but that she followed, nevertheless, with such ease and confidence, as though she couldn’t wait to reach its end.
According to her mother, whose estranged relationship with her daughter formed, Krishan recalled, one of the central subjects of the documentary, Dharshika had only been two years old when war broke out in Jaffna. Their family had lived in the midst of the fighting from its very earliest days, the most banal activities of their ordinary lives filled with great risk, sudden mêlées between the army and the Tigers often forcing them to stop what they were doing and run to take shelter. Even when there was no fighting there was the constant presence of soldiers who patrolled the villages, who would use security checkpoints as an excuse to harass and inappropriately touch girls and young women, as a result of which the movement of females outside their homes had to be severely restricted. As a young girl Dharshika had been extremely close to the aged priest of the nearby church, her mother told the camera, always sitting next to him during mass and prayers, assisting him in whatever ways he needed. It had been her daughter’s goal from a young age to join the order as a nun, she added plaintively, so she could spend the rest of her life devoted to Mother Mary. Standing in front of the bombed-out ruins of this church in the next scene, asked by the filmmakers about this lost period of her childhood, Dharshika spoke at length about how the violence she’d seen had changed the course of her plans, recalling in particular an incident in which the army had shelled the church while civilians were sheltering there during the fighting, leaving behind a slew of bodies on the floor next to the fallen cross. On the verge of breaking down as she talked about these childhood memories, she managed to hold herself together for the length of the segment, wiping away a tear with the palm of her hand as if swatting away a fly bef
ore going on to criticize the Christian notion of turning the other cheek, asking how a God who cared about justice could let such things happen in his own house. These objections had led Dharshika to turn her devotion away from God and toward the movement and its Supreme Leader, but they hadn’t, interestingly, been enough to turn her away from Mother Mary, and she still returned to the church grounds whenever she could, she told the camera matter-of-factly, where she would sit in front of the lone statue of the Mother that still remained and speak her heart out for hours at a time.
All of these experiences had no doubt played a role in her decision to join the Tigers, but it was above all the death of her father, her mother made clear, that led Dharshika to run away from home when she was still a young girl. Her father had been a peon at the post office in Jaffna town, and he’d been killed along with twenty-four other people by an aerial bomb that the army had dropped one morning in the center of town, opposite the main bus depot. Some children were able to bear the pain and grief that came as a result of such events, Dharshika’s mother explained, while others lacked the capacity to return to ordinary life afterward. Her daughter belonged to the second category, and on an afternoon not long after the one-year anniversary of her father’s death, at the age of about twelve or thirteen, she’d secretly left home. In what capacity she initially joined the Tigers was unclear from the documentary—she might simply have been a resident in one of the many orphanages they ran, or worked as a volunteer in one of their many nonmilitary organizations, or she might have joined as a recruit straightaway and been sent away to some secret location for basic training. What is clear is that at some point in her later teenage years she ended up joining one of the Tiger’s all-women combat units, that she was selected eventually for one of the few highly coveted positions available in the Black Tigers. Speaking with a mixture of grief and pride at their family home, Dharshika’s mother explained with a tinge of embarrassment that she’d had very little contact with her daughter since she left at that young age, that she saw Dharshika only once in a while, when her duties permitted it, and even then only for very short periods of time. She’d heard that her daughter had done well in the Tigers, that her courage and talent had earned her the respect of the other cadres and her superiors in the organization, but she herself had no idea whether her daughter was the same person she used to be, how her character had changed and to what degree, had no idea even whether she continued to pray. Dharshika herself, interviewed presumably somewhere close to her base, spoke of her mother without sentimentality, as though she were talking about a distant relative who’d died years before, and listening to her Krishan had wondered whether some kind of rift had developed between Dharshika and her mother in the year following her father’s death, whether the daughter had formed some kind of resentment against the mother who’d been forced to raise her and her siblings alone after their father’s death.
This refusal to show any sentimentality, it became clear, was part of a more general toughness that Dharshika seemed keen to present in front of the camera, a toughness that was mirrored to some degree by her best friend Puhal, the other main subject of the documentary, but underscored at the same time by their differences. Puhal was twenty-four and in the same unit as Dharshika, the same height but of slenderer build, and somewhat softer in her way of speaking and moving. She too seemed keen to emphasize her toughness, but she generally took more time responding to the questions she was asked and was often hesitant in the answers she gave, her conviction undercut by a willingness to reflect on her vulnerability in ways that Dharshika seemed unable or unwilling. The two of them had spent every day together for seven years, and their comfort and intimacy with each other was clear from the brief glimpses the documentary gave of their shared daily lives. In one scene the two women, both advanced belts in karate, sparred against each other in the early morning, ending their session with a set of three-finger push-ups that they performed in parallel and at the exact same speed, while in another Puhal stood behind Dharshika and combed out the latter’s beautifully rough, unruly hair, straightening it out and plaiting it into two neat braids with an almost maternal tenderness and familiarity. In the interviews they did together they seemed to enjoy playing off each other, Dharshika’s bravado against Puhal’s thoughtfulness, as in a scene in which Dharshika joked about the US government gifting them an American tank that had been sold to the Sri Lankan army and then captured by the Tigers in battle, in response to which Puhal chided her as though she were a child, scolded her for making light of the losses that had been suffered in the course of winning the tank. In one of the scenes Krishan had been most struck by, the two women took turns discussing the modus operandi of the Black Tigers, whose missions, Puhal explained, involved taking out a major target with the use of very small, highly trained groups of cadres instead of relying on large numbers as the regular Tiger units did. They would be given their target months in advance of the mission, and for months their training would revolve around the specificities of that mission—its particular location, the season and time of day, and the nature of its target, military, political, or civilian. They were sent in with Claymore mines strapped around their chests, which they used either to destroy their targets along with themselves or, if they’d destroyed their targets by other means, to blow themselves up at the end of the mission so as not to be captured, which would of course have meant being subject to torture by government forces. Each member of the unit was always extremely eager to be selected for the next mission, Dharshika told the interviewer, each one of them begging and pleading to be selected, for which reason a kind of lottery system was used to choose teams, so that nobody could complain about being unfairly overlooked. No Black Tiger had ever returned alive from a mission, successful or not, and none of them went in with any expectation that they would return from their missions alive. You tended to stop caring about death after joining the Black Tigers, Puhal explained, learned gradually to take the inevitability of your own death for granted. This was the case for all Tigers, of course, but what distinguished Black Tiger cadres from ordinary cadres was that whereas ordinary Tigers could die at any moment, depending on the vicissitudes of battle, Black Tigers knew months before they died the exact location, moment, and method by which they would die, a death for which they trained for months once their mission was assigned and which they planned and visualized endlessly in the lead-up to that final moment. Krishan had been struck by the tone with which Puhal made this remark, as though she felt it was one of the virtues of being a Black Tiger that your death was totally in your own hands. There was an element of bravado perhaps in this remark, but it was clear that Puhal truly did find some solace in the thought that death could be planned and controlled—that this phenomenon that had been so omnipresent throughout their lives, that could strike at any time and was therefore a constant source of uncertainty and anxiety, could be something you chose rather than something imposed from the outside. There was something in the way both women spoke about their training and their future mission that made him feel that they not only had no fear of dying but were in fact looking forward to it, that they were in a sense even impatient for it, as though they felt they would, upon dying, be reborn into the nation for which they’d just died, as though they saw the nation for which they were fighting as a kind of heaven, as though death, for them, was not the end of real life but its beginning.
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