by Sharon Bala
Finished, he said, standing and rubbing his hands on his trousers.
Wednesday evening, Arun said. Be prepared.
He left without paying and Mahindan watched with relief as the Corona sped off. Still no sign of Chithra.
He retrieved the tire, checked the buzz box, rolled down the corrugated door, and, after affixing the padlock, walked home. Behind the house, he pumped water then squatted at the bucket to wash his hands and face. He scrubbed at his arms with a cake of soap. All the new nicks and scratches he had acquired that day stung.
There were sounds from inside. Drawers rolled on casters, the beaded partitions rustled between rooms. Chithra had changed into a housedress. She waddled out with a king coconut in two hands, sucking on a straw. A thumbprint of red kumkum was smudged across her neck. She was barefoot. The little bells on her anklets jingled.
You went to temple, Mahindan said.
She gave him the coconut to hold while she struggled down into the chair beside him. Went to say a prayer for the elephant baby, she said.
Chithra was in the eighth month of her pregnancy, but she was so big she said it felt like longer. Wait and see when this child comes if he is not an elephant.
We’ll call him Ganesh, Mahindan said.
Just go-men! She gave his arm a light slap.
Chithra was superstitious about names. She balanced the coconut on her belly and dropped her head to the straw. Her thali gleamed in the mellow evening sun.
This was Mahindan’s favourite time of day – sharing a king coconut, gazing over the lantana bushes, and listening to birdsong as evening closed in. The sweet water was the perfect antidote to rusty undercarriages, angry sparks spitting from the welder.
Anyway, it will be a girl, Mahindan said, taking the coconut.
Chithra pressed at her belly, trying to coax the baby to kick. Amma says, the way I’m carrying, it must be a boy. She leaned over and pinched his nose. Just hope he doesn’t inherit his father’s elephant trunk.
She levered herself out of the chair and went inside. He heard pans clanging, the high squeal of a knife being sharpened. Then Chithra came out with a bag of onions.
Come and help me with this, she called. Jobless fellow!
They cooked under a lean-to at the side of the house. Mahindan took over the chopping while Chithra measured red rice into the chatti pot.
Finer, finer, she said, hovering at his shoulder.
You modern women, he said. Too many demands.
Watch your mouth, she said. Or I’ll leave you with the elephant and join the LTTE. She dropped her voice a little as she said this, even though there was no one to hear.
And what do you think those girls are doing? he teased. Washing the men’s jungis and frying their vadai.
She bobbed her head from side to side. Mr. Funny Man. And you know everything.
Ask your thangachi next time she comes.
They were joking, of course. Everyone knew the truth was another story. The female cadres were as fearsome as the men and were being chosen for the most dangerous assignments. The girls put their names in a lottery to be sent on suicide missions. They took their last meals with Prabhakaran himself. No one is made to do it, Chithra’s sister had told them. There are more than enough mad fools who very happily volunteer.
Mahindan worried this could change. Nila had only joined out of a sense of inevitability. One day they would have come for me, she’d said. No boys in the family, and I am unmarried. If I volunteer early, go on my own, they might take care of Amma and Appa. The money had yet to materialize, but it was true that when the recruiters came around, they always let her parents be.
Strapping bombs to girls and nicely sending them to do men’s dirty work, Chithra said. Trust our people to invent this idea.
Reminds me, Mahindan said. Will you go and stay with Ruksala on Wednesday night?
Another job for the Tigers?
What to do, Chithra? Can’t say no.
No, no. I know. She rubbed his shoulder then moved her hand to her belly, absently. Anyway, Ruksala will be glad. Now that her time is close, she misses Rama more.
Mahindan thought of the job on Wednesday night. The Tigers didn’t tell him what they wanted until they arrived, and he never found out what happened after the vehicles left his garage. But if explosives were involved, they came wrapped in Velcro. He handled them gingerly, terrified the whole time. The weight of the canisters, their heft in his hands remaining long after the job was done.
Every time he was made to rig up the brakes on a car or strap bombs to the underside of a truck, he thought of how he was bound to these weapons, one link in a chain of events that would end a life. It gave him nightmares, the possibility that one day he’d work on a vehicle that Rama or Nila would be made to drive. But what choice did he have?
Was he worse than the engineers who built these explosives? The man who invented gunpowder or the companies that profited from its sale? The secretary who worked for the head of the company, who answered his telephone then took her salary to the market and bought food for her family? Was Mahindan any worse than this woman?
The Tigers claimed it was all in service of the greater good. Short-term sacrifices for long-term gain. Mahindan hated the Sinhalese and wished to be free of them, but blowing up this or that minister, sending a woman strapped with explosives into a market in Colombo, how would this bring them closer to Eelam? All it did was set the Sinhalese more firmly against them.
He didn’t mind so much when they targeted the army. When they attacked the garrison at Elephant Pass or liberated a Tamil village. But watching Prabhakaran on the news proclaiming the Black Tigers as heroines, triumphing over a civilian target blown to smithereens, Mahindan wondered: And so what? More dead bodies, but still no homeland.
It began to rain a little, so they ate inside. Chithra complained about a co-worker: He’s one of these last-minute cases, utterly useless!
Mahindan told her about Mr. Chanakayam’s car, how he’d popped open the bonnet and found the old man’s handiwork – a Pringles chip can duct-taped to a cracked exhaust pipe, holding the two parts together. Chithra was mid-laugh when the light bulb flickered off. The radio fell silent.
All hail the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Chithra said. These buggers think they can run a country? They can’t even manage to keep the lights on.
Back to hell
The woman said her husband had been killed by a bomb. He was ploughing the paddy field when it happened, coaxing the bulls through the sodden ground, the straw hat she had woven shielding him from the sun. He was barefoot and shirtless when the bomb came, and his sarong had been ripped off by the blast so that when they found him, he was naked and in pieces among his dead animals.
All eyes were on the woman as she spoke – the lawyers, the interpreter, the reporters shaking out pens and furiously scrawling in notebooks. She had a prominent mouth that jutted out distractingly, overcrowded with big white teeth. There was a script, carefully fabricated to strike a balance between detail and emotion, and the woman relayed it in a practised, vacant tone, staring at a point on the far wall. She would not look at Grace.
Although no one had been released from detention, at the beginning of November the chair had announced it was time to move on to admissibility hearings. They would begin with the women and unaccompanied minors, but in the new year they’d add men to the schedule too.
Now, in addition to detention reviews, Grace had to listen to all the gory details of people’s alleged life stories and decide whether or not they could apply for asylum. Before each hearing, she braced herself for the onslaught.
This was Grace’s third straight week of admissibility hearings and her last one for the day. If she left within the hour, she would avoid the Friday rush. But they were already four hours and nine minutes in, and the end was nowhere in sight. Warm air gusted from the vent above Grace’s head. Heat spread outward from her chest, rising up her neck. Her mouth was dry, but she had left
her office in a hurry and forgotten her water glass.
Grace stifled a yawn. It had been a bad night. She’d been standing at the front window watching a group of men coming at the house, running as though they were being chased, Steve in the lead. She’d had her hand on the deadbolt when Meg screamed in terror, waking Grace up, her stomach riotous with panic. Steve, his back to her, was snoring. The red digits on the nightstand shone 2:48. Grace lay there, in confusion, while the house slumbered.
Meg’s scream had been real. Even now, Grace could recall its verisimilitude, its pitch-perfect texture. Meg, her first-born by minutes. How closely our nightmares can mimic reality.
The woman claimed her name was Hema. She and her two teenaged daughters had arrived without so much as a library card and, in lieu of documentation, had signed a meaningless piece of paper affirming their names and ages.
The husband was only the first casualty. My sisters and mother, the woman said. All dead. My nephews and cousin brothers also gone, stolen by the LTTE. They would come with their tractors and stop opposite the house, all the boys they’d already caught crammed onto the flatbed trailer hitched at the back, chins on knees, staring out, dejected.
She used the word caught instead of recruited. Or the interpreter did. It was impossible to decipher who was saying what.
The interpreter jotted notes as the woman meandered through her tangents, flicking the pen up from the pad as he dotted each sentence with a finishing flourish. He strolled in every day with his things under his arm – a notepad, a legal reference guide, a Tamil–English dictionary, and two ballpoint pens – and lined them all up at punctilious right angles. Grace was irritated by this fair-haired man and his obsessive compulsions, this interloper who had no real role at these proceedings, no tangible responsibility, yet was the only one who understood every word.
The woman said she had two younger brothers. They were clever boys, good with their heads but useless with their hands. In her retelling, the brothers became sanctified. They were transformed into a single entity.
The brothers had never held a gun in their lives, didn’t even have the stomach to slash a knife across a chicken’s neck. The brothers were sensitive and squeamish. They had flat feet. The woman reported all of these details in a deadpan voice, like a truculent child repeating a history lesson.
Grace watched her speak, not understanding a word, scrutinizing her body language for a hint of what she was saying. The whole room held in suspense, at the interpreter’s mercy until he translated whatever he thought fit to repeat, with whatever commentary he chose to add or delete. Grace had the urge to knock his sanctimonious little stack of books and pens right off the table.
The brothers had hidden in the chicken coop when the recruiters came with their tractor. At first, their mother said she didn’t have any sons. But the LTTE had their own ways of ferreting out the unwilling. The woman’s mother was beaten. Palmyra fronds have dry, serrated edges. They can slice through skin.
A startled gasp threatened, but Grace swallowed it down, reproaching herself for getting emotional. Focus on the job.
The mother begged the Tigers not to take her sons. They were needed in the paddy field, and, anyway, they did not know how to use a gun. Please, please, don’t take away my boys. What do you want them for? They will be of no use. The woman said she never saw her brothers again. Her mother had died from the beating. Grace was skeptical. Was it possible to die from a beating? Squirming inside her clothes, she longed for air conditioning, to remove her suit jacket, undo her buttons, and air herself out in front of an open freezer.
In the last days of the war, the woman and her daughters had deserted to the Sri Lankan side.
Grace wanted to know when, but the woman would not say. April? Grace asked. Or May? Early or late? The woman said she did not know; she did not have a calendar. Every day and night, it was the same – bombs and shelling and people dying.
The time of day, then, Grace said, glancing at the clock. Ten past four. So much for avoiding rush hour.
I don’t know, the woman said. I didn’t have a watch.
She sat there, stubborn and unyielding as a rock. She had arrived in Canada and now that she was here, she would not be moved.
Grace fanned herself with an empty file folder. It must have been thirty degrees in the room, but no one else seemed bothered.
What was the position of the sun in the sky? Grace asked. Surely you recall. Was it high? Was it setting?
The woman glanced at her lawyers. No, Grace thought. They can’t help you.
The woman twisted her hands together, finally shaken out of her stupor. She fumbled for the answer. It was…it was…we had not had time for lunch…no…oh…that day there were clouds.
Tell us how you did it, Hema, Gigovaz said. Tell us how you crossed to the Sri Lankan Army side.
The young lawyer – the student – pushed a little cup of water toward the woman and said: Have a drink.
Stalling tactic, Grace thought. She could picture the circle of water in the cup, the tiny bubbles on its surface. The woman put the paper cup to her lips and drank. Her microphone was still on and the whole room heard the small gulps. Grace’s tongue was like sandpaper. She could grant this woman’s admissibility or she could do the safe thing and ship the three of them back to where they came from. She longed to go home and make this decision in peace.
The woman said, There was a lagoon.
Immediately, Gigovaz interjected. He wanted Grace to know this was the Nandikadal Lagoon. Here was the LTTE’S last stand – Tigers and civilians all trapped together on a narrow strip of land between lagoon and ocean. It was all well-documented. Exhibit L in the Evidentiary Package.
She was galled by his presumption of her ignorance, the unnecessary interruption in this already drawn-out saga. Mr. Gigovaz, Grace said. Are you giving testimony or is your client?
The woman said there were Tiger cadres guarding the lagoon, shooting at deserters. But people were streaming across anyway. When he translated, the interpreter waved his arms out in front of him as the woman had done to indicate waves of people.
The army was on the verge of victory and everyone was terrified. The lagoon was a murky brown, heavy with blood and the bodies of the fallen. It appeared impassable, but there were shallow areas. The Tigers were pointing out the paths, turning their backs as people waded across.
Grace cut in: I thought they were shooting at you. Now you’re telling me they were helping you to escape?
The woman grew flustered. Just when Grace thought she might finally catch her eye, she turned away. She shook her head yes, then no.
These people, Grace thought. They want to have it both ways. Well, she said, which one was it?
The woman said: The cadres had orders to shoot, but not everyone was following. Some might have been like my brothers – forced to fight. Anyway, they had joined to shoot at the army, not their own people.
The woman had recovered her nerve. She was on a roll now, intoning again in that dull, flat voice. The interpreter matched her tenor, belabouring every word and stringing out the sentences. Grace thought he was probably paid by the hour.
The woman said the whole lagoon was being bombarded. Shells spiralling at them, blasting into the water. People were falling back, shot by Tiger cadres or felled by bombs. The woman and her daughters pressed on. The water was up to their waists. It was slow going. Up ahead, they saw a cadre. He was just a boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen. His gun was pointed right at them.
The woman put both hands over her face as the interpreter relayed her story. Gigovaz pushed a tissue box toward her and she blew her nose.
Singh was writing in her notebook. The excitement in the reporters’ corner was palpable. They stared out like a single hungry entity, recording everything Grace said word for word so she could relive it all in the newspaper the next day and Fred could scrutinize her performance.
I was so frightened, the woman said. I did not want to die. But then one
of the other cadres, a girl, shot her gun. But not at us – at the one who was going to kill us. She shot him and he fell down and she threw her gun into the water and took my hand and we all ran together.
Was she telling the truth? Grace peered at the woman, hunched across the room, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. Why was she really here?
Grace was sweating freely now, the blouse beneath her suit jacket staining. She said: Please explain to me, madam, what the Tigers were doing. Were they helping you to cross the lagoon or were they trying to prevent you?
The woman trembled. She pulled her sleeves down further over her hands, as if she was trying to disappear into the sweater. It was…they were…My daughters and I were not the only ones…there were many others with us who also ran.
That doesn’t answer my question.
Grace was weary of this woman’s stuttering. If the story was true, if it was hers, surely she would be able to recount it in a straightforward way.
It was nearly five now and Grace had a dull pain in her shoulders, crawling up the base of her neck, the prelude to a headache. Her thirst demanded quenching.
The interpreter was speaking. Grace raised a hand to silence him.
Okay. Fine, she said. Let’s talk about what happened after you allegedly crossed the lagoon.
The Sri Lankan Army was there. They saw us coming and they saw that we did not have weapons, that we were not Tigers.
Singh spoke up. But wasn’t there a Tiger cadre with you, holding your hand?
Yes, but she was not wearing a uniform, so after she threw away her gun, she was like the rest of us.
I see, Singh said. And in your interview with the immigration official at Esquimalt you said the army was kind to you.
The woman flared up. Kind? They were monsters. We were made to live in a cage, a high fence all around. People dying everywhere.
Exhibit F, Singh said. After the war, the Sri Lankan government set up temporary IDP camps. A UN report found the conditions to be satisfactory. In fact, there was no reason for this woman and her daughters to leave. Eventually, they would have been relocated back to their homes.
