by Rohini Mohan
He tried to quieten his thudding heart; he breathed more slowly, he wanted to heighten his other senses. In school, a rich boy who had been kidnapped for ransom had led the police to his kidnappers’ lair entirely by retracing the sounds he heard while they drove him blindfolded. Sarva tried that now: inside the van, no one spoke a word. The traffic noise and honking had begun to subside.
He couldn’t focus. Why is this happening to me, he wondered. A year ago, he had come close to this: he was with another shipping company and was inside the harbour’s customs immigration office to arrange some papers for his Turkish assignment. An officer had seen Sarva’s national identity card, which had been issued in Tamil-dominated Jaffna and showed his name in both Tamil and Sinhala. With one look at it, the officer had identified Sarva as Tamil; he took him to a room to ask a lot of questions. Sarva still had the same ID card. As soon as this was over, he decided, he would apply for a new one from Colombo, where his name would be written only in Sinhala and he wouldn’t be as easy a target.
The van slowed down for what seemed to be a gate and then stopped. Sarva heard the door open and through his blindfold saw light flood in. He was pulled out of the van and taken up some steps. He heard a ship’s horn. That gave him his first piece of real information: he was somewhere near Colombo’s harbour.
AT HOME, SARVA’S mother, Indra, waited for him to call once he had reached his aunt’s house. It was six already. His father, John, had insisted they take the noon bus from Colombo back home to Nuwara Eliya; that’s where John’s mind always was, anyway. Now the housemaid was cutting vegetables in the kitchen and John was nodding off while watching a Tamil film award ceremony on TV. As usual, the volume was too high. The obnoxious presenter’s voice boomed through the old plantation bungalow. At least they had no neighbours. Uncomplaining tea estates surrounded them.
Indra tried calling Sarva for the fourth or fifth time. An electronic voice said in Sinhala that the number was ‘in a no-coverage area’. Sarva never told her where he went all day—none of her three boys did—but it wasn’t like him to wander. He was usually home at the time he said he would be. He hadn’t had lunch, and he rarely ate out in Colombo. ‘I want my sweet aunt’s rice and curry,’ he always said. Indra suspected he was just buttering up his aunt to win some pampering in return. That fellow would do anything to get attention.
She called him again. This time she heard the phone ring, but there was no answer. ‘Good-for-nothing donkey,’ she spat, her worst Tamil curse. ‘This is what I get for having boys!’
By dinnertime, Indra had called Sarva’s phone about thirty times. She wished she had stayed in Colombo. She called her sisters, Rani and Mani, every few minutes. She felt a numbing fear. The newspapers were full of disappearances and shootings, sordid details of an escalating war in the north that was affecting every Tamil—and even some Sinhalese—these days. These were familiar news items; she had been reading them since the nineties. A son missing, a husband stranded in another town because a highway had closed overnight, a sister caught in the crossfire, a neighbour found dead in a ditch, a schoolboy shot by a soldier, another boy joining the Tigers. It all began with these hours of not knowing.
Every wave of battle meant that Tamil families, no matter who they were, expected misfortune. Anything could happen, and few things could be stopped. Indra’s mother had once compared the Tamil experience to two million people dressed in white shirts being showered by purple berries falling from a shaken tree. Few would be left unstained. So every time misfortune missed them, Indra was wracked with guilt because she couldn’t help but count their escape as a rare blessing. She saw it as a breather until the next wave of consequences.
Finally, Indra phoned the nearby police station to file a missing person’s report.
‘Who’s missing?’ the bored voice at the other end asked in Sinhala.
‘My son,’ Indra said. ‘He is a seaman in Colombo,’ she added for some reason.
‘When did he go missing?’
She said he was supposed to come home for lunch, but she felt something had happened to him. The voice, now annoyed, told her to keep on waiting and hung up.
Indra sat on the threshold of her front door and stared at the darkening sky. Was she panicking unnecessarily? Maybe he’d just gone to a friend’s house. But why didn’t he answer his phone then? Only Sarva had this ability—to drive her berserk with his neediness and then drop her as if she meant nothing. He had stayed with her through her hernia operation. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked him to help change her bedpan. Oh, that was too much for any boy. But no, Sarva had grown up. He was close to his family now. He wasn’t footloose any longer. She called her sisters again to check if he was there. He wasn’t.
She decided she must do something before she lost her mind. She called her usual travel agent and booked two seats on the night bus to Colombo, leaving in two hours. ‘Hurry up with that pittu!’ she shouted to John, who was eating dinner inside.
BY THE TIME she returned to Colombo the next morning, Indra’s sisters had roped in her elder son, Deva, to do a round of Sarva’s friends’ houses on his motorbike. Deva lived with his wife and children just a few streets away from them, and he dropped in for lunch looking crestfallen. ‘One day or another, this was going to happen to us, too, Amma,’ he said.
In the afternoon, Deva went to the neighbourhood police station to once again try to file a missing person’s report. They told him to come back in forty-eight hours. As he was leaving, one of the constables called him to the corner and asked him why he was trying to file a report when his Kottiya brother was actually fighting the Sri Lankan army in the Vanni. The constable then grinned broadly. The other constables laughed.
When Deva went home, he told his mother only the part about forty-eight hours.
Indra did not sleep that night. Instead, curled up next to the phone, she pressed redial every few minutes. Her son should never have left her side, she kept telling herself unreasonably.
At around nine the next morning, still in bed, she groped around for her phone and reflexively pressed redial. A man who was not Sarva answered the phone. ‘Hello?’
Indra sat bolt upright. ‘Where is Sarva? I’m his mother speaking!’
The voice said, in Sinhala, that her son was being questioned. ‘Podi vibayak thiyanawa.’ A short interview.
‘Kohadu? Where? Where!’ Indra asked in Sinhala.
‘We have him. Stop calling.’ He hung up.
Indra had not eaten for twenty-four hours, but this, the tiniest clue about her son’s whereabouts, energised her. She quickly washed her tear-streaked face, tied a knot in her wispy white hair, drank half a bottle of water at one go, and called again. And again. The third time, the same man picked up. ‘Hello!’ he said gruffly. ‘Stop calling!’
‘Where is he? I want to see him!’ Her sister came running from the kitchen, gesturing to Indra to ask who the man speaking was. ‘And who are you?’
‘We cannot tell you. Stop calling.’
‘Please, son, I’m—’
He hung up again.
When she called back immediately, the number had been disabled.
2.
June 1980
INDRA BELIEVED THAT the birth of each of her sons had been accompanied by a sign. The birth of her eldest, Deva, coincided with her husband’s promotion from floor manager to factory supervisor at the tea estate: her firstborn had brought prosperity. Carmel, her last son, was delivered by cesarean, which Indra believed made him forever lazy. With Sarva, overnight her cascading black hair showed a thick clutch of grey. He was the child she would struggle most with.
Even at his birth in 1980, as the nurse in Negombo General Hospital had handed Indra the tiny, dark, hairy baby, she was irked that he was not a girl. Of course, a boy meant the continuation of the lineage, a boy would take care of his aged parents, a boy was all any Jaffna Tamil should want. But a girl would have been easy, an infusion of gentleness into Indra’s male bastion. Raisin
g a girl would have relieved her anxiety about her own fading youth.
Instead, here was a second boy. Her sisters both had sons, too. Only her brother had two daughters, the lucky man, and it was in his house in which she stayed after Sarva’s birth. Her husband was in central Nuwara Eliya, making arrangements for a home in the tea plantation where he’d secured a new job. Indra had refused to stay among the plantation workers in the damp line quarters provided. Instead, she moved in with her younger brother’s family in the western fishing town of Negombo. She was ten hours away from John, but she hoped that her absence might expedite his house search.
Indra’s brother had a general store in town and a fleet of buses that ran between Negombo and Jaffna in the north. Staying with him was not easy, although his wife was affable enough. He was always mocking Indra’s children, saying they had to ‘man up’. At the age of one, Sarva had taken to trailing behind his mother, holding on to the bunch of safety pins bundled at the end of her sari fall. The baby spent most of his time in the kitchen dragging pots and pans across the floor. Terrified that she might leave him forever whenever she so much as went to the bathroom, Sarva followed his mother everywhere. At night, he slept sprawled on her stomach, crying if she tried to lift him off or turned on her side.
‘You know what happens to such mama’s boys in today’s world, no?’ her brother would ask. ‘He is going to be torn into pieces out there.’
Indra was starting to think her brother was a coward. She saw weakness in his voyeuristic obsession with the vivid stories of mass killings and burnings that were splashed daily across the Tamil tabloids. It was difficult to parse fact from fiction, especially when the articles were riddled with bloody descriptions and excruciating detail. Maybe these things actually happened. She didn’t know. But they had inspired her brother’s kotthu metaphor: the noisy shredding, thrashing, and tossing of rotis on hot pans outside little eateries at dusk—a comforting reminder of dinnertime for most Sri Lankans—seemed to suggest to him all the ways a man could be hurt. And the sight of her toddler with his big lips, curly black hair, and shy smile invariably made him bring up the violence of the kotthu. Indra would wave her brother off, saying Sarva was only an infant, and if he wasn’t allowed to be attached to her now, when would he be? She never said more. She didn’t feel she could, not when she lived under her brother’s roof.
In Negombo town, Tamils lived among Sinhalese, Muslims and English-speaking Burghers. Her brother had lived there for over fifteen years, spoke fluent Sinhala, and had great friends among his Sinhalese neighbours. If Indra felt slightly ill at ease, she put it down to the pressures of living in a new place and her own rudimentary Sinhala. She had grown up in Jaffna, in an almost entirely Tamil community. She’d later gone to a Tamil convent school in Nuwara Eliya, where she learnt some English from the nuns but no Sinhala. While her younger brothers played cricket with a group of boys drawn from all the local communities, a relative or one of the Tamil tea workers chaperoned her everywhere, even on her walks to the market.
Nevertheless she tried to fit in. Indra believed she could pass as Sinhalese: she was large, round-eyed and fair-skinned. Instead of saris, she took to wearing long skirts and blouses like the Sinhalese and Burgher women. It was a while before she could shake the feeling that she had stepped out of her house in her underclothes. Still, she wasn’t sure she blended in; she was unable to speak to people, and she didn’t know their ways. She had become terribly conscious of the large red pottu on her forehead, something most Tamil Hindu women wore. When she went out on crowded streets, she sensed the circle growing in size with every person who set eyes on it. She felt singled out. She had always considered herself an independent, educated woman—she had practically raised her five siblings singlehanded, and now she helped her brother with his office accounts as well. It was embarrassing to feel so lost.
To add to her discomfort, her brother had begun to hint at a cash crunch, given that he alone was now feeding seven people. To expand his income, he planned to ply buses on new routes. Since his buses went north, his passengers were all Tamils and Muslims. His friends were encouraging him to start buses on southern routes. Negombo was three-quarters Sinhalese, they said; he had to tap the market. It was assumed that few Sinhalese would ever have reason to travel north. None of their families lived there anymore. It was not safe, his friends were always saying, shaking their heads during their tea sessions or drinking bouts. Since the Jaffna library had been burned by Sinhalese policemen in 1981, the militants in the north, some eight groups of them by then, were itching to attack any Sinhalese who ventured there.
The ominous discussions made Indra anxious. She was desperate for John to tell her he was coming to take her to their new home, far from her brother’s house. She considered leaving on her own, but people always talked when a husband didn’t come to collect his wife from her maiden home after childbirth. John visited his family in Negombo, but so rarely that Indra was sure her secondborn would never learn the word appa. And he was terrible with phone calls, refusing ever to speak for more than three minutes on the office phone, fearing he’d get into trouble. One evening he called with news that he had found a house a few kilometres away from the line houses, on an elevation, far from gutter waters.
‘Why don’t you come on your own?’ John suggested. ‘Why make a round trip, no?’
As if she hadn’t even heard John, Indra asked, ‘So, when are you coming to take me?’
AFTER THREE YEARS in Negombo, Indra moved with her sons to the house in the hills. While John was thrilled and relieved to see them when they arrived, he did not ask Indra why she had changed her mind and left Negombo on her own. He knew her stubborn ways. She didn’t explain in detail why she came so suddenly, merely saying her brother had been attacked by ‘some people’. John knew about the riot from the papers and didn’t probe further. His family was safe now. It was time to focus on the children and set up the house.
John had been promoted to the rank of assistant manager at the tea estate. In thanks for his loyal service since his days as a line man and then a factory supervisor, the owners looked after him well. He was allotted a white-and-red colonial building that came with a helper and a housemaid. The toilet and bathroom were a bit leaky, but John didn’t want to be picky. His favourite thing about the house was that it was a mere five hundred metres from the tea factory. He could walk to work and even come home for lunch and a quick nap.
Sarva’s infant attachment to his mother had ceased the minute they left his uncle’s house. He spent hours in the overgrown garden of their new bungalow, and as soon as Indra turned her back, he would run for the gate. She often found him two hundred metres away, under the tree where the women who picked tea leaves had left their own infants sleeping in sari cradles. Indra knew he was safe there—she could even see him from the gate—but she made a scene nevertheless. ‘Anything could happen,’ she would say. ‘And then how would we feel?’
For the first couple of days back from Negombo, she had a sick feeling in her stomach, a premonition of some sort. Indra never explained it, so John assumed she just did not want her child, the assistant manager’s son, playing with the workers’ children. What else could it be? He knew his wife’s views of the plantation workers and of his ancestors. Indra was not one to hide her feelings.
Indra and John had entered into a love marriage when they were both in their early twenties. They had fallen for each other, she for his quiet manner and he for her long dark plaits with red school ribbons. Their relationship had been one of stolen glances and smuggled love letters. There wasn’t much conversation. Her father, once a soldier in the British army, had been an accountant for a company that owned several tea estates in Hatton. He had lost his fluency of Tamil during his years abroad, and Indra, who read Tamil better than her father, often went along on his auditing rounds. In one of the bigger factories he frequented, they met John, just promoted from labourer to floor manager. ‘Young and obedient with a bright future
,’ Indra’s father had announced in English, with a slap to the lanky man’s back. John had blushed red, looking at Indra out of the corner of his eye. A year later, she was insisting that her father use his influence with the Sinhalese boss to get John a promotion.
‘Because I want to marry him,’ she told her father, by way of explanation. ‘Don’t you want your son-in-law to have a better job?’
When her father objected to John being a Christian, Indra replied with the confidence of a devout Hindu. ‘It’s not like I’m going to start praying to Mother Mary.’
The bigger bother, however, and one that would plague their marriage, was not immediately apparent, a matter Indra herself had struggled with. In one of their shy ten-minute meetings, in telling her about his childhood, John shared a story his grandfather had often told him. John’s great-grandparents were labourers relocated from southern India by the British during the colonial era. His ancestors crossed the Gulf of Mannar in a ship along with almost a thousand others and, from the western coast of Sri Lanka, were forced to walk to the hills at the centre of the island. It took them months, and en route hundreds died of hunger and exhaustion. John’s grandfather had been a baby during this mass migration, and yet he often retold the story of how they hacked down the forest to turn it into tea and coffee plantations, women learning to pick leaves and men learning to both farm and serve tea–first for the British estate owners and then for the Sinhalese ones. At the end of the tale, the grandfather would walk to his old metal trunk, and from under his folded dhotis and shirts would fish out the orange cotton sari in which his mother had swaddled him during their arduous journey.
John knew it wasn’t an extraordinary story in those parts; everyone in his school in Hatton, a plantation town, told a version of it. But he loved his telling of the story because it ended with the sari; no one else had the sari. For John, it was a piece of truth that had travelled from Trichy in southern India to a damp line house in central Sri Lanka. That fabric was the explanation for his existence, for why he spoke a Tamil different from Indra’s. It was the unspoken answer to her query about why he didn’t just quit his job at the estate if he hated it so much. He wanted to, but he couldn’t.
