by Rohini Mohan
As Isabel and Randy arranged a safe house for their new case, Sarva sipped hot sweet tea in the back of the office. It was remarkable that the NP agreed to help him. He credited it to Amma and the force of her conviction. His iron-willed mother had pulled him out of ditches innumerable times, and how quickly he always forgot. He did not deserve her.
‘Shall we go, men? What are you dreaming about?’ Randy asked.
‘It must be cool to have a boss like Isabel,’ Sarva said, grinning.
‘Okay, okay, lover boy,’ Randy said. ‘You’re my competition! This is why I have to send you away to Bataramulla.’ That’s when Sarva saw that Randy was holding two helmets.
Bataramulla was a suburb just outside Colombo, and had they taken a bus, they would have reached the safe house in two hours. But Randy was wary of army checkpoints and the police on main roads, so they rode on his motorbike. Throughout the one-hour journey, Randy spoke loudly, making jokes, telling Sarva to think of this as an adventure. Sarva concentrated on not screaming in pain. His crushed lower back felt the impact of every bump on the crooked routes off the highway.
‘How long will I have to stay in Bataramulla before going home?’ Sarva shouted over the revving of the motorbike.
‘Let’s see,’ Randy said. ‘Till it’s safe for you, till they stop tormenting your family.’
‘Okay, around a month then, I guess.’ He had no inkling then that it would snowball into eighteen months, enough time for him to lose all sense of where or who he was.
SARVA’S SLOW ERASURE began in a church in Bataramulla. A dour head priest handed Sarva to a young brother, Hendrick, to be shown around.
‘You’re not Catholic?’ the friar asked first. ‘But you’re a Pereira?’
‘My father was Catholic but I was brought up as a Hindu,’ Sarva said, unsure if this would make things difficult. But Brother Hendrick didn’t seem to care either way. He was jovial, smelled of soap, and said he was hooked on Facebook. Several Tamil-speaking boys in the same parish were studying to be ordained as Catholic priests, but he advised Sarva to keep a low profile. ‘The more you share with people, the more you expose yourself,’ he warned in all seriousness, and then repeated the word expose with mock shock and a little giggle.
Sarva had been given a room near the kitchen, at the back of the parish house. His own space, a soft bed, a clean bathroom. He was thrilled. He picked flowers and put them by his window. Next to the Bible, on a cupboard, he placed a small idol of Pullaiyar, which Amma had put in his backpack.
He wasn’t allowed to have his own phone and had to call his family on Randy’s. The NP suspected that Amma’s phones were tapped and did not want the safe house to be exposed.
Isabel and Randy visited occasionally, bringing news from home. Plainclothes policemen had visited Sarva’s Nuwara Eliya house again, and Amma had challenged them, demanding to know why they were looking for a man who had been freed by the courts. Ignoring her, the men repeated the same questions: ‘Where is Sarvananthan? Where is his passport?’ As Amma berated them, they searched every nook and cranny in the house. Aunty Rani had also reported a suspicious man who had tried to chat up the security guard at her Wellawatte apartment, asking whether Sarva had been to see his aunts.
‘Things are not going as we hoped,’ Isabel said. ‘You might have to stay away from home for longer than we expected, Sarva.’
The head priest suggested that Sarva occupy himself at the parish house. ‘Don’t simply sit around waiting,’ he said. ‘You can help out around here.’
So Sarva offered to cook lunch for the ten or so residents, but he didn’t last for long. They didn’t seem to like his cooking and were especially annoyed that the meals weren’t ready on time. Brother Hendrick asked if Sarva had used the whole bottle of chilli powder in the curries. Sarva was mildly offended but told himself that they didn’t appreciate his culinary experiments because they were simple men of God who wanted only bread and sambol or bland rice and curry.
After a couple of months, Isabel asked Sarva to think about going abroad. The way she said it reminded him of his mother’s attempts five years earlier to get him to leave the country. She had been frightened about his future and wanted him to get out before he was drawn into the war. Her Negombo brother who had moved to Long Beach, New York, had been ready to sponsor his visa. But Sarva was adamant. ‘What is there for me in America?’ he asked. He didn’t want to live off an uncle who was himself struggling to educate his daughters. When he finally landed his shipping job and started to travel around the globe, Amma was satisfied somewhat, hoping the foreign air would seduce him one day into settling abroad. A few years later, when relations with her US brother soured over a land dispute, Amma complained that Sarva had wasted a golden opportunity.
Ever since he had first been locked up, Sarva too had regretted not having emigrated when he had the chance. Desperate to get out of jail, he was preoccupied with thoughts of leaving Sri Lanka. He imagined the furthest place he could go to, beyond the whitewashed prison walls, beyond Colombo, away from Sri Lanka, beyond South Asia—somewhere far, far away. With his lawyer’s help, in early 2009 he made an asylum application to the Swiss embassy. He now told Isabel of this and she checked on its progress. She wanted to get him an interview as soon as she could, but ever since the army had started its offensives in the east and north, asylum applications from Tamils had soared; the waiting list was insurmountable.
Switzerland was the only country to half-process applications for political asylum at its consulate in Colombo and issue preliminary visas for travel. For Sri Lankans, a Swiss visa was an alternative to illegal emigration. The NP had worked closely with the Swiss in emergency situations before, getting people under threat across borders on short notice. But since their director had been deported, the NP’s clout had weakened considerably. Randy kept telling Sarva to wait, that things would surely work out soon.
Another month passed. There was a burglary at the Bataramulla parish house. Very little was stolen—only a laptop and some silverplated candlesticks—but the break-in shook everyone. ‘Why would any thief waste his time with a poor church?’ Isabel asked on the phone, her voice thick with suspicion. She came the very next day and drove Sarva to a safe house in Batticaloa, in the east of the country.
There, a Father Peter welcomed them to a retreat and counselling centre. It was called The Cuckoo’s Nest. Isabel’s eyes danced with amusement at the name, but Sarva didn’t see what was so funny.
‘You know? The book?’ she asked. He didn’t.
‘The movie?’ No.
‘Jack Nicholson, the actor?’
Sarva smiled, feigning recognition to end this attempt at bonhomie. He knew Isabel was trying hard to help him, but he was sick of waiting. In prison, he had seen his mother every day and had been allowed to speak to other people. Hiding out was different. Unlike prison, it did not kill his dream of freedom entirely but cruelly postponed it, day by day, crisis by crisis. Three months of self-imposed solitary confinement, and now, another hiding place at another seminary that required discipline, silence and obedience. His affection for Isabel was eroding fast.
The Cuckoo’s Nest was busier than the previous safe house. It sheltered more than fifty poor men and women, taught them tailoring or carpentry, and fed them three meals a day. Sarva’s room was in the men’s dormitory, and was basic—a washbasin, a wall shelf, a bed with a mosquito net. The women were in another building, and a lady warden sat on the veranda between the two hostels, her face severe and eyes hawk-like.
Men and women were discouraged from interacting and sat separately in the dining hall. The meals were bland and underseasoned, and Sarva felt that the spice had been leached from his life. He was the oldest there and was formally addressed as anna, in a way that isolated him. Father Peter always spoke tenderly to him, but Sarva sensed that this was not exclusive. He craved his aunt’s fish curry and his mother’s doting. When the parish sweeper once brought her toddler over, he played with the child incessantly
to somehow satiate the need to see his fat little nephew and hazeleyed niece. It was surprising how much he missed them all; he had spent most of his life negotiating more independence for himself. He felt unseen now and locked in. Days would go by without his speaking to a single person. Once, when it rained, he ran out of his room to feel the drops on his face, to sink into their coolness and feel like himself again. In this place, with its impersonal kindness, Sarva felt inanimate; a thing to be protected, fed and ignored.
Then Randy came by one day and said the government had revoked the visas of several more NP employees. They had deported Isabel. ‘She wanted you to know that she will always remember you, machan,’ Randy said. And just when Sarva thought this was another of his friend’s jokes, he continued, ‘You were her last case in Sri Lanka.’ Randy said NP’s days in Sri Lanka were numbered. They would pass Sarva’s case file to another NGO and hoped to do a handover. All of this, to Sarva, meant only that he would be hiding for even longer. He did not respond and refused Randy’s usual offer of a glass of arrack.
Perhaps Randy realised that Sarva was depressed, because on his next visit he brought a phone and three SIM cards from Amma. It was not safe, he warned, but since Sarva was so lonely, they could make an exception. Change the number as often as possible, Randy instructed.
‘And I should speak only for a few minutes each time, right? Three minutes, no?’ Sarva asked, perking up, recalling some trivia about phone tapping.
Randy guffawed. They had discovered ways around that now, he said, ‘But yes, do that if you want. Or just text, man.’
Sarva wasn’t sure later if it was the phone that had normalised his life or if he had adjusted to anonymity. He began to wake early and go for a walk within the campus to exercise his weak spine. He learnt to associate food with sustenance rather than taste, and his appetite improved. He called his family every morning and night. His littlest nephew was starting to speak and because he was told his grandmother lived in Nuwara Eliya, he called her Noorie. Sarva’s younger brother, Carmel, was into Snoop Dog and Jay-Z and wrote Tamil hip-hop songs about girls and gangs.
Although Sarva loved hearing their voices, the conversations with his parents always upset him. The plainclothesmen still came. His father had quit his job and found another as manager in a small private tea estate in Maskeliya. Amma was in the process of moving there, spending time between the two houses. Thus, fortunately, it was often the housemaid who answered the door to the TID or police. Amma had instructed her to say, ‘I don’t know’, ‘Amma has gone to town’, ‘I will tell them you came’, alternating between the phrases, and never to open the chain lock on the door.
The men continued to visit Aunty Rani’s Colombo house, too, and once even forced open her front door. Typical of Aunty, she narrated it vividly enough for him to picture what happened: she had been at the post office and her middle-aged tenant had called her, flustered and high-pitched. Some men had shoved around the apartment building’s watchman, taken the elevator to the seventh floor, and burst into the house. The tenant had screamed for several minutes and then fainted. Before that, she had registered this much: there were six or seven well-built men wearing crew cuts and sky-blue shirts tucked into grey trousers. They had asked for Sarva and Indra. Aunty said she was now noting the dates, times and details of all raids on her home in a diary.
Almost four months had passed since Sarva had been acquitted and the release papers sent to the TID, but the situation was now well beyond documents and courts. He was helplessly wracked with guilt about his family’s continued harassment. He often wondered if he should have just stayed in prison till the paperwork was complete, but his unending backache reminded him why he had bolted. The pain had grown and spread to his legs. A doctor prescribed some painkillers over the phone.
Sarva also had unexpected blackouts and would come to with bloodshot eyes. It burned when he peed, and every few days there were drops of blood in his urine. Shifting between sitting and standing was agonising. Sarva needed to visit a doctor for proper treatment, but the NP had been unable to convince a government doctor to see, much less treat, Sarva.
‘Any bloody doctor will be able to tell that your injuries are from torture, and the fucking cowards don’t want to get involved.’ When Randy was frustrated, expletives poured out. ‘Even if they’ll treat you, the bastards are too scared to put their signature on a damn certificate.’ The NP needed such a certificate for the asylum application, and it was proving impossible to get. It was urgent because soon the baton marks and chain impressions on Sarva’s body would fade. For now, the NP had given the Swiss embassy photographs of his injuries and his medical report from the prison attack.
Sarva spent afternoons on his phone, reading interviews with the lucky few who had escaped from the north and made their way to England or Canada. Within Sri Lanka, former combatants were arrested or had surrendered; the government had close to 11,000 men and women in detention camps, but gave no explanation for the 15,780 missing. Sarva’s life had led him along a different route: torture, trial and an acquittal. He had privileges—his distance from the war, a middle-class family with access to lawyers and some money, and a bilingual mother. Even so, his future was uncertain.
More than a year had passed since the end of the war, and the re-elected president was amassing more power. Rajapaksa had won six million votes, handily defeating General Fonseka, whose four million votes drew in most of the electorate in the minority-dominated northern and eastern provinces. The very next month, the president had Fonseka arrested for ‘military offences’. Over 100 military policemen burst into his house, threatened his family and dragged him away. It was the start of a stronger clampdown on all opposition, including the muzzling of press freedom.
Censorship and the threat of violence hung heavy over the media. Murder, kidnapping, violence against property and journalists, financial restrictions and control—all these techniques were employed to limit what could be published or broadcast. The government-run TV channel and papers ran propaganda and, fearing harassment, much of the private media learnt to practise self-censorship. Sri Lanka sat 162nd in the index of press freedom compiled by Reporters Without Borders, making it the lowest-ranked parliamentary democracy.
On websites and in foreign media, undercover journalists and activists published front-line reports and eyewitness accounts of the army shelling no-fire zones, using cluster bombs, grabbing land and harassing freed combatants. A year after the end of the LTTE, the missing pieces of the war gradually emerged, unveiling the fabrications of a government eager to claim victory but keen to deny the number of fatalities. Every time the state claimed the army caused zero casualties and that all killings were the LTTE’s responsibility, the Sri Lankan diaspora, including covert Tiger sympathisers, accused the state of sponsoring genocide. The truth lay in the gulf between claim and counterclaim. In the cacophony of different accounts, attempts to measure the cost of the conflict—the counting of the dead, lost, disappeared, raped or displaced; their names and addresses; the dates and locations of war crimes; the number of soldiers deployed, killed or injured; the battle methods of the army and the LTTE—became fraught with motives and desired ends. Propaganda eclipsed facts, denial extinguished compassion. The war’s end produced two aggressive parallel narratives, which ran fast and strong, never meeting, like the dual histories of the warring peoples themselves.
Sarva was far away from all the action. Yet he felt a kinship with the Vanni Tamils, a shared suffering. He envied them their closure. The long war had torn their lives apart but had also ended in front of their eyes. What he fought with were the ghosts from the same war: how long would they haunt him?
Sarva read Tamil and Sinhalese dailies cover to cover, including the obituaries, with a growing dread of finding the name of someone he knew—a classmate Malainathan from Chavakacheri or cycling buddy Frederick, who had moved to Mullaitivu—until he realised that such deaths would be kept out of the papers. People disappeared; they di
d not die.
After a while, he stopped bothering with the Sinhalese papers; they were filled with excited bloviating and overwrought praise for the president. Their optimism and convenient blindness made his blood boil. They wrote about the inauguration of new Tamil-language schools in the Vanni but didn’t mention that the earlier school buildings had been bombed. His own high school had been shelled and his primary school turned into a camp for the displaced. By and by, the helpless pathos of Tamil papers wore him out, too. His life was no different from that of the millions of Tamils they wrote about; his fate was inextricably linked to theirs.
The more he thought about this, the further Sarva sank into himself. Beside a small stream behind the Batticaloa seminary, he watched tortoises flop around, paddling into the water, onto the mud, into the water, onto the mud, a game without end, until the twisting current pulled them away.
If someone had told him how much longer he would have to stay at the seminary, Sarva might have fared better. Instead, the incremental extension of this period of hiding chipped away at him, the uncertainty leaving him breathless. What he didn’t know was that the months ahead would be a blur of locations and new identities. He would be desperate to be visible, numb with solitude, and constantly on the verge of nervous collapse, until an unexpected love affair, irrational and all-consuming, would resuscitate him.
PART THREE
refuge
17.
August 2010
‘YOU HAVE AN interview at the Swiss embassy tomorrow!’ Randy shouted on the phone. He was already on his way to Batticaloa to pick Sarva up.
Why he wasn’t given more notice Sarva couldn’t imagine, but he started to prepare mentally. Four months had passed since he left prison and he was sure his brain had atrophied. He would never forget Inspector Silva, but the other names were fading. At least remember the dates, remember the order, he told himself throughout the van journey to Colombo.
