The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  How far back would the army go in the twenty-six years of conflict, how broad a brush would they apply? The children conscripted in the final hour, having trained for just a day or two; the women pretending to take part to deter sexual predators; the men posing as fighters to get rations—they were all terrorists, the president claimed. Were they so dangerous as to warrant shelling them in a safe zone, along with those who were unarguably civilians? The boundary between civilian and militant had always been difficult to discern in the Vanni. Mugil herself was often not sure where the line should be drawn. But that doubt, in the mind of a Sinhalese soldier or general steeped in generations of hatred and with heavy weaponry at his disposal, was bound to wreak havoc.

  So here they all were, paying the price for that indefinable difference. People were dying around her, sometimes in a second, sometimes after excruciating weeks of suffering. The survivors—their families and friends—moved with the gait of people who knew they weren’t far behind. No longer did Mugil feel that initial frenzied need to survive. She simply wanted it to end.

  The year 2009 was supposed to be when her son enrolled in a school. Instead, here was Maran attached to her right index finger, flopping to the ground, holding a single packet of wet biscuits, hearing her yell that he was to eat only one a day. She had left Maran’s new school uniform behind in PTK and also forgotten Tamizh’s milk bottle. Every time they moved to a new place, they had to leave pieces of their life behind.

  Mugil had been walking longer than her family, from the mango orchard in Kilinochchi. Her limp was getting worse. At every step, the piece of shell lodged in her shin seemed to come alive and shoot flames right up to her chest. The wounds from before had felt like trophies—bodily commitment to Annan, to a freedom and autonomy her community dreamt of. Even in the scream of the most blinding pain, there had been an equally physical satisfaction: I lost blood for a reason. All those times, she had felt deeply that she had moved everyone closer to the heaven they were dreaming of. She could experience it, swallow it, taste it. She bore each new scar with pride.

  But this sharp, alien shard in her shin inflicted a pain that was not attached to a purpose. Maybe that was why everyone around her was screaming so much, wailing like babies. Maybe deep down, everyone knew there was going to be no reward for what was happening. Not tomorrow, not any time.

  She wondered if her obsession with her two boys had made her a coward, lowered her threshold for pain. No, no weakness today. Just one more day, she told herself, only half-believing. For months now, she had been trying to silence these doubts, dispel the fog of exhaustion that was blurring the future she had always seen so clearly.

  To keep from giving up, Mugil tuned her limp to the rhythm of the pain—short left step, long right step, short left, long right. Tha-dhaa tha-dhaa. It was a tactic her first firearms trainer had taught her. ‘Make it a game,’ she would say. ‘Don’t make it a life-or-death situation when it’s actually happening.’

  Her mother would not stop nagging Mugil to go to a hospital. Look around, Mugil kept telling her, look at all these people. Nondi, kurudu, oonam—limp, blind, half-human beings. Many more are dead. At least her family was whole, their hearts still beating. Had her mother not witnessed what the army did to PTK and to the people in Thevipuram? Had she forgotten the pregnant girl and her grandmother? There was more danger in looking for a safe place than in running. Mugil knew that at some point she would have to sit her mother down, hold her face, and say slowly and directly to her: we need to run.

  From what, they all knew. But where? To what?

  MUGIL REACHED AN earthwork, on the other side of which was Nandikadal lagoon and beyond that Matalan; from there the northern end of the Putumatalan no-fire zone was only a few kilometres away. The army was rumoured to be taking families to refugee camps from there. All along the vertical east of the no-fire zone was the Indian Ocean, from where some refugees hoped to escape on boats to India or Jaffna. Still others were making it across Putumatalan and going further south towards Mullivaikal.

  On the thin tract of open land before the embankment, with Amuda’s help, Mugil propped up a tarpaulin tent. Under it they would dig a bunker, just as deep as the shifting sand would allow, just as wide as their family of eight needed to sit. Other families were doing the same, to break the long walk through perilous forests and bombed-out villages before they took to the water. The Nandikadal lagoon lay ahead of them, bloated after the two-month downpour. Straight across it was the only route left to Matalan. The road was impassable; it was being shelled by both the army and the Tigers.

  They stayed here for about a week, biding their time and regaining strength before the next bout of displacement. At times, bursts of bullets and mortar shells whizzed around them, and the shudder of explosions shook the ground where they sat. At least one thing was clear: Divyan had promised to join them at Matalan. Again, Mother had asked him if he had reached Prashant at all. The more certain she became that her youngest was alive, the more she believed she was alone in her optimism. ‘You lot just want to move on, to have one less mouth to feed,’ she berated her daughters. ‘But I’m a mother. A mother never gives up.’

  Mugil didn’t pay Mother any heed, and tried in vain to bring the paruppu to a boil in the seawater. The vessel was caked with mineral scum, which had to be scraped off every few minutes. Ahead of her, families were swaddling their most precious belongings—school certificates, land documents, medicines, family photographs—in plastic bags, preparing to cross the water. A little further away, Amuda kept an eye on the kids. Kalai was drawing with her fingers in the sand, and the boys were staring at the coal-dark smoke spiralling from the villages they left behind. Explosions lit the sky every few minutes.

  Suddenly Prashant ran into Mugil’s line of sight, shouting, ‘Akka!’ Mother was the first to reach him. She hugged him in triumph, as if she had somehow conjured him up. ‘See? I knew my boy would not leave me like that.’ She wiped his face with her palms and kissed her fingertips. Prashant laughed, basking in the attention and taking in his sisters’ stunned faces.

  Amuda, not big on goodbyes or greetings, said, ‘Ah, sir has arrived.’

  ‘Where’s Siva anna?’

  Amuda gave the one-word answer she had been using to everyone: ‘Kfir.’

  His eyes widened. ‘Those savages! We’ll get them back! We’ll kill them all!’

  ‘Yes, go tell that to all the widows.’ Amuda’s tone was acidic, and she walked away.

  ‘Poor Amuda.’ Prashant sighed. Mugil pulled her hand back and slapped his face hard. ‘What did I do?’ he yelped.

  Mugil was furious. Why hadn’t he bothered to reach out, send one message through Divyan or any of the cadres? The floating boy with the absent stomach had appeared often in her dreams, and he always wore her brother’s face.

  Prashant took his favourite sister’s hand and mockingly slapped his other cheek with it. ‘I’m here now, no?’ he said softly.

  ‘Don’t talk to us like we’re children. You’re not a big hero, okay?’ Mugil shouted. ‘Where the hell were you?’

  It turned out that Prashant, whose expertise in the LTTE was building missile and shell cases, had been out of work for a few weeks. In 2007, even before the land forces moved in on Kilinochchi, the task forces and naval divisions had captured three of the LTTE’s floating armouries. The ships carried approximately 4,000 tonnes of military cargo, including dismantled light aircraft, artillery shells, mortar rounds and speedboats. All of it was simply sunk in the sea. Still, there was enough ammunition hidden in other places to last till early 2009. Now, however, as the battles intensified and the Tigers cadres exhausted their bullets and missiles, the engineering wing, too, ran out of supplies to manufacture more. Since December, Prashant had been manning the line outside PTK.

  So why didn’t he tell the family this? ‘Selfish, selfish!’ Mugil screamed.

  ‘I was doing my job, and now I have got permission to come check on my family,’ Prashant s
aid, unfazed. He walked up to the boiling pot. ‘What’s your plan? Where are you headed? Our boys are there in Mullivaikal. You will be protected there.’

  Mugil didn’t reply. She doubted if their protection was her brother’s foremost concern. The Tigers’ defences were nearby, and she knew they had built high sandbag walls along some parts of the lagoon. They launched shells from behind these, but the walls seemed to have a second purpose in hampering the movement of civilians. A few days earlier, Mugil had seen hundreds of civilians bound for Matalan clash at the walls with a large group of Tigers. The trouble brewed for hours as the cadres tried to dissuade people from leaving. They appealed to the civilians’ loyalty to the homeland and to the trust they had once placed in the Tigers. They scared them with fearsome reminders of what the army was capable of and the government’s historic discrimination against Tamils. They painted demonic pictures of the majority community the Tamils would have to live with if they left. They talked about how the Sinhalese would make the Tamil children their servants and rape their mothers and sisters.

  Tamil civilians had heard these warnings for decades; the Tigers were playing on justified fears fed by people’s experiences of personal discrimination and violence, and by their disconnection from the Sinhalese by language and geography. But the urgent reality today was the five months of unabated shelling and starvation. It had replaced every other demon.

  That day, Mugil watched the argument escalate into violence. People pushed the armed Tigers aside and clambered over the earthworks. The Tigers, in turn, pulled them down, beat them with palmyra branches and chased them back to their tents. Horrified, Mother declared that the apocalypse had come. ‘Kaliyugam, this is kaliyugam we’re witnessing.’

  Mugil suspected that Prashant’s sudden arrival, too, was meant to encourage them to stay. He didn’t have a palmyra stick, of course, but he did have his words.

  MUGIL WOKE UP at dawn while it was just getting light and left her tarpaulin tent to find a quiet spot to relieve herself. Lately peeing had become excruciatingly painful: there was an intense burn and barely a trickle. Severe dehydration had led to an infection.

  At this time of day, if there were no air raids, only women tended to be up. Bunker life erased all privacy, so pre-dawn was when women chose to urinate or, if they were menstruating, change the cloth in their underwear. Every time battle broke out, Mugil felt the world forgot about menstrual cycles. As Amuda commented once, with everything else in total disarray, it was a surprise to have anything arrive on time, especially something as inconvenient as a woman’s period. Female combatants on operations took pills that postponed the bleeding. Hospitals stored sanitary napkins for civilians; the UN, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Red Cross had given them out before being banished from the Vanni. But as the war continued and hospitals, clinics and makeshift dispensaries ran out of dressing wool and cotton, they used sanitary napkins to dress wounds. So, like other women, Mugil and Amuda had ripped up the last of their old saris to use as pads.

  Mugil didn’t find her quiet spot. Instead, around her, hundreds had already begun their journey to Matalan and Putumatalan. It was mid-April now, and the water level had fallen slightly. People waded through the muddy water that shuddered as if to consume them. The early crossers used the thin sandbanks as bridges, but there was no room now, and they had to walk through water. Women’s skirts and saris ballooned as they entered the lagoon gingerly. They sank deeper, to the knee, the waist, the neck. Thousands soon pushed their hips against the waves, finding their feet in the sand bed, and found it futile to use their hands for anything but to hold on to what was most precious. Parents carried their children on their shoulders and heads. Adults held hands and groped for shoulders to keep their balance.

  Everything else was left behind on the long shore. The mountains of discarded bags, baskets, clothes, motorbikes and trishaws grew. If utensils, TVs, books and bags had made it this far, they were now tied to trees and vehicles in the hope of being retrieved later. Some bicycles and tractors were retained till the very last minute to take the disabled or severely wounded through the water.

  The best time to cross Nandikadal was before noon, during low tide. The water level was manageable at this time, but the gunfire was often at its worst. The collapsing shallow bunkers in Matalan were, however, no safer than the water. So despite the barrage from the sky, leave they had to.

  The route chosen was behind the most crowded section of the lagoon; the deserted parts were bound to be deeper. At around ten in the morning, Mugil’s family—her father, mother, brother, and sister, carrying the four children on their shoulders—waded into the water. The further they went, the more the water and crowds separated the group. Balls of fire ripped through the air like arrows and fell into the water, diffusing loudly, throwing people off course.

  In minutes, her family had scattered. When Mugil ducked into the water to avoid the gunfire and emerged, Amuda was way ahead of her, Mother to her right. Maran had lost his balance and almost took another woman’s hand by mistake. Mugil began to panic. A matter of seconds was enough to break up families. Some days earlier, she had seen a woman trying to cross the chest-high water with a toddler on each shoulder. The woman lost her footing and crashed into the water, surfacing with only one of her sons. She screamed, whipped her head around, begged people to go under and look for her baby. Some did, but it didn’t help. The wailing woman had to give up and cross to save her other child.

  Mugil tied Tamizh tightly to her chest with a sari and her hands gripped Maran’s ankles tight to keep his body fixed on her shoulders. Throughout the six long hours it took to reach the expanse of sand before Matalan, she could not stop thinking of the drowned toddler.

  At the shore, Prashant propped up the blue tarpaulin again. Near it, Mugil and he struggled to dig a bunker. Trying to build one in the sand was like sailing against the wind. With the lagoon only a few hundred metres away, the groundwater leached in quickly, destroying the walls.

  Just as they managed a shallow trench and sat down to rest, Divyan arrived. Maran and Tamizh ran to their father. Mugil noticed a hobble. The armoured jeep Divyan drove had been thrown into the air by the force of a mine blast. He had landed on his back and dislodged a few discs. A white rope, which doubled as a sling for his left arm, securing it into his shoulder, was layered with coagulated blood and mud. His left thighbone had a hairline fracture. He had been recovering in the Matalan Tiger dispensary and had come straight from there. He was still unable to walk straight and was in a lot of pain. A strip of hair on the left side of his head was shaved off, exposing an ugly stitch. His boys wanted to be carried, but Divyan sat down slowly and told them, ‘Appa is hurt. He will carry you once he is better.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Maran asked.

  ‘No, not so soon!’ Divyan laughed.

  ‘Day after, then?’

  ‘You tell me when it is the day after tomorrow, and I’ll carry you,’ he said, to Maran’s satisfaction.

  Mugil asked her husband when he would have to go back. He said he would not; he was here for good.

  The small tent had only enough space for the children, Amuda and Mother. After dark, the others lay down outside, the wet sand soaking their clothes. Mugil stared at the night sky, at stars she knew well and had counted on whenever she was lost. Between the stars, explosions glittered and lightning flashed. Immense fires burned beyond Nandikadal. Smoke and the smell of gunpowder and burning flesh stung her nose.

  Suddenly, sharp whistles and crackles foregrounded the thuds and hums. Mugil moved fast and woke Divyan. The attacks were coming closer. Amuda shoved the children into the bunker and the rest of the family jumped in. Between the long whine of shells, they could hear cluster bombs detonating.

  Mugil had first seen a cluster bomb go off in PTK a few months ago. She had looked up from eating a roti in the bunker and stared, mesmerised by how pretty the explosion was. In time, she’d learnt that this bomb was like any other when launched. But about a
thousand feet from the ground it let out a loud soda pop–like sound, throwing out bomblets. This made a para-para-para noise, like a drum roll, before the multiple blasts.

  In Matalan, people who were just settling down to sleep had heard that same popping. They ran out of their tents and into the water and bunkers, screaming, ‘Kotthu gundu! Cluster bomb!’ This rarely helped. It was near impossible to avoid being hit. Each cluster bomb contained eighty-eight or seventy-two bomblets—depending on the type—and they travelled up to a kilometre from where they were discharged from the cluster.

  Soon after the drumming stopped, people crawled out of the futile sand bunkers where they’d been cowering. People were holding burst cheeks or bleeding feet and arms. The survivors knew that after every ten minutes of onslaught, there would always be a ten-to-fifteen-minute gap. This breather was their only chance to dart from tree to tree, go grab some food packets, or pull into the bunker a lost child or wounded man frozen in fear. In contrast, Divyan shuffled rapidly to one of the scattered bomblets.

  When he was in the Putumatalan clinic, he had seen a teenager with a bomblet lodged in the back of her thigh. The doctors had amputated her leg at the hip and the nurse had run out to discard the limb far from the hospital. Since then, he had been curious to see what these bomblets looked like; he needed to understand them and what they could do.

  He peered closely at the one on the sand, careful not to touch it. It was bell-shaped and smaller than his palm.

  He looked back at their tent and hurriedly called Maran and Tamizh over. Mugil ran over, too.

  He pointed. ‘Do you see this?’ Maran instantly tried to grab the shiny thing. Mugil held his hand back.

  ‘That is exactly what you should not do, okay? Will you listen to Appa? This is bad, it will go boom, and then you will die. You will see these everywhere, but don’t touch them, kick them or pick them up,’ Divyan said. ‘It is not a ball.’ The boys nodded. ‘He called it the machine gun of bombs.’