The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  Mother did not expect Mugil, now a mother of two, to continue working for the Tigers. But, in 2008, she was asked to join the Films and Communications Division; Colombo newspapers referred to it as the propaganda wing. Her team–eleven people including an LTTE spokesperson—taught map reading, made documentaries and films, took pictures on the front lines and during functions, wrote pamphlets, sent reports to their websites based abroad and issued press releases. Mugil’s first job was to photograph the bodies of dead fighters on the battlefield, track down the parents and deliver the news.

  At first, she loathed the role—she wanted to fight for her people, not take pictures of corpses. But as the years passed she came to take pride in the work. She believed she was still like a cadre, going to the battlefield, taking the same risks, but making sure she returned alive, with pictures. The closer she got, the better. She accompanied a unit or was driven to the location after the coordinates had been radioed in. If a cadre lost his or her life, she took a frontal shot, two side profiles, and a wide shot. If the body was shredded or burned beyond recognition, she would try to find an identifying mark. If the combatant’s ID was found on or near the body, she would catalogue the guerrilla name and code. Then, as soon as she could, she would find the fighter’s real name and address and take the photos to the families for identification. She would console the mourning mothers with a short speech she’d perfected with repetition: your child was very brave, he/she had killed a dozen before succumbing to wounds, you have to be brave to honour the memory of your child, we will avenge this death. If the deceased cadre was a girl, Mugil would sometimes add that she wished she could have died in the girl’s place.

  More often than not, the family would ask for the body. In the gentlest way, Mugil would explain that the body hadn’t been found or that it had been blown to pieces. If the body had been brought back, however, the logistics of shipping it for a family funeral were simple. The next step was to print the photos and display them on designated walls, in schools, offices, on trees. (Her father ran one of the printing presses that did this, so Mugil even knew how to work the machines.) Then came the elaborate funeral, which the local community body would organise and pay for. The fighters would be immortalised in graves that the LTTE would maintain. No death is futile, she’d heard Annan say in his annual speeches, if it inspired another to pledge his life for the Tamil homeland.

  It was an unpleasant job, but Mugil believed the process brought the bereaved families solace. As she told them, everyone dies, but there is honour in dying for a reason. On Martyrs’ Day, the pictures were printed en masse; even from a distance, Mugil could pick her photos out from those of the other photographers. She thought she had a knack—maybe it was an eye for composition or a respect for death—that made her work stand out from the rest.

  Mugil did this job for three months in mid 2008, and by October found that she was taking more than ten pictures a day. Her memory cards were full, even the back-ups. Barring the one in her pocket, she had exhausted her entire supply of batteries. She seemed to shoot pictures of nothing but dead new recruits. This was unprecedented. And without a satellite phone and only a stunning silence from her seniors, tracking down all the families of the dead was proving impossible.

  In early October 2008, one of the seniors in the political wing asked her to put her media work on hold and navigate the GPS for a group of new recruits. Mugil was torn. Was she back to being a cadre or just filling in? The Tigers didn’t generally mix combatant and non-combatant responsibilities and political wing heads giving military instructions felt stranger still. She also didn’t understand why they would ask an unfit, limping ex-combatant to lead a young unit. Finally, she assumed it was a one-off mission, coiled her hair on top of her head, and went to join her new unit.

  The nine girls in Mugil’s charge were about the same age as she had been when she joined the Tigers. They had hastily snipped bobs, and they held their guns as if they were aiming to shoot their own feet. Mugil felt a thick uneasiness in her stomach.

  She had felt like this before. Three men from the Tigers had come for her brother Prashant when he had turned fourteen. Mugil had pleaded with them, saying that her husband, father, and she herself had all pledged themselves to the Tigers. Could they not spare Prashant for a few more years? ‘How can you speak like this after having been a fighter yourself?’ the men had argued. They had continued to turn up for months, quietly eating lunch at her house, making jokes or napping till Prashant returned from school. Mugil would come home every day expecting to find her brother gone. But he left in stages instead of all at once. Prashant began to frequent the LTTE engineering department, hanging out with the men there, and learnt to make bombs, smart mines, and cheap satellite phones. Whenever Mugil objected, her brother’s retort was that she had joined when she was thirteen. Later, when he was around nineteen, he finally and officially joined the engineering department.

  Age had never mattered, Mugil knew. Vanni natives of five feet or more, boys and girls, became conspicuous if they didn’t join up. Sooner or later, they would give in to sweet talk or peer pressure. Since the 2002 ceasefire, the Tigers had even begun forcibly conscripting recruits. When parents rushed to the movement offices to retrieve their sons and daughters, Tiger leaders wrung their hands about a shortage of cadres.

  In 2008, the movement numbered somewhere between 5,000 and 11,000 Tigers. The Sri Lankan military, on the other hand, had 200,000 soldiers, and were recruiting more. As the pressure grew, many families in the Vanni, even those right under the Tiger leaders’ noses in PTK, hid their teenagers, keeping them from school and in some cases even refusing to let them leave the house. White vans—that dreaded symbol of the unknown–scooped boys off the street. Families arranged marriages for girls barely thirteen to save them from conscription. But the Tigers persisted. They had photographs of almost every family that lived under their authority in the Vanni. They would cross-check the photo with the members of the household, and if anyone, especially an able youngster, were missing, they would take a hostage until the errant youth reappeared.

  Some months before she’d been called to fight again, Mugil had read about a Tiger spokesperson denying allegations of child conscription. The United Nations had reported that since 2003 some 6,000 under-fourteens had been recruited—kidnapped from their homes and schools and sent to the front line, sometimes with barely ten days of training. The Tiger spokesman argued that what the UN condemned was only a call for more volunteers. It was everyone’s duty to fight, he said; he himself had joined as a teenager. Mugil identified strongly with that.

  Even though she’d joined in her teens, Mugil had always considered her recruitment voluntary. She believed that being in the Tigers had given her the kind of experiences a girl like her could only dream of. She’d undergone intense training before she was sent off to fight. She grew into the organisation, and the akkas and her fellow trainees were her closest family. She had little time or opportunity to complain. The movement touted a future Tamil homeland, but in the Vanni, they were already citizens, protected and provided for. People like her received monthly salaries of 8,000 to 10,000 rupees and stayed in quarters built specifically for them. When she had her two sons, Mugil sent them to the movement-run crèches, where they were fed and cared for while she went about her work. The Tigers clearly valued her decision to serve with them, and she was grateful every time they considered her qualified for a mission. She’d heard that before her time, people were even allowed to resign from the force. She would not contemplate leaving, though. After all they did for her, when her house was on the land they protected, how could she? How would the men and women she had sworn to protect treat her if she threw up her hands one day and said she was too old or too wounded to go to the battlefield?

  But the new recruits under Mugil’s command, their eyes fixed on the ground, were not what the movement needed. When she was told to keep a close eye on them, that some of them had repeatedly tried to run away,
Mugil had allowed doubt to enter her mind. They were shivering, their faces pale with hunger and fear. They huddled close, as if they were surrounded. Some of them didn’t even have standard-issue uniforms or cyanide capsules. Their hair had been cut short not to ease movement but to deter them from escaping. If they deserted the LTTE, they could be spotted anywhere. The bob had become a sign of imprisonment, rather than personal freedom. They didn’t want to be there and it was written all over their faces.

  These children were being sent to face a real army when they could barely lift their guns. And they were being led by her, a half-able fighter uncertain of her orders. It didn’t seem to fit the larger cause. Was this how the Tigers had been fighting in the last few months? Was this how they expected to win? With scared children? They were girls born into the war and its terrors, not its beginnings or causes. In the last decade, they had only watched loved ones die or disappear overnight, their older brothers leave on boats to foreign lands, their schools and roads shut down every few months. When they heard the distinct whistle of a shell, they were primed to run to their bunkers and crouch in the darkness. They did not see why they should fight, Mugil thought, and it was useless to tell them.

  MUGIL HAD FALLEN asleep on the tree and woke up coughing furiously. Remembering where she was with a start, she slapped both her hands to her mouth.

  It had rained all night. She had not heard from the high command for more than twenty-four hours. The seniors had banned use of the walkie-talkie a few days earlier; there was a suspicion that the army had tapped into their frequency or that there were traitors among them. She had been sent to guard the line with the girls for as long as possible; they would get the next orders to her somehow. Looking down, she wasn’t sure what she could do anymore.

  Below her, the carnage was over. Five naked girls, their bodies twisted in the last moments of struggle, lay still in the mud. No one had told these girls this could happen.

  The soldiers who had raped them had left. Mugil swung down from the tree, looked at her compass, and walked away.

  4.

  June 2008

  SARVA’S ABDUCTORS LEFT him on a seatless chair in the corner of a room. They handcuffed his hands to his back and kept him blindfolded, just as he had been in the van. The darkness pressed close. Outside, ships blew their horns and grunted in what was probably Colombo harbour. In the urine-smelling room, something dripped thickly. It was painfully arrhythmic, but Sarva found himself counting the drops. One to hundred and then back to one, in loops.

  He sat in his underwear, simultaneously preparing himself for and ignoring any thought of what was to come. He had vomited a few times, from nervousness and the stink. It was numbing, not being able to see his own hands or touch his own face. It seemed to erase any proof of his being alive. He sensed nothing except the stench of piss reaching into his nostrils. Even the pounding of his heart had dulled.

  Once in a while, he made a small soft sound: ‘Ah?’ It came out of his throat like a question. At first, it was his way of checking if there was anyone else in the room, staring quietly at him. After a while, it began to help confirm his existence. It could have been a few hours or a whole day since he had been brought in. The blackness around him made him unsure of time and its passing.

  Nothing had happened yet.

  It had to be a strategy. Sometimes a fearful imagination could do what no amount of interrogation could.

  Perhaps they would beat him. If Sarva was lucky, they would ask questions. His school friend Kanthan, who now lived in France without speaking a word of French, hadn’t been asked anything. They knew everything, they said, and Kanthan only had to sign a sheet of paper. When Kanthan refused, they beat him. Then he agreed to sign it but got the paper all bloody in the process, so they beat him again. A bloody confession paper was not going to work in court.

  Sarva fell asleep a few times, sinking into the hole in the chair, and then waking as the exposed nails on the rim cut into his bare thighs. Finally, after cutting himself badly, he realised he didn’t have to sit on the chair. He heaved his body sideways and fell onto the floor. Vomit and piss drenched the corner. He dragged himself to the centre of the room.

  At some point, he fell asleep curled on the floor. A kick to his stomach roused him. They yanked off his blindfold. His eyelids slowly came unglued. In the weak light of a bulb near the open door, he saw two men standing above him. They had closely cropped hair and wore dull blue shirts and shiny grey trousers, like men selling insurance.

  Sarva sat up and said, ‘Ayya?’ He was glad it was the respectful Sinhala moniker he’d blurted, instead of the Tamil anna. These would not be Tamil cops—there were few of those, and they would not be used to interrogate Tamil detainees. Should he have called them a neutral ‘Sir’, as he had been taught on the ships? But they didn’t look like sirs, and he doubted they had the patience for English.

  One of the men asked his name.

  ‘Sarvananthan John Pereira, ayya.’

  ‘Village?’

  ‘Nuwara Eliya, ayya.’

  ‘Not Jaffna?’

  ‘No sir, Nuwara Eliya. In a tea estate, where my father—’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  There was a pause.

  Sarva asked why he had been brought here.

  They ignored the question and wanted to know if he had ever gone to Vavuniya, a town south of the Vanni, and still under government control.

  ‘Yes, several times.’

  ‘Then, Vanni?’

  ‘No, ayya.’

  ‘Fine.’

  They put the blindfold back on him. Sarva heard the whoosh of a baton being swung. It landed sharply on his collarbone.

  Again, they asked if he’d been to the Vanni.

  ‘No, ayya!’

  A blow to his back. A few more to his knees.

  ‘Okay!’ Sarva screamed. ‘I’ll tell the truth, please, ayya!’

  They did not remove the blindfold or ask him the question again. They waited.

  ‘I was in Vanni in 2003,’ Sarva said.

  ‘You got training with the LTTE?’

  ‘I was forced, ayya.’

  They called him a liar. ‘You trained in 1993, not 2003. Don’t you know?!’

  Sarva’s brain felt foggy, his legs seemed to be evaporating. He was painfully hungry.

  The men were still speaking. ‘You have false teeth. You are a spy. You know Sinhala, Tamil and English. How can you not be a spy?’

  Sarva couldn’t find any meaning to stitch their words together. Everything seemed false and simultaneously true. They were repeating things, changing tiny facts here and there, alleging massive things, screaming, beating. Every time he said, ‘It is not me, ayya!’ the baton came down. The pain was one thing, but the fear befuddled him, made him unsure of what to confess and what to deny.

  After what felt like hours, the men left. Before bolting the metal door, one of them said, ‘Think about what you’re going to say to us when we come back.’

  Sarva considered saying yes to everything. But he wasn’t sure that would improve his standing with the men. They wanted him to plead guilty so that they could beat him some more, with more reason, greater moral superiority. He didn’t want to end up like Kanthan, who had experienced the cowardly shame of accepting all accusations, being spat upon and losing a thumb in the bargain. If the judge had not acquitted him of all charges, his friend would now be rotting in jail, losing more fingers. But even after his release, Kanthan had to be on the run. The court’s verdict meant nothing to the cops; it was as if being outside the legal limits of custody, investigation and trials freed the Terrorist Investigation Department to attack Kanthan more severely. Prison might be safer than this secret place. But he wasn’t sure that pleading guilty would keep him alive long enough to see the courts. He reminded himself of the things he should not utter.

  After some time the men returned. One of them ran at him like a cricket bowler and kicked him in the groin.

  They asked why
Sarva had only fourteen numbers in his mobile phone. ‘That must mean you have all the other numbers of your contacts in your head. You must have memorised them all.’ A boot cracked into his face. His mouth filled with blood and he passed out.

  He came to with a tight slap to his cheek. Before the high-pitched ringing in his ears subsided, his blindfold was ripped off and a plastic bag pulled down over his head. It was drenched in petrol. Someone tied a rope around his neck, and shook his head hard as if to swirl the petrol around. The fumes funnelled into his nose. Sarva gasped and tried to suck air with his mouth, but that made the fumes sting his trachea. He felt his legs thrash about and flashes of light sliced his head. His eyes were on fire. He was sure all of this meant death.

  Finally they took the bag off and left him.

  Every few hours, some men returned. They asked him the same questions and he gave the same answers. The petrol bag reappeared. He tried to figure it out, learn to breathe in it, but there was nothing intelligence or patience could do when petroleum flooded your insides.

  He was losing track of time, of their words, and where the batons and boots landed on his body. Sometimes he fainted. He pleaded for water, but wasn’t given any. The thirst made Sarva retch. Some bile spilled out. He cried, and worried that his tears would finally kill him.

  If the white van hadn’t got him, he would have been in Greece, in the harbour of Piraeus he’d heard so much about—a place that deserved to be called foreign. What would Athens smell like? Of baked bread or perhaps freshly tarred roads. It would be a vision of valour, power, gladiators.