by Rohini Mohan
‘They will not be able to give us anything! After everything I have spent on you, can a mother not expect at least a girl from a good family?’
‘I don’t want a penny from Malar’s family.’
‘You don’t get to decide that,’ Amma shouted. ‘Sarva, they’re from the sweeper caste! They’re so much lower than us!’
Sarva was losing patience. He made exasperated noises.
Amma started to cry. ‘I raise you, protect you, everything. And then some girl just swoops in?’ She went on, wondering why Sarva needed her for everything and then made this life decision on his own.
‘You are the one who encouraged me to meet her.’
‘I curse the day. Couldn’t you wait for me to find you a girl from our community?’
‘It will not be easy, Amma. Malar knows everything about me. She accepts me.’
‘She’s not doing us a favour! You are a catch for anyone.’
‘Yes, good luck trying to find a princess for this broken item.’ His voice choked.
Amma changed tack. ‘Don’t worry, my child—in a few years, when you are in England, everything will be fine. Then your mother will find you a nice girl from a decent family. Just end this, okay? I know you must be lonely, so she is a good friend. Okay? A good friend, that’s all. I know my son will not hurt me.’
He switched the subject to his father’s struggle to get retirement benefits.
Sarva felt like a fool for thinking Amma would accept Malar and ignore the caste difference. He should have known; she would find hierarchy even in a box of apples. She was trying to compensate every single day for her own marriage to a lower-caste man.
In addition, there was the dowry. In his community, there was rarely a way around it. It was compulsory, a convention that had become more entrenched with mounting expenses among young men’s families during the years of the conflict. Particularly among Indra’s Vellalar caste, brides were expected to bring a house. Malar would not be able to afford this, and Sarva didn’t want to demand it of her. Yet he knew that his convoluted journey had left his mother with a heavy debt—close to five million rupees. He knew she had counted on his marriage to ease that burden. It was why she felt so betrayed—abandoned in her effort to fix their family. At that moment, he hated his mother for the hold she had on him, and for the sacrifices that hung over his neck like a sword.
THANKFULLY, SARVA HAD other urgent concerns to distract him from family drama. The journey to London was fixed for October.
Kannan had three instructions for Bharati and Sarva before they boarded the flight. Once inside the plane, destroy your passport. At the immigration counters, lift your hand up high and say, ‘Asylum.’ Do not speak English, no matter what.
The instructions sounded mysterious and crucial, and Sarva was annoyed at Kannan for mentioning them at the last minute. The one about English sounded most bizarre. If they were going to the UK, should he not speak the native tongue, however little he knew of it? But thinking of the 600,000 he had paid Kannan, Sarva decided not to jeopardise his chances.
On 24 October 2012, when their flight landed at Heathrow, Sarva and Bharati looked at each other across the aisle and smiled. They had decided to go their separate ways, each bearing the burden of his past alone, without additional encumbrance, increasing both their chances of being accepted into this new country. They were not sure when they would see each other again.
Sarva disembarked and took the train to the airport terminal. He had a small backpack holding a toothbrush, toothpaste, a comb, a towel, blood pressure medicines from Bolivia, underwear, a couple of T-shirts, a pair of trousers, business cards from Jehaan, the Nonviolent Peaceforce and the ICRC, his Sri Lankan ID and the finger-sized idol of Pullaiyar that had been with him since prison.
He joined the long immigration queue. When it was his turn and the officer reached out to receive a passport, Sarva raised his own hand and shook it. ‘No,’ he said, stressing the word, trying hard not to break into more English.
The officer froze, his face hardened. ‘No. No passport,’ Sarva repeated. He had done as Kannan had instructed: on the flight he had ripped his passport to shreds and flushed the little maroon book with the Sri Lankan insignia down the toilet.
The officer said something about deporting him; he was already motioning to the security guards.
As uniformed guards walked towards him, Sarva abandoned the English rule. ‘No! I can’t go back to Sri Lanka!’ he screamed. ‘They kill me! They KILL me!’ To his own surprise, he started to cry.
The guards pulled him away from the immigration desk. Sarva yelled: ‘They kill me. No go back to Sri Lanka, please!’ He was sobbing by now, unable to say the words properly, but it didn’t loosen the grip of the guard’s fingers around Sarva’s forearm.
‘Asylum!’ he said, suddenly remembering. The word felt strange on his tongue. The officers didn’t seem to have heard. He said it again and again. ‘Asylum, sir, asylum.’ Why did it sound like Tamil? He had practised it throughout the flight, muttering it over and over, but now it sounded wrong.
He was taken to an office with frosted glass doors. As the officers shut the door and sat down, he said ‘asylum’ a few more times. Each time more meaning was shed from the word, until it was just a yelp.
‘Language?’ one officer asked. ‘Tamil,’ Sarva said. They called an interpreter. The man looked South Indian. Great, Sarva thought. An interpreter who would only half-understand him. He wiped away his tears and prepared to narrate the incidents he had described many times by now.
He had landed at three in the morning; they started speaking to him at seven thirty. With breaks, the interview went on for over ten hours. Questions about how he got to London, why he had left Sri Lanka, why he could not go back. They asked him about the smuggler who had helped him, and Sarva told them about Siva, not Kannan. If they were going to investigate and arrest someone, he wanted it to be Siva. They ran Sarva’s bag through a scanner and took his fingerprints. They left the room and returned every few hours with more questions. The fear Sarva had initially felt was fading, replaced by a dull anxiety. The procedure calmed him a little. The investigators wanted to know about him, not trap him. They might not be treating him as they did passengers with passports, but they were not going to beat him.
At dusk, the guards took Sarva out of the airport. The sky was threatening rain. Cold needles in the air pricked his bare arms; he had not worn a jacket. He was guided into a car. After a few minutes’ driving, they reached a police station. There, they said they were arresting him for ‘illegal entry’. Did he have a lawyer? When Sarva said no, they made a few calls. In an hour, a female lawyer and a male interpreter arrived. Through the interpreter, the woman asked him about his journey there and took rapid notes. ‘Don’t say anything,’ she finally said, almost echoing Kannan. ‘Whatever you say now or in court could be used against you later, so just say “no comment” to everything.’ Another phrase that meant more than it seemed to. Sarva memorised it.
That night, he was kept in a cell in the police station. He fell asleep wondering where Bharati might be.
The next morning the police took him to a court. As they clapped handcuffs on his wrists, Sarva’s heart raced. He stood in front of the judge, and the interpreter said he was being tried for crossing the UK border without the requisite travel documents. The judge ordered an immediate deportation, but his lawyer argued that he deserved better.
Sarva watched her struggle to convey his situation properly: the impossibility of his return, the certain death that awaited him in Sri Lanka. He was sure he could be more convincing himself. Her inability was going to get him killed. So despite the lawyer’s clear instructions not to talk, he spoke up.
‘Please, judge,’ he said, folding his hands, emphasising each word. ‘I can’t go Sri Lanka. Full trouble for me. Please, don’t send me back.’ He wanted the judge to see his desperation.
The lawyer used the opportunity to quickly add that Sarva’s was
a case of genuine persecution. She quoted from the UN Refugee Convention, to which the UK was a signatory and which compelled its agents to shelter people facing political persecution abroad, and which put Sarva’s safety and freedom above the immigration laws he had broken.
The judge took note and sentenced Sarva to two months in prison. Not understanding what that meant, Sarva resumed begging to be let off.
The woman sitting below the judge explained, ‘You have to do it so that the asylum process can start.’ From the lawyer’s exuberant handshake outside court, he gleaned that they had won. He would not be deported.
The police took him back to the station and gave him lunch—a box of fish and chips. As his tongue searched for any taste other than oil and salt, Sarva marvelled at how just twenty-four hours had changed the course of four tormented years. Perhaps the catalyst was the new country, or maybe his luck had turned. It was incredible that this government would actually consider letting him stay to keep him safe. He was not a citizen or voter, not educated or affluent. He felt like a liability, but law or morality seemed to have conspired to let people like him sneak into this world. What gall he had leaving Colombo, expecting countries he knew nothing about to just take him in because he arrived at their gates. He was better off than Trishanku, in that sense, because he was not turned away; he was allowed into the heaven he sought. He felt grateful for the unspiced fish and the absence of malice.
That evening, as he sat with two large white men in a cell at the East Acton prison, Sarva’s whole being was soaring, as if at the end of a crazy circuitous run. This was jail, too, but it felt like a five-star hotel. It had bathrooms instead of pee spots. His cell had a thin mattress for him to sleep on. At mealtimes, he was asked if he had a preference: vegetarian or Halal or ordinary. He felt free, not imprisoned. The TID could do nothing to him here. No Siva could suspend his life in places that ate away his dreams. If he did everything right, Sarva might never see Sri Lanka again.
26.
November 2012
AS THE FAMILY gathered for dinner one cold November night, Mugil asked the boys to go wash their feet at the well. She gave them a few minutes, letting them splash around. When they didn’t come inside after her third call, she went to the side door. The boys had settled around a full bucket, playing with paper boats. Tamizh’s ship was from the Sea Tigers and Maran’s was from the Sri Lankan Navy. They were shouting Shooo! Dish! Boom! Bam!—the noises of missiles attempting to drown the other’s ship. Tamizh’s T-shirt was already soaking wet.
Mugil told them they could play after dinner. As she turned around, Maran asked if she knew how the army would order a retreat in Sinhala. She shrugged.
‘Okay, I’ll ask my teacher tomorrow,’ Maran said.
Mugil said it was unlikely the teacher would know.
‘I will ask my new teacher,’ he insisted. ‘She will know.’
Mugil started to ask who this knowledgeable teacher was, but Maran ran to the kitchen with Tamizh, paying her no attention.
It slipped her mind until a few nights later, when she put the boys to bed. She asked Maran if he had found the word he was looking for. He hadn’t. ‘Anyway, what is so special about this new teacher?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said sleepily. ‘She is not like us.’ It was only after Mugil spoke to Amuda’s son, Maran’s senior in school, that she discovered that the new teacher was one of the two recently recruited Sinhalese women. For the first time ever, Sinhala had been made compulsory in Tamil-language schools in the north. It was announced as part of the government’s postwar commitment to trilingualism.
Schools in Sri Lanka had always been segregated by ethnicity—Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim. Universal free education meant that the population was over 90 per cent literate, but children grew up with little opportunity to interact with different communities. The best schools in the country were state-run, and a handful of these taught in English to multi-ethnic classes; in the rest, the language of instruction was exclusively Tamil or Sinhala. A small urban upper class—that cut across ethnic groups—spoke English, but the majority of Sri Lankans remained monolingual and did not share their formative years with people from other communities. Intimate relationships between people of different ethnic backgrounds were rare; it was common for a Sinhalese person never to have entered a Tamil or Muslim house for a home-cooked meal, and vice-versa. Inter-ethnic marriages were violently opposed and couples that defied the family diktat were often ostracised.
The only Sinhalese most Tamils met were policemen, soldiers or government officials, none of whom inspired much affection. After the Tigers forced the Muslims out of the north, these two Tamil-speaking communities drifted apart as well. As long as militancy existed, most Sinhalese never set foot in the Tamil-dominated north. Disastrously then, with rare exceptions, the only continuous interaction between different communities had been through conflict. Militants, the government and extremists of all types used this gulf between peoples to further fan hate and suspicion.
After 2009, the government created a Ministry for National Languages and Social Integration to undo this systemic ethnic polarisation. It mandated that all government officials be fluent in both Sinhala and Tamil, and also introduced native-language lessons in schools. In the policy’s implementation, however, deep biases privileged Sinhala. Tamil schoolchildren in the north now had to study Sinhala but Tamil was not mandatory in Sinhala-language schools. Moreover, from what Amuda’s son was saying, his Sinhalese teachers did not speak any Tamil at all. As a consequence, he was learning Sinhala poetry and stories by rote, but he could not string words together to make an original sentence.
As the boy ran off to his after-school class, Mugil sat on the threshold of Amuda’s shop. ‘What nonsense is this?’ she said. She didn’t understand why they could not hire bilingual Tamil or Muslim teachers. ‘How will these teachers explain Sinhala to our children?’
‘I’m just grateful our children didn’t get the soldier teachers,’ Amuda said. In schools in Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi, military personnel had been appointed as Sinhala teachers. They were known to take class in uniform and conduct ‘leadership workshops’ for the higher grades. The armed forces gave out scholarships, distributed books and stationery, organised field trips and sports meets. A military wing called the Civil Security Department had entirely taken over the administration of nursery schools in the Vanni. The change was unannounced, and many found out about it only when kindergarten teachers started receiving their wage slips from the Ministry of Defence. While people saw this as militarisation, and an attempt to exercise total control over the population, the Ministry of Defence claimed that these were philanthropic activities aimed at reconciliation and development.
When Amuda and Mugil were in school, the Tigers—the military of their time and region—visited their classrooms, too, spreading propaganda. Schools in the north, especially in the Vanni, had always been militarised. Now, the occupying force had changed from the LTTE to the Sri Lankan army. Much had changed, but nothing really had.
‘Where did they get these Sinhalese women from?’ Mugil asked.
‘From one of the new colonies, must be.’
In the decades that the sisters had spent in the north, they had seen few non-Tamil households. The war had divided the island demographically. The last of the Sinhalese and Muslim families in the north had been driven out by the Tigers in the eighties and nineties respectively, and Tamils moved in droves to the north to escape persecution by the state or Sinhalese mobs. Mugil was thirty when the war ended, and having always lived in the north, she had never met or talked to a Sinhalese civilian.
Since late 2010, however, Amuda and Mugil, like most Tamils, had heard about poor Sinhalese families from the south settling in the northeast. They noticed little shops with Sinhala signs cropping up, women in Kandyan-style saris, the newly set-up Sinhala-language schools and now Sinhalese teachers in Tamil schools—small changes but significant ones because these were form
erly unfamiliar sights.
The influx of outsiders had caused friction. Tamils returning from refugee camps found Sinhalese families on their land. Many of these Sinhalese settlements were fenced in and guarded by military personnel, perhaps to protect them from angry Tamil locals. People accused the government of inviting—even incentivising—southern families to relocate north and put a dent in the otherwise nearly homogeneous Tamil population. Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa responded that the Sinhalese were moving of their own accord and asked why any area should be dominated by Tamils. If the country was to be truly united, he said, all citizens should be allowed to live in any part of the country. ‘Do we stop Tamil people from living in Colombo?’ he asked once.
Politicians from the Tamil National Alliance, the most prominent coalition of Tamil parties, however, countered that many more Sinhalese had now returned than had left, and that the Colombo analogy was disingenuous. Tamils there didn’t get allotted land or houses from the state as the Sinhalese did in the north.
There was an avalanche of land disputes in the local courts. Some challenged the new Sinhalese takeover of Tamil land, but a majority of ownership claims were against the military. As the war wheeled to a finish in the summer of 2009, sixteen of the nineteen brigades of the Sri Lankan armed forces—more than 100,000 troops—were stationed in the north-east, mostly on the Jaffna peninsula. To accommodate them in high-security zones, land had been commandeered from Tamil civilians without consent, due process or compensation. Close to one-fifth of the Jaffna peninsula was now occupied by the armed forces, while the land claimants were sent to thorny forests or shabby refugee camps.
By mid-2012, thousands of Tamils were protesting this indiscriminate land grab. As the military expanded, Mugil, like thousands of others, found that she had no claim over her property. When some refugees were permitted to settle in uncontested parts of PTK, her family wondered if they, too, should try to recover their land. Mugil was against it—for a few months now, she had been thinking about the missed boat to India, wondering if staying had been her worst decision ever. She had made her peace with not going back to PTK; she did not know of a single case of a Tamil successfully claiming land back from the military. Amuda, too, said she had neither the resources nor the energy to start again. As the eldest in the family, Mother advised that they ‘let it be’.