To be honest, as a boy, I was less aware of being Tamil than I was of being treated differently because of my family’s wealth and status. It was odd to me, for instance, that my father discouraged us from swimming at the beach like other children. He associated swimming with fishermen and other labourers. Unfortunately, at that time, the caste system was still a fact of life in Sri Lanka, and when one grows up with a certain arrangement, it is easy to think that this is the way it is everywhere — the way life is supposed to be.
And because of the way I grew up, I was naive about many things. For instance, it would have been extremely unusual for my mother to engage with my father on issues of politics. A wife would never presume to debate her husband or even offer an opinion unless asked to do so. I am quite sure my father never asked. I have no idea what she thought about the majority Sinhalese. I doubt she knew any Sinhalese people. As a proper Hindu wife, she observed strict obedience to my father, as she fulfilled her role of complete devotion to him and her family. Still, she was intelligent, and I wonder what she thought about the situation in Sri Lanka. She was obsessively protective of her children and would shelter us from any threat.
I grew up in a cocoon, essentially immunized from any direct experience with the ethnic rivalries that would inevitably tear the country apart. It wasn’t until I was twelve years old, when I enrolled at boarding school in Jaffna, that I first began hearing stories of Sinhalese attacks on Tamils. In fact, the closer the country moved to war, the more Tamil families who lived in places like Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, were moving to Jaffna to enroll their children in Tamil schools. The city boys in my class would tell stories of Tamils being attacked and beaten by Sinhalese mobs or of family members being arrested at night and taken away by soldiers.
Before boarding school, however, my friends and I never really talked about it. My period of sheltered isolation lasted until 1981, when Sinhalese thugs went on a rampage and burned the famous Jaffna Library to the ground. It was my first experience with cultural genocide.
Tamils will insist that they have deep roots in Sri Lanka.
Anti-Tamil Sinhalese tend to dispute the claim that Tamils have a respected history in the country, insisting that Tamils are recent “outsiders” who flooded into Sri Lanka from India to work as cheap labourers on British tea plantations. Not surprisingly, the truth is somewhere in between and far more complex.
Not only do Sri Lankan Tamils have a rich cultural legacy, they have a well-earned reputation for prizing education and, most especially, literacy.
When the Portuguese conquered what was then known as the Kingdom of Jaffna (essentially northern Sri Lanka) in the early fifteenth century, they brought with them the rudiments of Western-style education. The number of schools was increased, and the schools were expanded when the Dutch ousted the Portuguese and the Jesuits.
The missionary schools created and run by the Jesuits later became the template for schools teaching large numbers of Tamil students. Interestingly, it was the widespread success, growth, and popularity of the missionary schools and their attempts to promote Christianity that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, provoked a nationalist backlash among Tamils, who wanted to establish Tamil-based schools and colleges. Tamils were both creating a sense of ethnic identity and solidarity and raising educational standards across the board.
When the British wrested colonial control of Ceylon from the Dutch in 1796, effective administration required the services of thousands of literate native Sri Lankans to work as civil servants and administrators. This angered the majority Sinhalese, however, as the better-educated and highly literate Tamils were appointed to prestigious and well-paying government positions in far higher numbers. It is possible, too, that the British favoured the minority Tamils as a strategic counterpoint to any revolt by the majority Sinhalese.
In any case, the tables turned in 1948 when control of Ceylon was relinquished by the British. The country was renamed Sri Lanka, and the majority Sinhalese — their anger still festering over the favouritism they believed the British had shown to the minority Tamils — embarked on their path to avenge what they perceived as years of injustice.
A few years earlier, a motion had been presented to the ruling congress to establish Sinhala as the official language, replacing English. It did not pass, but the stage had been set for conflict.
Tensions between the Tamils and Sinhalese escalated dramatically after 1948. Shortly after independence, more than seven hundred thousand ethnic Indian Tamils living in Ceylon were made stateless when parliament passed the Ceylon Citizenship Act, which made citizenship in Sri Lanka incredibly difficult for Indian Tamils to obtain. It is estimated that as many as three hundred thousand Tamils were forced to return to India as a result.
In 1956, Sinhala did become the official language of Sri Lanka, an act that outraged Tamils, most of whom did not speak Sinhala and who, therefore, either were forced to resign or found themselves suddenly ineligible for employment in any civil-service capacity. The Sinhala Only Act drove the wedge between the two ethnic groups even deeper. Tamils decried what they declared was blatant discrimination by the majority government. In response to the act, Tamil political leaders called for nonviolent resistance. When riots erupted in June 1956, hundreds of Tamils were killed, and the Sinhalese government hastily negotiated a compromise settlement with the Tamils that would have made Tamil the official administrative language in Tamil-majority areas of Sri Lanka. However, pressure from Sinhalese nationalists overturned the agreement.
Tensions flared in communities around the country, and at least a thousand Tamils were killed in riots that broke out, particularly in the east and north. The prime minister fanned the flames of anger and resentment among the Sinhalese by blaming the Tamils for the murder of a local mayor. Tamils were also rumoured to have been responsible for a horrible attack that left a teacher mutilated. Sinhalese gangs bent on revenge responded by attacking Tamils whenever and wherever they could be found. Even Sinhalese who sheltered Tamils were hunted down and threatened, beaten, or killed. Properties owned by Tamils were looted and burned down by Sinhalese mobs. These atrocities rendered around twelve thousand Tamils in Colombo homeless.
While mobs attacked Tamil citizens, the government refused to act. Five days after the riots began, the government declared a state of emergency.
In 1958, the Tamil Language Act was passed, but it would prove to be too little too late. The army was withdrawn, except in Jaffna. In effect, Tamils were under a state of permanent siege.
But I was aware of virtually none of this when I was growing up. And knowing why the civil war broke out would not have made a difference. When a person is pointing a gun at you, does it really matter why?
CHAPTER 9
You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.
— Joe Sabah
When I was twelve years old, my parents sent me to St. John’s College, a boarding school in Jaffna. The school followed British curriculum, standards, and policies. We lived by the clock, and it felt like I was in a military school. A wrinkled bed or a late arrival at class or meals would be met with consequences: after-school detention, loss of home-visit privileges, a slap in the face, or a beating with guava sticks. If we accumulated too many infractions, we had to face the principal, and it wasn’t pretty. He had a vast collection of canes and loved to use every one. Most of us followed the rules.
On my first day, my father and mother drove me to the school and parked our shiny white Peugeot 404 in front of an older building. A senior boy standing by the entrance greeted us. He was the prefect and in charge of the dormitory. He had a private room beside the entrance.
My new surroundings were very different from home. Instead of rooms, the dormitory had two sections, front and back. It looked more like a warehouse than sleeping quarters, with about forty beds lined up one next to another. I was assigned to the Evarts Hostel.
I noticed a couple of other boys sitt
ing on their beds, crying. They looked much younger than me, and it turned out they were only in grade four. I was attending grade six. But I felt like crying, too.
My mother prepared my bed as my father put my suitcase away in a communal area at the back. “Kavanamaka padikkavum,” she whispered to me, with tears in her eyes. Study carefully. I felt tears in my eyes, too. A few minutes later, my parents said goodbye and left.
I was overcome with loneliness. It was the first time in my life I had been on my own. I sat down on the bed, nervously wondering how I was going to survive in such strange and hostile surroundings.
My eldest brother, Lathy, was a student at the same school. But as a new boy, I was required to arrive early for orientation; Lathy wouldn’t arrive for another few days. Lucky for me, another boy came up to me after a while and asked me my name. I quickly wiped my face, brushing away my tears. I was embarrassed to be acting like a grade-four boy. He introduced himself as Shiran, and we started talking.
He was from Colombo, he said.
“Do you know anyone here in Jaffna?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said.
He pulled a bag of Smarties from his pocket and offered me some. Shiran was my first friend at boarding school.
Later that first day, a bell rang and the prefect entered the dormitory and commanded us to dinner. Actually, it wasn’t so much the bell that rallied us as it was a fellow from the dining-hall staff furiously banging a piece of steel bar from a railway track with a long pipe.
We all filed into the dining room, a featureless but spacious hall lined with tables and benches. I was told that the first two tables were reserved for vegetarians. Hindus are not allowed to eat meat, especially beef — cows are sacred animals in Hinduism — so I sat at the first table. We were instructed that every boy must eat everything on his plate before anyone was allowed to leave. Every table was assigned a monitor to ensure that we were following the rules. Otherwise, the prefect warned us bluntly, we would be disciplined.
At the end of each day, the warden of our dormitory, Mr. Ponniah, entered the dormitory and summarized the day. During these summaries boys would be notified of any demerits they had earned for mischievous or unacceptable behaviour. Some infractions were minor and warranted nothing more severe than a warning and a few demerits or a short time in detention. Punishments often were served by writing out things like “I will keep my bed clean all the time” one thousand times on lined papers. Other misdemeanours were more serious and could result in a boy being caned and/or expelled from school. Lathy was expelled once because he had left school without permission to come home. My father had been furious with him and had to use his influence to plead with the principal to allow him to return.
I had no wish to offend my father, so I did my best to toe the line when it came to the rules. I wasn’t like Lathy in that respect. He had a much deeper rebellious streak. Perhaps this is common in eldest sons.
Life in a boarding school is ruled by routine — mind- numbing routine. We were awakened at 5:30 in the morning and had mandatory prayers at 6:15. Study hall commenced fifteen minutes later, at 6:30 on the dot. We were called to breakfast at 7:45. Morning classes began at 8:30 and lasted until the 12:45 lunch break. Then more classes until 15:45, with sports afterward at 16:00. More studies at 18:15, then prayers at 19:45. After dinner, we went to bed and lights out by 21:00. As we moved to the upper years, we ended up studying much longer and instead went to bed at 23:00.
The thing about boarding school is this: one learns the ropes quickly. It was disorienting at first, but I learned I had to do everything by myself: waking up on time, making my bed, bathing, dressing for school, doing my homework, washing and folding my clothes, and so on.
I was uniquely inept at sports and joined the Scout Club instead. Occasionally, I played carom, a game similar to billiards but played on a much smaller table and using fingers instead of cues. Once I even won the runner-up prize for singles. I also participated in stage dramas, but I could never remember my lines when it counted, so eventually I was relegated to appearing in crowd scenes, where it did not matter if I flubbed or forgot a line.
The year was punctuated by major school events. The Battle of the North was the annual cricket match between Jaffna Central College and St. John’s College, two leading schools in Jaffna. The match was played over three days and the school ground was filled with current and former students, parents, and other spectators from all over town. The cricket fans would carry their school flags, beat drums, and dance around the city on match days to show their support.
The annual boarders’ day event was also a big deal, and we would start preparing for it a couple of months in advance. Actually a week-long celebration, it was filled with singing, dramas, various sports, memory games, eating competitions between hostels, and other events. Boarders’ day itself was on the Saturday, and the students would all have dinner on the school grounds with the principal, wardens, and their families. During that time, prizes were given to the winners of the week’s events, and then we would sing, dance, and tell jokes. I recall it as one of my happiest times at boarding school.
The food at the school was mostly unremarkable and often horrible, so we spent a lot of time dawdling at the gate, begging non-boarders to buy us food from Cheryl’s Café, the shop across from the school. Boarders were never allowed to leave school premises unless we had explicit permission. Every boarder was given two absits and two exeats per term. Absits allowed a student to be absent from the college for up to two hours. We used them for shopping trips and for buying snacks in town, or sometimes to go to one of the movie theatres. The masters and prefects were always on the lookout, watching like crows, for boys returning late from an absit. Exeats were for weekend home visits.
I thought of home a lot. Although I made many wonderful friends at school, the loneliness that seemed to be at my core never completely went away. I missed my mother’s delicious cooking. I was worried about my mother, of course, and about my younger brother and sisters. Often, I would lie awake at night wondering how they were getting along. Was my father treating my mother well?
My parents visited me at school, usually once a month on a Sunday. My father would drive up with my mother. I always looked forward to those visits because my mother brought home-cooked meals. Very often I would sit down right then and eat what she had brought. Other times I would share it with my friends, all of us huddled over parcels of food, scooping with our bare hands, desperate for a taste of home.
On those Sunday afternoons, my father was usually very formal. He would ask me about my school marks and occasionally, when I showed him my interim report card, he would check over it and say, “This is very good.” And that was about it. He and my mother would stay for a couple of hours. Once a week, boarders were required to write letters home. I never received any return letters from my parents.
I was restless; I did not really feel at home at boarding school the way some boys seemed to. I wanted to go home and spend time with my mother and have a break from school, but I was afraid of my father and unsure of how he would react. Around this time I found out that he was drinking more than before, and there was vague talk about the business not doing well. More worrisome, my father was fighting with my mother and with my aunt.
At school, I was a natural in mathematics and science but hated humanities and anything to do with art. On my O-level exams, I got five distinctions, in mathematics, science, health, commerce, and Hinduism, and three credits, in English, Tamil, and social studies. I became exhausted from the pressure of endless studying. The atmosphere was competitive and achievement was compulsory. All students at the hostel were required to have monthly performance reports signed by the principal. Even a slight drop in achievement from one month to the next resulted in a painful caning of the backside. Doing well was not enough; a boy who did well was required to continue to do well — or to do even better.
There were many times when I was so frustrated and upse
t that I threatened to quit. I dreamed of running away. It didn’t matter where. On the other hand, I was very proud of my accomplishments and wanted to work as hard as I could to be the best. This meant, however, many hours locked away by myself to study.
Looking back, I think in those years I was suffering from depression. I see now that I began to separate myself from my friends. I squirrelled myself away in my books; I avoided sports as much as I could. I lost interest in just about everything other than academics.
CHAPTER 10
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
— Barbara W. Tuchman
I was only six years old in 1972 when the various Tamil political parties in northern and eastern Sri Lanka voted to combine into what became known as the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF). A few years later, the front voted to demand from the ruling congress a separate Tamil state, Tamil Eelam. Also in 1972, a Tamil group was formed that would eventually be transformed into the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) guerrilla group.
Of course, I was not aware of these things at the time. Events in Colombo might as well have been a million miles away. What I do remember, however, was an increasing presence of government soldiers in the area around our village. I also began to hear about the freedom fighters. That was not what the government called them. To the government they were rebels and needed to be put down, like rabid dogs. The soldiers I remember were always standoffish, aloof, and suspicious of Tamils. Mostly I tried to stay as far away from the soldiers as I could. I tried to make myself invisible to them.
I have no recollection of ever meeting a rebel when I was young, but I imagined these freedom fighters must be good and honourable men. After all, who could be against freedom for Tamils? To a boy of my age, the whole thing sounded very exciting.
The Sadness of Geography Page 5