The scene that took place at the lake they were now passing, which had remained fixed in Krishan’s memory as the climax of the documentary, began with Dharshika and Puhal sitting together on its banks in full military fatigues, looking out over the water and trying to make out whether it was mountains or cloud that lay on the lake’s far side. The interviewer had just asked them, presumably, whether they thought much about the battles they’d fought in, for nodding her head at the camera Dharshika said with a smile that scenes of battle played in her mind every time she closed her eyes. She often dreamed of being in battle too, she went on, snapping off a leaf from one of the plants in front of her and beginning to shred it into little pieces, would often have dreams of seeing the enemy approach and trying to shoot but having her gun get stuck, or of shooting enemy soldiers but having no effect on their progress, the soldiers continuing to march zombielike toward her despite all the rounds she emptied on them. These were just dreams, of course, she added after a brief pause, drawing out a tiny glass vial that hung like a pendant from a string around her neck, in reality they knew they would never be captured, on account of the cyanide they carried with them wherever they went. No matter what happened they could always bite down on the capsule and end their lives if they were about to be captured, though if by chance they bit into the vial while they were asleep and dreaming, she said, glancing at Puhal and laughing, then that would be that, they would simply never wake up. Puhal then described how the capsule had to be used in the middle of battle or a mission, explaining that you had to bite into the vial with your teeth so the cracked glass would cut into your tongue, causing the cyanide to enter your bloodstream and kill you immediately. Even if you’d been wounded and were too weak to properly bite down, all you had to do was smash the vial and let a few drops of the cyanide drip onto your wounds, and this would be sufficient to obtain the desired effect. They talked as if the cyanide capsules were heirlooms that had been passed down generation after generation with these exact instructions, long-cherished reminders of their forbears and identities, and listening to the reverence with which they spoke on the subject Krishan had had the sense that they were, already in that moment of filming, talking to the camera as though from some other realm.
The two women were then asked what friendship meant to them, for Puhal turned her head away from the camera and looked shyly at Dharshika, a slightly embarrassed smile on her face, causing Dharshika in turn to laugh. It was clear from their smiles that the two friends hadn’t discussed their relationship with each other explicitly before, perhaps because it was more natural for such matters to be negotiated through gestures rather than words, perhaps because the impending approach of their deaths in the form of an as yet unknown mission made discussions of their relationship seem futile. Friendship for them, the two cadres told the camera, their expressions quickly turning serious, meant sharing in each other’s emotional lives. It meant sharing in each other’s happinesses and sadnesses, and it meant helping and supporting each other in whatever practical ways they could, though they were of course prepared to separate, they hastened to add, if one of them had to be transferred to another location. The discussion then turned from friendship to the subject of betrayal, the gravest offense a cadre could commit, one that the Tigers punished with execution, Krishan knew, even when there was little certainty about the allegation. The two women tried to justify the harshness of the punishment, explaining that the Tigers were fighting for the good of the people, that if a single traitor could, by sharing military information, put the entire cause in jeopardy, then it was better the traitor be shot than the movement and the people be endangered. Looking at the interviewer Dharshika then added, apropos of nothing it seemed, that if someone were to tell her that Puhal had betrayed the cause, if the accusation were to be firmly proven, that she herself wouldn’t hesitate to shoot her best friend. A look of uncertainty passed shadowlike across her face as she said this, as though she herself was surprised by what had just come out of her mouth, and falling silent she looked away from the camera, as if she’d spoken too quickly and needed more time to consider the hypothetical situation on which she’d just pronounced. She looked down at the reeds in front of her, then turned back toward the camera a second later and nodded her head gravely, as if to confirm that her initial instinct had indeed been correct, that she would indeed kill Puhal if she betrayed the cause. Puhal, who’d been looking out over the water all that while, turned and regarded Dharshika, who raised her head and looked into the distance to avoid her gaze. There was a period of long silence, in which only the gentle sound of the water lapping against the banks and the faint buzzing of dragonflies in the background could be heard, Dharshika continuing to pluck bits of leaf from the plants in front of her, examining them distractedly in her hand, shredding them, and letting them fall. Puhal then began to speak, breaking the silence with her own take on what Dharshika had said. Everything they did eventually made its way to the Leader, she said—if they did something good the Leader would hear about it, if they did something bad the Leader would hear about it, and if they committed an act of betrayal the Leader would hear about that too. If the Leader verified that Dharshika had indeed committed an act of betrayal, then most likely he would have somebody else execute her, but if for whatever reason it was she who had to do the job, then she too would shoot Dharshika, just as she was ordered. Puhal gave a small but triumphant smile as she said this, as though proud to show that she too was willing to kill her best friend for the sake of the cause, then rubbing the tip of her nose she immediately furrowed her eyebrows and looked away, an expression of irritation on her face, though it was hard to say whether her anger was directed at the interviewer recording the scene, at Dharshika for first so brazenly claiming that she would not hesitate to kill her, or at herself for responding in kind. The two women fell silent again, Puhal looking out over the water, Dharshika dissecting another leaf in her hands, and the film then cut to a wide landscape shot of the Vanni, of two large, seemingly unused buildings in the distance, surrounded on all sides by dense vegetation, the two women standing side by side in a corner of the screen, guns strapped tightly across their shoulders.
Krishan had been struck by that scene the first time he saw it, by the way it so vividly captured Dharshika and Puhal’s relationship and situation, something simultaneously so moving, challenging, and disconcerting about how these two women had abandoned everything to join the Tigers, their homes and villages, families and friends, about how they’d formed, in exile from their previous lives, such an intimate bond, and how, despite waking together almost every day for seven years, they were ready to give each other up for the cause they’d joined, even to kill each other if the need arose. The two of them were no longer alive, Krishan knew, they’d died most likely within a few years of filming those scenes, probably in one of the increasingly desperate suicide missions the Tigers had ordered toward the end of the war or while defending the rapidly shrinking land still under Tiger control. It was strange to think that he might now be walking past the very same lake that these two women had once looked across, walking on the very same earth that they might have trod upon all those years before, and it was strange to think how different he himself was now from the person he’d been when he’d come across those scenes for the first time, to think how far he’d felt from the northeast during his time living and studying in Delhi, as if it was a place from which he’d been exiled and as if, with the end of the war and the destruction of the world that had existed there, it was a place for which his yearning could never be fulfilled. He’d been seeing Anjum for about two months at the time, and he could still remember now the urgency with which he’d wanted to share the film with her afterward, his eagerness to show her some glimpse of that destroyed world he felt to be a part of himself, his certainty that she would be impressed to learn that this was the lineage from which he came, even if he didn’t fully agree with everything that all the other members of this lineage had done
. He’d told her about the film the next time they met and they’d agreed to watch it together, but this had turned out to be more difficult to accomplish than expected, for Anjum was rarely in Delhi during the weekends and rarely able to meet more than once a week even when she was in town. They were spending entire days together when they did see each other by that point, and there was of course always time available in the literal sense of the word, but all they could seem to do when they were in proximity to each other was gaze at and be gazed at by each other, consume and be consumed by each other, so that even when he remembered the film he hesitated to bring it up, worrying that watching a film was too mundane an activity to do together, that sitting together but not paying attention to each other would fail to do justice to what they felt for each other.
It was for this reason probably that when he and Anjum did finally watch the documentary, the first and only film they watched together, it was toward the end of their time in Bombay, toward the end of that trip that was the first occasion in four or five months that they spent continuous time with each other, in which the urgency for transcendence that they’d previously felt gave way to the possibility of other, more gentle ways of being together. They were staying in the room of a friend of Anjum’s who was out of town, and after the initial awkwardness and uncertainty of the train journey they’d spent the first couple of days much as they would have in Delhi, smoking, talking, and sleeping together, occasionally going outside but even then not very far, the only difference being that this time there was a totally different city in the background, a city by the sea of immense wealth and poverty, a city that seemed, even more than Delhi, like a veil or a mirage or an illusion that surrounded them. It became clear soon enough that they could not spend the entire trip this way, that being together for an extended period of time meant they would need to pay attention to all the various human and animal needs they more or less ignored in Delhi. They needed, first of all, to eat, and since they couldn’t afford to always eat out they’d had to plan their meals, to buy meat and vegetables and cook together. Their sleeping patterns too became more regular, no longer a capitulation to fatigue as it had been earlier, for if they didn’t sleep in the night they wouldn’t be able to see the city during the day, which was ostensibly part of why they’d come to Bombay to begin with. Anjum had a few friends in the city with whom she was supposed to spend time, people she’d gotten to know over the years through her activist work, and so they appeared together in social contexts for the first time as well. He’d been surprised by how charismatic Anjum could be in the presence of others, how friendly and lighthearted, qualities he’d intuited during their initial, public encounter, but which he’d somehow forgotten about in the time since. She continually asked her friends questions about their thoughts and opinions, their habits and routines, thoughtful, thorough, and disarming questions that came from a generous curiosity about other lives but were also, he sensed, part of a strategy that allowed her to avoid sharing too much of herself. He noticed that she was careful not to say or do anything that would allow anyone to perceive them as a couple, and though these moments troubled him he forgot about them with relative ease, reassured by how close they were otherwise becoming on the trip, by how much more open and accessible Anjum seemed to him now. He’d become familiar with so many of her invisible patterns and rhythms, with all those tendencies of being that were revealed only when one spent extended time with another person—the variation of mood in accordance with time of day, energy, digestion, and environment—and he’d begun, for the first time, to glimpse what a more substantial relationship between them might look like, what it would be like to actually share a life with Anjum. A calm and tender domesticity began to emerge as they cooked and ate together, went on long walks together and met other people together, the rapture and otherworldliness of their time in Delhi transformed, during their three weeks together, into a gentle and patient coexistence with their surroundings, washed by waves of desire that never ceased flowing, but that no longer made it impossible to participate in the outside world. He had known from previous relationships how quickly desire began to dissipate when two people became used to each other, how quickly the hope of transcendence with which infatuation begins was replaced by mere comfort and security, the safety of habit and routine, but he realized during their short time in Bombay that domesticity didn’t have to signify the domestication of desire, that it could mean not its dullening and deadening but its deepening and widening, habit becoming something that fortified and buttressed desire without at the same time stifling it, like a glass case that protects the delicate flame of a candle while being open enough to let in the oxygen needed to keep the flame burning.
It was as they were rolling a joint on the afternoon of their penultimate day in Bombay, their last full day in the city, that the idea of watching the documentary came up again and they decided to finally watch it together. Drawing the curtains, placing the laptop on the bed between them, they lit the joint and let the video play, watched the scenes unfolding on the screen before them in a deepening trance. They sat there watching in silence till the very end, listening to the music that played as the credits rolled, and when the video at last came to an end Anjum closed the laptop gently and they both remained unmoving for a while, reluctant to speak or look at each other in the same way that when a film ended at the cinema and the lights came on, there was a moment in which you were reluctant to make eye contact with the person beside you, as if to do so would be to acknowledge the transience of the world in which you’d just been immersed. He asked whether she’d liked the film and she nodded that she had, that she too had been moved by it and could see what had attracted him so much to it, after which they said little else about the film, deciding in a kind of tacit agreement to remain in their thoughts a little more, to let the impression it had made linger inside them a bit longer. Outside the sky was already turning into the lavender gold of early evening, it was getting late, they realized, and they would have to leave the flat soon. They’d planned to spend their last night walking the length of Marine Drive, the long C-shaped road that ran along the sharply curved southwestern coast of the island city, a road that shared the same name as the road in Colombo near which Krishan had grown up, but that was so much more immense that no comparison was possible. They got ready and took the local train down as far south as possible, crushed into each other by the constant press of people in the carriage, then took a three-wheeler from the station down to the southernmost tip of Marine Drive. The sun had just gone down but the concrete was still exhaling heat as they began to make their way up the length of the broad pavement, cars rushing by on the road to their right, tall apartment buildings reaching up into the monumental sky behind them, the water breaking gently against the man-made rocks to their left, the boundlessness of the ocean stretching out into the distance beyond. They talked about various things, what things exactly he could no longer remember now, their gazes directed above the countless people they passed, commuters, students, walkers, joggers, and couples, and it was only when they’d covered about half the length of the promenade that the documentary came up again in conversation, when deciding to sit down and smoke on the concrete ledge that gave onto the sea they began to talk about the dynamic between the two cadres, the nature of the friendship that clearly meant so much to each of them but that both had taken such pains to disavow.
She couldn’t stop thinking, Anjum told him as they looked out at the darkening sky, about the scene by the lake, the scene in which Dharshika and Puhal had claimed to be willing to kill each other for the sake of the movement. Dharshika would not have made such a cruel statement unless she’d actively wanted to wound Puhal in some way, she felt, unless she’d held some secret resentment against her friend that she wished to punish her for. It was the kind of deep, unspoken resentment that was only possible between people who loved each other intensely and yet sensed the possibility of being hurt by each other, between people who n
eeded each other and were yet unable to fully acknowledge this need to each other for fear of becoming vulnerable. It was a form of cruelty common in families and close friendships, where people are so dependent on each other but also so hemmed in and restricted by each other, and it was a form of cruelty that was an intrinsic part of the dynamic between lovers too. Watching the two cadres interact she’d wondered whether there might not be something deeper hidden behind their friendship, between the brasher, more assertive Dharshika and the somewhat more approachable Puhal, there was something almost erotic, she couldn’t help feeling, in the alternating boldness and shyness with which their eyes continually met, their gazes continually moving toward each other and then away. Anjum said all this more or less at once, as a clear, fully formed thought that she articulated, as was her wont, only after having dwelt on it by herself, and surprised by the suggestion, which he would never have otherwise considered, Krishan asked her whether she thought the two cadres had been lovers, adding that he thought it unlikely given how rigidly disciplinarian life for Tiger cadres was supposed to be. Anjum shrugged in a slightly indifferent way, as though the veracity of her interpretation was not really what mattered, then turned and looked out at the sea, rotating the ring on her middle finger absentmindedly. The documentary had reminded her, she went on after a moment, about a collection of old Buddhist poems she’d recently read, a collection of poems written between the third and sixth centuries B.C. by Buddhist nuns from all over the subcontinent, collected, translated into Pali, and passed down in the tradition as a single work. The poems were written across the social spectrum, by oppressed-caste women and upper-caste women, by serving women and prominent ladies, all of them evincing the same veneration for the Buddha and for the liberation that came with following his doctrine of radical detachment. Several of the poems depicted the situations that led to the conversion of their authors in surprising detail, many of them single women who’d joined monastic life as a way of escaping the compulsion to marry men they had no interest in, many of them married women who’d sought escape from the drudgeries of domestic labor and the unwanted sexual demands of their husbands, from what would now be called marital rape. Some had wanted freedom from the sexual violence casually inflicted on them by upper-caste men, while some had wanted freedom from the violent heat of their own high libidos and uncontrollable sexual urges, a coolness they found in Buddhism. Many of the women, Anjum added, had also joined the order as a way of coping with grief, with the untimely death of a son or daughter or brother or sister, the Buddha’s teachings on death providing the only consolation that really made sense of all their suffering. All of these elder nuns had, in other words, two thousand five hundred years before, left their homes and relatives in order to find, through the monastic order, liberation from the societies in which they’d been born, and she couldn’t help thinking about the parallels with Dharshika and Puhal, with all the other women who’d left their families to join the Tigers. Like the Buddhist nuns, they too had given up attachment to their bodies in response to the traumas they’d experienced, and like the nuns they too had joined a movement for liberation, a movement founded and led, like Buddhism, by a man, a movement that to their minds promised not only the possibility of freedom from the Sri Lankan state but also real and immediate freedom from their own society’s expectations and oppressions.
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