The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  At the Tigers’ inception, Prabakaran had banned marriage, relationships and sexual activity among the cadres. It was part of a rigid disciplinary code for combatants, which included bans on smoking, drinking and gambling. He enforced celibacy ruthlessly; carnal feelings were believed to distract combatants from the call of duty, and family life was considered corrupting, as it would make people selfish. Mugil and Divyan knew that Annan defamed, excommunicated and even killed those who strayed from this rule. They’d heard of couples that had been shot dead. ‘Both are not always killed,’ Mani had said once. ‘One is shot and the other is punished for life.’ One of those Prabakaran had executed was a dear friend and a cofounder of the LTTE. He tolerated no debate on the issue.

  Mugil and Divyan were finally able to get married only because at some time during the LTTE’s growth, Prabakaran himself fell in love. Several versions of this romance swirled through the Vanni, all told with varying degrees of glee and irony but always in a guilty whisper, as if even talking about his personal life might tarnish his titanic persona. According to one version that Mugil swore by, a pretty young girl came to the leader’s notice through a newspaper report. She was on a hunger strike to protest the killings of hundreds of Tamils by the Sri Lankan army, and Prabakaran sent his close friends to find out more. Eventually he decided to meet the girl himself. He ended her week-long hunger strike with a glass of juice, and then, struck by her dedication to the Tamil cause, fell in love with her.

  Another less popular theory went like this: the girl had accused Prabakaran of not caring enough about his cadres and letting them die like cattle without so much as an apology for their martyrdom. She then challenged him to stop her from fasting unto death. Prabakaran was said to have abducted her to silence the accusations, but when tongues started wagging about the leader living with a girl, he announced a wedding.

  Whatever the truth, Prabakaran revoked the anti-marriage rule some years after his own wedding. Still, it was only after a decade or so that several other lovers like Mugil and Divyan could surface at last.

  They had a wedding in PTK in early 2005. Mugil was a Hindu and Divyan a Catholic, but both had forsaken religion upon joining the Tigers. In what had become the practice in weddings between cadres, they came to their ceremony in fatigues, and instead of tying a thaali or exchanging rings, Divyan tied a thick yellow thread with a golden tiger tooth around Mugil’s neck.

  This was followed by an oath. ‘Even though we’re married,’ they promised, ‘we will place our nation, our Tamil soil, our Tamil people above each other. We will choose the gun over any birthday, family function, or consideration of love and kinship.’ It was an oath every Tiger man and woman had to take if they chose to marry while serving. Mugil wore the tiger tooth as a symbol of her marriage to the cause as well as to Divyan. It was to be a promise easier to make than keep.

  ON KOMBAVIL’S MAIN road, some courtyards looked abandoned while others were packed to capacity. The chaos of the northwestern region had not reached here yet, but some of its residents already had, and they must have brought warnings. While children played, adults rain-proofed bunkers with plastic sheets or sat around talking in hushed voices. They were preparing for air raids and shelling. When Mugil passed by the houses, some people looked at her, puzzled. What was a combatant doing skulking around alone? One or two asked her if ‘Kilinochchi was gone,’ if what the BBC radio said about the military offensives was true.

  One woman came up to Mugil and asked her tenderly if she was looking for her family. ‘If they’re not here, look near Suthanthirapuram. The army has been driving around with loudspeakers announcing that it’s a safe place. Some of our people have gone.’

  Mugil had heard rumours of the no-fire zone, but this was the first time a specific location had been mentioned.

  ‘Why didn’t you go?’

  ‘Why? Am I a coward?’ the woman shot back. ‘You will always have us. We won’t abandon you.’

  A baby wailed from a house nearby. Before the woman turned to run inside, she squeezed Mugil’s hand. ‘Jeyam namade! Victory will be ours!’

  Mugil’s aunt lived a short distance from the main road, across a narrow brick bridge and beyond a row of vegetable plots. Because of the rain, rivulets had cleaved through the mud path that led to the house, and Mugil kept her eyes on the ground. She didn’t want to speak to anyone else. There were too many questions, too much speculation. People wanted information but also reassurance. She wasn’t the person to provide either.

  When she finally got to the fence of palmyra fronds, she looked up. A few hundred metres from the gate, behind the lemon trees, Mugil saw her great-uncle on a chair on the porch. He was absolutely still, his hands hanging loose at his sides. His eyes were closed and his chin nestled on his collarbone. His sarong had fallen open between his legs, exposing his hollow thighs.

  Mugil threw the gate open and ran towards him. She must have screamed, because Chiththi, her aunt, came running to the door from inside, her eyes wide. Following Mugil’s gaze, she looked towards the chair.

  Chiththi walked slowly towards the old man. ‘Appa?’ she called softly. Mugil stood frozen in the garden, both hands on her mouth.

  ‘Appa!’ Chiththi said once more, louder. She fixed his sarong, making him decent. He didn’t stir.

  ‘Appa!’ She slapped his shoulder as if he were a child.

  Suddenly he sat up, startled, and stared at both of them in confusion.

  Finally he smiled crookedly at Mugil. ‘Come, come. When did you get here, child?’

  Mugil and her aunt looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  That night, when they explained to him what they had assumed on seeing his limp body, he sighed. ‘It would surely be good to go that peacefully, in my sleep, under the roof my son built for me,’ he said. His son, Mugil’s uncle, had departed for Germany a decade earlier. Chiththi said he worked as a chef in an Indian hotel there, but that was only what he told her on the phone; they hadn’t seen each other since he left.

  They ate rice and spinach for dinner, and Chiththi asked if Mugil had seen anything on the way there. ‘Anything we should worry about?’ Mugil knew that her aunt would never directly ask what the Tigers were planning, what job she was on, or why she was in Kombavil. She must have noticed that Mugil was alone, but she would pretend that nothing was amiss. It was the way of non-fighters in the Vanni.

  Mugil replied vaguely. Her aunt, too, let it go. They spent a few hours reminiscing about other battles, as the people of Vanni tended to do, especially when they were waiting out storms such as this. Mugil had grown up listening to these stories, about temples that had become shelters, family enemies who had become saviours, unlikely uncles who grabbed their wives from burning buildings, or aunties who had seen orphans bawling next to their dead parents. Some of them told it beautifully, describing the landscape of destruction, the flies, the way the earth sponged up blood: making miserable poems from sights they could not get out of their minds. A stranger might hitch up a sari or take off a shirt to point to a battle scar and launch into the tale of its origin. These were the common threads that bound the Tamil community: the close shaves, the what-ifs, the recasting of dumb luck as courage, pain as experience, losses as tests of character. Grief could never simply be itself because it was ongoing. As the battles continued, people needed to tell and retell these stories, gather mental energy for more strife, track back reflexive decisions that had saved or killed someone, and glean strategy from them.

  As they talked, Mugil refrained from mentioning the mango orchard or the girls. The moment wasn’t yet right for that story.

  When night fell, they spread the straw mats on the floor to sleep. For as long as Mugil could remember, a few chairs and one wooden kitchen shelf had been the only furniture in this house. Her own house in PTK was the same. Except for some of the most elite families, few in the Vanni bothered furnishing their homes. Plastic chairs were ubiquitous items—cheap to purchase and easy to leave
behind.

  Mugil wanted to change out of her camouflage shirt, and Chiththi gave her a printed cotton blouse. She didn’t sleep well, but it was a relief to lie down on an even floor in a dry place.

  Next to her mat was the cloth bag Chiththi had packed with papayas, a pouch each of rice, dal and red chillies, a packet of pickle and karuvaadu, salt, sugar, some milk powder, tea, and a Coke bottle filled with well water, just in case Mugil wanted to leave without saying goodbye.

  OVER THE NEXT three days Mugil walked, eating the papayas and a few handfuls of the milk powder. She wore Chiththi’s blouse over her trousers. When, at the crack of dawn, she had buried her camouflage shirt a few paces away from her aunt’s house, she had been grateful for the darkness—she didn’t want to see what she was doing. She told herself that if there were army around, she would not be taken prisoner. She wore her plait down instead of bunching it up on her head. She put a pottu on her forehead.

  She walked till she was close to highway A35. The masses heading for Mullaitivu were camping on either side. When she emerged from the thickets into the crowd, no one even glanced at her. There were lorries and tractors stacked with rice, flour and cereal revving their engines on the narrow roads but only inching forward. These were trucks from the government agent, the chief administrator of Kilinochchi district. They were trying to take supplies to where everyone was going. But hungry and impatient men, women and children were milling around the vehicles already, trying to grab their share before the supplies ran out.

  Thousands were trudging eastward, in the same direction she was going. Many others were resting a few metres away from the crowd. It was just before noon, and families were emerging from their bunkers to cook lunch.

  She was one of very few women on their own. Most were holding children, sitting beside their husbands, or helping their ailing parents. Many families had radios, which seemed to pick up short-wave frequencies. There was BBC Ceylon and the national station, Swarnavahini. Through the state-run radio channel, the government of Sri Lanka made announcements asking Tigers to surrender for their own good. They assured Tamil civilians that the army would guide them to safety.

  Like the Kombavil woman who promised Mugil that the people would stand by the Tigers, come what may, many civilians here, too, were inviting cadres into their bunkers, giving them food, and retying their bandages for them. An aged uncle was offering his own rice gruel to a young fighter, hoping to help him to regain strength, but the youngster was trying to walk away. Mugil remembered this happening to her often when she was a combatant. People were proud of the Tigers, especially the female combatants, and wanted to support them. The movement promised them freedom and an end to the war. What was a cup of tea or a plate of rice in exchange?

  Moreover, the cadres had things you could get in return for your kindness. Like the use of their satellite phones, at 1,000 rupees per call, to areas under government control or abroad. Local calls cost 500 rupees, as much as three kilos of rice. The fighters also had more motorbikes than the civilians, and you could hitch a ride if you couldn’t walk or had an injured family member. Today, however, people were giving up gold jewellery just for milk powder or drinking water.

  Despite these changes and the no-fire-zone announcements, people stuck with the Tigers even if it could lead them to the battlefield. They couldn’t yet trust the force that was waging war in their villages. The Tamils couldn’t be sure that the army would not just shoot or burn hundreds of them and bury them in mass graves. To Mugil, too, the Chemmani massacre felt like it had happened yesterday. The army’s grandstanding about taking over the Vanni territory and decimating the Tigers had been going on for twenty-six years. The Tigers had outwitted them all that time. What could change now?

  So despite the surrender orders, Mugil saw people shielding the Tigers among them. Familiar faces dotted the crowd, some in uniform and some not. LTTE bunkers were visible between the civilian tents. Fighters walked in small groups, carrying food supplies on their backs or on the motorbikes or bicycles they pushed. They were like black specks in rice, trying in vain to blend in. It was on their instructions that people were going towards Mullaitivu instead of the places the army suggested.

  Mugil began to collect some wood chips and twigs to build a fire before it rained again. She would boil half a fistful of rice, lace it with some crumbs of the fishy, salty karuvaadu and eat it with her aunt’s gooseberry pickle.

  She had barely begun when she heard a deep hum from the sky. Very quickly, it got louder. Others around her were also looking quizzically upwards and at each other. This was not a sound they recognised. It was thicker and deeper than the sound of a plane and not as clattering as a helicopter’s. It wasn’t a long-range missile’s whistle or the crack of a bomb. It was a hum, as if emanating from a wasp the size of a fighter plane.

  Reflexively, people ran back into the bunkers. Mugil crouched in one, about fifteen feet long and five feet deep, lined with stumps of coconut trees and covered with their large leaves. Husky coconut halves were holding down flimsy plastic bags that covered the gaps in the leaves. An entire tree had been dissected for this ephemeral safety. The children used to sing a rhyme about this: how generous the coconut tree, how tall it stands, how it sacrifices every part of itself.

  Because of the rain, the wet mud was falling in clumps into the bunker, threatening to loosen the tree stumps. A man next to her started to pat the clay back with his palms, pasting it on the wall like cement. He did it slowly, as if he knew the futility of the exercise. His daughter, who looked to be between eight and ten years old, was copying him, patting the clay with her small fingers.

  They must have stayed there for an hour, until Mugil heard people on the ground above her. They were coming out again, going back to cooking or fetching water. The danger had passed; there had been no explosion. She heard someone say that it must have been some new technology. ‘Not bad, the army is keeping up with us these days,’ the man in the bunker said, smiling. ‘We’ll try to figure it out when it comes next time. Or maybe by then, our boys will have built one of their own and will deliver a fitting reply!’ People were laughing, making jokes about the army’s dud fireworks.

  Mugil smiled, but her mind was on that hum. She wanted to memorise the sound, its length, its timbre. Its newness made her edgy. Sounds from the sky always came with fire. Thunder and lightning. Whistle and blast. What would follow this noise?

  After the hum faded, lunch preparations continued. The afternoon sun beat down, and people started to nod off under trees and makeshift tents. The bunkers were unbearably hot, so few went inside. Most children remained at ground level, running around.

  A blinding flash and then an explosion; when the missile hit, no one was expecting it. They had ducked from the hum, only to stand around in the open, easy targets for the shelling that followed. They didn’t know what it was called then, but the unfamiliar hum had been a drone. The army’s eye in the sky. The harbinger of a shower of missiles. The Sri Lankan forces had never used one before.

  Mugil stayed in her bunker, only surfacing after an hour. She walked in a daze around the bodies frozen in ugly shapes on the ground. Some who had made a late dash for a bunker were curled halfway near its mouth. The man who had patted down her bunker was calling out for his daughter. Mugil heard the words, but she couldn’t internalise the girl’s name. Her shin throbbed. Something had ripped into her and stayed inside.

  She walked into a cluster of trees, sure only that she wanted to go home. There would be no more stopping, no more talking to people. She felt stupid. The deaths around her seemed ridiculous. Those girls in the mango orchard, their contorted bodies shrieking till death took them, and here, these people dropping face down on their lunch plates. Dying in shameful ways, walking naively into traps. One would think this was a people who had never seen a battle before.

  She turned off the A35, wanting to avoid the main roads, and went into the jungle. As she entered the canopy, she took off her chain w
ith the tiger tooth and dumped it in a muddy stream.

  7.

  July 2008

  WHEN THEY DROVE Sarva out of the harbour area in a police van, his single fear was that Silva would bolt out of the station to say there had been a mistake, he was not to be let out yet, there was unfinished business. As they drove further and further away, this fear was replaced by disbelief. By the time the van pulled onto the premises of the Colombo Magistrate’s Court, Sarva’s relief was bordering on exhilaration. Was this the beginning of his march to freedom? He started to run the events of the past ten days through his mind. He would complain to the judge that justice had been denied him and demand to know why he had not been treated with the respect due to any citizen. He wasn’t sure he should name names, however, just in case they sent him back there. He would not raise his voice and would remember to be clear, chronologically correct, and absolutely confident.

  The courtroom was at the rear of the building on the ground floor. Sarva and his police escort walked side by side along the corridor, their arms and fingers entwined like lovers. The handholding replaced handcuffs, and several accused men stood at the back being similarly intimate with policemen.