by Rohini Mohan
The ways of the camp became easier to comprehend once she understood the situation. Ten or more people occupied each tent, assigned to their beds by camp officials. Food was served three times a day, and you had to queue alongside thousands of men, women and children waiting with their plates and cups. Inmates got thirty litres of water per day for washing, bathing and drinking, but if the water truck didn’t bring enough one day or you couldn’t collect the water because you were lining up for medicines, your loss would not be compensated the next day.
Pit latrines, separate ones for men and women, lined the corners of the zones. Some hundred people would use a latrine meant for twenty. They were always blocked and rarely cleaned. When the summer sandstorms blew mud into the air, the tang of urine and faeces wafted throughout the camp on the wind. Flies buzzed everywhere, and mosquitoes bred in the dirty drains cut along the tent rows.
Complaining about all this was impossible; in all the applications, forms and affidavits they had to submit, all the permits and passes they had to get, there was never any space for complaints or feedback. Communication went only one way. When the speaker boomed with orders and instructions, people responded mockingly, ‘God’s voice! Listen!’
Speaking directly to a soldier was inadvisable. One enterprising neighbour had created a spot of shade in front of his tent with spare wood poles and a piece of tarpaulin. It stood for barely two days before a soldier kicked it down, saying the pathway between rows of tents had to be kept clear.
‘Why are you doing this? I only wanted some shade, and all of us used it,’ her neighbour argued.
As Mugil watched, the soldier’s eyes bulged. He took a menacing step towards the man and bellowed what sounded like rules in rapid Sinhala. The neighbour stared blankly for a bit and then looked at his feet. For the next few days, the soldier would swing by to check if anyone had dared raise the sunshade again. ‘Why couldn’t you just shut your mouth?’ Father asked the neighbour. ‘Every time he comes, he’s checking us out to see if something else is amiss.’
Visitors could not enter the camp. They could meet inmates, as Aunty Sumathi did, at the visitors’ centre by the camp entrance, the cubicles separated by tin sheets, for not more than twenty minutes, and under the watch of an armed soldier. When the workers from the UN Refugee Agency or World Food Programme came with aid packages, you couldn’t talk to them or ask for what you really wanted: sanitary napkins, milk, medicines, a clean toilet. Mobile phones were banned. Inmates were allowed a three-minute telephone call from the landline in the camp office, but the wait for this often lasted two days. Also inmates were not allowed to travel between zones; zones 2 and 3 were separated by a gravel road and a high barbed-wire fence. If there was one rule people defied most, it was this. The barbed wire was repeatedly breached all along the fence. The army thrashed someone for it every few days.
Mugil sometimes wondered why she didn’t feel more grateful for what the Sri Lankan government gave her. For a moment—when she thought of the battle raging just two hours away by road from where she stood and remembered that thousands were still trapped in the conflict—she would acknowledge that there was food, water and shelter in the camp, just as promised. Her family was together, all alive; they didn’t have to move home every few days, and there was a shed school for the children. The Bank of Ceylon had opened a branch inside the camp, and she had been able to deposit 6,000 of the 10,000 rupees that remained with her family. The aid agencies were not being kept away as they had been in January. Mugil whined about their under-salted, undercooked, insufficient meals, but when she heard others complain, she was embarrassed. Did she too sound that petty? She had heard that the NGOs would soon bring dry rations and allow people to do their own cooking. Perhaps the government did care about their health.
The same military that was bombing their villages less than a hundred kilometres away, that shelled no-fire zones with impunity, was running this refugee camp. As the inmates settled into the routine, they learnt to coexist with the army, sharing the same putrid space, and their interaction changed. When the soldiers used polite words or smiled, or when they were quick to explode into a rage, an elder might forgivingly say, ‘They are just young boys following orders.’ A few faces became familiar, the leniency or gruffness of some well known, but Mugil still stiffened when one of them passed by. Some of the soldiers were considerate, even generous; one of them slipped Amuda’s baby daughter a packet of biscuits or a toffee once in a while. Mother befriended a tall one called Krishan after he helped her carry her water buckets. Krishan had been recruited just a year earlier, which meant he was fresh from his first experience of war.
‘Look, not even a moustache has sprouted on their lips yet’ was both an abuse and a free pass. Some of the soldiers had Sinhala–Tamil phrasebooks, but this unnerved the inmates more than it pleased them. ‘Oh, they won’t let on that they understand us,’ Mugil’s sunshade neighbour had whispered. He believed, like most people, that the soldiers’ language classes were meant to help them flirt with the Tamil girls or to spy.
The rule Mugil detested most was the one that forbade them from working outside the camp. This was really why she couldn’t feel real gratitude towards the army, only anger or mistrust. Every waking moment was spent asking for something. Life was a series of agonising queues for food, water or the latrine. They were reduced to tearing at each other for essentials; at the end of April, two children were crushed to death in a stampede for food. Everything was a handout to the conquered people, not a right. ‘We survived all that to become beggars and thieves,’ Mugil often said. Internees chased water lorries and smuggled in vegetables wrapped in saris, not because they were incapable of working for a living but because they were not allowed to. One could work for food inside the camp, however, and when Amuda joined the camp accounts office, she signed Mugil up as a part-time Tamil teacher at the makeshift school. Every week, they got oil, soap, powdered milk and three kilograms of rice. The payment was paltry for the work they did, but the jobs gave the sisters some dignity.
Mugil loved the few hours she spent teaching. Even with the shortage of textbooks, benches, pencils and chalk, the tin-shed school was a sanctuary of optimism. It was one of the first facilities to be set up in Manik Farm; inmates had demanded it even before they asked for a medical clinic.
For the Sri Lankan Tamil community, education maintained its cultural heritage. Even in pre-independence Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was once known, school and college enrolment among Tamils exceeded that of other ethnicities in the country. Gradually, differences in educational attainment came to form the identities of the Tamil and Sinhalese communities, which grew into separate ethnic blocs, each of which considered itself wronged by the other. When an anti-colonial revolution swept the country, the south and west focussed on a resurgence of Sinhala, while the Tamil-dominated north saw the proliferation of American missionary-run English-language schools alongside anti-British movements. In the coming decades, however, Tamil and Sinhalese political leaders selectively highlighted certain facts of colonial history to exaggerate ethnic distinctions and justify violence. Aided by propaganda and politics, a particular narrative gained popularity. It maintained that when the British hired English-speaking locals, Tamils, who were 12 per cent of the population, held about 60 per cent of government jobs. That ‘60 per cent’ is much contested, but was a powerful inspiration behind discriminatory state laws and the Tamil militancy, and continues to encourage the perception among the Sinhalese that they are a sidelined majority. The idea of colonial bias was one of the earliest causes of tension in independent Sri Lanka. Sinhaleseled elected governments passed Sinhala-only language laws and admission policies, claiming that this was affirmative action designed to help youngsters from backwards rural areas, but they were widely seen as a way to undo the predominance of minorities in universities. As middle-class Tamil applicants were refused college places, they rallied against a state that blocked the advance of a prosperous, more literate p
eople—these were the perceptions on which the Tamil militancy was mobilised. Thousands left to study abroad and poorer, frustrated Tamils went on to join separatist groups. Politicised in this way, education became both a marker of a besieged identity and an aspiration for the Tamils.
In the camp, too, determined students from six to sixteen years old thronged the makeshift school, gratified simply to spend a few hours in a classroom. Many of them had carefully wrapped their school certificates in plastic sheets to protect them from exposure to the elements, hoping to continue their studies when stability returned. Now, a few months after the school was set up, high schoolers began to take their OL and AL exams in the camp.
That morning in Zone 2, Mugil had supervised a batch of eighty OL students taking mathematics exams missed during the war. At half past twelve, she was back in her tent. Since everyone else was queuing up for lunch, she decided to use the privacy to change the bandage on her leg. She could hear the distant metal clang of the server’s ladle hit the plates to a predictable beat, serving gruel or rice and sodhi. There would be no vegetables or fish or chicken except in the name of the dish. As soon as she opened her bandage, flies started to hover around it. She used one hand to swat them while the other slowly unwound the gauze.
The camp clinic had determined that a piece of shrapnel was lodged in her shin, but not having an X-ray machine, they had referred her to the Vavuniya general hospital. She had wanted to take her sons, too. Maran’s neck and arms had broken out in itchy pink patches that grew larger as he sweated and scratched. Tamizh had a wheezy cough, and a camp doctor had said it was bronchitis, from which almost three-quarters of the inmates suffered. Mugil meant to ask the doctor how her son contracted it, but he only spoke Sinhala, and in the two minutes stipulated for each patient, there wasn’t time for a discussion to be carried on through the interpreter (a Tamil inmate whose Sinhala was so halting that worried patients elaborately mimed their ailments for the doctor).
Even with the doctor’s letter, it had taken a week for the camp’s administrator, Brigadier Weerakoon, to give Mugil a day pass for the town hospital. She was not permitted to take her sons. ‘Then you’ll just run away happily,’ said the soldier distributing the passes at the front office. He had said it in Sinhala, but he jeered, and his fingers had done a fast run.
As she had walked through the camp gates for the general hospital ten days earlier, Mugil looked down at herself. She was wearing the skirt her aunt gave her. Her fingertips were white with the chalk she had used on the school blackboard earlier that day. She had bitten back the words that rushed to her mouth, eager to respond to the soldier. She had already run far from everything she held dear.
At the hospital, the verdict had been as expected. The shrapnel would have to remain where it was. Painkillers were given, and the external infection cleaned and bandaged. Mugil had enquired about Maran’s sores, and the Tamil nurse asked if she was living in the camp. ‘Malnutrition, and probably ringworm, then,’ the nurse said. ‘All that shit floating around, I hear. Once you’re in your own home, the sores will disappear.’
On the way back to camp, Mugil had scratched the itch of defiance building up inside her. She stopped at a shop and bought a used Nokia mobile phone for 3,000 rupees. It would be perfect for the phone card Aunty Sumathi had smuggled hidden in the hem of the sari.
Now in her tent, having redone her bandage, Mugil fished out the phone parts she had hidden all over the tent. The back cover from under the mats, the keypad in the folds of the tarpaulin, the plastic-wrapped battery in the clay under the wood poles. She assembled them and switched on the phone. It beeped almost instantly with a text message.
It was from the government of Sri Lanka’s information department, and had been sent at 1:20 p.m., 19 May 2009. Addressed to all Sri Lankans, it proclaimed, in Sinhala—a language she could not read—that LTTE chief Velupillai Prabakaran had been killed on the battlefield.
MUGIL STARED AT her mobile phone, unable to make sense of the swirls, dots and exclamation marks of the Sinhala text. It spooked her. Something really big must have happened.
When her tent-mates returned, she showed the text to Bhuvi, a young man who had worked in the Kilinochchi government agent’s office and knew some Sinhala. He squinted at the phone a long time.
‘No wonder they served kiri bath today,’ he finally said. It was rice cooked in milk, a Sinhalese dish made for celebrations and festivals.
He translated the text.
Mother gasped. ‘It is a lie,’ Father said. ‘They are lying.’ Mugil thought it was the worst kind of propaganda. That evening, when it was announced on the camp loudspeaker, people stopped in their tracks.
LTTE chief Prabakaran had been killed by the army in Mullivaikal the previous day, 18 May 2009. The government TV channel, Rupavahini, showed pictures of his portly body lying on the ground, his eyes closed, face swollen, a smear of blood on his head under his camouflage cap. President Mahinda Rajapaksa cut short an official trip to Jordan and the government media showed him kissing the ground when he landed. The next day he announced that the death of Prabakaran marked the end of terrorism in Sri Lanka. Speaking from Parliament in his trademark white kurta and maroon shawl, Rajapaksa said, ‘Today is a day which is very, very significant—not only to us Sri Lankans but to the entire world. Today, we have been able to liberate the entire country from the clutches of terrorism.’ The war, he added, was a stage in a larger, nobler task: that of assimilating the Tamils into Sri Lanka as part of a unified national identity. The terrorists were gone now. Peace would prevail; warring Sinhalese and Tamil identities would be reconciled. ‘We should live in this country as children of one mother,’ he said. His voice was triumphant. In just his first term as president, he had succeeded where eleven heads of state before him had failed.
The streets of Colombo erupted in celebration. The inmates of Manik Farm were cloaked in gloom. Prabakaran’s death meant the same thing to both groups: the end of the LTTE.
That night in Zone 2, some people organised a candlelight vigil. They lit hurricane lamps and candles in a clearing near the tents and gathered around it in silence. In barely five minutes, shouting interrupted the ceremony. The inmates expected Sri Lankan soldiers and had prepared their cover story: they were mourning not Prabakaran but the thousands of civilians who died in the Vanni.
But the voices spoke in Tamil. ‘Aye! So eager to celebrate Annan’s death, anh?’ they yelled. ‘Get out! Scram, you traitors!’ It was a small group of men, loud and brash, their eyes wild with despair. ‘You have no respect!’
An elderly woman tried to mediate. ‘It is only an anjali, a memorial, don’t you have eyes to see?’ she said, with the authority her age gave around men young enough to be her grandsons. ‘What is the despair in this?’
No one paid attention to her. A beefy man blew out the candles in a huff. The others kicked over the kerosene lamps. This was the image of 19 May that would endure in Mugil’s mind: the pathetic aggression of these men, their blowing out of candles as if they were throwing punches, the way they looked at the teary mourners and said, ‘You’re all Sinhalese ass-lickers!’
For her, the news was like the shattering of glass on a silent night. She had never thought of the day Annan would be gone. He was her hero, the man whose words and mission had directed most of her life. He had taught her, her sister, her brother, her husband, to keep a firm eye on the future they wanted and let it shape the present. All the decisions she thought she had made of her own volition—her proud rebellion – were made for the dream he had designed. She told her father, without reserve, that she felt orphaned. He understood; it was likely he felt the same way.
Mugil wasn’t sure why she’d thought Prabakaran immortal. She had rarely seen the leader after the cherished felicitation ceremony, except when he gave the annual Martyrs’ Day address. Yet, somehow she was devoted, always conscious of his presence. This face appeared on every poster and film; the fifty-four-year-old had never looked o
lder than forty. Few knew more about his personal life than that his aged parents lived in Valvettithurai and that he had two sons, the first a commander of the eponymous Charles unit and the second eleven years old. Tales from his youth were symbolic narratives of imminent greatness or innate brutality—he shot small animals with a catapult; he hated the discipline of school; he moved from petty theft to bank robberies to fund the fledgling LTTE; the first person he assassinated was the mayor of Jaffna.
A handful of trusted associates had earned his trust by demonstrating intense loyalty, a crucial test of which was keeping quiet. When Divyan had trained as Annan’s bodyguard and spent most of the day tagging along with the leader, he was sworn to a code of silence. Even to Mugil he had allowed himself only two anecdotes, both adding to the leader’s aura of power and benevolence. One was about the time when Annan, in bed with a fever and headache, asked Divyan to bring him some headache tablets. Fumbling with the foil packaging, Divyan dropped a pill on the dusty floor and began to extract another one. But the leader stopped him. ‘Someone must have risked his life to smuggle that pill into the Vanni,’ he apparently said. ‘Let us not waste his sacrifice. Give me the Panadol that you dropped.’
On another occasion, Divyan was called to accompany Annan to an impromptu meeting. As the bodyguards ran in, the leader’s wife said they had not eaten lunch. Divyan would describe how the leader had taken the plate of rice and curry, balled it up into mouthfuls and fed his bodyguards ‘with his own hands’. ‘I felt like Annan was my mother,’ he would say.
Mugil wondered if Divyan, wherever he was, knew about 19 May. He would be heartbroken. Those in the camp who struggled most with the news were conjuring conspiracy theories about a faked death. The tales of Prabakaran’s escapes to India when he was hunted in Sri Lanka were resurrected to illustrate how he always had a trick up his sleeve. A woman in the camp’s water queue told Mugil that her son believed Annan would spring a surprise and turn up in a foreign country. For thirty years he was not even caught, the son said, now suddenly he is killed? A generation that had known only one leader believed he was invincible, gifted with unmatched military cunning, even divine foresight. Bhuvi’s cousin, a boy from the political wing, pointed out that since the global proscription of the LTTE in the nineties, Prabakaran had been a wanted man. ‘Even India and all the western powers couldn’t catch him. How can this new Rajapaksa and his army do it?’ The cousin was sure Prabakaran had escaped, tapping into the legendary intercontinental network of LTTE supporters and covert sponsors.
