The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  A song called Thalaivar sahavillai—the leader is not dead—was all over the Internet. Many Tamils were arrested just for listening to the song. Mugil had received the song on her phone, the powerful words and rousing tune playing over file pictures of Prabakaran. It came with an instruction to ‘forward and delete as soon as you watch’. Another photo became a popular meme: originally published in an Indian Tamil magazine, it showed a laughing Prabakaran watching a report of his death on TV. It was captioned, ‘Far away in an unknown location, he laughs. The leader is not dead! Long Live Tamil! Long Live Eelam!’

  When the inchoate theories grew into rumours that Prabakaran had escaped in a secret tunnel from Mullivaikal to India and that the dead body left behind was a secret double, Mugil was disgusted. ‘They are all talking as if this is a movie!’ she complained to Amuda, who was weak with wheezing and counted on Mugil for all the latest updates.

  Mugil, in turn, relied on Bhuvi and schoolmaster Sanjeevan, whom she called ‘newsreaders’. At every opportunity they were glued to their radio transistors, tuning into the BBC, India’s NDTV, and several Tamil stations. They ignored the frequencies playing music except when they tuned into one during the news bulletin. Their email inboxes and phones were full of articles and reports, and Bhuvi was so well connected to his government colleagues in Vavuniya and Colombo that Mugil was sometimes afraid he might be a spy. On the day he showed her the UN satellite map of the no-fire zone and the craters caused by shelling, however, she banished any such doubt. With Prashant away, Bhuvi easily filled the role of Mugil’s younger brother. She did not share this familial intimacy with Sanjeevan, who taught mathematics in the makeshift school, but he had impressed her with a sullen demeanour that would not tolerate nonsense. He was a useful person to know.

  Weeks passed and the camp expanded. In the wider world, only shreds of information floated around about the last stages of the war, and even less was known in the camps. In fact, different groups—the Sinhalese and Tamils, the English-reading and the vernacular-reading Sri Lankans, the diaspora Tamils and the Tamils still in Sri Lanka—were consuming their news from completely different sources, rendered in their native language and each with its own bias. Among the cacophony of denials and argument between the Sri Lankan government, the UN, and global human rights groups, divergent narratives of the war’s end emerged.

  Bhuvi and Sanjeevan, with their obsessive lapping-up of news, were able to fit some pieces of the puzzle together. In May 2009, by the Nandikadal, in an area only slightly larger than a football field, Prabakaran and some top LTTE leaders had hidden in bunkers holding thousands of civilian Tamils hostage (the UN estimated 5,000, but the number is always debated). They were cornered, with the army to the north and south, the navy on the eastern coast, and the lagoon to the west. After the military captured the rest of the Vanni it encircled Mullivaikal. This third no-fire zone was identified as a Civilian Safe Zone, a technical change of nomenclature that legally allowed the army to attack it. Here, the Ministry of Defence launched what it called a humanitarian rescue mission to evacuate the civilians. Simultaneously, the army rained shells into this tight circle. The Tigers resisted with suicide attacks on the army’s 59th Division in Karayamullivaikal and Wadduval shore. Hundreds of civilians died in the mortar shelling and crossfire, and thousands burst out and left the area by sea, going to islands near Jaffna or to Mullaitivu beaches, from where the army took them to the camps. Meanwhile, a group of Tiger leaders raised white flags in surrender but were shot nonetheless. A team led by Prabakaran’s son Charles was shelled. Finally, Prabakaran, with a number of leaders, including the political wing head, was killed while attempting to escape in an ambulance via Nandikadal. As one of the only surviving Tigers close to Prabakaran, the surrendered Tiger spokesman Daya Master was flown into Mullivaikal by the air force to identify the body. A tag marked 001, a T-56 rifle—the same kind Mugil had lost in Kilinochchi—two pistols, a satellite phone and a canister containing diabetes medicines were found along with the body.

  About 282,000 Tamils from almost five districts were now housed in Manik Farm and a few other camps. Families were separated across camp zones, but the army maintained its ban on travelling between them. On 28 June 2009, Sanjeevan participated in a massive protest against this prohibition; his sister was among those trapped in Mullivaikal and now in Zone 4. Despite Mother having forbidden her, Mugil went along with Sanjeevan to the demonstration. Shouting slogans by the barbed wire between zones 2 and 3 and then again in front of the camp office, she saw her quiet friend yell till he was red in the face. Each time he shook his fists in the air, his anger was renewed and his soft voice went up in pitch. ‘I feel like I’m hitting my head against a wall,’ said Sanjeevan. She, too, felt a tightness in her chest, as if she were suffocating. If Sanjeevan needed to see whether his sister was safe, if he wanted to meet her after months of separation, why should the army stop him? Everyone in the camp was a survivor. They had seen horrors and lost loved ones—some dead, some left behind, some missing. Tears had been shed and replaced with the burn of helplessness and a collective desire for closure.

  After the protest, the rules were mildly relaxed. Zone 4 remained a high-security area, but sometimes, on the army’s whim, relatives would be allowed in. By this time, soldiers were also taking bribes to bend the rules. In mid-July, Sanjeevan was finally able to meet his sister—he had paid 10,000 rupees. Mugil saw him sitting with Bhuvi the next day, wearing his silence like armour. She waited for a week before she asked him how the visit had gone.

  ‘My sister has lost an eye,’ Sanjeevan said. ‘She wishes she had lost her life.’ The Tigers had kept high earthworks around them and shot at the civilians who tried to leave. His sister’s husband and their daughter had not survived. ‘I know we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,’ Sanjeevan said. ‘But if our leader needed to use innocent people to protect himself, then he was dead long before they killed him.’

  14.

  May 2009

  COLOMBO HAD BEEN transformed. The passengers on the bus seemed less burdened, more relaxed, as if it were a holiday. Relief was writ large on their faces. People looked at each other and smiled knowingly. The demons had been conquered. The lurking tension of the everyday was gone. There would be no more suicide bombers on school buses or trains. Airports and markets were safe.

  Indra’s own days were unchanged, most of them spent between home and prison, in a perpetual state of suspension. From the bus on the way to see Sarva one day, she saw some middle-aged men pump the hands of young soldiers stationed at checkpoints that had been there for years. They were thanking them for their service, perhaps also hoping to see less of them in their city from now on.

  Months after the killing of Prabakaran, Indra saw more Sri Lankan flags flutter on storefronts, rooftops and lampposts. Patriotic songs went on sale and were played incessantly on loudspeakers. Pettah market sold toy soldiers dressed in Sri Lankan army uniforms alongside military guns and kids’ clothes in camouflage prints. We love our country, everyone seemed to be saying.

  Sri Lankans had suffered conflict after conflict since independence. The first insurgency occurred in 1971, in response to an economic crisis. Unemployed Sinhalese youth formed a socialist militia called the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or JVP. They led an armed revolt across the rural south and central provinces, but in three weeks the government cracked down, killing around 15,000 insurgents, many of them poor teenagers. By the eighties, militants had emerged in the north, too—young Tamil men and women demanding a separate state. The 1983 riots which Indra had narrowly escaped—when urban Sinhala mobs ran amok, killing more than 3,000—were the beginning of the bloodiest decade in Sri Lankan history.

  By the late eighties, the Tigers were locked in a struggle with the Indian army, which had been deployed to disarm Tamil militant groups. At the same time in the south, the JVP struck again; over two years, the militia and the army butchered thousands of Sinhala Buddhist peasants and young lower-middle-cla
ss men. Every group in the conflict engaged in revenge killing, and youths all over the island were murdered in gruesome ways. It was common to see corpses dumped in rivers and beheaded bodies publicly displayed. Boys were chased in broad daylight and their throats slit. Families found bodies with burning tyres around their necks. Indra’s sister Rani, who lived in Colombo then, had seen three Sinhalese boys hanged from a tree in the city centre. Uncounted young men had disappeared, thousands were murdered and more than 10,000 thrown in jail under terrorism charges. Violence and destruction had become mundane. Even after the Sinhalese militia was subdued in 1989, the Tigers kept up the violence, ruling the north and terrorising the south. The Sinhalese public abhorred them doubly for this.

  The perpetual state of war incrementally polarised the country. Through the bloody years, successive governments fanned ethnic hatred and even the surviving JVP socialist leaders turned their outfit into an ultra-nationalist Sinhala Buddhist political party. Tamil complaints about discrimination and their call for autonomy found no support among most Sinhalese, who had endured checkpoints, economic instability and a culture of fear for too long. So when the LTTE was eliminated in May 2009, the people on the streets responded by embracing an era of hope and rejoicing that an ethnic war had finally been won.

  The festive mood in Colombo made Indra uneasy. She, too, was rid of something that had wrecked her life, but she did not share the elation of those around her. The celebrations were alienating. Somewhere in the texture of the victory was the tense fibre of her defeat. She sensed it among the revellers but also felt it twist inside her. She felt exposed, more vulnerable than before.

  In prison, the women in the visitors’ queue discussed the end of the war. They brought up what they read in the papers or heard from relatives about the thousands killed, about the bullet through Prabakaran’s forehead, about the zoo-like refugee camps. They analysed what it meant for their loved ones inside jail: release, detention, a life sentence. Or did it change nothing? There was much to say, but when guards passed, they changed the subject. It was dangerous to express doubt or question the cost of victory.

  Indra could not even imagine how it would be inside prison. She was told only in August that the Tamil prisoners, during assembly a day after Prabakaran’s death, had attempted to observe two minutes of silence but were admonished and forbidden to do so. They had finally done it a week later at night, in their cells. Indra often advised Sarva to keep a low profile and not agitate the guards. He had a stock reply: my behaviour has nothing to do with how they treat me.

  In August 2009, when the journalist Tissa was charged with terrorism and sentenced to twenty years in jail, Sarva plunged into depression. He had tied his fate to Tissa’s, the prisoner he thought most likely to bust his way out and throw the gates open for the others. When Tissa was sentenced, Sarva was inconsolable. ‘They really spare no one,’ he told Indra.

  Around the same time, the TID accused him of having been a member of the Tigers’ intelligence wing; they claimed he had confessed to his involvement. When Sarva’s trial began, his lawyers argued that he had been tortured in custody and that the TID had no evidence to support their allegations. Indra gave a statement that her son had been forced into the LTTE. Even though she followed nothing of the exchange between judges and lawyers, she went to every hearing in court. She had relinquished nearly all her possessions to pay the lawyers and she only hoped they were making some progress. Showing up was all she could do.

  The intimidation had now reached her doorstep. Every other week, plainclothes policemen and soldiers visited Indra’s Nuwara Eliya tea estate bungalow or her sister’s apartment in Colombo. They searched the house and questioned the family about Sarva’s whereabouts, as if they didn’t know he was in jail. Some of them even followed Indra and her sisters when they took the bus to prison.

  Fear sapped Indra of energy. After a long day at the court once, when she walked to the bus stop, she fainted. When she came to, a young soldier from a guardhouse nearby offered her a bottle of water. She pushed it away, asking if he was trying to poison her. ‘How can I trust you?’ she asked in Sinhala. The soldier looked hurt. He said she was like his mother. Could she think of him as her son? She had sipped the water, but not swallowed the mistrust.

  After the sixteenth visit from the plainclothesmen, Sarva’s lawyers recommended that Indra approach an NGO for help. She met a group called the Nonviolent Peaceforce, an international NGO working to protect civilians from political violence. In just a few days, the NGO confirmed that Indra’s movements were being watched. They asked her to keep them informed about her activities, and offered to help deliver food to Sarva in prison occasionally.

  But Indra continued to visit the prison—it was her way of keeping an eye on her son. If she needed proof that her persistence was worthwhile, she got it on 13 November 2009. It was one of those days when the prison guards would just not open the gate. Relatives had been queuing up since seven in the morning as usual, but noon came and went and still the gates remained shut. No explanation was given. People were losing their patience and hurling abuse. Indra and some others were pleading; one woman even offered a bribe. But the guards would not relent.

  Finally, at three o’clock, the gates opened. Visiting relatives charged inside. Indra dashed to the wire mesh, her eyes scanning the faces for Sarva. She spotted Rooban, who she knew was Sarva’s best friend. She was about to wave when she noticed something odd about his face. His forehead seemed squashed from the top. Then she saw the other prisoners pushing against the wire mesh and bars. Many of their clothes were ripped. She caught a woman pointing at her husband’s nose in horror. He touched it, wincing—it had snapped to the left.

  When she finally saw Sarva, Indra screamed. His shirtsleeves were spotted with blood. He was supporting his lower back with one hand and clutching his abdomen with the other, as if midway through making a wobbly bow. When he looked down, saliva dribbled down his mouth; he seemed unable to close his lips. The visitors were asking what had happened. Indra couldn’t string together a coherent answer from what she heard of the replies.

  Indra called the lawyers’ office as soon as she got home. A few meetings later, it became clear what had happened, why the guards had not opened the gates. After breakfast, when the Tamil prisoners had returned to their cells, Sinhalese prisoners had stormed the Tamil section and the door was locked from the outside. More than 200 Sinhalese inmates wielding clubs, hockey sticks, metal rods and chains attacked about 130 unarmed Tamils. When the Tamil prisoners grabbed the sticks and rocks being used to attack them, a full-scale riot ensued. The sinhalese prisoners stripped and beat a middle-aged man. They stuffed another’s face into the toilet bowl for so long he lost consciousness. Someone almost bludgeoned a partially sighted prisoner to death with a stone. Many inmates banged on the gates, shouting for the guards, begging them to stop the assault. More than an hour after the violence began, prison officers turned up and took the Sinhalese prisoners away without a word. The Tamil prisoners remained behind bars.

  Ten minutes later, a guard called the names of seven Tamil inmates. Five of them, including Sarva, came forward, only to be set upon again by about fifty Sinhalese prisoners in the courtyard. One attacker held Sarva down by his neck and another pounded his lower spine and stomach with a hockey stick. The five Tamils were dragged to the office, and there it was the prison staff’s turn to beat them. ‘You have the balls to create a riot?!’ one baton-wielding officer shouted.

  Outraged, Sarva told his lawyers that he wanted to file a fundamental rights petition accusing the prison authorities of colluding with the Sinhalese inmates to deliberately target Tamil prisoners. Indra, too, wanted the prison officers to be punished, but could not help feeling that a petition would be futile. She knew that Sarva had learnt from Tissa that he had the right to file such a complaint. She didn’t want to discourage her son, but a petition hadn’t protected a VIP prisoner like Tissa. Any legal attacks mother and son launched would o
nly be arrow after arrow loosed against a bulldozer.

  15.

  September 2009

  WITH THE RAINS, a bloodless battle began. August flooded the refugee camp with sludge and disease. Tents in low-lying areas of Zone 2 billowed in the gush of dirty rainwater and sewage.

  By September, Father was bedridden with diarrhoea. He lay on a straw mat in the tent, half-conscious, exhausted. The frequent visits to the toilet were agonising; he had to lean on someone and drag himself there. Mugil accompanied him until the day he couldn’t hold it in and went all over himself. Embarrassed, he had fallen on his knees, held his face, and sobbed as Mugil had never seen. Now Bhuvi or Sanjeevan took him or, if they weren’t around, Mother did, on a rusty wheelbarrow she had smuggled in by bribing the soldier Krishan with 500 rupees. More often than not, Father didn’t last until the latrine area, and he burst into tears.

  Mother, on the other hand, had hardened. She was always scolding Father, asking why he waited until the very last minute before saying he had to go. All the caretaking expected of her had calcified into a loveless efficiency. She snorted, spat and complained, walking away as if on cue when one of the children asked for food or water. In the muggy afternoons, when activity dulled in the camp and people rested, she sat outside their tent, hugging her knees, still and unmoving, not even waving away the flies from her face.