The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  ‘The good man, he died in his sleep,’ people said, as if the months before his death had nothing to do with it.

  ‘At least he did not die under a bomb, he will go to God,’ they said, as if a humiliating disease was a peaceful way to go.

  It would cost 10,000 rupees, including bribes, for the body to be taken to Vavuniya for burial, and another 10,000 rupees for the funeral. Amuda said she would get a loan, at interest, from one of the richer camp inmates, but Mother forbade it. ‘We have too much debt already,’ she said. There was nothing else to discuss.

  And so they buried Father on the camp’s periphery, at the bottom of the barbed wire fence. Other bereaved families seemed to have made this choice, too; there were many mounds, close together, at various angles, almost overlapping, and Mugil was afraid the men she had paid to dig would hack into a decomposing body. A family three tent rows away from Mugil’s had guided them here. Soon after arriving at the camp, their daughter had died of an intestinal rupture caused by shrapnel. She was young, ‘fair and just twenty-six’, the mother had said, and engaged to marry a boy from their village before they were displaced by war.

  The death of the young was considered more tragic, which depressed Mugil because it implied that her father’s time had come. It had not, she wanted to tell them. Your daughter was going to start a family, while my father had one. Why was the potential greater than the actual? He was once healthy enough to take his grandchildren to school, to expect to see them attend college. He could scoop them up and jump into a bunker. She wanted to say she felt rudderless and alone. But she said nothing because she was the person who had not known where to bury her father.

  An armed soldier hovered nearby as they dug the grave and Amuda abused him under her breath. They would have to get a death certificate soon, and this soldier would be the witness. This was something else the family of the twenty-six-year-old had told them. In a register, the girl’s parents had entered the date of death as well as the age and identification marks of the deceased, but the cause of death, usually filled in by a doctor, was added by the soldier.

  ‘Bomb attack,’ the dead young woman’s mother had said.

  ‘From unknown causes,’ the soldier had written.

  The dig took two hours. Mugil’s family stood watching. Everyone was crying except Mother.

  When they were about to lower the body, they noticed a small shroud lying unattended nearby. The bedsheet bore a Red Cross logo.

  Mother went over to it and slowly opened the flap. Under it was the grey face of a boy not older than six. She threw her hands up and let out a howl.

  ‘Take everybody!’ she wailed, looking skywards and beating her chest. ‘Oh the things my eyes have to see …’

  The soldier slipped away. Without a word, the gravediggers started on another grave, this one only three and a half feet long.

  When they returned to the tent that afternoon, muddy and defeated, Mother ripped to shreds the tarpaulin sheet Father had slept on and burnt it on their stove. A month later, in December 2009, a pass system would be officially introduced, allowing people to leave the camp for up to thirty days for medical reasons.

  16.

  June 2010

  AMMA’S WORDS WERE brief. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘Someone will pick you up outside the court.’ The plan was spare, but it could be no other way.

  As soon as Sarva left the court building, still handcuffed, he walked with the guards towards the prison bus. From the corner of his eye, he saw his brother’s yellow car parked a few feet ahead, its licence plate removed. Near the bus door, as soon as the prison officer turned the key in the handcuffs, Sarva ran for the car.

  He shouldn’t have had to run. A few days earlier on 22 June 2010, Sarva had been acquitted of all charges of terrorism. It was a miracle: Amma and the lawyer had somehow managed this feat in twenty-four months, while many others arrested under the PTA frequently remained imprisoned for much longer. After the upheaval of the past few months, it was unnerving to think that a signature and a stamp would soon allow him to emerge from the labyrinth. He was still in prison, but a formality would soon release him. Rooban had got out a month earlier, and Sarva knew that he was freed thanks to the desperate payment of 400,000 rupees to the attorney general. Sarva had wondered if Amma, too, had paid a bribe, whether his acquittal had been entirely legal. Amma brushed his scepticism aside with a simple question: ‘Where would I have found all that money?’

  Sarva was uneasy about being declared innocent. He wasn’t sure if being a man on the street made him more vulnerable to the TID. Free men disappeared all the time. His lawyer seemed to have the same concern. After his acquittal, he advised Sarva to withdraw the fundamental rights plea they had filed against the Colombo New Magazine prison for the 2009 attack on Tamil inmates. Sarva wanted justice for his friends, but it was dangerous to aggravate the government any further. And so, while Sarva sat on the bench in Court No. 2, his lawyer declared his client’s intention to withdraw the case against the prison. The judge had taken note and called a lunch break. She had then called Sarva to her office. ‘Why do you want to withdraw the case?’ she had asked in Sinhala. The question was perhaps a routine one, a matter of protocol, but for a moment Sarva felt the guards accompanying him bristle.

  Accusing the authorities that held him was not safe, he wanted to say. I have had enough of these dark walls and dreary hopeless days, he might have said. But she was a judge. He was not able to form these words in her presence. ‘Miss, I just want to go home’ was all he managed.

  The judge scratched her head and said, ‘Okay, haari, mudaar.’ Release him.

  When they left the court, Sarva knew what he had to do next.

  Some days ago in the prison waiting room, the lawyer had explained why Sarva was in jail despite his acquittal. The TID claimed not to have received Sarva’s release certificate from the attorney general, and insisted on keeping him in custody until then. This was a frequent ploy to delay release, the lawyer said. ‘They will never receive it, of course,’ Amma had fumed. ‘I’ve had enough of their theatrics. We’re going to get you out.’ There were no charges against him and he’d won all the big fights; now that freedom was so close and yet denied, even his mother had lost patience. She would stage a getaway. ‘Next time after the court visit, okay?’ she had said.

  As he ran to the car, Sarva was afraid. He wanted to see if the police were chasing him, but he did not dare look. He imagined TID officers watching him from the shadows, lunging at him, pulling him into a dark corner and beating him with batons. He imagined how he would suffer in silence, committing himself to one day taking vengeance. He knew he must be deranged to be so paranoid, to need the fantasy of his silent heroism, to be unable to feel an emotion as simple as relief when he shut the car door on what had been the worst year of his life.

  SARVA’S OLDER BROTHER, Deva, was in the driver’s seat and Amma sat beside him. They turned around to see Sarva slide in. ‘Shut the door properly,’ Deva said urgently and hit the accelerator. They were so sure of being pursued that no one actually bothered to see if they were.

  Sharing the back seat with Sarva was a burly man with a wide, dark face and shoulder-length curly hair glistening with styling gel. ‘Hello, brother,’ he said, as if he were inviting him into a party. Sarva knew this was Randy, who worked for the NGO protecting Amma from the plainclothesmen harassing her. He was the only one in the car who did not look harried.

  ‘Is it done?’ Sarva asked anxiously. Deva was driving like a madman, and Amma was staring at the road ahead with an intensity that could only be prayer.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ Randy reassured. Here they were stealing Sarva away from custody, and Randy looked as if he was sitting behind a counter in a bank. What a laid-back chap, Sarva thought. If the police had followed them, they were not doing so anymore. Sarva tried to relax.

  They drove directly to the beach in Wellawatte, but at a safe distance from Aunty Rani’s house, and parked oppos
ite the railway station. Amma said they couldn’t go home; the TID had been at the end of the street when she left for court that morning.

  It was about an hour after noon. Sarva, Amma, Deva and Randy crossed the railway tracks and walked onto the beach. ‘Have a bath,’ Amma said, handing Sarva a bar of soap. It was Lux, the fragrant soap his mother always bought and which her sons thought too feminine but could not be bothered to make the effort to replace; it was the family soap. She also had a small travel bag in her hand with his clothes from home, washed, neatly folded and pressed.

  Sarva took off his rotten cotton trousers and faded T-shirt and walked into the waves. He bathed in the sea, his mind empty. When he finished, he put on the fresh shirt and trousers Amma gave him.

  ‘You must be hungry, but we should go to the NP office straightaway,’ said Randy. Amma would not accompany them. She was going home with Deva. She had planned this rescue, arranged for Randy’s NGO to help, done everything for Sarva since his detention. She had gone beyond what she thought herself capable of, singlehandedly seeing Sarva through two years of uncertainty. He knew that without her he would not have left the first basement he was taken to. Without the reassurance of her lunchbox of rice and mutton curry and sweet-and-sour brinjal, he might have lost his mind in prison. But now, as he stood in front of her, she seemed too tired to linger over the reunion. She left without her characteristic teary goodbye or long hug. Before going, she awkwardly apologised for forgetting to bring him a change of slippers.

  RANDY DROVE SARVA to the Nonviolent Peaceforce office in Colombo 3, talking all the way. He wore a shiny shirt, and the hair near his temples was drenched in sweat. His voice was surprising: soft, childlike. He spoke Tamil, and said he was a field officer at the Sri Lanka office of the NP, a risky job with a constant threat of violence from powerful quarters. A Burgher of Portuguese descent, he joked that he looked ‘like a black bear’, which made Sarva laugh. In the next few months, as they got to know each other better, Sarva would come to depend on Randy’s humour in the darkest moments.

  At the NP office, Randy introduced Sarva to Isabel, a tall, warrior-like woman. As soon as he met her, Sarva was rattled. Other than his lawyer Sumathi, this was the first young woman he had met in more than a year. She was pretty, and her smile had the warmth of welcome. He became suddenly conscious of his appearance. What she saw would not be the muscular, broad-shouldered, well-dressed man he once was. In prison, he had aged rapidly; Isabel would be looking at a patchy face, thinning hair, black rings under his eyes. These days, he slouched when he walked. The once round cheeks were sunken. His thick pink lips, once striking against his dark skin—the hallmark of the men in his family—were chapped. To make things worse, the shirt Amma had given him was oversized, bought at a time when he ate three helpings of rice at a meal and lifted weights.

  He thought Isabel was white at first, but when she sat next to him on a sofa, he saw that her skin was a golden brown. Later Randy told him she was ‘maybe South American or Mexican’.

  Isabel said Sarva’s mother had briefed them about his ‘situation with the TID’. NP would first find a safe place for him to stay. Sarva understood only some of what she said; it had been ages since he had heard English, and it was hard to follow in a foreign accent. Apprehensive, he replied in Tamil, and Randy and Devi, another field officer, translated. As he listened to Devi, impressed with her fluent English, he became intensely aware that he did not sit with this group as an equal but as a victim seeking help.

  Isabel said she needed to know specifics—dates, names, whatever he could remember. ‘I apologise in advance for having to ask you some sensitive questions, okay?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Please, call me Isabel.’

  ‘Okay.’ Of course he would not call her Isabel.

  ‘At any time, if you want a break, please tell me to stop, okay?’

  Sarva nodded. He was astounded an interview could even be conducted this way. He marvelled at Isabel, her even tone, her liquid eyes and the effort she made to put him at ease. He told her everything from the beginning, narrating his kidnap, detention, court cases and prison time in detail. He was describing the ordeal to another person for the first time. He mixed up the chronology and could not recall names. Isabel and Randy gently prodded him for dates.

  As soon as he said the English word ‘torture’, Isabel shook her head in distress. It’s always the same nonsense, she said, but looked stricken enough for him to think this was the first case of torture she had encountered.

  ‘My lower back, it’s broken. Paining,’ Sarva said. He was searching for phrases in English, attempting to level the ground, to establish a more direct connection than was possible through an interpreter. ‘My eyes, dull. Burning. Petrol bag.’

  Isabel gasped. ‘Really …’ she said, jerking her neck back. When he said, ‘They beat me’, he watched her eyes widen in anger and her mouth twist, contorting her pretty face. She was hanging on his every word. Had he become so inured to pain that he could not react as she did? Isabel must be terribly large-hearted, he thought, if she felt such personal emotions as rage and disappointment for everyone she met. Or she must be soft, a lightweight. He pitied how easily she was mortified but was nonetheless grateful. When he described being chained and handcuffed in the prison’s underground remand court, it was her unconcealed horror that told him it was inhumane. He was learning to judge his treatment for the first time through her eyes and to classify the seamless string of brutalities he’d endured on the scale of human suffering. Although Isabel repeated a lot of questions in the three-hour interview, by the end he felt unburdened.

  ‘Thank you for being so patient with me,’ Isabel said, as if it were he who was doing her a favour. She squeezed her hands together on her lap. If he were a woman, he was sure she would have hugged him. ‘I asked so many questions because we have to be careful, you know,’ she added. ‘We can’t take on … doubtful cases.’ She let that statement hang in the air, allowing Sarva a final chance to come clean as to whether he had served in the LTTE. ‘The court has discharged me,’ he said. ‘I have papers.’ For now, that was the legal truth that mattered.

  When Isabel went to her desk, Randy and the other staff explained to Sarva what NP did. The NGO protected journalists, human rights defenders, whistleblowers and any civilian under threat from violence. They were headquartered in Brussels, with offices in conflict areas around the world. They specialised in unarmed protection, which meant keeping civilians in safe houses, providing security, and sometimes helping them secure political asylum in European countries. Sympathetic immigration authorities, embassies, civil servants and locals helped them anonymously, and there was always the fear of repercussions from the government, ranging from cancelled visas to arrests or even physical harm. The staff admitted that since 2008 they had been on shaky ground in Sri Lanka. Their director, Tiffany Easthom, a Canadian national, had been deported just a few months earlier, and they knew they were all under state surveillance.

  A recent experience had made the NP more jittery. Someone named Senthil had sought protection, claiming the TID had tortured him. The man had been in prison for six months. But after Randy did a background check and Isabel interviewed him, they discovered that Senthil was a TID mole, planted to observe their methods, expose their safe houses and uncover their network. The infiltration had sent a ripple of panic through the organisation, as they realised they’d almost taken on a spy. It would have greatly endangered not only the employees but also the people they helped.

  Ever since the war intensified in the north, the government had wielded sedition and anti-terrorism laws against humanitarian agencies. NGOs like the NP worked under outrageous constraints: their projects were subject to approval and monitored at every stage by the state or armed forces, the very bodies they were often taking on. Since 2007, the principal threat had come from the state and its armed forces. Farcically, the Ministry of Defence and the presidential task force appointed themsel
ves regulators of groups documenting this violence. The threat of deportation hung over their every move, hampering their work. NGO licences were cancelled, and the visas of aid workers were revoked. The NP was thus wary of helping those accused of being linked to the LTTE. One ill-chosen case would be enough for them to get kicked out of the country.

  As Isabel put it, ‘The situation was complex.’ She sifted through Sarva’s story for fact and fiction, analysing the risks of taking on a man once accused of terrorism. She believed Sarva’s account of being tortured, but was ambivalent about his vague claims about service in the LTTE. Militancy spread far and wide, often in indiscernible ways. There were fighting cadre, spies, political workers, fundraisers, forced recruits and sympathisers—a shade card of the movement’s reach. The Rajapaksa regime tarred them all with the same brush, but some NGOs knew better.

  NP was not short of legitimate reasons to offer Sarva protection. His arrest had been illegal, like hundreds of others in Sri Lanka: the country saw the second-highest rate of illegal detention in the world, after Iraq. Sarva’s still-visible wounds were proof of horrific custodial torture. Even after his acquittal, the police continued to harass his family. They threatened to detain him again. In addition, Sarva’s case was well documented. The Red Cross had registered Sarva’s detention after that chance meeting in the TID basement. They had made sure that a police arrest report was drawn up, after which his detention was on record, a rare piece of luck that helped the NP substantiate his claims.

  Despite her doubts, Isabel was persuaded by Sarva’s acquittal. The court’s declaration of his innocence—exoneration by a body that was rarely lenient or sympathetic to an accused terrorist—was the NP’s best insurance policy.