by Rohini Mohan
But their old house in PTK was nothing like this. They had lived in the basic quarters the Tamil Tigers had given them—two rooms and a kitchen. All around, people blown there by conflict or loyalty from places as far afield as Colombo and Jaffna lived just like them, in equal-sized houses with thatched roofs and no electricity or running water. They had been surrounded by the forest, sharp and unforgiving in the summer, bountiful but mosquito-infested during the rains. They had known everyone in the neighbourhood; everyone spoke Tamil. Maran, had he been old enough, would have walked with the neighbour’s son to the government primary school five minutes from home. People were attached to the little there was because they had built it with their own hands.
This house, in the northernmost town of Sri Lanka, was so close to the Arabian Sea that the wind howled through its rooms. It had a yard of pearly sand, bald coconut trees and lantana shrubs. Its compound wall, whose green and pink patterns had dulled in the salty air, hid them from the street. She cleaned the rooms inside and removed the portrait of the glowering ancestor. The deities continued to watch over her. The skid marks on the red oxide floor suggested that there had once been some chairs and tables, but they had probably been stolen or cut up for use as fuel during the conflict. Even the front door was missing.
Mugil didn’t need a door; the roof alone was more good luck than she had dared hope for. If she wished for something else, the little she had might be snatched from her. She prayed that the owners, descendants of the man in the portrait, would not abruptly return and throw them out. Mother vaguely remembered an affluent family residing here but didn’t know why they left or who they were. She and Amuda moved in with Mugil but insisted it was temporary. The UNHCR gave them a resettlement kit—25,000 rupees, some tin sheets, a bag of cement, rope, basic household items like bed sheets, jerry cans, kitchen utensils and construction tools—and Mother was determined to rebuild what was left of her old house. ‘Why take someone else’s?’ she asked Mugil.
‘Because they are gone and we are here,’ Mugil replied.
Ever since she discovered this house, abandoned, littered with the muck the seasons had swept in, Mugil had felt optimistic. The tension from the press of queues and the constraints of tent living left her body; the urgency of bare survival melted away. It was so simple to buy cheap fish and gather firewood, start the stove, boil some rice, eat a filling meal, sleep. Mugil imagined Divyan released from detention, arriving at this house, praising her for her decision. Her boys would be going to school in smart uniforms. Drumstick, mangoes and jackfruit would hang from healthy trees in the yard. Perhaps the years of fear would end at this house.
20.
May 2011
SINCE JANUARY, MUGIL had done little apart from care for her home and family. By summer, Maran and Tamizh had lost their beaten look and the house was more or less in order. She made her own front door: she wove a cadjan mat, mounted it on a wooden frame and used a stick and rope loop as the latch. It would not stop thieves—what was there to steal?—but it gave her some privacy. She knocked the rust off the backyard toilet door and bought a bucket, mug and plastic drum to fill with well water. There was no electricity, so she purchased kerosene lamps and candles. Mother and Amuda had moved out to their old property; they had fixed what was left of that house, but the roof repairs were stalled for lack of funds. It was comfortable enough to live beneath the sky in the summer months, but the roof would have to be fixed by June, before the rains.
Mugil did not remember things ever being this expensive. The compensation they had received from the government, a one-off payment, had evaporated in the first month. The cost of living had escalated since the end of the war, an effect of the sharp rise in demand from refugees and the still ailing economy. Non-refugee locals seemed to struggle, too, because incomes had not caught up with expenses. For families from the Vanni, the market rates were doubly shocking; the price of essentials had been regulated under the Tigers, which muted market fluctuations. Staples like milk powder, oil and coconut now tripled in price.
It was annoying, having to buy food they once caught or grew. Coastal households with men around managed to make fish curry twice a day. Even though the navy rationed day passes for fishing and occasionally banned it, when they did go to sea, the men said, ‘Fish is free, the sea charges nothing for it.’ Only the garlic, tamarind, oil, salt and chilli powder needed to be bought.
When Mugil bought seafood, she wondered if the fish seller realised there was no man in her house. Sometimes she returned from the market with an empty bag, indignant about paying money for vegetables and lentils that she could have grown on her acre of land in PTK. But even those who still had some land, like the farmers closer to Jaffna, were seeing disappointing crops, especially in the rice paddies. When some of them came to the Point Pedro market to sell produce, Mugil asked if they needed farmhands; she needed to earn a living and she had experience. But they were too deep in debt to pay for labour. As a cooperative, they were working on coconut, plantain and mango orchards, but the soil was poor and they had other obstacles to deal with. The saplings needed tending, but what with travel restrictions, sudden curfews and a tight budget, they were invariably falling behind. If the rainfall in June were low, they’d be in trouble. Life was precarious for everyone, and over time, expenses piled high: medical treatment, education, loans. Without a reliable income, people had to be creative. A refugee family that still lived in the Amman temple sold their tin sheets and used the money for their daughters’ tuition fees. Another sold their government-issue rice bags to buy supplies for their newborn. Mugil gave her rice bags to a mill for pounding, a method that expanded each kilo by half. She made gruel for meals, retaining the starchy water; this way, her rice lasted for several more weeks.
Every visit to the Point Pedro village office to complete some bureaucratic formality cost Mugil 53 rupees for bus fare. So she combined such trips with visits to one of Divyan’s aunts who lived nearby. She would sit with the family and chat aimlessly for an hour. When it was time to say goodbye, the aunt would run into her yard and pack a few papayas, pumpkins or coconuts for Mugil to take home. If she were lucky, there would be a half sack of lentils or rice, too.
Saris became curtains, unnamed leaves made it onto the dinner plate, buckets of well water were bartered for firewood. When Amuda passed a broken wall somewhere, she brought home some of the bricks. Discarded fragments of fibreglass boats from the beach became part of a fence. A rusted bike wheel became a laundry hanger; pieces of its tyre were door stops, and the tube was stretched across Mugil’s bicycle bar to hang baskets. The sisters were turning into scrap geniuses.
Mother pawned her gold bracelet, two rings and her thick silver anklets. This sustained them for another two months. Mugil had lost her distaste for her community’s compulsive accumulation of gold, having seen so many people sell their jewellery during the war. She was never attracted to the thick, clunky designs people bought, and she herself wore only small hexagonal ear studs. She disapproved of gold as a marker of status, but were it not for the hoarded jewellery, many families would have been without food or shelter. For the displaced, it was invariably the currency of distress, the most portable thing of value. Mugil had owned a house and farmland, but when she ran for her life, they were lost. How easily trinkets, coins and chains could be bundled into a handkerchief and tucked into sari petticoats or underclothes. One by one, they would be pawned or sold—for utensils, an operation, some poultry or goats.
But pawning gold was never a simple transaction. For the Tamils, it was a tragic, sentimental shedding of prosperity. Acquired on auspicious days, worn to weddings, child-naming and coming-of-age ceremonies, each piece of jewellery had a value far exceeding its cash price.
Mother had pawned everything since Father passed away, giving a different melodramatic reason each time: she was embracing widowhood, ageing, or their new poverty. She sometimes broached the subject of selling her wedding chain. ‘What use is the thaali wit
hout him?’ she would say. ‘We need the money.’ Mugil wouldn’t hear of her selling the thaali. Even if it curled unused at the bottom of a metal trunk, it was evidence Father had once existed. If it came to selling this, Mugil would have failed as the head of the family; she would have pushed them to shed their last ounce of dignity. ‘Keep it for when we’re worse off,’ she told Mother.
It was May 2011, and Mugil needed a job. She did not have much of a formal education but could ride a motorbike, use a camera, even climb a coconut tree. She was fluent in Tamil, good with numbers, and had a way with people. But she had begun to have misgivings about displaying these skills lest she be identified as a former combatant. Things had shifted inside her. Her life was no longer dedicated to the movement, but the state would not see that. The TID and army would find little to distinguish the unrepentant from the transformed and give her no credit for deserting the Tigers. She would be pushed back to the edge. She knew that hiding was perhaps unfair to those who had surrendered, like her own husband. But there was Maran and Tamizh, and the need to raise them overrode all other moral concerns.
It wasn’t easy to be invisible. She knew the rules but hadn’t absorbed them. Oh no, Mother would say, good family women don’t go to the market after dusk. They don’t sit near a man on the bus. They don’t draw attention. A loud voice, short temper or confident walk was enough to get one into trouble. Amuda knew of a primary school teacher in Thevipuram who organised a sports day without following the recent practice of inviting an army official as the guest of honour. She was banned from leaving her village without military permission. A young man, an acquaintance of Mugil’s from Valvettithurai, went missing after he turned down a soldier’s offer of a beer. ‘I don’t have such habits,’ the customers in the tea shop heard him say. Only a former combatant, the powers that be seemed to surmise, would have the prepossession to both refuse alcohol and do so looking a solider in the eye. It did not help that the young man belonged to Prabakaran’s hometown.
Being female itself invited danger. Mugil knew seven women in her neighbourhood who had become more vulnerable after the killing or kidnapping of their husbands. They told her in whispers how the soldiers used the investigation into the missing man as a pretext to come by after dark or to summon the women to the army office alone. One of them had been asked to send her teenage daughter. The soldiers, only a few years older than the girl, did not touch her but teased and flirted till she was in tears.
A woman could do no right. If she spoke to soldiers, she was easy. If she did not speak to them, she was rude or had something to hide. They were harassed for information or amusement. The mother of one of Maran’s friends told Mugil that late one night a soldier walked in (she, too, had no door) and ‘slept next to her’. Mugil knew that phrase to mean she had been raped.
It was all as real as it was bizarre. There was no use going to the police, even if they were Tamils; they had been neutered. The military ruled the north—one soldier for every eleven civilians. The government said this presence was necessary to weed out Tigers, separatists and antisocial elements. Those categories included anybody who didn’t cower in fear of the military: former Tigers, of course, but also journalists, priests, association leaders, wisecracking boys, women who recoiled from flirtation.
The consequences of being picked out by the army were farreaching and permanent. You could be detained for a long time. You could be prosecuted under the PTA, and who knew where that would lead. It felt dramatic and over the top at times, this dread of oppression, especially for those who had never experienced it before. The army’s presence in Colombo had made the Sinhalese feel safe, and many asked why Tamils were so resistant to it—they are there for the Tamils’ own good, they would say.
But every time Mugil passed a soldier, her pulse raced, her palms sweated and a terrifying image of her boys, orphaned and wailing alone, flashed through her mind. She imagined being plucked off the street and plunged into darkness. She sometimes scoffed at her fear, told herself it was paranoia, but it still gripped her. It had happened to others, too many innocent others. She fought to subdue her confident stride and straight back. Kept her voice soft. Did not run as fast as she could to catch a bus. She would hoist one of her sons on her hip when approaching a checkpoint. It was not enough that she was harmless; she needed to be seen to be harmless.
It was not just the army’s watchful eyes she had to worry about. The Tamil community was unforgiving to combatants after the war, calling them traitors. They accused the Tigers of stealing from civilians on the run. For many, the former cadre were the lowest scum of society, the reason the army was apprehending innocent people and a force whose decrees had robbed families of their children, whose decades of promises came to nothing. Some people swung wildly between feeling betrayed by the Tigers and nostalgic for the era they represented, but the old loyalty had entirely dissipated. Ex-combatants were dreaded, avoided like the plague. Any association with them was considered too risky. Most people would give them up to the army without hesitation. The ones who went through rehabilitation were suspected of being government spies. No one wanted to employ them.
Female ex-cadre faced the worst stigma. Those who were single were deemed unsuitable for marriage; they were too independent, too dangerous for any family. In gossip, their unwilling visits to army camps were recast as sexual liaisons. The older women—married or widowed—were held to unforgivingly high standards of femininity and obedience.
This was why, when Mugil mounted her bicycle, she kept her legs together, her eyes on the ground. She did not argue with men. She shrank. She acted frail for the comfort of others.
And so it was that Mugil chose what she felt was a traditional woman’s job. In May, she and Mother started a small business with their neighbour Sangeeta, making snacks. Mugil, as the worst cook but fastest talker in the group, made deliveries to the market on a bicycle donated by the Dutch Refugee Council. The kind cool-bar owner was their most dependable customer, and he recommended their delicious fish rolls and patties to other shops, too. They made between 500 to 1,000 rupees every day. Some of this they set aside to keep the business running, and the rest they split evenly between them. At first they naively bought groceries at retail, but in time Mugil cut wholesale deals. Some evenings, she scoured the shops for day-old vegetables or oddly cut fish that sold at half-price and tasted just as good.
Her pretence of innocence made Mugil feel like a criminal. ‘I’m acting so much like a helpless mother that I forget that I am a helpless mother!’ She felt hemmed in, but the snack business worked. She earned just about enough and, given the circumstances, it was the most feminine, unthreatening job she could be seen doing.
Amuda had something marginally better on the horizon. An international NGO had offered her an interest-free loan, and she was considering setting up a knick-knack shop. With the loan, she would be able to afford a solar panel and a used fridge, so she could stock milk and yogurt. ‘And I could chill soft drinks and water,’ she declared, knowing the demand for cool beverages in households with NGO visitors. ‘Nothing like a chilled glass of Necto or Sunquick to get hot and bothered people into a giving mood.’
Mugil, too, had applied for the loan; she didn’t like not being chosen. When Amuda signed the papers a few weeks later, Mugil read the certificate. ‘Special Livelihood Loan,’ it said at the top of the page. In the checklist of borrower eligibility, there was a tick next to ‘Disabled’ and ‘Widow’. Mugil swallowed the resentment that rose like bile in her throat.
Later, she asked Mother why Amuda was always the more deserving one. ‘She has always got stuff because of her limp, and now she’s a widow, too,’ she said.
Mother didn’t look at her. ‘She is your sister,’ she said.
Mugil continued: ‘Fine, I guess she deserves help, but why are others like me left out? I’m also alone, without my husband.’
A few days later, their snack business partner, Sangeeta, arrived to settle the previous week�
��s accounts. She went straight into Mugil’s kitchen and made two tumblers of black coffee. Not finding any sugar, she added more water to make the brew less bitter.
They sat on the porch. Mugil sipped, and let out an appreciative sigh. ‘You added coriander seeds?’
‘You like it?’
Mugil nodded vigorously and sipped some more. She could never make coffee like this. ‘What was I doing in the past?’
‘Again this? It’s okay, akka, you can change now, start anew,’ Sangeeta said.
‘How? They won’t even give me a loan.’
Sangeeta cocked her head. ‘I didn’t get one either, akka.’
Mugil was not surprised. For all her optimism and toiling, twenty-nine-year-old Sangeeta was a difficult one for NGOs to slot. She had been living in Point Pedro for a decade, having moved here after her marriage to Daya, a fisherman. The woman wore too much powder on her face, and too much oil in her glorious long braid. She had three boys. Her youngest, six-year-old Madhusan, was the one who had told Mugil his father was dead. In time, as the two women struck up a friendship, Sangeeta told her how Daya died. She remembered that day as a series of pictures and sounds, the connections and context emerging from years of retelling the story to the police.
In January 2007, Daya had stopped at Point Pedro market after work to buy kites for his sons. The army had already begun to capture parts of the Vanni, and security had been ramped up in all Tamil districts. The military dotted every corner of the market. One soldier asked Daya for his ID, glanced at it and handed it back. Daya came home and gave the older boys their kites. Remembering something else he wanted to buy, he decided to go back to the market on his motorbike. Madhusan, then two, asked for a ride, so Daya put the boy on the petrol tank in front of him and drove off.
