The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  In truth, Sarva had not been entirely passive during all that time spent in churches. Though his father’s Catholicism had made little impression on him as a child, now, with nothing else to do, he gave religion a shot. One just had to go through the motions, he decided, the deliberate, slow string of ritualistic actions. The soft one-knee genuflection, the loud amen, the mumbled amen, the choral amen, the sign of the cross over one’s chest, the sitting and standing for choir, the saying of grace before a meal, the unfussy silent use of the fork and spoon—he wanted to master it all and fit in.

  Sometimes, out of boredom and also gratitude, he attended daily mass. On Sunday, it pleased him to see well-dressed families occupying the pews sway to the choir, nod to familiar faces, and mumble parts of the prayer they had memorised. Afterwards, they would elbow each other, lining up for juice and snacks. People left their shoes outside, as he would do in a temple; he had never noticed this before. They were quieter than visitors to Hindu temples, and he wondered how devotion could be so muted. He liked worship to leave him buzzing, to overwhelm his senses and to leave its camphor smell on his clothes.

  When he said this to a young priest in Badulla, the man laughed: ‘You just want to break coconuts and scramble to get a piece!’

  Sarva agreed. ‘There is joy in getting even half a banana from the temple priest!’

  ‘Okay, okay. But let me see a Hindu temple putting up a fugitive like you.’

  It was only a joke, but to Sarva it rang true. He saw many broken people seeking shelter at these churches. Journalists and aid workers would stay the night, and social workers delivered documents, food and money intended for people stranded in zones cordoned off by the army. It was almost self-destructive how much the priests risked simply by allowing human rights work to be conducted on their premises.

  Sarva stayed for almost four months in a seminary in Hatton. Here he met Father R., a thirty-something priest with whom he formed a strong bond. After dinner, they would have long philosophical conversations about duty, morality and what it meant to have faith when your world was crumbling. Father R. said that, in his experience, suffering was as likely to make someone reject God as turn to Him for comfort. But they all grappled with the same questions: why is this happening to me? What have I done to deserve this? The greatest challenge of his life, Father R. said, had not been finding God but reconciling his spirituality with the violence of war. He was a Tamil, raised in a village near Jaffna, and, after being ordained, had worked for two decades in the Vanni areas, teaching and counselling youngsters. After several years, he found that he had taken sides and chosen to support the Tamil separatist movement. He abhorred their violent ways but had begun to wonder if there was any other way to fight generations of discrimination, and decided it was impossible to work in such a polarised society without taking a political stance.

  ‘Then what is the difference between you and a Tiger?’ Sarva asked.

  ‘Maybe as much difference as there is between a Tamil and a Tiger,’ the priest said. He did not speak Sinhalese and believed that without his cassock he was no less vulnerable than an ordinary Tamil civilian. The army rarely stopped his church van, but he was always terrified of harassment. Once, in Colombo, he had been out without his vestments, wearing trousers and a shirt, on his way to meet his relatives. The soldiers had not believed he was a priest even after he had showed them his ID card. They had stripsearched him and he spent the night in a police station cell. Since then, he never left the church without his cassock.

  For the priests and nuns, their vestments were armour. Their robes commanded respect from the armed forces, some of whom were Christian. Buddhist soldiers, many of them rural boys brought up to venerate saffron-clad Buddhist priests, often extended the same courtesy to members of the Christian clergy. This gave nuns and priests greater access to closed spaces like refugee camps and detention centres. Father R., in addition, made maximum use of the privileges his church gave him: chauffeur-driven cars, access to village authorities, an international network of contacts, even the church’s usually large premises. In heavily patrolled regions, church and temple compounds tended to become hangouts for friends, venues for NGO meetings, places with secure boundaries where people could sit alone in silence.

  Many people who knocked on the parish door needed more than prayer. They suffered from post-traumatic stress and as the presidential task force rarely approved NGO projects for psychological counselling in war-affected areas, church group sessions were frequently the only therapy on offer.

  Public funerals and memorials were banned, leaving thousands with no way to deal with loss. In May 2011 Jehaan and some of the priests had organised a silent prayer for one of their number who had died in the war. It was held in Kilinochchi, the deceased’s birthplace, but refugees from all across the north came to the renovated church where the ceremony was held. As the priest prayed for the souls of those who died in pain, there was the rare spectacle of people bursting into tears, mourning for the first time in public.

  Exercising this privilege was not without risks. One of Father R.’s colleagues from Jaffna, a priest who ran an NGO focussed on the rights and safety of war widows, received death threats on a weekly basis, and he heard the giveaway clicks on his office landline and mobile phone indicating that they had been tapped. A western province priest who had accompanied some foreign journalists to a camp woke one morning to find navy booths on either side of his street, keeping watch on him. Some priests delivered straightforward, apolitical religious sermons, helping people find peace without controversy through God and family. When Sarva stayed with such priests, he noticed their deliberate indifference towards him, his story, or the reason he was hiding. But they fed him, gave him shelter, and did not give him away.

  ONE NIGHT AFTER dinner, Sarva told Father R. about Malar, the source of an obsessive love that had preserved his sanity through the long months of hiding. Malar had entered his life at a time of crisis. After Shirleen and her friend had applied on Sarva’s behalf to a Danish university, a grave technical mistake occurred. He gained admission, and the fee had to be paid in advance, which Amma did, but the money didn’t reach the university on time and his student visa was not approved. He would have to wait another semester to apply again. That meant six more dreadful months in hiding. And that was when Amma had mentioned Malar.

  Amma and Malar had met at a convention in Nuwara Eliya on studying abroad. Malar was a schoolteacher and had spent a year in Switzerland and Germany on an exchange programme. To Amma, she looked kind and respectful. She wore her chiffon sari modestly, neatly pinned to her blouse. Her fingers were patchy with blue ink. She spoke English and Tamil and said she could understand ‘a little Swiss’. Amma had trusted her with Sarva’s story, and she had agreed to give him some tips on applying for courses abroad.

  After this, every time Sarva called Amma, she insisted that he speak to this lovely girl, Malar, to learn more about opportunities in Switzerland. Amma adored Shirleen but unfairly blamed her for the rejection of Sarva’s visa. ‘They don’t know about these things,’ she said, and gave him Malar’s number. ‘She is very smart, so don’t try your broken English with her,’ Amma added.

  He called her. She didn’t pick up but called back at night. They talked till dawn.

  The next day he messaged her in transliterated Tamil. ‘Thank you for stealing my sleep!’

  ‘I’m sure you’re used to it!’ she replied, with a wink and a question mark.

  ‘This has never happened to me before,’ he typed, adding a smiley. ‘I swear on my mother’s life.’

  They spoke again that evening, after Malar got home from school. He explained his situation and she shared hers—her brother had taken a boat to Canada but was struggling to get asylum as the country was tougher with refugees than it used to be. Her parents were retired, her mother was ill. She was the only breadwinner in her family.

  A week later, he admitted to her that it was ‘love at first sight’. She cried.


  For months, as he went from safe house to safe house, they spoke on the phone. About what, he couldn’t say, but it was not about Switzerland or universities. Amma knew that much when she got his monstrous mobile phone bill. He asked Malar to get a SIM card from the same mobile company so that they could talk for longer. It would be cheaper if they were both using Dialog.

  While he marvelled at their compatibility—they were late risers, both put family above everything else, loved movies, liked travelling and the hills—he would ask her why she had chosen him over other men. She said it had started with shock at his experiences, and amazement at his survival. It might have begun with sympathy, but this wasn’t pity-love, she assured him. She liked his childlike nature, his ability to joke at the worst of times, his greed for joy, his strength. Yet, she felt like caring for him, shielding him from the elements.

  When Sarva was housed in Kottayena, Jehaan told him he would be moved to Hatton next. Excitedly, Sarva told Malar that he would be getting closer to her.

  ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ he texted later that night. ‘I want to know if I’m right.’

  She did not reply for two days. For those forty-eight hours, every morsel of food was mud, everyone he saw was ugly, boring, annoying. Was she insulted? Had he blown it? ‘Sorry,’ he texted in transliterated Tamil. ‘Was that out of line? Please, I’m a decent guy, don’t misunderstand me.’

  The third day, as he dragged himself to breakfast, the phone beeped. Her picture. A yellow floral-print sari. Long wavy hair with a shiny clasp. A toothy smile that was simultaneously shy and mischievous. She stood near a window, and her head reached the curtain rod.

  ‘You are tall!’ he typed. He was impressed. He was tall. This was perfect.

  ‘???’ she replied.

  ‘It is a compliment! You are more angelic than I imagined.’ And so on. All day, he raved about her beauty. He sent her YouTube links to ballads by A. R. Rahman.

  Finally, her reply: ‘Can I see you?’

  He had sent her an old photograph of his, posing in front of his house, healthy and wearing his best trousers. In a few minutes, guiltily, he sent her a recent one, taken by Randy near a waterfall on one of their trips between safe houses.

  She called at night and they chatted for hours. The proctor who had a room next to Sarva’s knocked hard on his door: ‘Quiet!’ The lovers giggled uncontrollably. The next day, Sarva jumped the parish walls and bought her two saris, one cream and another maroon. He cut his palm scaling the wall on his way back.

  Hatton, his next destination, the closest he’d come yet to Malar, was where he had gone to high school. As if association worked some magic on him, he became a teenager in love, single-minded and relentless. Sarva loved being in love with Malar. He felt like his old self: playful and always in a good mood. The jitters left him, his appetite returned. His eyes were always wandering to his phone, hoping to find an incoming message. He was happily distracted, and reeling with a sensation he hadn’t savoured for ages. After more than a year in hiding, he was tired of being tortured, hunted, of being the man with medical problems and no family. Malar made him handsome, funny, normal. She knew what they had done to him in the basement. She understood that if Sarva did not heal entirely, the two of them could probably never have children. She loved him nonetheless. She was everything he needed.

  Without Randy around, Sarva couldn’t think of anyone to confide in. But the moment he blurted out her name to Father R., the priest unexpectedly squealed with delight. From then on, Malar was all they really talked about. It was Father R. who convinced him to meet her.

  It was arranged for the second of the month. Sarva and Father R. took a van and parked it opposite the Hatton bus stop. Her Nuwara Eliya bus would arrive that afternoon. She had told her family she was visiting a school friend in Hatton.

  The first time he saw her, she was standing near the petrol pump, attempting to cross the road as buses wound this way and that, people milled and trishaws meandered, their drivers hoping to pick up a fare. She towered above them all. She was so tall.

  He was running across the road. He was grabbing her hand. ‘Vaa di!’ he was saying in front of everyone. ‘Come!’ He was pulling her to the van. She turned crimson.

  The priest left them alone in the van and went off to buy groceries. Sarva held Malar and could not let go. They were hugging hard, speaking at the same time, hearing nothing, laughing nervously but feeling a floating inner calm. They held hands tight. ‘Why are you squeezing me?’ she asked. ‘I’ll also squeeze you.’

  Meet my wife, Sarva said, when Father R. came back.

  They spent the day walking around the seminary, sitting in the church, or taking shade under the mango tree near the poultry. They wondered if they should get engaged. But before a conclusion could be reached, two o’clock rolled around and she had to leave to get home for dinner. He gave her the saris and showed her the cut on his palm. She scolded him, then cried.

  When Father R. and he dropped her off, Sarva kissed her forehead before opening the door of the van. As she walked to the bus and waved, Father R. said, ‘What? You kissed her like she was your daughter.’

  Sarva was still in a trance. ‘How can it be that this is the first time we have met?’

  A COUPLE OF months later, in May 2011, Sarva decided to leave the country. Malar had helped him make up his mind. ‘Follow your dreams,’ she had said. ‘Go to America. You’re smart enough to find a job there and manage.’ Later, she could apply to study for a Master’s and join him.

  He would travel with a fake passport. His brother Deva’s friend would smuggle him out of Sri Lanka with about ten others. The guy owed Deva a favour, so the fee came at a discount. Sarva would pay 2.5 million rupees instead of 4 million. It was all working out.

  Shirleen and Jehaan were appalled. They visited Amma and Deva, trying to make them see reason. It was dangerous, they said, and there was no assurance Sarva would eventually get asylum. Amma sobbed as she explained that they just couldn’t wait any longer, living separately, never seeing each other, knowing that Sarva was wasting his life. Deva did not say much.

  ‘We cannot help you any longer if you decide on the illegal route,’ Shirleen told Sarva. How could he trust a stranger, a human smuggler, with his life? Jehaan explained the risks. Sarva could be deported from the airport as soon as he arrived—he didn’t even know where that would be. If he were sent back, the TID would arrest him the moment his plane landed at Colombo. His nightmare would begin all over again.

  Sarva understood. But he was done with the safe houses. He had found the woman he wanted to marry and he wanted to get his life in order. He had given so many people control over his decisions, so many strangers had walked in and out. He needed to try it his way. He would trust his brother.

  On 4 May 2011, Sarva left.

  19.

  January 2011

  MUGIL AND HER family were finally getting out of Manik Farm. Without explanation, an official in the refugee camp office handed her a release notice and told her to prepare to leave. She couldn’t read the form, which was written in Sinhala, and was too afraid to ask for a translation and risk triggering a familiar tirade about how it was high time the inmates learnt the first language of Sri Lanka. What she understood from the form was that she was being sent home—but the wrong home. The army was sending her to Point Pedro, the town of her childhood, not to PTK.

  Confused, Mugil went to Harini Akka, a woman from the row closest to the camp office. Harini Akka spoke some Sinhala and overheard things. Mugil had buttered her up for months, always stopping to chat and listening patiently to her complain about her mother-in-law. Akka was a Dalit and her husband, an upper-caste doctor with a Jaffna University degree; his family had stridently opposed the match and disowned them when they married. In the thick of battle in early 2009, Akka had seen the doctor being picked up by the army, which now denied ever detaining him. Akka and her mother-in-law had been compelled to join forces in their hunt
for him, though each took every opportunity to blame the other for their family’s misfortunes. They shared nothing but the conviction that the doctor was alive and being kept hidden by the military. Mugil thought it was more likely he had been summarily executed, but she was not one to dash their hopes.

  Mugil found Harini Akka sitting outside her tent in the mud, her legs stretched out under her frayed housecoat. She was removing black specks of dirt from a plate of rice gruel. Mugil showed her the release notice.

  ‘Oh, Parutithurai for you!’ Akka squealed, using the old Tamil name for Point Pedro. ‘I was praying for you to get some good news.’

  ‘This is not good news, Akka! Why Parutithurai? I don’t understand. I was expecting to go to PTK.’

  ‘Don’t nitpick, be like me. Just take the chance and get out of here.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Jaffna.’

  ‘But you’re from Viswamadu, no? Why are they sending you to Jaffna? I don’t know what is going on.’

  Akka said the army told her that Viswamadu was not yet cleared of mines. ‘So I’ll have to live at my mother-in-law’s for a while. It’s a pain, but what to do?’

  Mugil sat down next to her and started to shave the skin off some plantain.

  ‘Is PTK also not yet cleared of mines?’ she asked. ‘Is that why I have got Parutithurai?’ The town had not been directly affected in the most recent battle.

  Akka shrugged. ‘The army has fallen in love with our Vanni now. They want it all for themselves.’

  Then, dropping her voice, she added, ‘Those places … there are memories there. This government does not like that.’

  The release was a fraud, Mugil thought. Bussing people to strange places instead of their homes was hardly granting them their freedom.

  The camps had been open for almost two years now, but few Vanni residents had been released; the official reason was that the inmates needed to be screened for Tiger cadres and the war zone had to be demined. There had always been mines in the Vanni, but in the last stages of the war, both the army and the Tigers had laid many more haphazardly, without keeping records. Global demining agencies had worked painstakingly slowly with former combatants and the military, and cleared several villages for habitation on the Mannar coast and on the peripheries of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu. But it was only the army and navy that had moved in there, expanding their military presence while the villagers were imprisoned in refugee camps. Even after they had started releasing a few hundred inmates every month under international pressure, most villages remained out of bounds.