by Rohini Mohan
When John recounted this story, Indra realised that he was a plantation Tamil. She was a Jaffna Tamil, a community that had settled in Sri Lanka centuries ago, and the difference disturbed her. The boy she loved was a labourer. She thought plantation Tamils a poor, uneducated, uncultured lot. But the heroines in Tamil movies loved the handsome, good-hearted labourers, didn’t they? And whatever their status, John’s father was a doctor. That counted as a rise in class. But could her family accept him, his background? Perhaps she herself couldn’t. She continued to meet the tall boy with downcast eyes, though with growing trepidation.
After a few more clandestine meetings, however, Indra unearthed a golden nugget from John’s history. His mother belonged to the high-caste Vellalar subcommunity of Jaffna Tamils. This freed Indra to imagine a marriage between them, it convinced her disapproving father, and it allowed their differences to—at least temporarily—melt away.
Even after their wedding, John continued to talk about his ancestors as indentured labourers, while Indra focussed on his high-caste mother and doctor father. It was as if they were speaking of two different families. So when Sarva played with the children of the tea pickers and Indra forbade him, John seethed but rarely argued. It had always been this way.
In the spirit of his birth sign, Sarva gave Indra several other things to worry about, too: hiding in the tea bushes, eating from the servant’s plate, going into the backyard to look for snakes—he was always doing what he was told not to do. Indra saw a quiet sureness in his actions, rather than defiance. He never sought permission or approval. Indra always rushed to his rescue, partly because she had never shaken off the feeling of dread that had entered her bones when she left Negombo.
That shiver of premonition meant that she was always expecting an imminent catastrophe. And this seemed to manifest itself in Sarva’s behaviour. He ate poorly and had stomach upsets. His asthma attacks began to hit at midnight. Indra became surer than ever that these were omens of what was to come.
LATE ONE JULY morning in 1983, a few days after she returned from Negombo, Indra was alone at home in Nuwara Eliya with baby Sarva. John was in Hatton and would return later that week. As she was feeding the child, she heard a commotion down below, near the tea factory. She peeped out her door and heard a few workers shout that they’d seen four busloads of thugs driving towards the plantation. ‘They’re coming!’ they screamed.
It was finally happening. Indra had feared this ever since she had left her brother’s house. The feeling had been unshakable, especially when her nights were filled with flashes of the ugliness she had witnessed in Negombo.
She had spoken to no one about the sight of her brother being dragged out of his shop by sweating Sinhalese boys in T-shirts. They had stripped him naked and beaten him with cricket bats. They burned his shop to the ground and strewed the stock on the road. Another mob broke into the house, too, but to Indra’s surprise, the Sinhalese neighbours smuggled her family and her brother’s out the back door in time to escape.
In the four days the neighbours helped to hide her family, they had exchanged few words. Soft baila from the local radio filled their silences, its good-natured thump-thumpity-thump at odds with the menace on the streets. At meals and before going to sleep, Indra’s family tuned into the news on BBC Ceylon. It said the Sinhalese mobs were furious about Tamil politicians demanding that a separate nation be carved out from Sri Lanka. Some other accounts said the mobs wanted revenge for the ambush of thirteen army soldiers by the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who were in turn responding to the Sinhalese police’s burning of the revered Jaffna Tamil library two years earlier.
The reports were guarded, and the reasons given for the violence seemed speculative. A week earlier, the government banned the press from reporting Tamil militant activities. So Indra and her family had not heard about the immediate reasons for this bloodlust. The Tigers’ number two, Seelan, had been killed in Meesalai in Jaffna in a shoot-out with the army. To avenge this, some of the other top leaders had detonated a powerful mine, killing the thirteen soldiers. Eight of the soldiers were under twenty years old.
The ping-pong of murder and counter-attacks in the north turned into mass killings in Colombo. The mobs targeted Tamils who lived among the Sinhalese: on Monday, they cornered and attacked the city-dwellers in Borella and Wellawatte, nestled between the sea and Colombo’s busiest bazaars; on Tuesday, it was Kandy, where a deputy inspector general spotted goons with short army crew cuts; on Wednesday, it was Badulla and Negombo, where Sinhalese men burned and beat fishermen and traders; Passara on Thursday. The course of the violence, it seemed, was a wave emanating from Colombo.
The radio anchors predicted that President Jayawardene would order a curfew and that any ruffians found loitering in the streets would be arrested. As the families huddled around the transistor radio, Indra’s brother said he wished the curfew would be declared soon. His Sinhala friend clucked. ‘Are you crazy?’ he asked. ‘Then you’ll stay inside your house and these madmen on the street will know exactly where to find you.’
Indra shivered. She had not considered this possibility. How could everything turn against them like this? If people had seen this coming, why had they allowed the soldiers’ dead bodies to be brought into Colombo? The news said the police had protected Tamils in some places, like in Kurunegala, where an inspector drove away most of the mobs. But overall, the police were mute spectators, even collaborators.
The government was setting up refugee camps for Tamils on the run. Her brother suggested they go there, but his Sinhalese neighbour’s wife would have none of it. ‘Let’s wait till it stops fully,’ she said. So for four days they stayed in the neighbour’s house, eating rice and week-old sambol twice a day. The women took turns putting the children to sleep and washing their soiled clothes. They didn’t talk much.
The men drank arrack as if it were their lifeblood, but without their usual banter about how this MP stole that many lakhs and that councillor got this or that person transferred to get his son-in-law a job. Political discussion felt trite at a time like this, when its effects hit so unnervingly close. Red-eyed from sleeplessness and drunkenness, the men cut sorry figures: tragic characters whose gloom could change nothing.
On the day news anchors began to analyse the massacre in the past tense and denials started to pour in from government departments, Indra’s brother and wife left with their children for the refugee camp in Colombo. They planned to go from there to Jaffna, where all the Tamils seemed to be fleeing to be among their own. Rather than joining them, Indra had taken her sons on an overcrowded bus to Nuwara Eliya. When she arrived, John maintained a relieved silence; he had listened to the radio and there were, after all, police everywhere. Perhaps he knew. Beyond mentioning her brother’s injuries, Indra couldn’t bring herself to talk about it either.
A few days later in Nuwara Eliya, as Indra heard the approach of the mob, she realised she had not fled far enough: the violence had reached the hills. There was mayhem in the line houses where the workers stayed. As Indra was feeding Sarva breakfast, she heard two sounds: the mob howling their intention to ‘cut up the Tamil dogs’ and the plantation workers shouting at her to ‘Get away from here! Get lost!’
Neither said why, but Indra understood. Earlier, someone had pleaded for her to leave, saying that if she, a Jaffna Tamil, stayed, they would all be attacked. They had asked her to go up to Tank Hill nearby, but Indra knew she would not survive there with an infant. The Sinhalese owner had given her four minders: one Sinhalese and three plantation Tamils. They were meant to protect her, but when the moment came, they were nowhere to be found.
As soon as she heard the ‘get lost’, Indra started to run.
She ran to the Sinhalese owner’s house for refuge, but he told her to save herself, and shut the door in her face. Indra froze for a second, then ran towards the estate. She tried to climb a tree but couldn’t get a handhold.
She heard the buses screech
to a halt at the gates. Between the tea shrubs, she put baby Sarva on the ground and lay on top of him, holding her torso up slightly, lizard-like, with one arm. With her free hand, she covered his mouth.
The ground was soggy. Something crawled between her toes. Above, she heard horrific screams, dull whacks and thuds. Women sobbing, begging. A steel utensil clanged and rolled down the steep steps of the line-house colony for what felt like a whole minute. She crouched lower.
Alongside the northern Tamils, the ones the Sinhalese were really pursuing, plantation Tamils were attacked. These workers—poor and largely illiterate, underpaid—were neither the Tamils the LTTE fought for then and claimed to represent nor the ones scholarly Tamil politicians demanded a place for in Parliament.
By noon, a deathly silence had descended over the estate. Gingerly, Indra lifted her head. One of her bodyguards, a young Tamil worker, was lying a hundred metres away, slashed and stabbed. In Indra’s still arms, Sarva had fallen asleep.
AS AN ADULT, all Sarva knew of that day in July 1983 was that he had slept through the bloodiest anti-Tamil pogrom, which killed 3,000 people and led hundreds of thousands of Tamil families to flee the country. Even decades later, ‘God saved me,’ was all his mother wanted to say about that day. She never told him that it was the loneliest moment of her life.
Twenty-five years later, when Sarva disappeared, Indra knew that nothing had changed. Her husband was immobile with worry; her eldest son would help only in his spare time, and her sisters waxed and waned in their support. They all wallowed in the paralysis of grief. Indra was not shy about berating them for it, but this didn’t change how alone she felt. With just as little warning, Indra was now once again a petrified mother trying to save her baby from an unseen horror.
Five days after Sarva’s disappearance, a man telephoned Indra to say in fluent Tamil that he had found her son. When the caller came to see her a few days later, Indra exploded with inappropriate laughter. The Tamil-speaking man was the whitest American she had ever seen.
3.
October 2008
LOOKING DOWN FROM the mango tree into the abandoned orchard, Mugil cursed herself for having lost her T-56 assault rifle. She hadn’t fired it in years; who knew if it still worked, but it gave her an extra swagger: every second step, her hip swung to the left to avoid hitting the rifle slung over her right shoulder. She liked to refer to it as her crab walk.
The T-56, stolen from a burning Sri Lankan army camp in Mullaitivu in 1998, was a souvenir from Mugil’s first successful operation in the Tamil Tigers. She was eighteen then, the second-in-command in one of the squadrons. She had been part of a great triumph and had made sure every one of the nine girls she led had come back alive. They had looted everything from the camp complex, taking every item except the Sinhalese books and the pornographic magazines in the soldiers’ quarters. They had then cleared the way for the seized army tanks and bulldozers to be driven into Tiger territory. The incredible ambush had made Annan Prabakaran, the supreme leader, call her name out during a formal celebration and shake her hand in front of other combatants; he praised her for being the kind of woman the Tamil homeland needed.
And now she had gone and lost the rifle to the same army, to Sinhalese boys who looked half her age. Boys she wanted to shoot as she watched them rip the camouflage shirts off five Tiger girls down below. Mugil hoped someone would intervene. But below her only a smouldering garden shed stood mute witness. Bullet holes pocked the mango orchard that had seemed like such a safe hideout just half an hour ago. When the soldiers had arrived, she had clambered up a tree. Now the foliage obstructed Mugil’s view of the other girls below her, but she could hear their voices as clearly as shrieking alarms.
The girls were screaming in Tamil, except for one, who was repeating the word epa like a loud and shrill chant. That was not how the Sinhala word was usually used, but it was an expression Mugil had often heard Sinhalese policemen and the army lob at civilians. Epa! when they didn’t want you to sell apples by the road in Jaffna. Epa! when you tried to drive on at the checkpoint at Vavuniya. Epa! Don’t! The girl’s voice seemed to ring through all of Kilinochchi. But through the shelling, bombing and chorus of wailing in the forest, no one would hear. Mugil had grown up with war since she was a teenager, but this moment was unlike anything she had experienced before. This latest phase in the conflict had begun two years ago, when the Tigers had forcefully closed the sluice gates of the Mavil Aru waterway on the east coast, cutting off the water supply to some 15,000 villages. In response, the Sri Lankan air force had attacked the Tiger bases. At the time, Mugil had assumed it to be just another stage in the twenty-six-year-long cycle of attacks and counter-attacks between the Sinhalese armed forces and the Tamil Tigers. She had gone about her life unbothered, until August 2008, when the LTTE had sent her to the field after almost a decade of injury-induced retirement. Now, the entire might of the Sri Lankan armed forces, led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, was engaged with the LTTE across the north and the east. From the unprecedented brutality around her, one thing was clear: the army wasn’t just attacking the military might of the LTTE. It was laying siege to the idea of the Tamil homeland, the very inspiration behind the Tigers’ leadership.
MUGIL’S FATHER HAD always said that in Sri Lanka there were some districts where the army or government could not hurt even a Tamil fly: Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, part of Mannar, north Vavuniya, and southern Jaffna—collectively the Vanni. It was the core of the area separatists marked out as Eelam, the separate Tamil homeland that was the dream of most Tamils and the sworn goal of the Tigers. Tamils came to these places to escape the army on the eastern and northern coasts, or the Sinhalese mobs rioting in Colombo and Nuwara Eliya. Here, they hoped, the armed Tamils would shield them from the armed Sinhalese. Her father would say this with dramatic emphasis, bringing his right index finger and thumb together with a tiny gap that represented the Vanni’s Tamil fly protected by the Tigers.
As a teen forced to move to the Vanni, Mugil had suspected that this was her father’s way of talking up their thatched hut and searing-hot village, named Puthukudiyirippu, or new settlement. She was twelve when they moved there, leaving their harbour-view house in breezy Point Pedro after shrapnel started flying in through the windows. They had left in a rush, but since her mother had packed only two sets of clothes for each of them, Mugil had assumed they would return soon. As they fled, she had seen her first bomb crater: a giant elephant footprint on their street.
They’d taken a shaky crowded boat from across the Kilali lagoon and disembarked at Kilinochchi, where they’d stayed with relatives. Then all of them, including the relatives, had walked for two days to Puthukudiyirippu. It was just a shrubby jungle then, with hundreds of people flowing in like an infestation of ants.
The heat had been unbearable. Mugil was not considered fair-skinned unless compared with her sisters, but the harsh Vanni sun seemed to take that as a challenge. She watched her skin gradually burn to an even coffee char, the hair on her legs grow thicker, and the soil coat her toenails with a permanent shade of rust. Even before she had fully comprehended the place, it had entered her skin and made her one of its own. Like most others who thronged the town then, Mugil’s family never left. PTK, as they called it, became home.
Life in the Vanni was an odd combination of freedom and scarcity. They had government post offices and public phones, but except for some Tiger officials, no one had personal satellite or radio telephones. People had plenty of access to food, but because cattle herding was sometimes a border security issue between the Tiger- and government-controlled areas, milk was generally available only in powder form. Many families had bicycles and some had motorbikes, but since fuel was heavily rationed, they often rigged the latter to run on kerosene.
The Tigers—alternatively called the Eelam Movement—became the biggest employers in the region, hiring people for their courts, cooperative societies, banks, vegetable farms, orchards and teak plantations, to work in pu
blishing, filmmaking and engineering, to fish and to drive. If you were a cadre, the movement took care of everything, from your underwear to your housing, and provided for your family if you died in battle. People who established their own shops or garages paid sales taxes to the movement. The Sri Lankan government still ran the schools, registrars, hospitals and ration shops, and these somehow coexisted with the Eelam institutions.
The movement leaders wanted a Tamil homeland in which no one would starve, beg or steal. Thieves were rare in the Vanni, not only because people had few possessions but also because a burglar nabbed by the Tigers’ blue-uniformed police would get a public flogging. Within a few months of moving to PTK, Mugil saw a man paraded through the streets: he wore a garland of soiled shoes and slippers, was naked except for briefs, and his head was shorn so badly it was covered in bloody nicks. He’d been caught stealing jewellery from a house. Mugil wasn’t allowed to join the crowd that followed the shamefaced man, but her brother and father went. At dinner that night, they reported seeing the burglar tied to a lamppost and whipped with a belt. On the way to school the next day, Mugil took a detour to see the scene for herself. The man’s body slumped from the lamppost; he had been beaten to death. A woman, perhaps his mother, sat at his feet, staring blankly into the distance. Mugil had run home crying. When she described what she had seen, her mother said, ‘But you are never going to face this situation. No, Mugil? That treatment is only for the bad guys.’
The Tigers controlled everything from discipline to food supply to mobility; but unlike Colombo residents who lived in dread of suicide bombs and air raids, most Vanni Tamils did not consider the militants a presence to fear in the initial years of the movement. Then, the Vanni’s people revelled in their relative freedom, and relished promises of more to come. In contrast to the Sinhalese-dominated south, where language parity was the law but not the practice, here everyone on the streets and in the offices spoke, read and wrote Tamil. Vanni Tamils felt no language-based anxiety about going to the police, politicians or government agencies; miscommunication and discrimination were not everyday experiences as they were for Tamils living in the rest of the island. Only a handful here even spoke Sinhala, the national language and the only official one until 1987. Few had even met a Sinhalese person other than the occasional government official.