by Rohini Mohan
There were still thousands who stayed in the Tiger-held areas—from injury, allegiance to their leaders or fear. Criticism of the LTTE was not easy for most; loyalty was not just a generations-old habit but also considered a duty in guerrilla war. Some were sure the Tigers would have a reasonable explanation for what seemed like utter betrayal. Mugil heard it said over and over again: ‘They must have a strategy they have kept secret from us. We must stick with them.’
Mugil’s family was clear on one thing: they could not bring themselves to trust the army, especially after the hospital bombing. Going to the no-fire zone, they felt, was a sure way to die at the enemy’s hands. Mugil was also certain the young soldiers would not spare her and Amuda.
Having a member of the family serving in the movement made leaving doubly difficult. Divyan had to return to duty that night and didn’t want his family to act without him. ‘Stay in the bunker,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to get a driving assignment at Vattapalai.’ He would get in touch with Prashant, too, and let him know that’s where they would go next. ‘Give me a few days.’
FOR PEOPLE IN PTK, days and nights passed in phases of cowering from rain or missiles, foraging for food and repairing bunkers—actions to which there was no other purpose than to prolong survival. More than a month had passed since Kilinochchi was captured, and taking shelter was becoming dreary. Dulled by the routine and tired of crouching underground, people began to test their limits. In dry afternoons, they walked far from their bunkers to stretch their legs, stopping to chat with acquaintances and leisurely going about life-threatening tasks.
Both rumours and facts were exchanged as bunker room vetti pechu, or idle talk. Telephone lines were down and satellite phones were rarely available; gossip was the primary source of information. People gleaned lessons from new arrivals who told horrific tales from other places and of the miracle of their escape. They hung on the words of barefoot analysts conversant in military strategy, seeking to understand the impact of losses and wins. If a long-range missile hit a school at quarter to two in the afternoon, how long before another was launched? If a pellet from a cluster bomb lodged itself in your leg, why would amputation be the only option?
Children ran around near the sandbags, playing hide and seek, hopscotch and war games, shooting each other with twigs. A Catholic pastor who was among them held daily prayers for the Christians; many Hindus attended for the solace of swaying in group prayer and for the comforting sound of the pastor’s beautifully crafted words.
At one such gathering, Amuda met a schoolmate who, since her wedding, had moved to Vadduvakal, near Mullaitivu town. This woman had returned to PTK a day earlier, having left Mullaitivu when it fell to the Sri Lankan army. She described how her family had tried to take a boat out of Mullaitivu and into Vavuniya or Jaffna. But the missiles had come from the sea, too, killing her teenage son, parents-in-law, and most of the twenty-odd people on the boat.
Amuda was shaken. She related this to Mugil back at the bunker: ‘What I can’t believe is that Mullaitivu has fallen to the army, and we find out only now, after ten days! Which world are we in? Next, our mother will die, and we won’t know the date on which it happened.’ It was perhaps an idle comment but it alarmed Mugil. How could chronology be possible when minutes became weeks in the darkness of bunkers and a day was lost in a moment’s explosion? She had to regain her grip on time. She tore a long strip from her mother’s already ripped sari and turned it into her version of a tally bar. Beginning with 25 January, the day Mullaitivu fell, she tied one knot for every sunset. A count of every day they survived.
But the knots would not record how hard it was to make it through every single day. Death and serious injury were becoming more familiar, but the most dreaded killer was hunger. Mugil hated its slow onset and the maddening paralysis it brought. Malnourished children and famished adults shrivelled. To put out the burning in their stomachs, they made rash decisions and took risks. They fought over morsels, dove into burning jungles and rushed frantically to food supply lines, wherever they were.
When Mugil heard that some officials from the government agent’s office were distributing paruppu, salt and pumpkins in an Iranpalai school, she spent half a day crossing the dangerous A35 highway to get there. As she stood in the food queue, she scanned the hands of those coming back from the counter. Each carried a small pyramid of yellow pumpkin spotted with brown fungus. A newspaper packet held 250 grams of pale kadala paruppu—one look and she knew it would be hard as pebbles. The precious salt was packed in pages of used school notebooks, like thumb-sized sachets of holy ash from a temple. She had expected much more; she had brought an aluminium bucket.
‘Come on, give us coconuts!’ yelled a man from the queue, a futile demand that came at least once in every food line. From behind him, a woman’s assertive voice heckled the distributors. ‘You should have told us it was rotten Indian rations; we wouldn’t have bothered to come!’ she shouted. That won a few tired laughs. The heckler then asked sarcastically if it hadn’t occurred to the government agent to send drinking water. ‘Or maybe you expect us to drink the seawater!’ More nervous laughter.
Mugil watched as the woman marched past her to the front of the queue and grabbed a few food packets. No one protested; the woman wore pants and a shirt. As she walked back, she lifted the rations for everyone to see. ‘It’s running out!’ she said cruelly. Several people broke the line to rush to the counter. That’s when Mugil recognised the heckler’s cocky grin and intimidating broad shoulders. The woman had been one of her first unit commanders.
‘Devayani akka!’ Mugil called out.
The woman turned around. ‘Selvi!’ she shouted, using Mugil’s old nom de guerre. She pulled her former protégé out of the queue and hugged her. ‘Sugama irukkeerhala? Is your family well?’ she asked. The greeting had survived their region’s many battles; its evocation of family, health and happiness reinforced what they held most dear.
‘Only as well as everybody else,’ Mugil said.
‘Where is that Divyan? Aren’t all of you together?’
‘Most of us. Divyan is on duty. Prashant—I don’t know where he is,’ Mugil said. Did Devayani akka have a way to find out? Did she still have a satellite phone?
‘No, I don’t have my phone. Anyway I’m not waiting for orders anymore. I’m done.’
Mugil was taken aback by her senior’s candour. ‘Won’t the main office come after you?’
Devayani akka responded with a hollow laugh. ‘Who will they kill if I’m dead?’ she asked. Then, pulling Mugil away from the queue, she lowered her voice. ‘We’re crumbling, Selvi, we’re fighting with each other about what to do next.’ The commander admitted that the Tigers’ weapons were fast running out and that she had let some young recruits escape when she was put in charge of them. She railed against the LTTE political wing for recruiting ‘just anybody off the street, by giving them two slaps’. Her niece was killed at the front, she said, and so was her brother. She was weary of the arguments among the leaders, their collapsing unity. ‘I’m still in uniform,’ she said. ‘But that’s just for show.’
Mugil listened to Devayani akka, but half her attention was on the queue. She was annoyed at having lost her place. So when the commander paused, Mugil seized the opportunity. ‘Can I ask you something? Where do you think Prashant might be?’
Devayani akka looked confused, so Mugil continued. ‘You remember him? Prashant? My little brother? The eager boy? He was in the bomb-making unit, not on the front lines. I’m afraid he won’t survive all this.’
The commander seemed to pull herself together. She said that just a week earlier she had heard a rumour that many Tiger boys had been sent to an area near Valipunam, which had been a no-fire zone since late January. While one section of the LTTE had tried to stop the masses from relocating, some other leaders sent social workers, engineering department boys and Tiger doctors there to help set up tents, carry luggage or treat the wounded. She suggested that Mugil’s br
other had perhaps also been sent there. ‘I’m not sure, okay? It’s what I’ve heard,’ she said.
Mugil began to thank Devayani akka when the latter slipped the food packets into Mugil’s bucket. ‘You know how the Sinhalese chaps are trying to win, right?’ she whispered. ‘By starving all of us. That way, they won’t have to waste ammunition.’ She patted Mugil’s stomach. ‘You beat their game and eat as much as possible, okay?’
‘You?’ Mugil asked, but Devayani akka was already walking back to the counter.
Late that evening in PTK, the family mulled over Devayani akka’s tip-off about Prashant. Father didn’t entirely believe it; he had decided from Mugil’s narration of events that the former commander had all but gone cuckoo. But it was more information than they had had in weeks, and Valipunam didn’t seem too far off. Mugil could make a quick trip there to search for her brother.
The decision made, they began to cook their first meal in two days, and Mugil opened the tiny sachet. Inside was not salt but the crushed dust of a few dried fish, salted by the sea air.
MUGIL LEFT FOR Valipunam before dawn, before Tamizh could wake up and throw a fit. He was too attached now, always wanting to be carried, refusing to leave her hip. Maran was lying half awake, and when she stepped over him in the bunker, he mumbled deliriously that he wanted some water. ‘Not one glass, I want a full bottle, amma.’ She shushed him.
Valipunam was across the highway, which the army patrolled. On the other side, in the section of the no-fire zone close to the A35, the Tigers were hiding in bunkers and firing at passing army trucks and tankers. She zigzagged across the road, using the vehicles as cover, and walked through the jungle and beyond to the cleared areas, in the opposite direction to the mass of people heading for safety.
As she approached Valipunam, the smell of burnt flesh made her retch. An eerie silence pressed on her ears. The houses were abandoned, their roofs blown off, and the palmyra trees were decapitated. Tents smoked. Hastily dug and discarded bunkers were collapsing wetly into themselves. She tried to find her way to the middle school, which the Red Cross had converted into a temporary hospital for civilians. Perhaps Prashant was there, helping.
The place looked nothing like she remembered. The once lush paddy fields were barren. Plastic bags, bits of clothing, toothbrushes, combs, toys and utensils stuck out from the soil, household items overtaking the land like weeds. Through the thick smoke, in the distance, she saw a woman rocking on her knees, her hands on a small boy’s body. Her shrill oppari pierced the air.
Swollen bodies lay in the streams of rainwater. A few hundred metres away, some boys were straightening the corpses, fixing the clothes of dead girls, moving the bodies away from the centre of the road, where they could get run over by tankers or jeeps. Mugil guessed they were workers from the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation, or TRO, a local NGO attached to the Tigers. This was their way of preserving the dignity of the dead.
By the looks of it, Valipunam, touted as a no-fire zone, had been hit by repeated air raids. Mugil hoped she wouldn’t find her brother here. But if not here, where could he be? She was unable to process the sights and smells. Fallen trees were still smouldering. The shelling was past, but the burning present. She held her hand to her nose and mouth. Below her, the body of a young man, face down in a culvert, bobbed slightly. His camouflage shirt was torn and his sarong ballooned. In panic, Mugil took a step closer and turned the body on its back. The boy’s thin chest hair was clogged with blood, grass and mud. Below it, where his stomach should have been, was a large cavity that was still bleeding. It was only then that she looked at the boy’s face. Just a second ago, she could have sworn it was Prashant.
She turned around and ran.
It took a day for Mugil to reach her family. They were preparing to leave for Matalan. Divyan had apparently sent word that he would meet them on the way there. He still couldn’t trace Prashant but assured them he would soon.
‘We told him you’ve gone to look for your brother,’ Mother said.
Mugil said she had been unable to find her way to Valipunam.
‘Really?’ Mother asked incredulously. ‘You took a whole day to get lost?’
‘Be glad that at least she came back alive,’ Father mumbled.
As they packed small bags, mostly with food rations and firewood, Father put his arm around Mugil’s shoulder. ‘I meant to ask you … Do you have a skirt, Mugil?’
Mugil knew what he meant. She was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a long blouse. She was dressed like a Tiger.
‘No skirt,’ she said. ‘But I will find something else.’ She undid an old housecoat that Amuda had wrapped around some vessels and pulled it on. The longish housecoat not only hid her sinewy calves and scars but also changed who she was in the eyes of the world. In a series of impulses, she had gradually shed the façade—the gun, the cyanide, the tiger tooth and now the uniform. Each act had taken only a few seconds, but eventually the effect was like shedding her skin. She was setting aside the only life she had known since she was a teenager.
As the family left their bunker, their neighbours stared at Mugil. After fifteen years, the proud female cadre among them had changed into civilian clothes. The men and women Mugil had grown up with seemed to judge her, their eyes smiling and their lips curling in vindication at her eventual hypocrisy. Here is that woman, their eyes seemed to say, that great combatant who just a few years ago hunted down traitors and deserters, and now a deserter herself. Here is the limping combatant who was so disgusted with her sister for refusing to join the Tigers. Where are her morals now?
Nothing in the Vanni was valued quite like self-sacrifice. In this regard, Divyan and Mugil had been role models for the youngsters at every opportunity. They had always walked a few steps above the ground. She had visited her neighbours’ homes and lectured their sons and daughters, speaking of the virtues of serving Annan, selling them the dream of Eelam before they ever thought about engineering, teaching or accounting. ‘Take part in the making of a better tomorrow’—how many times must Mugil have uttered those words to wide-eyed teenagers? Of course the others would avenge themselves with their stares in this moment.
‘Ignore them,’ her father said, sensing her shame. ‘This is no time for self-pity.’ He thrust a coughing Tamizh into her hands. ‘Look at his face every time you feel some doubt. Now it is all about family, that’s all.’
11.
February 2009
INDRA HAD WOKEN up before everybody else. She made herself some black tea with three spoonfuls of sugar. She opened the balcony door to let in some cool air. Colombo was hot even at sunrise, even in February. Her sister Rani was still in bed. She had better wake up soon. If they wanted to get the food to Sarva by lunchtime, they had to leave for the prison in two hours.
She downed her tea, soaked some rice in a pot of water, and put some paruppu in the pressure cooker. She made another cup of tea, covered it with a saucer and got ready for a shower. As she passed the bedroom, she pulled Rani’s toes, which stuck out from under the blanket.
By the time Indra was out of the bathroom, Rani was sitting on the balcony sipping her tea. ‘Shall we take some mussels, too? I heard the fish vendor call from the street.’
‘Good idea. Remind me to make some buttermilk as well.’
Rani asked if Indra had slept well. ‘Just take those sleeping pills, akka.’ Rani said. ‘I don’t know why you won’t.’
Indra had spent the previous day at the lawyer’s office and then visited several pawnbrokers to see how much they would lend against her gold bangles. She had returned exhausted and gone straight to bed but had tossed and turned till dawn. The sleeping pills would have helped, but she felt somewhat guilty taking them. How could a mother sleep soundly when her son was still in prison, lying on a hard floor every night? ‘I got a few hours, it should do,’ she said feebly. In the puja corner, she lit an oil lamp and smeared some holy ash on her forehead. These days she cooked only after a bath and a prayer, p
ious habits of her own mother that Indra believed would bring good luck to her family.
Sarva’s lunch menu had been decided the previous evening: mutton curry, mallum, rasam and rice. Rani had prepared the mutton before she went to sleep. She had roasted and ground coriander, cumin and dried red chillies and massaged the mixture into the mutton. She added salt, turmeric, cinnamon powder and crushed cardamom pods, as well as tomato puree to cut through the fat. The meat had been marinating in the fridge all night.
In the morning, Indra took over. She added oil to a clay pot—Sarva could always tell when she cooked meat in this vessel, he said he smelled its earthiness. She threw in chopped onions and garlic, ginger for the zing, and slit green chillies for heat. She roughly tore—never cut—curry leaves and pandan leaves and they hopped in the oil. Immediately the aroma sharpened, and she knew the curry would be perfect.
Her mother had taught her cooking like a science—flip the dosai when brown, cut the meat in the direction of the muscle, lift the ladle against light to see if it is steaming, add the iron-packed spinach water to the lentils, slam the garlic cloves flat and pull the skin—and Indra had fortified it with her own philosophy. To her, there were no shortcuts and no do-overs; the fate of a dish was determined right at the beginning, when the onions were sliced and the first ingredients chosen. If something was forgotten then or a step was missed, nothing could save the dish in the end. Some cooks might think clever substitutes or new techniques could fix anything, but not Indra. If the curry was not sour enough, you couldn’t add more tamarind bit by bit; you had to accept that you made a mediocre curry that day. Once you burned the oil, everything you put in it would reek of your mistake. She was aware of the possibility for error and she focussed with the intensity of a trapeze artist to avoid it.