‘This isn’t something that you have to feel sorry about You’ve grown up, Yoga. There’s nothing to worry about. The bleeding will stop on its own very soon. All you have to do in the meanwhile is use some rags as a pad to absorb the bleeding.’ The lady’s instructions on how this was to be done mortified and embarrassed the young girl. Among the rags provided, there were old panties that looked disgustingly like moulted snake skin. Although the thought of wearing shrunken and crumpled underclothes revolted her, she had no choice.
Was this a curse or a blessing, she wondered. Strange feelings flooded her being, neither sad nor happy. Bewildered, perhaps.
Akka Vathsala had been left in the care of her aunt because she had begun menstruating and needed to be protected. ‘Who is responsible for my safety now?’
Although she struggled with the enormous burden of the housework, the house was safe; she had no doubts on that count. However, she agonized when she thought of all the special treatment meted out to Akka by Amma upon her gaining puberty. Amma had kept Akka Vathsala screened off from the others in the house; she had fed her a raw egg each morning and had massaged the girl’s sore abdomen with warm sesame oil.
She pictured Vathsala Akka and Amma anointing her with turmeric paste before tenderly bathing her. She visualized the older women shooing away Kala and her little brothers who were hovering around curiously. A faint smile played about her lips.
‘I am such an unlucky person. I can only imagine such things in my dreams. God has written in my fate that such things are not for me. My fate will only let me dream of raw eggs, sesame oil massage and turmeric baths.’
Although there was a small consolation that her period gained her some respite from household chores, she was isolated even more because of the quarantine awarded to her by her ‘impure’ status. This added to her distress. During those days, she learnt what loneliness was; all she had for companionship was the one sheet she had to cover herself with. There were some broken tools and some old pots and pans in that room and there were a few cockroaches and lizards and their shadows at night would frighten her. She, who would run half a kilometre at the sight of a cockroach, learnt to sleep among them. There was a little skylight window, just below the roof, which was big enough to let a cat come through; the moon spreading its beams through that window would put her in a state of ecstasy
She bathed on the ninth day, and then prayed and applied sacred ash on her forehead. She felt as if a mysterious and secret door within her had opened and it filled her with pride and jubilation. She had been reincarnated as a whole new being and her cooled blood stirred and excited her.
Although she wasn’t particularly fond of the mistress of the house, she touched her feet reverently and sought her blessings. ‘I’m not sure if my mother and father are still alive. You are like a mother to me and you have kept me safe. I’ve never really thought about, or wanted to, go out, but today I’d like to visit the temple. May I?’
Her words must have kindled a spark of compassion in the woman. The lady bought her a dark red, ankle-length skirt, embroidered gold thread, a matching blouse with short sleeves and some jasmine flowers. The ensemble seemed to have been tailored for her. She had never worn anything like it before and she was filled with affection and gratitude toward the mistress.
This was also the first time that she had worn flowers in her hair. The fragrance spread through her entire body. She was fascinated by the glowing young woman reflected in the mirror and was amazed at the change she hadn’t noticed creeping up on her. She seemed taller. Her eyes sparkled. Her insides fluttered like a bee caught in a rainbow. The transformation felt magical.
That very evening, she was taken to the temple and she had the satisfaction of a wish being fulfilled for the first time in her life. She felt that this was a truly blessed day in her life. She longed to see her mother. She prayed for everything to turn out well. In the temple a truly happy surprise was awaiting her.
As soon as she entered the temple, her heart melted. Waves of sentiments filled her heart with happiness. Memories of the atmosphere at home spread through her heart like roots that spread in the earth.
I should have been at home at a time like this. I should have been with my mother.
Sometimes the most unexpected meetings happen in the most unexpected places and become very important events in one’s life.
When she saw Senbagam, a neighbour who was also her classmate in school, she wondered whether such happiness was possible in the world and she pinched herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.
‘Those are people from my village. The girl, Senbagam, studied with me in school and she was also a neighbour. May I go and speak with her?’
Having taken the mistress’s permission, she hailed Senbagam and ran up to join her. Senbagam had come with her uncle and his family. She whispered the story of how she had attained puberty in Senbagam’s ear and Senbagam smiled shyly. She heard that Vathsala Akka was still in town.
‘You are next,’ she said and Senbagam tittered nervously.
Yoga shared with Senbagam her sorrow at not being with her family at one of life’s milestones.
‘We returned last Saturday from Eralakkulam to Mavadivempu. The conditions in the village are really bad because they are conscripting soldiers for the fight for Eelam left, right and centre. They are dragging away children from their homes and schools. I’ve come to stay with my Periappa and study here.’
‘Senbagam, if the Movement takes away little children, won’t they have to fight in the battle-field?’
‘No, you silly girl …take us for example, can we, can we lift a gun, take aim and shoot? They want people, they capture them. If kids like us go, we won’t even be able to withstand one battle. We’ll be dead.’
Although meeting Senbagam had been comforting, the news she had given was alarming. Yoga tossed and turned all night, her brain cogitating various hopes and strategies.
‘Akka is safe and secure in Chitti’s house. But I’m living with total strangers. Doesn’t anyone wonder how I am or what has happened to me? Senbagam is blessed to have parents who care so much that they’ve sent her to another town and ensured she continued her education. My parents have reduced me to a servant. And someone as unlucky as me is called Yogalakshmi (Fortunate One)!’
Sundays were halcyon days with no early morning kitchen chores. Yoga was still in bed although it was past six o’clock and dawn’s sunbeams had filtered into her small room. She lay there like a wounded bird, with no will to get up. The sheet that she used to cover herself, which always seemed a heavy burden that oppressed her, today seemed warm and inviting. Her heart longed to stay all day in the comfort of her cosy sheet. She let her imagination run wild, drawing colourful pictures in her mind of her release from this dark room.
‘Yoga,’ her mistress summoned her shrilly.
When she heard the mistress’s voice, shrill and high-pitched as the whistle of a bus, Yoga sprang up breathlessly. Her body shook as if it was in the middle of an earthquake. The blue sky of her imagination was now was covered with dark clouds. The sea was frightening in a turmoil of waves and fierce winds. She came and stood in front of them looking like a sick chicken.
Yoga hurried into the dining room to see an unusual scene. Sithambaram, the master of the house, sipping his tea and poring over the morning newspaper as usual, ignored the entire drama unfolding in the room. Every day he read the papers, whether to escape from his wife’s nagging or to know the happenings in the world one could not say. He read them from cover to cover, sometimes twice or thrice each. His daughters were glaring at Yoga, their eyes red with weeping.
‘Where have you hidden it?’ shouted the mistress, pouncing on the hapless servant girl and cruelly twisting her ear. Yoga looked at her with her eyes widening with fear.
‘What, Amma?’
‘Don’t pretend like you know nothing at all…Buvana’s earrings are missing … You must have taken them. Who else stays here? You cunningly
asked to go to the temple yesterday. You must have passed on the stolen earrings to someone you met at the temple.’ Shell-shocked and speechless Yoga just gaped.
‘Why would I take Buvana’s earrings? I swear I never even saw them…’
‘Don’t give me that! Now that you’ve had a taste of dressing up in finery, you’ve started coveting things,’ she accused. ‘Where is it? Did you give it to that girl at the temple yesterday? Where does she live? Tell me!’ She twisted Yoga’s hair and slapped her cheek. Yoga saw double; she saw two of her fat, short mistress. Her unruly hair also had doubled in her vision. Half asleep, half unconscious with shock, she felt that someone had hit her on her back and pushed her down. The ugly side of the mistress’s nature became evident to her that day.
‘I swear Amma, I did not take anything. Buvana must have forgotten where she placed them in her room. Please ask her to look for them, ma!’
She held her hand to her cheek, her tears brimming over.
‘You’re insolent as well as a thief!’ She dragged the terrified girl by her hair into the kitchen.
‘Amma!’
Yoga’s scream galvanized Sithambaram, who ran into the kitchen with his two daughters at his heels.
On Yoga’s thigh there was about half-a-span heat scar of a knife. She rolled around, beat her head on the floor, bent and straightened her legs in agony.
‘You crazy woman! What have you done? Is this something an educated person will do? You haven’t even bothered to find out whether she is truly guilty of stealing the bloody earrings.’
His voice had an element in it that had never been heard before. He was unable to decide on the best course of action and he faltered in his dissatisfaction with his wife’s behaviour.
‘I did ask her, over and over… But she stubbornly maintained that Buvana must have misplaced it and should look for it. She…’
‘Stop it! So what’s wrong with what she said? The kids lose their stuff all the time and search all over the place for their things. Is that unusual? But what you have done … this is wanton cruelty …’
Yoga had curled into foetal position in the corner of the kitchen, still sobbing. Sithambaram gently lifted the girl in his arms, carried her back into the dining room and placed her on a chair. He administered first aid on the burn. The burned skin was blistered and ugly. Yoga blew on the wound, making ‘ah’ and ‘oo’ sounds. She who had not known what physical pain was till now was screaming at a pitch loud enough to shake the house to its foundations, doubled over in agony. Yoga shrank from his touch, yelping a little and biting her lip to stop herself from screaming.
‘Shhh, child … stay still. This is a balm for the wound and will help it heal.’
Sithambaram sat with her till she went to sleep. He was filled with a sense of pity that he had never felt till then.
As Sithambaram entered the bedroom he heard a tearful Buvana saying, ‘I didn’t do it on purpose, Amma. I swear…’
‘So, you found those damned earrings, then…you punished an innocent girl… and so severely!’ he thundered. He slapped his daughter and then his protesting wife.
When Yoga woke up at midday, she was aware of the searing pain on her thigh. Her mind kept playing and replaying the sequence of that morning’s events. This was the most humiliating event in her life.
Even as a child no one had ever hit her or had ever accused her of anything. She had been too proud to even ask for food, leave alone steal it, even when she was starving; not even from Senbagam, her closest friend.
‘I must leave this terrible place … but where can I go?’ she thought. ‘Home? What will I tell them? They will wonder why the people, who kindly looked after me all this time, suddenly accused me of a crime. I would become a burden to my family and they will begin to resent me. No, I definitely don’t want that. I wish I could just die.’
But how?
Death by all the different means that she could imagine were all equally terrifying and her thoughts made her weary. Rage and shame ate into her. Only the thought of death gave her any consolation.
Suddenly an idea struck her. Senbagam had said that even little children could enlist into the army although they would almost certainly perish in their first battle. If she joined the Movement, death in battle would be inevitable and solve all her problems.
4
It was the only printing press in town. The owner, whom Thawakkul knew very well, could neither refuse nor agree to do what she had asked him to and was in a real quandary.
‘You are saying that she is an ex-Tiger… isn’t it risky?’
‘Why fear, sir? The war is over. The Tigers have surrendered, been prisoners of war, been granted a second life and have reintegrated into society. Isn’t their expectation justified? How many times will you punish someone for the same mistake? Trust me. Theivanai is a good, hard-working girl and you’ll have no problems with her. Training for two weeks is all I ask … You are the only press owner that I know…Please…’
Thawakkul was relentless in her pleading but the press owner remained suspicious. ‘Whatever you may say, Thawakkul, these are people who harmed us and for no reason at all. They ruthlessly massacred sleeping villagers. They committed misogynistic atrocities. Ripped open helpless women by inserting bayonets into their vaginas. Slashed the abdomens of pregnant women committing foetal homicide, laughing insanely all the while. Their bigotry and fanaticism knew no limits. The Muslim population was targeted … They killed the men who were worshipping in a mosque in Kattankudi.
Unable to set aside his dark memories of the crimes perpetrated on Muslims by the Tamil Tigers, he spoke with great anger in a passion-filled voice. Thawakkul was aware that before the nineties, Tamils and Muslims had co-existed in harmony. As a little girl, she remembered, a lot of their family friends were Tamils. They frequently visited them and treated each other like kinsmen. She had called Vappa’s friends Maama or Maami and jumped on to their laps and played and chatted resting on their shoulders.
What followed was a bitter time in history. The blood that had been shed would always remain fresh in the nation’s memory.
The two incidents that the press owner cited were deliberately planned and executed coups by the Eelam Movement. In 1990, in Kattankudi’s Meera Jumma Mosque, the Eelam Movement had shot at a night congregation of worshippers, killing them in large numbers as a part of their plan to exterminate the Muslim minority population. At around the same time, in Eravur, a hundred and eighty innocent, unarmed Muslims were hacked to death in their beds as they slept.
In some villages in Polonnaruwa district the genocidal activities perpetrated by the Eelam Movement were far worse than any of these. There, in the clearly Muslim areas of Palliyagoda and Ahmadpuram, a whole community of farm workers were butchered.
When such incidents happen, it is not just people who are killed, but an entire society’s dreams, expectations, beliefs, way of living, cultural identity – everything is destroyed.
This genocidal activity against the Muslims and the mass killings are not events that can easily be forgotten. Thawakkul fully understood that.
Although the war had uprooted her and made her a refugee, her heart refused to harbour vengeful thoughts because such feelings did not heal and only snowballed into further violence.
‘What you say is quite correct, sir. These incidents which created a big rift in the good relations between Tamils and Muslims, are facts that cannot be forgotten. But to consider the entire Tamil population as enemies because of such acts which were carried out by the Eelam Movement is not fair. We have to be realistic. At the start of the Eelam Movement, we cannot deny that young Muslims joined the Movement and became warriors. We have to consider the Movement’s atrocities as actions carried out when it was psychologically sick. If one community starts hating the other because of such wrongful actions and seeks to avenge themselves, it will destroy the very foundations of society’s quest for progress. You’re an educated man, who is capable of thinking wisely.
If you yourself cannot get past this, then…
‘Even the thought of the events you speak of is bitter. However, they are no longer fighters and want to correct their mistakes. Don’t you think that the magnanimous thing to do is to forgive and forget? Although Hind had sucked the liver of her Chacha, didn’t our Nabi Mohammed forgive her? Although we cannot all have the magnanimity of the Prophet, at least we can have a little compassion and be a little less rigid…’
The gentleman finally capitulated and agreed to train Theivanai free of charge as Thawakkul requested.
Could the rift between the Tamil and the Muslim communities heal within the life-span of one or two generations, wondered Thawakkul. The horrific consequences and the losses were such that people’s hearts were still feeling the hurt. She realized that although many organisations had undertaken measures to bring the two communities together and bring about peace, they would have to find a new way of dealing with the distrust. Efforts should be made to bring together not just entrepreneurs, workers and university students from the two communities but include the war-affected, ex-fighters, politicians and other such groups who were the main cause of the rifts between the two societies. The leaders of the society had acted against the people and needed to actively right their wrongs.
When she called Theivanai and told her that she could be trained in a printing press in Eravur, Theivanai was hesitant.
‘Eravur…Can’t I train under our own people in town?’
While the printer’s reaction had been that of anger and distaste, Theivanai’s reaction was that of uneasiness from her sense of loss of self-respect.
‘Why, Theivanai? Do you mean the Tamils? What is the problem with Muslims training you?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know anybody in Eravur, whereas I know the people here and trust them.’ She made up excuses of being afraid and having no place to stay there, but the fact was that she just did not want to work there.
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