The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  Lynx House abounded with examples of refugees stealing scenes from another person’s history, refining and practising it for the asylum interview. They had all heard the cautionary tale of two Iranian roommates who were best friends and had shared their stories with each other. The one who was interviewed first by the UK agency had told his friend’s story as his own. When it was the other man’s turn, he was accused of lying and denied a visa. It was only when he challenged the ruling in the courts that, a year later, the decision was reversed. Everyone wanted a visa, Sarva’s group agreed, and people would not hesitate to spice up their history with someone else’s horrific experience. It was best to be careful.

  Sarva and his friends spent most of their time in supermarkets, reading price labels, prowling for new discounts and offers, such as a jar of mayonnaise with every bottle of ketchup or a two-for-one offer on packets of rice. Sarva knew that Poundland was where he could get the most enormous bottle of shampoo or body lotion for only a pound. Tesco had the spicy chillies and pungent red onions essential to his Sri Lankan curries. The chicken was fleshier at the local Arab shop than at the big stores. Basmati rice and vegetables were cheaper at Lidl and the 99 pence store had the best deals on cheap sweets and chocolate, of which Sarva ate fistfuls when he was hungry. The housemates shopped together like a family. Their purchases differed according to culture and dietary habits, but in a matter of weeks everyone settled into an even pattern determined solely by the £5 daily allowance from the NASS.

  Sarva had a phone now and called home daily. He saved small amounts from his meagre dole and sent them to Malar so she could pay her phone and Internet bills. Their conversations these days always degenerated into a fight, broken only by a heavy silence or tears. A prospective husband had visited Malar at her house. ‘I couldn’t help it, Mummy just invited him,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, so why did you have to serve him tea and snacks?’ he had demanded. She explained that she couldn’t insult her parents in front of guests. She assured him she would love no one else as much, that he was her soulmate.

  ‘It’s not all that,’ he said. ‘You are tired of waiting for me.’ In his angst, he was rude about her family. She hung up. They did not speak for weeks after that.

  To overcome his insomnia and impending failure in love, Sarva drank cheap readymade cocktails (‘It’s only juice,’ he told Kajini) with Prathipan till he passed out on his bed around dawn. He would wake at noon, drink a mug of milk, and check the mail to see if he had a date for his interview. He whiled away the rest of his time going for walks, thinking about Malar or visiting Niru. Days and nights blurred together. Finally, one snow-lashed February morning, he received a letter calling him to an interview on 11 March.

  HIS BODY BUZZED, his back throbbed, his sleeplessness worsened. The interview was a month away, but Sarva was tense with anticipation. His lawyer was overjoyed. ‘I don’t want to get your hopes up,’ she said on the phone. ‘But an early interview is usually good news.’

  There was a party at no. 77. Prathipan invited three Sri Lankan Tamil women from the neighbourhood, Kajini brought her sister, brother-in-law and their children visiting from Luton, and Bagi Annan supplied soft drinks (there would be no alcohol in front of the women). As the guests arrived at midday, filling the kitchen and living room, Sarva started on his elaborate version of koli kozhambu and elumbu rasam, chicken curry and bones soup. He delegated the onion chopping, garlic smashing and tamarind squeezing to the other men and he cleaned the large bird. Niru darted around the house playing train with his cousins. Kajini teased that Sarva’s idea of good food was copious amounts of oil, cream and dried fruit. The women itched to take over—‘Turn the heat down,’ ‘Cut the tomatoes finer,’ ‘Put the lid on’—but the men banished them from the kitchen.

  When he finally served lunch at five o’clock, the famished guests attacked the soggy potatoes and spicy chicken with gusto. The housemates joined them. ‘Sarva, my brother! Asylum for you!’ Takloum toasted with a glass of Pepsi. Sarva widened his eyes and shook his head, dramatically mouthing, ‘No! Ssh!’

  By dusk, the men had shut themselves in a room with a bottle of brandy. The women wished Sarva luck and left. Kajini hung back at the door. ‘There were twelve of us here today,’ she said. ‘Some have been in the UK for years, but only you got an interview. I am praying every day. God will take your side.’ She asked a sleepy Niru to give Sarva maama a hug and kiss.

  ‘Akka, it will happen for you also soon,’ he said, guiltily.

  ‘I sure hope so,’ Kajini sighed.

  Sarva had downplayed it all day, but he knew that for everyone he had fed, an interview was nothing short of a miracle. He didn’t want to rub it in their faces. He had been edgy about the evil eye, about envy corroding his good fortune. He had no experience of being the lucky one in the room.

  WHEN HE HAD a moment alone some weeks later, Sarva called Malar and quickly hung up. A missed call of two rings meant ‘Call me back when you can.’ One ring meant ‘Call me now!’

  ‘?’ she texted. This broke protocol, but it was the first time since their fight that she had responded at all. Through her silence, he had drunk himself silly, sobbing in the bathtub for hours, wondering if God had knowingly thwarted his suicide plans with the interview letter, blaming his mother for the strain on his affair, cursing President Rajapaksa for making it impossible for Sarva to even visit Malar in Sri Lanka. With one text from her, hope was restored.

  ‘Have interview in two weeks,’ he texted back, then chased it with an ‘I love you soooo much.’

  After about three hours, during which he had imagined their entire life together—the wedding, the happy family and children, economic success—she called. ‘Hello?’ she whispered.

  ‘Mummy is near you?’ he asked, always his first concern and annoyance.

  ‘No, she has gone to the neighbour’s but she could return any moment.’

  ‘I got my interview letter!’ he squealed. It was thrilling to say it aloud, with the appropriate high pitch of achievement. He had reserved the excitement only for Amma and a handful of friends.

  Malar did not reply.

  ‘Hello? Mummy has already come back?!’

  ‘No,’ she said, and went quiet again. Sarva wanted to fling his phone at the wall.

  ‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘I will pray for you, like I do every day.’

  ‘Thank you. At least you still care for me,’ he snapped, unable to help himself.

  He heard her sigh in exasperation. ‘Please, Sarva,’ she said, switching to English, as she did when she wanted to be romantic. ‘You are in my heart always.’

  ‘Then why are we apart?’ Sarva pleaded. ‘Talk to me. I will get the visa, I’m 90 per cent sure! Tell your parents you will come to the UK, you will have a home with me.’

  Malar said she could not come, could not wait, her parents didn’t like him, she could not disobey them, but her love had been true.

  ‘After everything I went through, I was done in by love! I’ll tell the interviewers that!’ Sarva laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t like to point it out, but I sent you money, Malar … We had a plan …’

  ‘Mummy is coming,’ she said hurriedly and hung up.

  So that was how it was going to be. When the interview letter arrived, Sarva’s first thought had been that he would tell the interviewer he was engaged and intended to bring his fiancée from Sri Lanka to the UK. He had heard that the agency always asked about family back home, and he had planned on proudly telling them about Malar, showing them her picture. He even had a letter from Father R. attesting to his having seen them exchange rings in Hatton. But that plan was trash, she was trash—all promises and all betrayal. Sarva tried not to give his mother credit for her ‘bad feeling about this girl’.

  EVERY DAY, SARVA lay on his bed, going over imaginary situations in which he found the words to make Malar change her mind. Or other scenarios in which he’d never met her and was single, a wild bull, free to be with a differ
ent woman every day. Once, when Sarva ranted about how he did not care that Malar had betrayed him and how he would never fall for feminine wiles again, Prathipan asked him if he knew what he was going to say at the interview.

  ‘What is there to say?’ Sarva said. ‘And is there a point in all of this?’

  Prathipan suggested that he meet Giri Anna, an asylum consultant. Giri Anna had advised hundreds of Tamil asylum seekers for close to a decade, vetting their stories of persecution for gaps, adding or refining believable elements for those whose applications he considered weak. This elderly man had arrived in the UK as an asylum seeker himself in the early eighties, fleeing the riots in Colombo. Now, he ran six grocery shops and two hotels in London.

  A few days later, Sarva met Giri Anna at his house just outside Swansea. Sarva suspected that Giri Anna might have helped the Tigers smuggle men abroad—rarely did a penniless, uneducated Sri Lankan Tamil migrant become so wealthy without cooperating with the LTTE—but he did not ask.

  Giri Anna knew that interviewers watched like a hawk for inconsistencies, suspicious documents, and lies. Consultants like him helped applicants tell their experiences coherently, sharpening the relevant bits and cutting the flab. They encouraged them to exaggerate or blur details as required. A woman who had lived in five villages in Jaffna and the Vanni, for instance, would be advised to focus on the Vanni days. The fear of kidnapping would be revised to look like a narrow escape from an actual attempt. The state oppression of the Tamils was real, but as thousands sought asylum in the UK, consultants helped enhance individual experiences to improve the odds. They filled gaps, but left just enough of the rough edges for the story to seem convincing. ‘Only a lie sounds perfect,’ Giri Anna said. ‘The truth is always a little vague.’

  Most asylum seekers thought they had to convince the interviewer they were victims, he said. They tended to focus on their horrific past experiences. But in countries like Sri Lanka, where the war had ended, interviewers expected testimony about recent atrocities and the threat of future attacks. So Giri Anna advised a student refugee to elaborate on his friends’ disappearances—to demonstrate the grounds for his fear of deportation. He asked a harassed Tamil journalist to include in his statement unrelated incidents of his wife’s sexual harassment at a police station.

  Sarva was told to list the number of times the police had harassed his mother after he had left Sri Lanka. While all asylum claimants had fled state violence, a visa was granted only to those who were at risk on their return.

  Giri Anna was sure the agency knew that former Tigers were the most obvious targets of the Sri Lankan government today. He claimed that after the end of the war, conscripts, child soldiers and rehabilitated former combatants had become better candidates for asylum in the UK than civilians. The agency would shun those who had been convicted of human rights abuses or had occupied leadership positions where they might have been involved in war crimes, he said, but it recognised that in an ethnic war of three decades, there were many helpless pawns.

  After listening to Sarva and looking at his documents, Giri Anna insisted that at the interview, he talk about his LTTE days. ‘You have a much greater chance with your truth,’ he said. ‘They won’t send you back knowing you will get killed within five minutes.’ Staggering through these fine distinctions between truth and falsehood, Sarva decided to tell all.

  28.

  November 2012

  MUGIL SHOULD HAVE known that thoughts about leaving were contagious. As soon as Divyan agreed to emigrate to India, Amuda decided to join them, a prospect that, to her own surprise, gladdened Mugil. Their children had grown to be closer than their mothers had been as siblings, and separating them would have been difficult. But a larger party meant greater expense and more elaborate plans for departure. They needed to raise 100,000 rupees for each family.

  They could borrow what they needed from a moneylender. Mugil was acquainted with some people in Jaffna and Point Pedro who helped former combatants through remittances from the Tamil diaspora that once supported the Tigers. The whole transaction would be informal, just like during the war. But Mugil and Divyan discussed it, and decided to avoid any former Tiger associates. It was better to let those old relationships lapse.

  They ploughed through their possessions for anything of value. Mugil had her bicycle, furniture and steel utensils; Amuda had her fridge and house. All of it was put up for sale. For the first time since the end of the war they were looking for permanent solutions to their problems.

  After his disappointment with the land records, Prashant, too, came up with a way to leave the country. He would work on a ship somewhere, for which he would not need a fake passport; his naval science certificate helped him get the requisite travel document for working at sea. He would have to get to Saudi Arabia at his own expense and, once there, he could work without pay for a year at the Yanbu port, gradually reimbursing the agent who got him the job. The agent had taken Muslim men to the Gulf this way for years. Ever since hard-line Sinhala Buddhist mobs started demolishing mosques and attacking Muslim-run shops and malls, many more young Muslims had been looking for work abroad. Prashant would soon depart with a group of forty men.

  Mugil thought this a dangerous plan, especially since the agent would keep Prashant’s travel documents, but her brother was not one to worry. After a lot of drama and tears, he got Mother to sell her gold wedding chain for enough money to buy him a ticket to Jeddah. With that, his emigration plans became firm.

  Only Mother would be left behind. There was no question of her going with Prashant, and she hated the idea of India. She had visited South India briefly when Father worked in a quarry there and had found it unbearably filthy. There were more than 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamils in India, living in more than a hundred camps across the southern state of Tamil Nadu, including special high-surveillance camps for those considered security threats. Mother had heard grim stories about the dirty refugee tents, the infamously brutal and corrupt Q Branch anti-terrorism police, the strict evening curfew, and the lifelong requirement for a residence permit to be stamped every six months. She believed India was not hospitable to Sri Lankans anymore. The strain of finding a respectable job and a decent house to rent would be too much at her age.

  She didn’t dissuade her daughters, though. They would be better off leaving before they got embroiled in some mess here; India would let Mugil and Amuda breathe easier. Mother’s elderly cousin was setting up a house in Patthampattaram in PTK, and the old women would be fine together, she said.

  Mugil fought every day to change her mother’s mind—how could she stay behind alone? Did she not realise that once her family left Sri Lankan shores, there was no coming back? She would never be able to see her grandchildren again. If Mother became ill, they would not be able to come to her. And, god forbid, if she died alone, who would visit her grave? At that point, Mother shut Mugil up by saying there would be no point visiting if she were already dead. ‘You stubborn old goat!’ Mugil shouted. ‘Your brain has shrunk with age, you are making dumb decisions!’

  In any case, there was their estranged sister in Mannar, Mother said. ‘She’ll at least come to see me when I’m dead.’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ Amuda replied.

  Eventually the sisters let it go. Perhaps Mother wanted to die in the same country as Father. Maybe she wanted to spend her last days in the Vanni. Or maybe she was just tired of taking care of them.

  On 24 November, Mother cooked the last elaborate meal she would make in a long time. It was a seafood extravaganza: crab prepared three ways, fish fried and curried, shrimp steamed with drumsticks, and sprat chutney. She said it was because Prashant was leaving for a desert, ‘and who knows when he will taste fish next’. To an explosion of laughter from the others, Prashant told her that Saudi Arabia was surrounded by seas and that he would be working on a ship. Mother was sheepish, but the meal was perfect.

  The children had been told about their uncle leaving forever. The younger ones
made drawings for him; Maran drew a ship, Tamizh a smiley face, Kalai an infinite spiral. Amuda’s oldest gave him a stiff hug.

  When the day came, Prashant packed a single bag and left the house with Divyan. The family stood at the gate, waving and crying, but Prashant looked excited.

  Divyan accompanied him and two of his friends to Colombo, from where the three would take a flight to Jeddah. A travel agent in Wellawatte found them affordable tickets for 30 November, in five days’ time.

  Prashant insisted that Divyan return to Point Pedro instead of wasting his time in Colombo. When Divyan said his goodbyes and took a bus back, he thought about how desperately the family had wanted to stay together during the war and when he and Prashant were in detention. The reunion had been brief, and somehow this final parting seemed preordained.

  DIVYAN WAS OUT working on a bridge and Mugil was in the kitchen when Prashant called her mobile phone in the early evening of 1 December. When she saw the missed call half an hour later, she tried to call him back, but her prepaid phone card didn’t have enough credits for the call to go through. She ran to Amuda’s house and used her phone, but there was no answer. The sisters were worried sick; Prashant had not answered his phone since Divyan had left him in Colombo. He should have boarded the flight to Jeddah on 30 November. How was he calling from his phone a day later?

  Mugil bought more talktime the next day and called and called. Prashant’s phone was always switched off.

  Three days later, around dusk, two plainclothes policemen walked into Mugil’s house. They went straight into her living room and called her name. Startled, she ran in from the side yard. When she saw them, the crew cuts, the hard eyes, the large forearms crossed in front of their chests, she knew what it was about. It was happening to her family now.