The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  ‘Get me out, Amma. I can’t bear this any longer,’ Sarva said.

  She wiped his face with both hands, ran her fingers through his hair, and gently touched the gash on his cheekbone. ‘Are they hitting you?’

  He looked at the floor.

  ‘What are they saying you have done?’

  ‘Puli.’

  Indra breathed out in exasperation. ‘My son is not a puli! Catch the real Tigers!’ she shouted at the police in Tamil. She thought of how she had almost killed herself six years earlier trying to pull Sarva out from hell to avoid this backlash. But she did not mention it to the police—it would only make things worse.

  ‘Why are you catching my son?’ she yelled in Sinhala.

  A constable walked towards them. ‘That’s enough, Amma,’ he said.

  ‘Amma, please,’ Sarva sobbed. ‘Just get me out. Please.’

  They dragged him away, leaving Indra and the other parents stranded and disconsolate. Some of them were already asking the police when they could see their sons again. Without a word, everyone was handed more forms.

  Indra was furious. She had not raised this child for twenty-eight years so that someone could burn his dreams down in a moment. She had never raised a hand to him, so who were these people to hit her son?

  She began filling in a request for the next meeting. The American had explained to her that if Sarva were registered as a detainee, he would be safer. He would still be in prison but out of the secret basement at least.

  Marshalling her limited Sinhala, more limited English and full religiosity for her son’s cause, Indra tried everything during the next few weeks. She needed to get him out, put him on record everywhere like the NGOs were saying. The government wanted to hide Sarva, make people forget him. But she loudly announced his absence from her life to everyone who would listen and many people who wouldn’t.

  First, there was the police, but they sent her home with false assurances and insults. Then, the local politician, but he had her wait for three days on a promised appointment before leaving the country on holiday. So she wrote him a letter and left it at his office. She went to Sarva’s employers, the ship bosses. She got nothing better than a shrug, and was told they would provide any employment documents she wanted but no more. They advised her to find a lawyer.

  The lady from the house at the top of the street told Indra to go to the Kali temple in Mayura Place every day and do an archanai there or make an offering of a dozen bananas to destroy the evil eye that afflicted her family. Another mother she met through the Red Cross told her to go to the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission and register a complaint. Indra didn’t ask her how she knew; anyone who was aware of that sort of thing would want to keep details to a minimum.

  Indra too was learning not to spill the entire story to anyone until they had shown a commitment to helping her. She’d met six lawyers, based on recommendations from acquaintances and relatives in Colombo and Jaffna, and while they had all heard her out, none had the time to take up Sarva’s case. When she left each of their offices, Indra worried about what they would do with the copious notes they’d taken. Even idle gossip could have the burn of malice.

  Indra persistently went to the Colombo office of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission, trying to work out which ledger she had to fill in before meeting which clerk, whose directions might be genuinely helpful or, more likely, lead to a dead end. She zoned in on one employee who answered a call in Tamil—and assuming that he might be the least ill intentioned, focussed all her energies on him. A week later, he handed her a lot of forms. Some she filled in on her own, reading the Tamil print under the Sinhala and filling in the blanks with neat Tamil letters.

  The Sri Lankan government letterhead was the biggest image on the page; its authority gave Indra the jitters. What if she wrote the wrong thing and had to scratch it out? She was relieved when an employee filled in a couple of other forms in a mixture of Sinhala and English. She gave Indra a receipt with a registration number and told her to go home, saying, ‘We will call you if something happens.’ Indra wondered what that something would be, but she didn’t want to ask and risk annoying the clerk.

  As she took the bus back, she thought about her recently improved life: her comfortable homes in Colombo and Nuwara Eliya, John’s status as manager, Deva’s flourishing tourism business and the big dowry and perfect grandchildren his pretty wife had given them (even if the wife herself hadn’t been Indra’s choice).

  Once again, Sarva was the reason things had fallen apart. Yes, there were others like him in the police station. There was a war up north; they got only very limited information about that in the papers, but she remembered that the local Buddhist temple, owned by a ruling-party politician, had celebrated some recent military victory. Something was going on in the Vanni, as it always was, and once again Tamil boys were dropping like flies all over the country. But why did her child have to end up again on the wrong side of fate? When things blew up, he always seemed to be at the epicentre.

  Like when Sarva was nine, and Indra had been rushed to the hospital for her third delivery in Jaffna. That night, Sarva had insisted that he be taken, too. But Indra and John had gone first, leaving him behind with his grandfather in her maternal house in Jaffna. It was too dangerous out, and a curfew was in place. The Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF) were fighting the LTTE in the north. The Indian and Sri Lankan governments had signed a treaty to end the insurgency: under pressure from India, Colombo had agreed to merge the Tamil-dominated northern and eastern provinces and give a provincial Tamil government some autonomous governing powers through a constitutional amendment called 13A. In exchange, the Tamil militant groups would disarm. But the Tigers did not agree, so the battle began. They refused to give Jaffna up; it was their headquarters and instead of laying down arms, they trained them on the IPKF. At the time Indra and John needed to go to the hospital, in 1989, the battle was at its peak.

  An embargo on diesel and petrol meant that only a few taxis were plying the roads, their engines jerry-rigged to run on kerosene. A thatha in the neighbourhood offered to drive them for 3,000 rupees. They survived the bombs that whizzed all the way between Indra’s mother’s house in Jaffna and the Chavakacheri hospital only because they took stupid risks. Indra barely made it without popping out the baby in the car. When she came to after the caesarean, she saw that her father had caved in to Sarva’s tantrum and brought him along. On a bicycle. Everybody, it seemed, was doing foolish things. The child’s face was creased with worry, his knees bleeding. Indra could not imagine what he might have seen on the way there.

  ‘You have a sister,’ she said. ‘But she is not well.’ For hours that night, Sarva stared at the odd-looking baby, her forehead swollen with fluid. Nurses had rushed in and out of the room every few hours, prodding the baby’s head and whispering to each other in Sinhala. There was only one doctor there that night, and he was tending to the blood-spouting bodies being brought in by injured, shell-shocked people.

  The next morning, a few hours after Sarva announced that his sister would be named Doola, the baby was taken away in a shroud. Days later at home, Sarva would not stop asking when the doctor would send Doola home. Indra had smacked him hard.

  Why did he have to be the only boy to have seen a sister who did not survive even twenty-four hours? Even now, decades later, Sarva would correct Indra when she told people she had three sons. ‘And a daughter,’ he would add. He was wise enough to see how it tore his mother apart, but it was compulsive, his desire to mention Doola, to describe her fluid-filled head.

  THAT EVENING AT the Pillaiyar temple, when she ran her hand over the lamp flame, Indra prayed hard. It would take a year of her life, that’s all. She could fight for a year if it meant a lifetime of peace.

  She tried to focus on the future, a time when her son would be out of jail, back at work, and married with well-dressed children. She believed that imagining a happy time kept her optimistic, gave her energy. She had done this
through all the uncontrollable events that had bombarded her life. She would do what she could now, with the unshakable confidence that God would soon reward her efforts.

  The priest gave her a vilvam leaf and a red hibiscus. ‘Any progress?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet, Iyerai,’ she replied.

  ‘Your troubles will be over soon, sister. Just have faith,’ the priest said, moving on to the woman next to her.

  Everyone prayed for something, Indra knew. If not happiness, everyone wanted a trouble-free life of peaceful invisibility. Her mother used to say that when God had a long list of requests, he held a lottery. If you wanted to better your chances of winning, you had to have more tickets in the mix. You had to flood God’s ears with daily prayer. Come trouble, temple visits were a given—and not just any temple. You had to choose the most powerful deities.

  She had also learnt to be specific about her requests. She didn’t ask for ‘everything to be all right’; she prayed that all the forms she had filled out would reach someone influential soon, or that the big-time lawyer Deva had contacted would accept Sarva’s case. She prayed for her son to get a good night’s sleep, for any hand that hurt him to rot and be eaten by maggots. She prayed for her English and Sinhala to improve so she could argue better with the constables and clerks who stood between her and her son.

  Indra stuffed 100 rupees down the brass hundiyal and marked her forehead with vermilion kumkumum. She sat at the base of a corner pillar over-decorated with flowers and heavenly dancers. The sun was setting, and the trainee priests were lighting the rows of oil lamps leading up to the deity. Home seemed much farther than just half a kilometre away.

  6.

  December 2008

  EVER SINCE MUGIL had walked away from Kilinochchi, she had been hearing the thud-thud-thud of missiles crashing in quick succession in the distance behind her. A silence would follow. And then again, the triple thuds.

  By New Year’s Eve, it looked as if Kilinochchi might fall. For Mugil, this was beyond imagination. Kilinochchi was the Vanni’s core, Tamil Eelam’s capital. Here were the Eelam courts, the Eelam police headquarters, the Eelam Bank with more gold jewellery than cash, the marriage registrar, the office where Mugil had got her two-wheeler driving licence. Here she had also picked up LTTE stamps to stay in the Vanni and passes to leave it. It had not been captured for more than a decade. At this point, however, it was a gutted town. Only Tigers remained, and they had built a perimeter around the town to deter the advancing army. Every village around it, apart from the one Mugil was leaving, had either been captured by the army or destroyed by the Tigers themselves.

  Mugil’s safest route home to PTK, avoiding any run-ins with her colleagues or the army, was through the forests. She decided to go eastward and then south. She knew the topography well; in the training camps, they were told that the jungle was another of the Tamil guerrillas’ weapons. Defeatingly thick and dotted with booby traps, it was a dangerous place for the Sri Lankan army. But the tropical trees, lagoons and sandbanks were as good as signposts on a highway for Mugil. That said, she had never been inside the jungle alone, and her camouflage was worrying her. If anyone found her walking alone in the bush, she could be shot on sight or could meet the same fate as the girls she had left behind. She needed to get rid of the uniform.

  Kombavil village was on the way, and Mugil made for her Aunty Chiththi’s house. Her aunt lived there with her eighty-year-old in-laws, one arthritic and the other with a bad heart. They wanted to wait for as long as they could before leaving home. Displacement meant days, sometimes weeks and months, of walking, crouching and thirst. They had worked out the odds: they had a better chance of surviving if they stayed put.

  At the mouth of Kombavil, she stood outside the village clinic to catch her breath. The usual fever and blood pressure patients were standing to the side of the entrance, watching injured men and women being carried in and out. Every second person seemed to be bandaged somewhere. Bullet extraction was more or less routine for a clinic of this size, with about thirty beds, but when patients arrived with mine shrapnel lodged in their bones or precariously close to their vital organs, they were sent home with painkillers and bandages. Many spent the rest of their lives carrying the shards of battle within them.

  Mugil, too, had carried a piece of metal in her leg for over ten years. It was in a tight fold behind her right calf and sent an ache hurtling up towards her hip whenever she sat down or stood up. The X-ray had shown a tiny crescent-shaped fragment the size of a snipped fingernail in her tibia. The source of her slight limp, it was her most memorable scar—the one that, along with her spinal injury, had coaxed her out of singlehood and into family life.

  Mugil’s had been the first wedding in the Vanni after the 2004 Asian tsunami. She had spoken to her husband for the first time in 2000, while lying hurt in battle during an operation in the north. A missile chunk had hit her squarely in the abdomen, and after running through brambles for an hour, she collapsed from excessive bleeding. A combatant who happened to pass by lifted the half-conscious Mugil, threw her over his left shoulder, and continued to run, still shooting with his right hand. She was hurting but she was also embarrassed; her clothes were torn from her stomach to her inner thigh.

  When she regained consciousness at the Mullaitivu hospital, a man lay in a stretcher next to her. His arms were tanned but his chest was pale. Some short black curls flopped from his crew cut onto his forehead. His shoulder was in a cast, and tiny pieces of shrapnel had punctured almost his entire body. This was the man who had saved her life.

  When no one was around, Mugil asked him his name. ‘Divyan,’ he replied, giving her his Tiger name. His eyes were large and bloodshot.

  She had seen him before, at the training camp. He was called Dileepan then, and worked in the long-range shooting team, for whom her own team had often assigned coordinates through GPS. During target practice, he had almost blown the girls’ heads off by letting the missile fly in the opposite direction from the coordinates.

  That afternoon at the camp lunch, she had walked past his group to deliver her well-practised line. ‘With people like you, we don’t need the Sri Lankan army,’ she had said. Her friends giggled, egging her on.

  By Tamil standards, Mugil wasn’t much of a beauty. The Vanni’s unrelenting sun had burnt her to a coffee brown, and she thought her high cheekbones and cleft chin gave her a masculine look. But she was proud of her thick dark hair, and thought her bob stylish. Her sharp wit and way with words had also made her popular among the girls. Whatever the situation, she had a fitting line. Her big black eyes often twinkled with mischief.

  In response to her jibe though, Dileepan—Divyan—had gaped stupidly. No laughter, no comeback. People like this now join us, she had thought of saying, to drive the knife in further. But he’d looked at his feet without a word, and she felt a little sorry for him.

  A week later, he had sent her a package through her younger brother Prashant, who by then worked in the engineering department. It was a book of Che Guevara quotations. On the title page, he had inscribed a saying in Tamil: ‘Silence is an argument carried out by other means.’ He had pressed the pen so hard on the page that the downward curve of the blue-inked dha in vivaadham had torn through the paper.

  She had been grudgingly impressed. Still they didn’t speak—it was forbidden to hang around chatting, and anyway, it never occurred to her. Who had time for boys? She and her friends in the women’s wing had things to learn, points to prove, muscles to harden. But her brother wouldn’t let it go. Whenever she met Prashant, he was always talking about Dileepan, Divyan, whatever his name was.

  One day Prashant had come with exciting news. Apparently Divyan was soon going to be on Annan’s personal security team.

  Mugil hadn’t believed it. Please, she had thought, it’s impossible. That imbecile among the Tiger chief’s black commandos?

  But Prashant persevered with his account. He had discovered that Divyan had been learning about An
nan’s daily routines and his prescription medicines. Later, when her commander confirmed the rumour, Mugil could not look at the fool in the same way again. Maybe his silence did have something to it. Her closest friend in the unit, Mani, told her that maybe it would be wise to apologise. ‘He may put in a good word for you with Annan then, should you ever need it.’ Mugil, however, wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You won’t get far like that,’ Mani had scolded.

  In the Mullaitivu hospital, lying in the same ward as he was, Mugil thought she understood now why Annan might appoint a man like that as his bodyguard. Divyan had no regard for his own life. She was overwhelmed with gratitude and wanted to make amends. She couldn’t be condescending anymore. She rehearsed her apology silently, editing and rephrasing it in her head. She wanted to say sorry and thanks but also to make light of it all.

  Finally, when they were both woken for lunch, she said the words out loud. ‘I never meant anything I said, you know, at training.’

  ‘Both of us know you did,’ he said quickly, sputtering on his rice gruel a little bit. ‘I did think that’s not how a woman should talk.’

  That irritated Mugil, but she bit back a sharp retort. When the nurse left the hall, Divyan smiled. ‘But then I also thought, she’s not an ordinary Tamil woman, no? You’re a puli, a Tiger.’

  They ate their gruel quietly. He asked for her guerrilla name. ‘Prashant only told me your home name,’ he said.

  ‘Thamizhazhagi,’ she said. The one who is as beautiful as the Tamil language.

  When they were discharged from the hospital, her brother took her home. In a few days, Mugil was called to the office in PTK. She had a spine injury, so she was declared unfit for battle and transferred to the navigation division. She heard later that evening that Divyan, too, had been pulled off the field. He was given driving duty. They were both still cadre but would not carry weapons.

  Neither really made a move to meet again, but they continued to exchange books and sometimes letters and poems about love for the country or mythological allusions to courage. When Mugil told Mani about this, her friend was thrilled. Their nickname for Divyan was ‘The Fool’. Although most of the girls in the barracks were around twenty, it wasn’t easy to talk about boys or love around them. You couldn’t tell who would snitch to the commander. Once, when Divyan came to their training facility to drop off supplies, Mugil was so afraid he would make eye contact that she did not leave the gym. She kept track of the operations he was assigned to. It might have been easier if she had asked her brother for more information, but she didn’t want to betray any special feelings for Divyan or, for that matter, for any boy. Prashant, not even a fighter yet, was becoming quite a stickler for the movement’s rules. And if there was one thing a fighter couldn’t do in those days, it was to fall in love.