Sugandhi Alias Andal Devanayaki

by T. D. Ramakrishnan

  ‘They waited for a week, perhaps for the acid burns to heal, to start on the next punishment – cutting off my hands. It happened in Divine Pearl, in the hall downstairs. All the prisoners and jail officials had gathered to watch. I was surprised, since no one had come to watch the acid brushing. As I was extremely conscious of my disfigured face, I did not look at anyone. I had partially lost vision in my left eye. The task of carrying out the punishment was given to the highest ranking military officer. As it is sinful to utter his name, I will call him General.

  ‘The soldiers led me to a high platform. The implements to chop my hands off were arranged on a table nearby. I could see the glitter of the knife with my right eye. That was enough to send shivers down my spine. A military officer read out the list of crimes I was supposed to have committed. It was said that I had tried to escape by seducing the main security guard. It was also said that it was to prevent me from seducing anyone else that my face had been burnt with acid. And my hands were to be cut off to stop me from trying to escape. As I had not repented after the first phase of punishment, they were forced to carry out the second phase. The General came to the platform, smiling. Two soldiers held me to a pillar near the table and tied me to it with a smooth rope. Then I was asked to put my hands on the table, bow down and close my eyes. I obeyed like a machine. Someone marked a spot near my elbows with a marker pen. Then the General said in a sympathetic voice, “Poor thing. Don’t cut off both her hands at once. Let’s do it one by one, okay?” The soldiers tied my left hand to the pillar. I wanted to scream, “No! Cut off both my hands together.” But punishments are not carried out according to the criminal’s convenience. I put my right hand forward and shut my eyes. As I stood waiting for pain to claim my body, someone tapped me on my shoulder. It was the General. Calmly, he said, “I’ll save you from this punishment. Can you speak to the TV channels in support of the president?”

  ‘Was he repeating Robert’s words? I thought I should act intelligently. Emotional outbursts would not help me. I looked at him and nodded in agreement. He asked the soldiers to free me. They did so, quickly. Robert too came up. I cried, “Please don’t cut off my hands. Call the TV channels. I’ll say whatever you want me to. Don’t cut off my hands.” I wept loudly. Robert looked at me in disbelief. The General and the other officers were happy at my change of heart. But they repeatedly questioned me to make sure my transformation was genuine. Eventually, they were convinced that the harsh punishment had had its effect and that I had realized the merits of the president and the military. When the General asked me if I wasn’t upset at being raped, I shook my head with difficulty. An officer said, “Sir, that wasn’t rape. She was really enjoying those moments.” Everyone laughed and walked towards the officers’ mess. Robert pulled my hand and asked me to come with him. I obeyed. He said, “You could have agreed before I hurt you.” As I fumbled for an answer, he said, “Well, perhaps that’s when you learnt your lesson.”

  ‘I had lunch with them. That night, they moved me from the cell to a guest room near the officers’ quarters. A doctor came from Colombo to treat the acid burns. He wanted to admit me to a hospital in Colombo. I asked Robert whether it would be better if I went to the media after my wounds had healed. “I can tell them that I was hurt by the Iyakkam.” He replied, “Though you are a Tiger, you are intelligent.”

  ‘The next day, I was admitted to the hospital. Everything was shrouded in secrecy. Robert was given the task of protecting as well as observing me. He was with me day and night. He trained me on how to behave before the media. He took me through the questions they were likely to ask and told me the right answers. After one week, a press conference was organized at the hospital itself. They presented me as a girl they had rescued from the Tigers. Apart from the Sri Lankan media, the international media had also come to meet me.

  ‘But I broke my promise. I answered their questions the way I wanted to. I repeated the expletives I had used to curse Robert when they asked me about Mahinda’s ideas. Some members of the international media who had interacted with me in my capacity as a media coordinator for the Iyakkam in Kilinochchi understood what was happening. Though the military tried to move me to another hideout, it was impossible as the hospital was filled with the media, supporters of the opposition parties and human rights activists.

  ‘Robert was suspended and another officer was entrusted with my security. Using that opportunity, a few foreign journalists along with HOPE, a human rights organization, rescued me. A member of HOPE pretended to be me and spent a week in the hospital. By the time the military realized that they had been duped, I had reached Canada by boat, ship and plane.

  ‘But they carried out their punishment in the end. Three months after I reached Canada, it happened. Once when I was out, a hired criminal entered my apartment. When I returned, he attacked me. I thought he was a thief. But he did not want any money. Though the six-foot tall, well-built man could have raped me, he did not attempt to do so. He said, with no emotion, “I want your hands.” He did not reply when I asked him who he was. He took out some very sophisticated instrument and cut off my hands, one by one, at exactly the same spots marked out in Divine Pearl. He put the severed limbs in a bag and took them away, making sure that no hospital could rejoin my limbs. Though I spent the entire night bathed in blood, I did not die.’

  Meenakshi’s story ended. In shock, we looked at our hands to make sure they were still there.

  28

  As we sat troubled, not knowing what had happened to Meenakshi after losing her hands, we received Arulmozhi Nangai’s message: ‘Same time tomorrow.’

  I lost my peace of mind. I couldn’t sleep at all. I didn’t even notice that Juliet was beside me. If I shut my eyes, all I could see was Meenakshi’s eyes. Her soft voice haunted me. I was sure that it was Sugandhi. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Juliet. I was besieged by doubts. Who was Meenakshi Rajarathinam? Could Sugandhi write a story like ‘Devanayaki’, a story which had a historical background? Unable to sleep, I went to the balcony. Juliet came to me.

  ‘What’s the matter, Peter?’

  ‘It’s hot inside. I wanted some air.’

  ‘No. Something is troubling you. Why don’t you tell me?’

  She kept a hand on my shoulder. To divert her attention, I asked, ‘Why do you and Gayathri participate in this widow’s meet?’ She quickly moved away. I sensed that she was angry. I pulled her to me and said, ‘My dear, please try to understand. You are no longer a widow. Forget the past.’ I could see her eyes glitter even in the dim light of the room. Within no time, she had forgotten Meenakshi’s story. But Juliet had something special to tell me. She guided my hand to her stomach and said, ‘If you put your ear to my stomach, you will hear someone call you daddy.’

  When I said that Gayathri may be able to hear us, she fell silent. She hugged me and drifted off to sleep. Meenakshi’s half-covered face continued to haunt me. ‘We can love only once in a lifetime.’ I couldn’t agree with her. I was falling in love with Juliet.

  When we started for Colombo, Juliet said, ‘Peter, look at Gayathri, look at the countless widows in Sri Lanka. We have to do something for them.’ I could see Gayathri waving at us. I hadn’t known that she was a war victim too. She never spoke about herself. Driving easily upon the empty roads, Juliet told me about her.

  ‘Gayathri got married three months after she came back from the Film Institute. The groom was a smart journalist, Aniruddha Jayathilakan. Unfortunately, they could live together for only two weeks. He was an assistant editor with the Sri Lanka Guardian. His articles, which harshly criticized the human rights repression of the state, were a headache for the government. They decided to put an end to such writing by killing him. They had him murdered in the Maldives when he was on his honeymoon. They raped Gayathri before that. Then they pushed his body into the sea. It is rumoured that the assassins belonged to Gota’s gang. The Maldives government protected the criminals.

  ‘Gayathri’s father, the no
velist Karunarathna, couldn’t bear it and died of shock. Gayathri’s life was also threatened. But she remained unfazed and joined Vikrama’s Sunday Leader. When Vikrama was killed, she started writing a column called “Witness” for Al Jazeera. Her mother, a lawyer, and her brother supported her in everything.’

  I felt great respect for Gayathri, who had not let the tragedies in her life beat her down. When she said, ‘Peter, almost all the women activists in Sri Lanka are rape victims,’ I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. These words contained the answer to the question why Sri Lankan women chose to become suicide bombers.

  It was a day when important decisions had to be taken in Colombo. I watched the screen test of the Khmer actress who had been shortlisted to play Devanayaki’s role. I immediately told Christie that she wouldn’t do. She was very slim, although her face bore some typical Kambuja features. ‘Devanayaki was voluptuous,’ I reminded him.

  That night, we went back to Gayathri’s house in Gampaha. At 10 p.m., Meenakshi came online. This time, the conversation was not recorded. There was a dignified sixty-year-old woman with her. Though Meenakshi had covered for face with a black veil, I recognized her voice with its pronounced British accent. It was Sugandhi. She admitted it herself.

  ‘I might have confused you yesterday. So I decided to end this game of hide-and-seek. I am Sugandhi alias Andal Devanayaki. When I left the Iyakkam, I changed my name. Now I am Andal Devanayaki. This is my mother, Meenakshi Rajarathinam. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be alive now. As I lay in a pool of blood after my hands had been cut off, she saved me. She was my neighbour in Canada. She is from Trivandrum in Kerala. My birth mother, Dr Kanakavalli, had worked as a gynaecologist in Colombo Castle Street Hospital. Dr Rajarathinam, who was her colleague, married Meenakshi. In the massacre of 1983, Dr Rajarathinam, like my parents, was killed. Luckily, Mother escaped. During my last days with the Iyakkam, I used to secretly write poems under the pseudonym Eezhathachi. They were poems questioning the anti-democratic stance of the Sri Lankan government.

  ‘It is this anti-democratic ideology that led to the downfall of the Iyakkam. The leadership was never ready to seriously consider criticism or rectify their mistakes. Instead, like fascists, they wiped out the people who criticized them. If it was a woman, they would get her married to somebody from the Tiger leadership and push her into the prison of marriage. The value system of the Iyakkam was extremely patriarchal. The marriage would be followed by pregnancies and children. All critical thinking would end with that. But swimming against the tide, I started writing under the pseudonym Eezhathachi. I emailed the poems to my father’s friend, Nallur Sivachidambaram, who lived in Paris. He published them in an online magazine called Karupu. When the poems were well-received, we decided to publish my autobiography, The Notes of a Female Fighter. But Sivachidambaram was killed on the day it was advertised. It was around the same time that the last battle of Mullivaikkal took place. That put an end to my writing.

  ‘I resumed after a few years. Some of my friends in Canada revived Karupu. For reasons of security, I used my mother’s name while writing. My life was threatened both by the Iyakkam as well as by the government. But that is not the only reason why I decided to write under the name of Meenakshi Rajarathinam. It was Mother who brought me from the world of poetry to fiction. She told me the story of Devanayaki who had lived centuries ago in Kanthalur Salai. When we heard that a book called the Susaana Supina had been discovered in Sigiriya, Yamuna went there and scanned a copy for me. I read it with great difficulty and with a lot of help from Mother. I wrote a story exaggerating the information I found in that book. That is the reason why I’m known as Meenakshi Rajarathinam in SSF.’

  When she stopped talking, the real Meenakshi Rajarathinam began to speak.

  ‘I too would have been killed in the riots of 1983. A Sinhalese policeman rescued me when he came to know that I was from Kerala. He took pity on me. But I wasn’t in a position to go back home as I was known as the woman who had married a Sinhalese. They didn’t know I was married to a Tamilian. I was three months pregnant with Arul then. I gave birth to her in a refugee camp. I lived there for three years. One day, Dr Sridhar, who was practising in Canada, came to our camp. He was involved with an organization that rehabilitated refugees. His family had been killed in the riots of 1983 when they had come to Sri Lanka on vacation.

  ‘He thought that I was his dead wife Manimekhala and hugged me tight. I was astounded. He was weeping, calling out, “Mani! Mani!” When he realized his mistake, he fell at my feet begging forgiveness. I too started weeping. He asked me whether I would go with him and I agreed. Anyone in my situation would have. I flew to Canada with my two-year-old daughter. The next year, I gave birth to Yamuna. Dr Sridhar was working at Toronto General Hospital. I later joined the hospital as a nurse. Dr Sridhar was a very dignified man who did not hesitate to speak his mind. Naturally, he fell out with the Iyakkam. The cause for the quarrel was money. The unwritten rule was that every Sri Lankan Tamil in Canada should pay money to the Iyakkam in accordance with the salary they earned. They had deputed certain people to collect this money every month. We had to pay thirty dollars. When I started working, they raised it to forty. Apart from this, they would collect a couple of thousand dollars every year under some pretext or the other. If we refused to pay, they would threaten us by saying that we would not be allowed to return to our native land. When Arul was eight years old, she needed a major surgery. We had to spend a lot of money and could not afford to pay the Iyakkam. Dr Sridhar explained our position to the men who came to collect the money, but they refused to listen and threatened him. He told them that he wouldn’t give money for them to buy guns and explosives.

  ‘When he was coming back from work the next evening, the Iyakkam shot him in front of our apartment. I was on duty at the hospital. My children and a neighbour brought him there, but he was already dead. Nobody in our neighbourhood dared refuse the Iyakkam after that.’

  Weeping openly, she continued, ‘I lived alone in this country with my children. As I had a job, we did not face financial difficulties. Though I paid money to the Iyakkam regularly, I hated them. It was not just because they killed Dr Sridhar that I felt angry. Is this how freedom is obtained? Haven’t you heard of Mahatma Gandhi? He won freedom for such a large country like India without using guns or bombs. What did these people gain after so much bloodshed?

  ‘I was born into a family of musicians in Trivandrum. So I taught my daughters music and dance from a young age. When they grew up, they gravitated towards western music. Arulmozhi Nangai and Yamuna Sridhar are well-known singers now. Four years ago, they got a sister – Andal Devanayaki. They sing songs written by her. Their band is called SAD. For reasons of safety, we tell everyone that Sugandhi is dead.

  ‘Devanayaki is like my eldest daughter. When I took her to the hospital, she was nearly dead because of the loss of blood. It took three months for her wounds to heal, and another month for her to be able to speak. She’d had a nervous breakdown. When I got to know that she was Dr Kanakavalli’s daughter, my sense of responsibility doubled. I got expert doctors to treat her post-traumatic stress disorder. We treated her face as well. With music and love, I brought her back to life. Now she is all right. She can live, though she has lost her hands and vision in one eye.

  ‘When I heard that the Iyakkam was planning a movie on Rajini Thiranagama with Devanayaki as the heroine, I was touched. Rajini was Dr Sridhar’s student in Colombo Medical College. He was very proud of her. She had come to this house in Canada. Now I hear that it’s a Hollywood production. My child can’t take the role now, so someone else will have to do it.

  ‘Even in her condition, Devanayaki is not idle. She is fighting the Lankan dictatorship with her stories and music. She is leading a huge youth movement. Though Arul and Yamuna handle her profile, she is the brain behind it. But she cannot continue with this. When millions of people protest against the president in Colombo, she cannot lead them. That is wh
y it was decided to entrust Gayathri with the responsibility.’

  When Meenakshi Rajarathinam stopped, Devanayaki bowed to us and removed her veil. I was shocked. Her face was a red mass. I could look at her only once. I ran out, crying uncontrollably. I got drunk that night, trying to drown out the memory of her face. I was not fully conscious even on the return journey to Colombo.

  It took me three days to come out of my alcoholic haze, and even then I was weeping on Juliet’s shoulders. Finally, she said, ‘Please stop it, Peter. You have to decide – do you want Devanayaki who is disfigured and in Canada, or me?’ I was struck by her question. Sugandhi was dear to me, but I had lost her ages ago. I couldn’t think of a life without Juliet. She was carrying my baby. The selfish, practical man within me woke up. I hugged her and said, ‘Juliet, you are the one I want.’ I don’t think she believed me.

  The SSF activists, who had also seen Sugandhi on Skype, prepared for a mass uprising. They planned the protest against the Commonwealth Summit in three stages. The first stage was an online campaign with the slogan: ‘Try the president as a war criminal. End his dictatorship.’ Many other demands were also made. They wanted freedom of expression and the rehabilitation of widows and people maimed in the war. They also demanded putting a stop to the attacks on Muslims. The second stage envisaged a large number of discontented youth moving towards Colombo inspired by the online campaign. The city of Colombo was to be filled with people on the day of the Summit. Then the helpless dictator would have to surrender. We found this out from Juliet. The third stage was a heavily guarded secret. Only Gayathri knew about it.