My father began to dig.
He unearthed a metal box. We all gasped. The small box was made of copper, and inside it had been hidden sand, lemon seeds, and lengths of human hair. Human hair was a common ingredient in curses and was associated with many discomforts and maladies. My father handed the box to the woman, and she led us back to the prayer room to resume the ritual.
She put the box down, then suddenly collapsed to the floor and began twitching and jerking and rolling her eyes. “Leave this body!” she commanded. She started shrieking and jerked like she was being stabbed by sharp needles. She rose to her knees, white foam bubbling out of her mouth.
Kanna, Lathy, and I panicked and dashed out of the prayer room and into another room to hide. My parents waited for the old woman to regain consciousness, but she did not. Alarmed that she might have taken ill, they took the old woman to the hospital. The next day, my mother told us, the lady died in her arms at the hospital. She had traded her soul for my father.
My mother claimed that this event had a huge impact on her. After that, no matter what my father ever did, no matter how mean or cruel or selfish he was, her love and devotion to him never wavered.
I have no idea who put the curse on my father. It could have been a member of my father’s or my mother’s family. I was young, and it is easy to believe anything when one is young. All I know is that my mother believed, and she felt sorry for him. She believed that he had been cursed and he needed help.
It took me a lot longer to feel the same way about my father.
* * *
A few years later, my aunt finally reached a breaking point in her relationship with my father. After a bad fight, she moved back to her parents’ home with Sumathi and Sharmilee. Kala stayed and lived with us, and my mother continued to treat her as if she were her own daughter. By that time my father was a broken man in both his business and family life. But my mother remained devoted to him.
To this day my mother refuses to discuss her relationship with my father or her sister. I know from my own experience that she is an immensely proud and strong woman. She had to be, to stay with my father all that time and under those conditions.
I don’t understand her, but I deeply respect and admire her strength. Whoever I am today, I owe to her — to her love and her incredible strength and her quiet courage.
CHAPTER 7
My older brother, Lathy, was responsible for all his siblings. I often resented his lord-of-the-manor ways, although I also realized what a terrible and often unwelcome burden being the eldest son was. I do not recall my father behaving as if Lathy would one day take over the jewellery shop, as was the custom with fathers and eldest sons, but it might have indeed been his hope and expectation. However, Lathy was still in boarding school (as was I) when the civil war began, and after that things went very badly for my father. So who knows?
Lathy didn’t show any real interest in working at my father’s shop, in any case. I think he was much more interested in striking out on his own. I do know, however, that my father expected Lathy to do his duty when it came to taking care of the family.
I seldom talked to my older brother. Whenever my mother thought I was being too familiar with him, or too free in my ways, talking back or arguing with him, she would scold me: “Respect your brother!”
Sometimes I would get beaten for taking things from Lathy. Because he was the eldest son, he got all the attention from everyone — our father, mother, uncles, aunts, grandmothers, and grandfathers. My father bought him a bike on his tenth birthday, when I was just eight. I had always wanted to learn how to ride a bike, so I begged him to let me borrow it.
“First, you have to clean it and show it to me,” he demanded.
I spent two hours cleaning his bike, including the rims, spokes, and tires. Then I used coconut oil to polish everything. He soon realized my potential and agreed to lend me the bike. The deal was that I had to clean it before taking it and upon returning it.
I was too young to properly respect my brother. All I wanted was to have fun and play. I was on much better terms with my younger brother, Kanna. Together, we could have fun that we weren’t allowed to have with Lathy.
Construction on our family home had begun the year my mother and father were married. When I was born three years later, the house was finally finished and they moved in.
After my aunt had come to live with us, my father added the extension, and eventually our house consisted of two verandas with five rooms and two kitchens. We had an iron gate along with seven-foot-high concrete walls. We also had a German shepherd named Tony, who guarded our house day and night. The dog was two weeks old when my father brought him home, and I think giving him the name Tony had something to do with my father’s love for Hollywood movies. My father hired a carpenter to have a shed built for the dog, and he arranged to have special milk delivered for Tony’s bowl. Twice a week, Kanna and I went to the butcher shop to buy meat and then cooked it for him. He enjoyed his treat and played with us.
Years later, when the soldiers attacked our village, Tony hardly barked. He was quite old by that time. After the civil war had begun and times were hard and we were struggling to eat, my family could not afford to feed him. One day he ate a dead crow, became sick, and died. I had left Sri Lanka, at the time, and would learn about it in a letter from my mother. She said Kanna was devastated and mourned for months.
When my father was still successful, before the outbreak of the civil war, his driver, Hanny, would wash and polish our car six days a week. Hanny was very handy and would always drive us into the city when we needed a ride, although I usually biked. I tried to avoid Hanny because if I did something wrong — such as the time I made the mistake of eating with my father’s employees, thus compromising his status — he would tell my father. The consequence of my misdeed was usually a beating with my father’s belt.
In addition to Hanny, my father was wealthy enough to employ a servant. He was older than Hanny, shy and quiet. We called him Appa. He came from the Kandy tea-plantation area. He had a wife and child in Kandy, but we never met them. Twice a year, he left to visit his family. My father paid him well.
Both of the men had Sundays off. On those days, our father would take us to our favourite beach, Casuarina, for picnics. It was usually sweltering, so we would take a quick dip in the ocean to cool down. We did not swim like other children, though. My father considered swimming in the ocean an inappropriate activity for us. We loved playing along the shore and flying our kites. We ate lots of fish, crab, shrimp, and vegetables, but what I remember best from those Sunday picnics was the goat curry with rice. Cooked with fresh Sri Lankan spices, goat-meat curry has thick gravy with extra depth of colour. When my mother cooks it, I can smell it from miles away.
Our servant did most of the house chores, such as taking care of our plants, chopping firewood, and cleaning the yards. He did pretty much everything except cook and wash dishes. My mother did the cooking. She would often go to the market to buy fresh seafood and vegetables. At home, my father would eat only if my mother or aunt prepared and cooked the meals. My mother would stand next to him and serve him his food. Once he finished eating, she would give us children our meal, and then she would eat alone. Sometimes Kanna and I would eat with our servant. We treated him as part of our family.
In the village, everyone treated us differently because of my father’s prominence. When we visited temples, the people would let our family go to the front, keeping their distance and standing behind us. When I travelled by bus or train, people — even older people — would offer me their seats.
I am ashamed when I remember this now, but I was too young at the time to understand what was going on or to question it.
Like my father, I had a head for numbers and was highly detail oriented. When I was ten years old, I managed to save about three hundred Sri Lankan rupees (about eleven U.S. dollars) in my bank account. It was a lot of money at the time, enough to feed a family like ours for a w
eek.
Often, I would buy a variety of items in town at low prices and store them in a locked cabinet at home. With so many children underfoot, my mother was always in a hurry, so I would sell her “my groceries” for twice what I had paid. It was our little secret.
I was also something of a budding agriculturalist. I cleared a large patch of our backyard to plant chili, cassava, eggplant, long beans, and bitter melon. My younger brother, Kanna, was bigger and more muscular than I was. Because he loved doing outdoor work, I managed to convince him to be a partner in my business. He was delighted! What that meant was that he would do most of the clearing, digging, fertilizing, watering, and weeding; I would concentrate on management.
At first, it worked out well. The vegetables flourished and I had dreams of reaping a rich and profitable harvest. What I had not factored in to my business plan was my mother assuming the vegetable garden had been planted entirely for her benefit and convenience. It took a lot of time and energy to run a business at such a young age, and I felt it was my father’s responsibility to provide for the family. When I saw my mother picking my vegetables for the family dinner, however, I realized I had no way of stopping her.
My other money-making schemes were even less successful. One summer day, I forced myself to wake up around 4:00 a.m., then went to cut down a banana tree. I had noticed that the tree in question had a rack of about two hundred bananas, but climbing it to cut down the rack seemed far more difficult than just cutting the whole tree down. It was hard work, but when the tree toppled over, I loaded the bananas onto the back of Lathy’s bicycle and pedalled into town. I sold my bananas to a vendor at the fruit market and managed to bicycle back home before anyone else awoke. I pretended as if nothing had happened and went to school as usual.
That evening, though, my father came at me with his belt. I knew he was going to beat me, so I ran like mad straight at him. He was momentarily startled, and when he swung the belt, the buckle caught me on the calf of my right leg. I screamed with pain and hit the ground, grasping my leg. Blood began pooling on the floor.
When my father saw the gash on my leg, he went white as a sheet. My mother hurried into the room and pressed a cloth to my leg, and then the chauffeur drove the two of us to the hospital. Not my father. A doctor stitched my leg and I was sent home. My father was not there when we returned.
Later that night, my mother admitted that someone had informed my father that I had been seen selling bananas at the market. He had been furious, as it was shameful and a huge insult for the son of such a successful and respected man of the village to be selling fruit in a market. He was angry that we had lost respect.
For days after that, he avoided me. He never talked to me about what he had done; he never mentioned the incident.
I was angry, too, at first. Once I even exaggerated my limp, groaning, just to irritate him.
My brother Kanna and I played with our cousins often; we went to the beaches, played hide-and-seek in the bushes, flew kites, climbed trees, chased cows, and used slingshots to hit the squirrels. In the evenings, Kanna and I liked to ride our bikes to the shopping area in town and hang out with our cousin Suddy. Sometimes we went to the local cinemas and watched movies with Suddy and his friends and ate street foods: kothu roti, vadai, and sundal.
Kothu roti is chopped roti, a flatbread, combined with fried egg and seasoned mutton curry, which the vendors made in front of us in the street. The smell of the sizzling meat would make my mouth water. Vadai is a fried pastry, crispy on the outside but marvellously fluffy in the centre. We ate them plain or dipped them in coconut sambal and sambar. Coconut sambal is a mixture of grated coconut, dried red chillies, small onions, tamarind, and salt. Sambar is a thick gravy mix consisting of lentils and a variety of vegetables cooked with tamarind and other spices. Another delicious treat was sundal, made with chickpeas, grated mango, coconut, and chopped onion, which Suddy would buy for us from the vendors out in front of the cinemas.
Most of the movies we watched were from India, as the local cinema only played Tamil movies. If I wanted to see a European or American film, I had to wait for my father to take us into Jaffna. We usually did this on a Friday after visiting the temple. My father and I loved westerns and James Bond films. I especially liked The Man with the Golden Gun. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but it didn’t seem to matter.
I looked forward to the Hindu festivals every year. Some lasted for days, and we would spend the whole night at the temple. Special guests from out of town would come and play barrel-shaped drums and nadaswaram, long classic wind instruments commonly played at Hindu weddings and at Hindu temples during festivals. We could hear the music from miles away.
The annual Nallur Festival runs for twenty-five days in August. Men and boys dress in bright white sarongs, while women wear colourful saris. The entire town of Jaffna and the Nallur Kandaswamy Temple are transformed to stage an intriguing event. At night, holy men pull a massive chariot around the town. The next day, devotees insert metal hooks through the flesh of their backs in honour of the gods and carry a kavadi (a semicircular wooden box decorated with colourful ornaments and peacock feathers) on their shoulders. They dance on the streets while drums and nadaswaram are played. In some instances, the hooks are attached to a pole and the pole attached to the front of a tractor. The tractor drives the worshippers through town before heading to the temple. A person stands at one end of the pole and rocks it up and down like puppeteer with a gigantic puppet or a fisherman with a wiggling fish. According to custom, the devotee puts his palms together and chants arohara over and over. This is a short form of ara haro hara, which means “Oh God Almighty, please remove our sufferings and grant us salvation.”
The devotees who carry the kavadi are people who have been cured of an illness and have promised to perform a ritual of self-mortification as tribute. According to my mother, a devotee never feels any pain. My older brother, Lathy, carried a kavadi once after he was cured of chicken pox. He was about eight years old at the time, and my mother had promised God that if he were cured, he would carry the kavadi. This kind of practice was very common when I was growing up. He had to dance to the music with the kavadi on his shoulder. Although it may have been painful, we were happy that he had kept my mother’s promise to God.
Every year, my brothers and I would save money for eleven months, then spend it all during the festival. We would buy toys, statues, pictures of God and movie stars, sweets, and sodas. There were no toy stores in our town, so Kanna and I would make our own toys. We would nail a tin lid to a stick to roll along the street or place soda-bottle caps on the train tracks and wait for the train to pass. Once a cap was flattened, I would make two holes in the middle, insert a long string and tie a knot, and then hold the ends of the string to make it spin, like a chainsaw.
Kanna was a good sport. He would sit inside an old tire and I would roll him down the street. It was great fun.
But it wouldn’t be long before everything changed.
CHAPTER 8
This country belongs to the Sinhalese, and it is the Sinhalese who built up its civilisation, culture and settlements.
— Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero, Buddhist monk, to a BBC reporter, May 30, 2015
On May 18, 2009, the brutal twenty-six-year ethnic conflict known as the Sri Lankan civil war officially ended. Depending on who is consulted, the war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils killed more than one hundred thousand civilians and a total of more than fifty thousand government soldiers and armed rebels. The United Nations concluded that as many as forty thousand Tamil civilians were killed by government forces in the bloody final stage of the conflict alone. Acts of genocide, it reported, were perpetrated on both sides, but it singled out Tamil civilians as the most abused victims.
As with most wars, there was nothing civil about it. In a civil war, winners are often difficult to distinguish from losers; no side truly wins. Even when it is over, it isn’t really over. Not
for everyone, anyway. Allegations of assault, rape, and torture against the Sri Lankan security forces continued to circulate years after the war ended. Evidence “strongly suggested the abuse was widespread and systematic,” according to a Human Rights Watch report in 2013.
When I was growing up, the majority Sinhalese strongly resented the presence of Tamils, whom they dismissed as undesirable. They saw the Tamils as newcomers who took much and contributed nothing to the country. Today, it is not nearly as bad as it was back then, but the peace is still fragile. The war is over and the situation in the North has improved, but the mental trauma has not disappeared. The Sinhalese remain the majority population in Sri Lanka, and — as has been said many times — history is written by the winners.
The Tamils have always maintained strong cultural and religious beliefs. A Hindu ethnic group from southern India, Tamils at the time of the civil war made up 20 percent of Sri Lanka’s population; the Sinhalese, a Buddhist ethnic group, accounted for 75 percent of the total population. The remaining 5 percent consisted mostly of Muslims and Christians.
The truth is, Tamils have been in Sri Lanka for centuries. But so what? What difference does it make how long a people has been here or there? Or that one is a Hindu and another is a Buddhist? Isn’t it more important who we are?
I was born and raised among Tamils. Tamils were all I knew, and I was — still am — extremely proud of my Tamil heritage. Before the civil war, being a Tamil was not even an issue. I never thought about it. Politics was never discussed at home. My father, as a prosperous, well-respected businessman, focused less on the status of Tamil ethnic identity and the issue of Tamil independence and more on the practical demands of sustaining profits and maintaining his status. I expect that some of his higher-official friends, with whom he conducted business, were Sinhalese, and it made no sense to make enemies.
The Sadness of Geography Page 4