The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  The mutton went in. Water was added, the pot closed with a lid, the flame reduced. She checked the curry every five minutes, gave it a stir, waited till the oil surfaced. After half an hour, she added fresh silken coconut milk. Many in Sri Lanka used Maggi instant coconut milk powder, but Indra despised it on principle. The powder did the job all right, gave density to the curry and moistened the meat, but it lacked the sweetness of freshly squeezed coconut milk. Extracting it was a labour of love, but so what? This mutton curry—meat on the bone—was the favourite of both mother and son. There could be no shortcuts.

  Rani had gone downstairs to buy mussels, an indulgent addition to the menu. The large fleshy ones were expensive, so she got a handful of the pebble-sized ones. The sisters worked quietly, never having to taste or measure at any point, both led by the memory of their mother’s recipe. As Indra slit the beans and bajji molaga, Rani steamed the mussels. They were fresh, and the purple-ringed shells snapped open in minutes. She sautéed them with the long strips of beans and molaga as well as some spicy chilli and tamarind extract. Indra then cooked some rice and made a quick green salad with chopped mallum leaves, small onions, green chillies, lemon and shredded coconut. Rasam was served every day, so Indra had bottled a thick concentrate of tamarind, pepper, cumin, turmeric and garlic and stored it in the fridge to last a week. Now, to a spoonful of the concentrate, she simply added hot water and curry leaves sputtered with mustard seeds. In a big steel tiffin carrier, Indra packed all this food and poured the rasam and buttermilk into small polyethylene bags.

  The bus to Borella was at 7:10 a.m., so the sisters were out the door by seven. Rani’s son, who had woken up as they were leaving, asked if there was any food left. There is a plate with rice and rasam on the dining table, they said. Next to it was a small bowl of mutton curry for him, without any of the meat.

  After changing buses three times, they reached New Magazine prison at eight. As they entered the gates, a guard checked their belongings and noted their national ID numbers. Then they joined the long queue of relatives, mostly mothers and wives. The prison officials would let in visitors only after eleven thirty, but everyone came early to find a spot in the queue. During the long idle wait, mothers exchanged pleasantries and worries. There were many familiar faces ahead of Indra, women she had been seeing for months now. She had befriended a handful whose sons were in the same cell as Sarva. One of these women, Grace, walked over.

  ‘So, is it meat day or vegetarian day?’ Grace asked. Indra knew Sarva shared his lunch with some of the inmates, including Grace’s son. ‘Mutton,’ Indra replied. ‘Ah, that Sarva won’t share with anyone!’ said Grace with a smile.

  For some time, Grace had come on these visits with her pregnant daughter-in-law, but a month earlier the police had arrested her, too. She was with the TID for interrogation now, and family were not allowed to visit. The daughter-in-law was in her second trimester when she was detained and had already developed some complications. Worried sick, Grace had been struggling to find a lawyer and an NGO to help secure a release as soon as possible on medical grounds. ‘I hear you found Sarva a good lawyer,’ she said to Indra, and asked for the number.

  Indra found Mr Vel’s office number in the palm-sized diary she always had with her. Usually it was in her handbag, but since phones and handbags weren’t allowed inside the prison, she would stuff money and the diary inside her bra. The tattered pages were filled with numbers, names and addresses for every office, commission, activist, lawyer, politician and journalist Indra had met in the year since Sarva had been arrested. It was mostly her own large Tamil letters leaping over the lines, but some people had written their details for her in English as well. Between the pages, several business cards stuck out, collected in compulsive hope. On the central pages, Indra had written the dates and times of every intimidating visit the plainclothes police had made to her house. Ever since she had understood the deniability built into everything the police did to her son, she had started to make lists, note things down, put everything on record. They wouldn’t give her a single document, so she created her own. She had learnt to be meticulous, because as in her kitchen, here too there were no second chances.

  When the gates opened, there was the usual push. The guards sometimes shut the gates midway through lunchtime, citing some security lapse or a breach of discipline. So people shoved to enter the visitors’ hall, only to be held back by shouting guards. It happened every day, and each time, Indra felt ashamed. The people in the queue, in coming to see their loved ones behind bars, shed every ounce of dignity. She saw elderly women sob and throw them selves at the feet of guards half their age, begging them to reopen the gates. Only few like Indra spoke Sinhalese and had homes in Colombo. Most others had come from places as far away as Kytes Island in the north or Batticaloa in the east and were living in cheap lodges or rented houses, just so that they could bring food to their sons or husbands every day.

  In the corridor leading to the visitors’ hall, two guards stood on either side of the queue, each with a bench in front of him. They wielded a steel spoon each. The approaching women had to place their lunchboxes or steel carriers on the bench and display the contents. The guards would then run their spoons through the containers, one by one, checking for banned substances hidden in the curries and rice.

  Indra bristled. Everything inside the lunchboxes had been prepared with care, love and even prayer, and in one moment it was defiled. It made her retch to see the same unwashed spoon going into every box, touching yoghurt to rasam, rice to puttu, dregs and droplets moving from one box to another. On Fridays, Saturdays and Tuesdays, her family was vegetarian because she visited the temple. On those days, as the spoon rose from other people’s meat dishes and plunged into her vegetables, she uttered an apology to God. Sometimes the guards had a mug of water next to them to clean the spoon, but once she saw the oily brown liquid inside the mug, she wondered whether the daily lunchbox was worth all this trouble, and why her son could not just eat prison food.

  She entered the visitors’ hall, and saw Sarva waving behind the wire mesh. A guard took the tiffin box and passed it through a shaft to another guard on the other side of the mesh, who handed the lunch to Sarva. Immediately her son put his nose to it. A grin lit his face. Over the din of other men thanking their respective mothers and wives, sending loud desperate love to their children, Sarva shouted, ‘Amma!’ and gestured as if he were cracking a bone with his teeth and sucking the marrow, the way she had taught him to eat the best part of the mutton.

  There, that is why she spent eight or nine hours of her day to bring him one meal. To give him that memory. To make him do things normally just as he used to, like greedily smelling his lunchbox. He had earlier tried to save some of it for dinner, too, but when it had spoiled one day, he had been unable to forgive himself. Indra believed the smell and taste of home, the sight of his aunt or mother once a day, kept him motivated and hopeful. For her, it was an opportunity to ensure his good health and safety. In the CRP, he had been beaten brutally and she had not known for weeks. That could not happen again.

  It was almost three o’clock when Indra and Rani got back home. They absently ate some leftovers, did the laundry, watched some news and started to prepare for the next day.

  SARVA’S BROTHERS HAD begun to complain that he had taken over their lives. ‘You have every freedom, no one has put you in jail, no one has broken your bones,’ Rani once scolded her son Darshan, who was unemployed after completing a filmmaking course in India. ‘Go fix your life. You have no excuses.’

  The energy and finances of the entire household were focussed on Sarva and his well-being. He consumed so much attention that, on 7 February 2009, when Indra’s daughter-in-law Priya called her to say some plainclothesmen were dragging Indra’s son out and arresting him, she was confused. ‘Inside prison?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re taking Deva, Amma!’ Priya yelled.

  Her other son. Someone was kidnapping her firstborn. Indra rus
hed to Deva’s apartment a few streets up. Three men were pulling him into a van. Priya stood frozen on the street, tears streaming down her face.

  Indra ran to the men. ‘Please don’t do anything to him,’ she cried. ‘He’s just a travel agent. Please!’ One nightmare was unfolding to reveal another. ‘Stop please, tell me what it is!’

  Ignoring her appeals, the men thrust Deva’s head inside, closed the van door, and sped away.

  Upstairs in the apartment, Deva’s children sat dumbfounded on the sofa. The house was a mess, chairs pulled out of place, curtains torn down, shattered glass on the floor. Priya stood over the debris looking crushed. Her right hand gripped the bottom of her bump, and Indra thought her daughter-in-law would go into labour right then and there.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Indra asked. Priya did not reply. She was in a trance, pointing around the house, describing the men doing their search, throwing stuff around. They had taken Deva’s laptop. They knew about Sarva’s detention. They said they suspected Deva’s involvement and wanted to ask him some questions.

  Priya looked straight at Indra. ‘It’s your stupid jailbird son’s fault!’ she said. Her voice was harsh. ‘He is dragging everyone down with him.’

  Indra had been hearing this ever since Deva’s wedding, when she had run off to rescue Sarva from the trouble she rarely spoke about. She wanted to erase the memory of those days, but Deva and his wife would not let it go. They insisted that she only cared for her middle son, an accusation impossible to counter. Shall we weigh my love for each of my sons on a scale, Indra would ask. She had hoped that her sons would look out for each other as she had for them, but over the years they had grown more detached. Indra blamed the rich, demanding daughter-in-law for tearing the family apart. Deva always told his mother that she was being dramatic, but Priya knew exactly what Indra thought of her. Every time Indra asked Deva for money to pay Sarva’s lawyers’ fees or to buy Nuwara Eliya-to-Colombo bus tickets, Priya had raised questions.

  ‘Mother and son together are killing the whole family!’ Priya was shouting now.

  Indra knew how powerless Priya must feel at this moment, but couldn’t she see that as Deva’s mother, she too was upset? Still, Indra began to apologise, saying she was only doing what she was supposed to do with Sarva, she hadn’t anticipated all of this, she loved all her sons equally.

  ‘Enough, stop it! I’ve heard all this a hundred times before, what is the point now?’ Priya said. ‘At least you have done this before. Tell me what we should do now.’

  Together they went to the Wellawatte police station. By this time the cops recognised Indra and knew that one of her sons was in jail under PTA. ‘Hmm, now what happened?’ asked the first policeman she met.

  Indra had a feeling they already knew the answer.

  ‘They have detained my first son.’

  ‘Who has?’ the cop asked. The others were staring.

  ‘The TID, who else?’

  They laughed, just as they had when Sarva was taken. ‘He must be a Kottiya,’ one of them said. ‘His place is in jail.’

  ‘He’s just a travel agent—he has done nothing wrong!’

  A policeman said he saw Deva ‘stylishly walking around’, driving a car, taking millions from people to get them visas for trips abroad. ‘How come he’s so rich?’ They were implying that Deva’s agency was a front for smuggling and other fundraising businesses.

  Indra started to sob. One of them said it was her fault. Raise two terrorists and then cry, he said.

  For the next few days Indra asked her sisters to take lunch to Sarva and threw herself into the search for Deva. She spent the nights at Priya’s house and sent the children to Rani’s. She told Carmel, her youngest, to stay at a friend’s house and not venture out. She was sure he would be next. It would be relentless; she would be running again from prison to police station, lawyer to activist; in the end, nothing she did would ever be enough. She was fighting a force she could not comprehend.

  Indra’s lawyer had his juniors call the TID office. They were told that no Deva was being detained there. But that’s what they always say, insisted Indra. The lawyer suggested that Deva might not have been taken to the TID office yet. As was the practice in such illegal abductions, the victim would be kept in an abandoned house or garage, where interrogation could occur without the restrictions of custodial rules. Indra had come to understand that these unrecorded hours were when the most brutal torture occurred. And because there were no witnesses other than the police, the incident could be entirely denied.

  The country had seen abductions for recruitment or vendetta since the southern insurgency and during the LTTE period. But one didn’t exist today and the other was crumbling in the north; it didn’t stop youths from dying or disappearing. Had she not seen the men dragging Deva away, Indra might have suspected both the TID and LTTE. As it was, the Tamil militants were losing the war in the north, and the state had launched a covert operation to sweep for sympathisers and cadres everywhere else in the country. Since 2006, these kidnappings, especially of Tamil boys, had increased exponentially: the UN had recorded some 10,000 cases but many more went unreported. Indra herself knew many mothers who beat their chests for years over vanished sons. They had seen unknown men take their kids away, but once a police report had been filed, the mothers had discovered that the investigating authority was usually the same TID or army department suspected of the kidnap. These agencies said no one was arrested, no one was tortured, no one was held in custody secretly. A court could only go by evidence, and when that was obliterated, all that was left was a family member demanding truth, investigations and other rights that were a nuisance to a military-backed government prioritising national security concerns above everything else.

  Enforced disappearances, the NGOs called these cases. To Indra, it was simply a fight against a spectre of lies. She imagined that soon her picture, too, would be in the newspapers, with dishevelled hair and a tear-streaked face, holding passport photographs of her sons, showing the world that they existed, that she was not insane.

  Four days after Deva went missing, Priya received a call from an unknown number. The voice asked her to pay 2 million rupees, failing which they would hurt her husband. Indra had not expected this. She instructed Priya not to pay because that would still not guarantee Deva’s safety.

  The lawyers had connected Indra with an NGO that provided protection to civilians under threat of state violence. She told them about Deva, but the activists said they were flooded with such requests and needed more time to do background checks. They suspected that while Deva’s kidnap was intended to look like classic detention, it could also be an attempt at extortion. The demand for money was a dead giveaway, they said, and it had happened to several other aggrieved families.

  Indra felt lost, spinning out of control. She kept the news of Deva’s disappearance from Sarva; she didn’t want to make him feel unduly guilty. If this were indeed extortion, perhaps they should pay? She had no one but Priya to discuss this with, but her daughter-in-law was already shutting her out, saying she didn’t want to have anything to do with Indra or with Sarva’s case.

  On the eighth day, Indra heard that Deva was back home. She rushed to his flat. His forehead was bleeding, his chest black and blue. That morning, Priya had paid 2 million rupees to the kidnappers and they had sent Deva home. Indra was not told any more.

  ‘We’d better do things separately now,’ Deva said, not meeting Indra’s eye. ‘You deal with your son, I’ll deal with my life. We don’t have to all sink in the same boat.’

  12.

  March 2009

  MUGIL WALKED TOWARDS the coast, one child in each arm—a dot in a sea of people inching along laboriously. Heat rose from the earth, burning her bare feet. It was almost two months since she had left PTK. As monsoon turned to summer, the displaced families around her had trebled. Some two million had abandoned the first no-fire zone in Suthanthirapuram after it was shelled by the Sri Lankan military. As
they fled, the army declared a second safe zone on 12 February. This one was on the north-eastern coast, a narrow strip of fourteen square kilometres stretching from Putumutalan down to just before Mullaitivu town. Loudspeakers every few kilometres promised safety and food, as they had for the first no-fire zone. The government announcer, perhaps an army man, said, ‘Go to Putumatalan! There will be no shooting there.’

  Few bought what he was saying. The first safe zone had turned into a battle zone and potential relief had led to further trauma. Yet with nowhere else to go, the swarm—including Mugil and her family—trudged on towards Putumatalan. Mugil was merely following whoever was in front of her. Charting a route wasn’t possible, especially with the little information they had. But even as she stuck to the herd, she could not shake off the thought that she was walking into a trap. She recalled what she saw in Valipunam, at the tip of the first no-fire zone: the burning flesh, the woman crying in grief, the disbelief. The army had killed thousands of innocents, claiming to target the Tigers hiding among them.

  Several cadres had indeed exchanged their uniforms for sarongs and shirts and had mingled with the families. But were they still a threat?

  The man who gave Mugil directions to Valipunam, for instance, was a combatant until three years ago, when he contracted tuberculosis. He wasn’t even armed anymore. Did the army consider him an active Tiger and someone to be targeted? Devayani akka was still in uniform, but she had given up the cause—how would they define her?

  Mugil herself had trained as a teenager, but her longest stint in the LTTE had been as a photographer. Her father printed pamphlets for the militants but had not carried a gun once in his sixty-six years. Her mother had quite possibly fed every hungry cadre who knocked on her door. Their PTK neighbours, two middle-aged doctors, had skipped the basic ten-day arms training compulsory for Vanni people, but they had saved the lives of innumerable fighters. It seemed as if the army now considered non-combatant, sometime supporters, such as Mugil’s parents and their neighbours, as part of the Tigers’ military operation.