Malini

by Robert Hillman

  ‘Your appearance is excused. Now take yourself far away before I call the keepers!’

  ‘Honoured lady, allow me to speak. I—’

  ‘Allow you to speak? You may talk until your face turns blue, but up in the forest, not here. Now make haste out of my sight!’

  ‘I am Malini Ranawana. I am the granddaughter of Panya Ranawana. This is my sister, Banni. Please, honoured lady, inform my grandfather that we are at the gate.’

  Varya, about to shout for the keepers, suddenly froze. She looked at the tall girl more closely. And in her mind she compared the girl she saw before her with the girl in the photograph that Panya Ranawana kept on the wooden mantelpiece in his living room, next to pictures of his son and daughter-in-law and younger granddaughter. This girl was older than the Malini in the picture, and much dirtier, but…was it possible?

  ‘You say you are my honoured master’s granddaughter? What is your father’s name? And your mother’s name?’

  Malini said, ‘My appa is Chandran Ranawana. My amma is Tamara.’

  Varya’s hands flew to her face. ‘All the gods! Malini, is it you?’

  She took a ring of keys she wore on a belt around her waist and quickly unlocked the gate. ‘And this one is Banni, the beauty? Come in, come in!’

  She embraced Malini, then Banni, and showed the whole party into the house, calling to her master. ‘Honoured sir! Come and see! Honoured sir! By a miracle – your granddaughters!’

  Panya Ranawana, awakened from his afternoon nap by the noise, made all the haste he could on his ancient legs.

  Varya called, ‘In the kitchen, honoured sir!’

  Panya stopped in the kitchen doorway and gazed at the small crowd of children gathered around the table.

  ‘Malini, my beloved child! Banni, the beauty! All the gods, what a day for this frail old man! Let me hold you.’

  Malini and Banni hugged their appappa and kissed his hands.

  ‘Children,’ said Panya Ranawana, ‘ten thousand prayers have been answered! My son and his honoured wife? Do not give me news my heart cannot bear!’

  Malini told her grandfather that his son, her father, was wounded but in the care of the Red Cross with her mother. More she could not say.

  Banni let out a yelp of alarm. ‘You did not tell me this!’ she said.

  ‘I could not,’ said Malini. ‘Forgive me, Banni.’

  Malini introduced Nanda, Amal and Gayan, each of them suddenly shy in the house of Malini’s grandfather. Nanda said, ‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ and Amal and Gayan repeated her words, struggling to master Tamil.

  Malini gave a brief account of the long journey from the coast. Then she asked for a glass of water.

  Varya hurried to the stone water jar and filled a tall glass, but before Malini could so much as sip, she fainted and crumpled to the wooden floor.

  A fever raged in Malini like a typhoon that roars in from the sea and turns the world upside down. She did not know where she was or who she was. She saw a house on fire, flames hurling themselves into a crimson sky. She saw a demon with a hundred heads pulling birds from the air and swallowing them whole. She saw a funeral pyre with a body on top, and the body was that of a girl, and many people stood close by and wept and sang songs of mourning.

  She said, ‘It is me. I am leaving this world.’

  A cup was held to her lips. Water ran down her throat. Then the water stopped and the fire returned.

  She heard a voice, that of a man. He said, ‘It is the return of malaria. This can happen. She has exhausted her body, and malaria has returned.’

  A long time passed, so it seemed. Malini in her fevered state said, ‘I am ready to die.’ She saw Kandan as he’d looked in life, but graver, no smile, just a sadness in his eyes.

  On the funeral pyre the body caught fire and burned like a torch.

  She saw a mansion of white stone. She walked a long path lined with trees and climbed fifty steps to a pool of silver water. Tall doors swung open. She walked through a hall where guests were eating from a banquet table. Someone said, ‘Her eyelids moved!’ An old man with wrinkled hands held her face. He said, ‘I bless all the gods! This child lives!’

  Ten days into the fever, Malini’s appa and amma arrived at the orchard in a rusty yellow utility purchased with the American dollars Chandran Ranawana had kept hidden in the soles of his boots. Chandran was bleeding through bandages around his chest. He had been shot five times by government soldiers who had been ordered to kill Tamil men fleeing the enclaves on the coast. The soldiers had lined up more than a hundred Tamils – not only men but young women they suspected of having fought for the LTTE – and fired at them. The soldiers had left the bodies where they lay. Relatives of the murdered men, concealed in the forest, rushed to the site of the killings as soon as the soldiers departed. Malini’s mother found her kanavar badly wounded but alive. With the help of other Tamils, she carried him for two days to a Red Cross field hospital, where his life was saved. Two weeks later came the purchase of the yellow utility, and the journey by night to Ulla Alakana.

  A woman with tears in her eyes was bathing Malini. She held a blue cloth. She dipped the cloth into a brass bowl and ran it over Malini’s bare arms, over her legs.

  Malini said to the woman, ‘Who are you to wash my body in this way?’

  The woman said, ‘Your amma, child.’

  She said to the woman, ‘My amma has left the earth. Don’t tell me lies. Whoever lies to me, I will kill.’

  The woman dried Malini’s body then dressed her tenderly in white cotton. Malini said to the woman, ‘Bring me my sword.’

  Time was a flock of white birds gliding across a sky of blue and red. Then it was a stream. She knelt and put her hand into the stream. A blue fish with golden eyes leapt into her arms. The fish shed its tail and became a blue cloth. The woman returned and was again bathing her body. She said to the woman, ‘Bring me my sword, demon!’

  The woman kissed her on her cheeks and on her forehead and at last on her lips.

  A morning came when Malini woke and knew in an instant who she was and where she was. Her sister, Banni, was sleeping in an armchair beside the bed. Banni was dressed not in jeans and her pink shirt but in a blue sari. She looked so much older! On a table close to the bed sat an assortment of medicine bottles. One was half full of pink liquid. Malini could read the English script on the label: Do not employ when allergies are suspected.

  Malini said, ‘Sister…’

  Banni’s eyes opened slowly. She gazed at Malini.

  Malini said again, ‘Sister…’

  Banni sat bolt upright. She sprang from the armchair and fell to kissing Malini rapidly all over her face. ‘I bless all the gods! I bless Shiva a million times!’

  Then Banni called, ‘Amma! Appa!’

  A minute passed. Malini’s father hurried into the room, and her mother. Her father’s shirt was open and bandages circled his chest.

  Malini lifted her arms and closed them around her father’s neck. When he raised his face and gazed at her, his eyes were glittering with tears.

  He said, ‘Blessed girl, I said a thousand times you would live! A thousand times I said it. This girl will live. This girl with a lion’s heart, she will live!’

  Malini’s mother sat on the other side of the bed. She held Malini’s hand against her heart. ‘You said so, Husband, a thousand times.’

  Malini could see Banni over her father’s shoulder – Banni, who was so much older in her blue sari. Her face was soaked in tears. She murmured over and over, ‘Sister…Sister…Sister…’

  Nanda and the boys ran into the room. Nanda took Malini’s hand. Amal and Gayan clamoured to get to her, but were held back by Nanda. Amal shouted at the top of his voice, ‘I will destroy any who stop me!’ Malini laughed for perhaps two seconds, then the laughter turned to tears. She felt that the happiness that surged through her so strongly could almost kill her with its force.

  Almost three weeks had passed since Malini had sto
od at the gate and announced that she was the granddaughter of Panya Ranawana. In that time, she had twice been thought in the bower of Shiva, and twice she had moved her eyelids and restored hope to the hearts of those watching. The doctor had said, ‘The girl intends to live, so it seems.’

  The doctor was guessing in part when he said that Malini’s fever was a new bout of malaria. What he did know was that Malini had been dangerously fatigued before she became ill. With the country in the state it was after the war, it was impossible to have Malini taken to a hospital in Colombo. Everything was chaotic. Tamils were being turned away from clinics and hospitals. Many thousands had died in the past month. The fighting had ended all over Sri Lanka, but murder had not.

  If the idea of ‘innocent civilians’ had ever meant much in warfare, it meant even less now that the civil war was truly ending. The ‘human shields’ – Tamil civilians, held by the LTTE cadres – died in far greater numbers than LTTE soldiers when the government troops attacked the enclaves.

  The news of these deaths in the thousands came through on the BBC World Service. Malini and her father, still recovering from what should have killed them, listened together for two weeks to the news, then by mutual agreement, gave up their sorrowful vigil beside the radio in Panya’s living room. Instead, they walked in the orchard for hours each day, stopping to watch the birds falling from the air onto the ripe guavas. The keepers chased them away by beating drums and shouting at the tops of their voices. ‘Ho, thieves! Fly or die, thieves!’

  Malini and her father regained their strength over the next two months. With the village school shut down in this post-war period of chaos, Malini made her grandfather’s living room a classroom and taught Amal, Gayan, Banni and any children of the village who cared to attend. Her subjects were mathematics, science, geography, history, Tamil, Sinhala and English. The children sat on the floor with notebooks and pens while Malini moved from one group to another encouraging and correcting. She had a knack for teaching and before long had a school of seventeen, Tamil and Sinhalese, aged from four to thirteen. As for her own studies, she kept up with maths at an online university and read her grandfather’s English novels and poetry.

  For the broken society outside the classroom, there was nothing she could do. Remaking a country is too big a task for one person, or even for a thousand. It is a task for millions. One thing that could be achieved, though, was to remember Kandan in some special way. Prayers were offered at the shrine of Shiva in the orchard each day for eight days, but it was Gayan who one morning came running into the house holding a small mango tree in a cardboard planter. It had become Gayan’s habit to help the orchard workers plant new trees in the western section of the orchard, and this morning an idea had leapt into his head.

  He stood panting before Panya, holding the tree above his head with both hands. ‘Kandan!’ he said. Panya, was baffled. He thought the boy had lost his wits. He called for Nanda. When she came, Gayan said, in a state of high excitement, ‘For Kandan! This tree!’

  And so it was that a mango tree was planted in the west of the orchard to commemorate Kandan’s life. Malini and Banni, Nanda, Amal, Panya, Chandran Ranawana and his wife Tamara, Varya and three orchard workers watched on as Gayan lifted the small tree from its cardboard planter and lowered it into a hole. He patted the soil flat around the base of the tree, then stood upright and tapped his hands together in his particular way. He said, ‘This is for our friend Kandan.’

  Malini said, ‘For our friend Kandan.’

  Then all of those watching said, ‘For Kandan.’

  One morning when all the children of her school were working away in four separate groups, and Banni in her sari was bent over her maths questions with a frown of concentration on her face, a blessed moment came Malini’s way. The weather was not too hot, and the ceiling fan was purring softly. In the kitchen she could hear her father, her mother, Varya and her grandfather quietly discussing the business of the orchard, since it was agreed that Malini’s father would help with the management of the estate until it was safe to return to their village on the coast. Nanda, at last putting on a little weight, was sewing a rag doll as a present for a girl from the village, an exquisite thing with small buttons for eyes and blue wool for hair. From outside came the cries of the orchard workers as they scaled their ladders beneath the guava boughs. Malini stood still at the centre of this small, thriving world and drank in happiness, gladness and gratitude. She thought, It is something to still be here, my heart beating, everyone absorbed in tasks other than survival. It is something.

  Her father walked into the living room that was now a classroom and looked across at his daughter. She looked at him, at her father, and smiled.

  Each understood the happiness in the heart of the other.

  Author’s Note

  I first visited Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka, when I was a kid of sixteen, travelling the world in search of adventure. The country at that time was known as Ceylon. From the deck of the ship, the city looked like the most thrilling destination on earth. The sun was setting and the whitewashed buildings of Ceylon’s colonial era turned a bright orange, then a more subdued pink. Dozens of small wooden craft crowded around the ship, each boat packed with fruit and fabrics for sale to the westerners gazing down from the deck. The vendors sang songs celebrating their wares, and called out to the tourists above. ‘Many fine mangoes for you, sirs and ladies! Pineapples so tasty, indeed!’ The noise the vendors made was like an orchestra of voices, the music rising and falling. At that time, the island was at peace. I thought, Such a beautiful land.

  When I next visited Sri Lanka in 2005, peace was the last thing that came to mind. The shocking violence of a civil war that had been raging since 1983 had left a dark cloud of suspicion and resentment hovering over the island. There was still great beauty to be seen in this vivid green land, but wherever I went, I met people who were sorrowing for what had become of Sri Lanka’s civil society, and sorrowing, too, for sons and daughters, husbands and wives killed in the fighting. At that time, a truce had been proposed, but I did not meet anyone, Tamil or Sinhalese, who believed for a moment that the war would soon be over. I came across raw hatred and I heard angry denunciations, but more often I encountered sadness and regret.

  The war in Sri Lanka pitted Sinhalese against Tamils, the two major ethnic groups of the island. In 2014, the overwhelming majority of Sri Lankans are Sinhalese (around seventy-four per cent), and largely follow the Buddhist faith. The Tamil people, including immigrant Tamils from southern India, make up approximately fifteen per cent of the island’s population, and follow the Hindu faith, for the most part. Both Sinhalese and Tamils have inhabited the island for millenia. The age-old Tamil population was joined by some hundreds of thousands of Tamils from southern India in the nineteenth century. These ‘newcomers’ were recruited by the colonial British to work in tea plantations.

  The Tamil population tends to be concentrated in the north of the island, and along the east coast. Like minorities in other lands, the Tamils feel more secure living close to each other, forming communities where the Tamil religion and culture dominate. But wherever people live as a minority in their homeland, such security can often feel under threat. After Sri Lanka achieved independence from Britain in 1948, the Tamils of the island felt increasingly marginalised by a government dominated by the Sinhalese. Tamils claimed that a whole range of government policies were designed to restrict their access to education, to employment in the public service and to the securing of finance for businesses. In 1956, the Tamil language itself ceased to be recognised as an official state language. In the 1970s, militant Tamil groups emerged to carry the fight for equality beyond peaceful protests. The dominating figure in Tamil politics was Velupillai Prabhakaran, who would one day lead the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in an armed struggle to establish a Tamil state in the north of the island.

  It might have been predicted as early as a decade after independence that civi
l war would break out in Sri Lanka, given the grievances of the Tamil people and the mounting impatience with their political claims among the majority Sinhalese. But I doubt that anyone at that time would have foreseen the extraordinary brutality of the war. For this was one of the most savage conflicts fought since the end of the Second World War in 1945. Although the war is usually considered to be three wars, with truces in between outbreaks, each stage of the conflict was equally violent and bloody. Terrible war crimes and atrocities were committed by both sides in the conflict, including the massacre of civilians, torture, and the destruction of entire villages. Further killings were carried out by bandit groups. Unarmed civilians were considered no different to armed combatants. Children were killed in great numbers. And this was the war in which the world first heard of ‘suicide bombing’: human beings, strapped with explosives, blowing themselves up in crowded areas.

  The armed forces of the Sri Lankan government gradually gained the upper hand over the LTTE from 2006 onwards. The LTTE surrendered in May 2009 after a series of terrible defeats. In the final months of the war, Tamil civilians in great numbers became trapped in enclaves in the north and east of the island and many died during the final assaults of the Sri Lankan Army. Human rights groups had been calling for an international investigation of war crimes over the entire period of the civil war, and have recently succeeded in having the United Nations Human Rights Council agree to an enquiry.

  Today, many thousands of Tamils remain displaced within Sri Lanka, and a number of the issues of discrimination against Tamils that led to the civil war still persist. I recall particularly two comments from my last visit to the island in 2005. The first is that of a young man I questioned about his views on the war. He said, ‘Tamils do not belong in Sri Lanka. India is their home. They should leave.’ The second is the voice of a much older man, a shop owner in Colombo. ‘Robert, what can I say to you about this war? I can say this: heaven forgive all of us. All.’