The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  ‘What!’ Sarva hissed back.

  ‘Just don’t go!’

  There was such panic in his friend’s voice that Sarva decided to take him seriously. After the evening line-up, he hung back till he was the only one left in the corridor. The guards looked surprised, then yelled for him to get inside. Sarva refused.

  ‘What is this new drama?’ a guard said, shoving him.

  ‘No! I won’t go in!’ Sarva shouted.

  A baton fell with a thwack on his already cracked lower back and he dropped to the floor. They dragged him into his cell with a stream of abuse.

  That night, as wife-beater had warned, Sarva was awakened by a chaos of fists and feet: three—no, four men. One held him down, stepping on his forearms. The others—none was from his cell—stomped on him, pounded his abdomen, kicked his hips, stood on his chest.

  Some prisoners ran to the gate and started to scream for the warden. It was about fifteen minutes before the guards came. By then, Sarva had curled up into a ball and was spitting blood.

  The morning after the ambush, when he was brought back to the cell after seeing a doctor, he spat at the men in his cell. ‘Cowards!’ he yelled in Tamil. They’d shared a room, seen each other piss in a bucket, but none of them had defended him. Even the wife-beater felt like a potential danger now. He might have warned Sarva about the attack, but how had he known it would happen?

  Sarva was shaken by the unadulterated hatred that drove the attackers. He had smelled their collective need to mete out punishment, squish the worm he was to them. They clearly thought they had the right to destroy him at will. Every vice Sarva witnessed—the marijuana smoking, the nightly cocaine and cigarette exchanges, the abusive language—he began to associate with the inmates’ Sinhala-ness. He resented their lack of fear.

  8.

  January 2009

  MUGIL REACHED PTK by mid-January. She’d spent almost two weeks on a circuitous route from Kilinochchi, which, by the main roads, was only about forty kilometres from PTK. The way was dotted with mines and pocked with shell craters and she feared the Tigers might spot her. Her shin was a dirty yellow and red now, thoroughly infected. The cloth bag that served as a bandage was soaked in blood and smelled rancid. Her head throbbed from thirst.

  She had come this close to home. It would be a shameful waste if, at this point, she were pulled back into the Tigers’ dwindling ranks. They were desperate now, hunting for people to throw in the lines, if only to hinder the army’s progress. Many months ago, the LTTE had given three days of compulsory weapons training to entire villages, including children and the elderly, like her sixty-six-year-old father. Mugil’s mother had tried to dissuade the recruiters, reminding them that this old man had printed pamphlets in the eighties for Thileepan’s historic fast. Although he had been a Tiger leader, Thileepan had become an icon of nonviolence to the Tamils after he had starved to death protesting the massacres committed by Indian and Sri Lankan armies in Jaffna. Many people who had fasted in solidarity or helped organise Thileepan’s protest afterwards laid down their guns. Mugil’s father, too, had always said that seeing Thileepan’s selfless determination had shifted something inside him. He had tried to explain this to the platoon subcommander rounding up villagers for training. Father asked why he had to train at his age, especially when he had served the Tigers for decades in other ways. He was told curtly that there are times when everyone must pick up a gun.

  On the outskirts of town, Mugil waited to make sure the Tigers were not watching. When the torrential rain let up and the armoured trucks moved, she lay stomach-down in a trench. When it poured in sheets, obscuring vision, she dashed into PTK.

  In the Vanni, PTK was held up as a model of development, with concrete bungalows, temples and churches, lush parks and good high schools. It was an example of what the Tamil homeland could look like. People often said that if ever there were a mall in Tamil Eelam, there was no doubt it would be in PTK, with Kilinochchi putting up a good fight. When Mugil described her hometown to anyone, she used a popular standard in the Vanni: here, she said, a young woman could walk alone on the streets at night. According to her, for a woman, there was no safer place in Sri Lanka than PTK.

  While its residents swore by PTK’s modern spirit, it was, before anything else, a town steeped in war. Opposite the government hospital was a United Nations relief office. There were three orphanages, a home for the elderly and destitute, and a vocational centre for the hundreds of men and women—militants and civilians—disabled by the conflict. In the town centre was the Pass Office, where the Tigers gave—and often refused—passes for civilians to leave Vanni for a day, a week, or a few weeks, based on the guarantee of another resident family. Long queues were common outside this office. In the schools, students were given reflex drills and shown how to run to bunkers during air raids. Some seesaws in the playgrounds were shaped like AK-47s. School walls were plastered with pictures of martyrs and grotesque images of Sri Lankan state leaders and presidents grinning over piles of dead Tamils. The children added their touch to the images, drawing devil horns on the politicians’ heads. Trees and fences held notices with stencil prints of a burning candle, the symbol of mourning. Every family living in PTK had arrived here after being forcibly displaced by battle or evacuation.

  Now PTK was heaving again with thousands of people. This time, there were families hailing from the far west to the east, occupying every inch of space. Those from the eastern provinces had been on the road for more than a year. Most had relocated about two dozen times in less than three months, searching for safety from army bombardment in the shrinking Tiger territory. The Tigers told them to stay calm and move to PTK, to the south of which they held a strongly fortified redoubt, the only one left apart from the units in Mullaitivu. People arrived in droves. They believed Annan had a plan, as he always did, a stunning strategic strike that he would launch at the opportune moment. For now, however, it was mayhem.

  By the time Mugil reached her parents’ house, the red dusk had darkened. As she approached the doorway, feeling with her feet for craters and bunkers in the courtyard, someone called out, ‘Akka!’ It was the raspy voice of her younger sister, Amuda. ‘Akka! No one’s there!’

  Amuda had lived in Paranthan, a village in Kilinochchi district, with her husband Siva, who worked with her in the Tigers’ farm accounts department. Their son was six and their daughter Kalai was two, born two months after Mugil’s second, Tamizh.

  Mugil’s mother compared the sisters’ relationship to that of a snake and a mongoose. Mugil and Amuda were rival siblings; one was always cutting the other down to size. Mugil had been particularly exasperated by Amuda’s polio. When they were children, Mugil was expected to do all the housework because Amuda was too weak to sweep, unable to squat to cook by their floor-level stoves, or too embarrassed to go to the market. Mugil and Prashant, the youngest one, were close, and they ganged up against Amuda and the third sibling, Priyamvada, who was a perpetually ill crybaby. Mugil also thought Amuda lazy, even cowardly, for escaping recruitment into the Tigers. It was unfair of her; she knew Amuda was physically challenged, but she couldn’t help suspecting that her sister exaggerated her disability to get away with a lot. When Amuda entered a love marriage with Siva, a soft-spoken, artistic, handsome upper-caste man who composed soulful songs for the LTTE’s propaganda movies, Mugil had not hidden her surprise. ‘Kaakaikki mayil,’ she had joked cruelly, twisting an old saying. A crow gets a peacock.

  Amuda, for her part, thought Mugil had grown pompous because of her career with the movement. She liked being a mother and an accountant. ‘Everyone helps in their own way,’ she would say when they fought openly. ‘Don’t think you’re some great hero just because you wear a uniform.’ Mugil, who was in the Malathi unit by the time she was a teenager, would retort, ‘It’s not about uniform. It’s about how much of your life you’re willing to sacrifice.’

  When Mugil was injured and pulled off the fighting cadre, Amuda picked that moment to
tell their mother that her ‘arrogant’ sister would ‘feel the pain now’. Once Mugil learnt about this, they stopped talking altogether. The fights ended, but so did any chance of reconciliation.

  Now, the rival sibling approached her, limping slowly. Relief and nervousness made Mugil exclaim as if she’d run into a longlost friend on the street. ‘Amu!’ she yelled. ‘When did you get here?’

  ‘Come, come, Mother and all are in the bunker,’ Amuda said. ‘We need to leave. We were waiting for some news from you.’

  They walked in silence for a while before Mugil found something to say. ‘So? Where is my tiny devil Kalai?’

  ‘Must be playing with her brothers,’ Amuda said. She grumbled that Kalai had been throwing too many tantrums. ‘We forgot her colour pencil box and she won’t stop crying about it.’

  ‘She’s a baby. Maybe she’s hungry.’

  ‘Everyone’s hungry.’

  ‘And Siva? How is your husband?’

  ‘Kfir adichchadu,’ Amuda said, her face placid. One of the army’s Kfir missiles hit him. ‘Just as we left Paranthan. He had gone outside the bunker to get the rice gruel and curry we had cooked, and the Kfir hit him. Dead on the spot, gone.’

  The Sri Lankan army owned seven Kfir ground-attack fighter aircraft bought from Israel to use against the LTTE. When the Sri Lankan air force dropped long-range missiles on the Vanni from close quarters, hundreds of civilians died with the Tigers.

  Amuda continued, ‘I just watched him burn. I covered Kalai’s eyes. She was his pet.’

  Mugil wanted to hold her sister’s hand or at least meet her eye to reassure her. But they’d never had that kind of relationship.

  ‘The body?’ Mugil asked.

  ‘I left it there and came back. I had to get the children.’

  ‘But you saw the body? You’re sure it was him?’

  Amuda nodded.

  Mugil persisted. ‘You’re sure he was gone?’

  ‘Yes. I went to his body two days later. It was lying there, piled with eight or ten others on a tractor. I had to take his purse from his pocket. He had all our money and I had to leave. I will never forget that I did that.’

  It was the longest conversation they’d had in years. And Mugil had asked about the dead body more than she had consoled her sister. But Mugil had to find out. In their fear and panic, too many people were leaving their loved ones behind, sometimes mistaking a severe injury for a fatal one. She had to make sure her sister had checked.

  Amuda led Mugil to the bunker their family shared with a few others. Mugil and Prashant had dug this for their parents years ago and taught them how to add sandbags, repair and waterproof it. It had three levels: the damp ground floor, which was the safest but most suffocating section, a lumpy mezzanine for storing bags, and a breezier upper level for when immediate danger had passed. It also had a small alcove with a dry toilet. They believed it to be one of the more durable underground structures in the area.

  Newly arrived families didn’t have such bunkers. Many simply dug hasty trenches and covered them with tarpaulin or coconut leaves. Otherwise, they just sat by the roads, in yards, across fields. Mugil could not tell how many there were, but she saw thousands of heads catch the headlights of vehicles, their hair glowing as if on fire.

  Mugil found her mother sitting on the bunker’s upper level, the roof off, painstakingly cleaning a banana flower. When she saw Mugil, she held it up. ‘See! I can’t believe this was just hanging on the tree and no one had got their hands on it yet!’ Even on good days, Mother was all skin and bones, but now, with no oil in her white hair, her eyes sunken and lips chapped, she looked a hundred years old.

  Inside the bunker there were people Mugil didn’t recognise. Mother had taken in a distantly related elderly couple, and their very pregnant granddaughter. She looked no older than sixteen.

  ‘Her husband was taken by Pottu Amman,’ Mother whispered, pointing to the girl. Pottu Amman, the senior LTTE leader now in charge of PTK, had stepped up the recruitment of underage boys and girls. Several families were going to great lengths to protect their children. Boys and girls hunkered down in bunkers, never venturing out. Parents married them off in their teens, hoping the recruiters would then spare them. The girls were encouraged to get pregnant to escape conscription. Self-preservation had pushed her people to reject practices they’d followed for years.

  Mugil said hello to the pregnant girl, and asked how far along she was. ‘Five months,’ she said. Her voice was high like a child’s.

  Amuda called Mugil’s sons. ‘Maran! Tamizh! Look who’s come!’ Maran emerged from the dark, running towards them. He saw Mugil but coolly turned away and sat next to his grandmother, sucking on the flower pods. If he had missed his mother, he didn’t show it.

  Tamizh, on the other hand, started to cry uncontrollably. Mugil held her baby, hugging him and, as a distraction, described some birds she had seen on the way there. He felt bony and weightless in her hands. He had only one slipper on, and his eyes were bloodshot. Mother said he had not slept in four days. He just would not close his eyes. Mugil rocked him in her arms, not sure if it would help.

  Around them, half-lit people bobbed slowly in the expanse, making supper or getting ready to sleep. The bunker next to theirs, however, was abuzz. Mugil’s mother said their neighbours believed that the worst bombing came at night, and they did not want to ‘lie down and die for the army’. No one who took shelter in that bunker was allowed to sleep at night.

  Wherever it was in the Vanni, each bunker had a character: its own obsessions, its own schedule, its own fears. One large bunker in Uruthurapuram, occupied largely by the elderly, was lined with blue tarpaulin hoarded by the occupants, who felt the rain to be their greatest enemy. The residents of a rectangular trench near what was once the office of the Coir Cooperative Society followed a strict roster to maintain a nightly lookout. A disabled former combatant called Manian enforced this with such fervour that even after pneumonia did him in, the bunker’s inmates followed his routine. Next to the Manian bunker was the ‘ladies’ bunker’. This trench, with eight women and seven young children, had become a kitchen of sorts. They cooked gruel or paruppu at every opportunity and distributed it to others in exchange for milk, firewood, medicines or groceries. For survival, they were counting on the men’s uppu kadan, the moral debt incurred by eating someone else’s cooking.

  Packed with splintered households and strangers from different villages, the bunkers created new families with every battle. Years afterwards, bunk mates would recognise each other on the street and greet each other with the melancholic joy of survivors. They would ask if that broken limb had healed, if the family was together, if mother had overcome her paranoia, if the army had finally allowed them to go home, if they were planning to go abroad. The raw bonds forged while crouching underground, among people thrown together by catastrophe, would last a lifetime.

  MUGIL’S FATHER HAD been out gathering firewood. On his return, he immediately sat down to ask her if she knew what was going on. Military strategy was his preferred topic of conversation, especially with the daughter he always called his ‘first son’. When he began the ‘battle talk’, as Mother used to call it, Amuda walked away.

  Father said Divyan and Prashant had come by some days ago, bringing news: Kilinochchi was captured, and the army had crossed Elephant Pass. Mullaitivu was still standing, but Divyan had hinted that they were surrounded there, too. Prashant, however, had assured him that ‘something will change and we will hit back’.

  Father reported her little brother’s assertion with a wry smile. The latest in their family to work with the LTTE, Prashant had the passion of a recent convert. He was good for morale and made a resolute soldier, but Mugil knew it would be years before he learnt to balance obedience with discretion. Father trusted her instinct, however, and wanted to know if their decision to leave PTK was well advised. ‘We’re being fired at here, so shouldn’t we try to leave for Vavuniya or Jaffna by boat?’
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br />   Mugil told him what she had seen on the way—the retreat of LTTE units towards PTK. But she felt muddled about what to make of it, unable to judge if being near the Tigers meant they’d be protected or if they’d end up in the line of fire.

  In similar situations since the nineties, the LTTE had usually kept the Tamil civilians with them, even forcing them to leave their villages with the movement of cadres. It had led to hundreds of deaths, but had saved many more lives. Exodus was the very foundation of the Vanni. Cadres internalised the practice: if civilians were removed from the picture, the army would have a free hand to bomb the fighters. And if the fighters lost and ceded territory, inch by inch, the dream of a Tamil homeland would go up in smoke. Keeping civilians around them was the way these guerrilla forces fought. It bought them time and, often, resources.

  But on the other side of the line now, Mugil was disconcerted. Had the battle followed them or had they been led into the battle? What if she and her father were dragged out to fight? Perhaps it would be worth the risk to defy orders and leave. Would the Tigers ostracise her family if they won the war? Moreover, leaving the area meant they would have to fend for themselves. Here, the Tigers were accompanied by ration lorries, from which you could buy food. Even if a coconut cost 600 rupees, at least it was available. What would be in store for them at the other end, where the army was? She wasn’t sure she could abandon the saviour and embrace the attackers. If they were not under the Tigers’ care, who could her family turn to? Was it time to tell father about the mango orchard, about her hopelessness? Aloud, she said, ‘We’ve never been surrounded this tightly before. Maybe the leaders know something we don’t. Divyan and Prashant are on duty, we should listen to them for now. Let’s stay put until they return.’

  ‘Why is Pottu Amman in charge of PTK?’ Father asked next. ‘What happened to Ratnam Master?’