The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  Divyan promptly disregarded their advice. He was tired of manual labour and had failed to find a driving job. Seeing other families apply for permission to cultivate their land, he wanted to follow suit. Prashant was the only one to support him. Mugil suspected that her brother meant to use their land as collateral for a loan. Prashant wanted to emigrate to Saudi Arabia with three of his friends on fake passports, and needed to pay the agent in advance before his planned departure in November 2012.

  When they were alone, Mugil warned Divyan about Prashant’s plans, but he wasn’t worried. ‘He can have any designs on the land he wants. We don’t have to think about that,’ he said. ‘I just want to go back home.’

  She asked him not to be nostalgic. ‘PTK will not be the place we knew. You will not be able to bear it.’

  ‘We can build it up slowly. It’s not like we are strangers to hardship.’

  Mugil reminded Divyan that they had bought the plot in 2005. ‘What if the government says that it is not legitimate?’

  Divyan twirled his hand in a ‘what to do’.

  ‘What if there is a Sinhalese family on our land? Or some army camp?’

  ‘Che che, nothing like that will happen.’

  It had happened to almost everyone they knew. A few of Mugil’s acquaintances from near Nilaveli in the east had complained to the district officer that Sinhalese families had unlawfully occupied their land—in a village where Tamils were excluded. The officer said the new colony was legal. The divisional secretary had assigned plots of land for cultivation and residence to the Sinhalese families, following orders from the Eastern Province governor, a former military general. In Mannar in the west, too, when 285 Tamil families were displaced from Mullikulam village in 2008, navy officers had moved in, and subsequently their families. When the refugees protested this illegal takeover in 2009, a few were offered compensation and replacement homes elsewhere, but their access to the sea and to their fertile ancestral farms was lost.

  ‘We’re not special, you know,’ Mugil told Divyan.

  ‘Since when did you start giving up without even trying? Is it not worth trying?’

  Mugil didn’t reply. Her hopes were frayed, but she didn’t want to dash his.

  Divyan wrote to the village officers in both Point Pedro and PTK, giving the address of their plot of land. A couple of weeks later, at the Vavuniya revenue office, an official told him that no land documents remained for the area; the Tigers had burned all the records for the Mullaitivu district. The government had also issued a land circular ordering that land lost during the conflict would be used for security purposes and ‘development activities’. As Mugil had feared, any purchase or sale made during the conflict was considered void and made ‘under terrorist influence’. The officer said that if Divyan had any of his own government-certified records, perhaps some appeal could be made in court. Otherwise the land would be deemed unclaimed. The new records would say the owners were not traceable.

  ‘But we’re claiming it now!’ Prashant shouted. ‘How can you say there is no owner when we are standing in front of you?’

  The officer said these were his instructions. Unless there was proof of ownership, the government would keep the land.

  Divyan looked askance at the officer. Their family had left everything behind, including their documents, when they ran from place to place in the war zone. As the officer turned to the person waiting behind them in line, Prashant’s frustration boiled over. He pounded the desk, shouting abuse at the Tamil official, calling him a lapdog of the president. Some other disgruntled petitioners in the queue joined in, venting their anger.

  Divyan expected to be thrown out, but the officials paid little attention, looking as if their mouths were sewn shut. They were powerless against the will of the military and the regime. Prashant’s was surely not the first tantrum they had seen. With no written record, Divyan was just one among hundreds of thousands who had been kicked off their own land. He was not special.

  WHEN HE GOT home, Mugil did not ask Divyan how it went at the revenue office. Instead, the next day, she told him that Sangeeta had decided to move to India. Some days later, Mugil said she had contacted an uncle in Chennai in southern India and he had invited them to visit. A few weeks later, she said the uncle was ready to put their family up for a few months should they want to move there. If they wanted to stay in the government-run refugee camps for Sri Lankan Tamils in Tamil Nadu state, the uncle advised they go to Trichy, where the tents were kept in better shape.

  Divyan was unresponsive to these hints, so Mugil finally asked him directly: did he want to leave Sri Lanka?

  ‘Leave here?’ Divyan asked. ‘Permanently?’

  She told him it had been a recurring thought ever since the military had taken over school administration. She wanted a different childhood for her sons, one that did not involve the normalisation of guns and armies. India, easily reached by boat and just half an hour’s flight away, was the only foreign country they could afford to emigrate to. Divyan knew all this; they had talked about it under fire at the Mullivaikal lagoon. Their future was no more certain now, but at least the family was together, in one place. She wanted to revisit the idea.

  ‘You’re the one who didn’t want to go last time,’ Divyan said.

  ‘Everything has changed,’ she said. Couldn’t he at least think about it?

  They had only received their new Sri Lankan IDs the previous month, he pointed out.

  ‘I don’t feel connected to this anymore,’ she replied, pointing to the ground. With the last patch of her beloved hometown snatched from her, she was living in someone else’s house, in someone else’s country.

  Some nights later, when Maran and Tamizh were asleep in their parents’ laps, Divyan said he was ready. ‘We will have to borrow a lot of money somehow,’ he said. But his face glowed. ‘I have heard that the Srirangam temple near Trichy is beautiful.’

  27.

  November 2012

  WHILE SARVA SERVED his jail time for entering the United Kingdom illegally, his immigration lawyer applied to the UK Border Agency on his behalf. Wheels turned to start his asylum process, and after two months and four days of incarceration, he was released.

  He was driven to a refugee facility in Cardiff, Wales. When Sarva asked where that was, the van driver pointed to a picture of Princess Diana on his dashboard.

  ‘Diana, do you know?’

  Sarva nodded, he did.

  ‘She was the Princess of Wales. I will show you the castle on the way.’

  Sadly, the castle was behind an enormous stone wall, but the Cardiff Sarva saw through the van window intrigued him. The capital city of Wales was quaint and bustling with tourists and students. On signs outside pubs, offices and shops was the image of a red dragon standing on its hind limbs, clawing the air with its right front paw. If it held a sword, he thought, it would look uncannily like the Sri Lankan flag’s golden lion, the symbol of Sinhalese pride. He stared at the street names—they had English lettering but he was unable to read them. ‘What is that?’ he asked, pointing to CAERDYDD.

  ‘It’s Welsh for Cardiff,’ the driver explained. ‘In Wales, the language is Welsh.’

  ‘Wales is not England?’

  ‘No!’ The driver laughed. ‘And don’t you dare call a Welshman an Englishman!’

  Sarva was impressed—he had assumed everyone in the UK spoke English. ‘Then this place is like Jaffna in my country,’ he told the driver. ‘I am from Sri Lanka, but I speak Tamil, you know.’ The driver, who worked for the agency, said he had driven hundreds of asylum seekers from a dozen countries, and he rarely met a Sri Lankan who was not Tamil.

  The driver dropped Sarva off at Lynx House, a transitional shelter for asylum seekers. As he shouted ‘Good luck!’ and drove away, Sarva decided that when—if—he settled down in the UK, he would drive a taxi for a living. The roads in this country were silk.

  The sheer number of refugees at Lynx House astounded Sarva. In jail, he had
met thieves, burglars, chronic violators of traffic regulations, trespassers and other petty criminals. But here was a horde of the biggest rule breakers: men and women who had shed their citizenship to creep across the border of a developed nation. In every room, brown, black, white people sat: a country of outsiders, their eyes shining with immigrant hope. How many nations had given them reason to flee to this alien land? What were their wars? Whatever they had run from, here they could count on three meals a day at the canteen, TV programmes in the common area, health care at the nurse’s station. Sarva had expected competition among the refugees, like hundreds of creatures converged around a shrinking watering hole. Instead, he felt camaraderie.

  Sarva shared room 113 with four others. Prathipan, a diffident thirty-six-year-old plantation Tamil from Sri Lanka, was a handsome hypochondriac with a propensity for marathon naps. His sinuses were agitated by winter and summer alike, and the joke in their room was that Prathipan was born wearing his turtleneck sweater. He soon became Sarva’s wingman and confidant.

  His second roommate, a gaunt Pakistani farmer with endless legs, had two unpronounceable qs in his name; Sarva just called him Pakistani. He was in many ways Prathipan’s opposite. He was never in the room, rarely wore more than a shirt and trousers even on the coldest of days, and resisted Sarva’s boyish charm. They conversed in broken English, neither much bothered by their incomplete understanding of each other. There were two more refugees sharing the room—a gay student from Libya and a middle-aged Chinese man—but both were moved to another location before Sarva had been there two weeks. For days after they were gone, Sarva kept up the crude mockery of an imaginary character that was a combination of their former roommates: a gay Chinese man. It was this running joke that would eventually win Pakistani’s affection.

  During his twenty-eight days at Lynx House, Sarva befriended five other Pakistanis and a Sinhalese couple with a toddler. Sarva was surprised about the latter. Why would a Sinhalese man want to leave a nation that was tailor-made for him? In time, he found out: the Sinhalese husband was a vernacular journalist who had been threatened for writing pieces critical of the government. The last article had been on the demolition of mosques and churches by a new hard-line Sinhala Buddhist group called Bodu Bala Sena. As a devout Buddhist himself, he had written about his shame when Buddhist monks had attacked people of other faiths. The police had raided his house, and a few weeks later he had left Sri Lanka with his wife and child. Sarva liked the couple but he didn’t bring up his own reasons for leaving.

  The canteen was Sarva’s classroom for learning about life in the UK: he could drink cold water but not hot water straight out of the taps. He learnt to chew with his mouth closed and eat dinner at six thirty in the evening, not nine. To fit in at the dining table, he tried to master cutlery. It was embarrassing when a European child smiled to see him slyly use his left index finger to nudge the last of his peas onto his spoon. Shoes were not taken off at the door and were even permitted on the sofa. He discovered the power of ‘please’, ‘would you’ and ‘thank you’. Accompanied by a smile, these words worked like magic on the icy administrators of Lynx House. In his room, however, Sarva lived as he always had: barefoot, speaking loudly and sitting cross-legged on the floor. He missed home for its small freedoms.

  Lynx House had strict rules, but it was nothing like prison; inmates could wander in the city as long as they returned by early evening. On his walks around Cardiff, Sarva would call his parents from a telephone booth. Amma had had another hernia operation and was in and out of hospitals. She was relieved that he sounded upbeat and assured him that she prayed for him every day. His father came to the phone, too, these days, asking him to describe the roads, buildings and people of England. He advised Sarva to polish up his spoken English. Before his father hung up, Amma would grab the phone to issue her stock instructions: eat well and don’t call ‘that girl’.

  Sarva did call Malar. Her parents were urging her to meet eligible boys and choose a husband. He tried desperately to dissuade her from giving in to the pressure. He sang paeans to the good life in the UK and the luxuries of the developed world, such as furnished houses, automatic doors and microwavable meals. Men opened doors for women, and she could wear stylish clothes without worrying about what society might think. ‘Imagine, you will be living in comfort here with me,’ he would say. They couldn’t speak long, so he took to plastering her Facebook wall with images of pink hearts, teddy bears and roses. He emailed her videos of love songs and pictures of himself in romantic poses. Prathipan said that love was Sarva’s full-time job.

  SARVA WAS SOON allocated independent accommodation in Swansea—with Pakistani and Prathipan, to his delight. They were to share the house till the agency reviewed their applications and called them for an interview. They were not permitted to accept paid work or leave town for more than five days at a time. Till their asylum application was reviewed, the National Asylum Support Service would pay their rent. Additionally, each received a cheque for £150 by mail every month, to be cashed at the post office. The arrangement sounded practically hedonistic to Sarva.

  They moved in on 16 January 2013. Number 77 Prince of Wales Road was at the top of a street with an almost thirty-degree incline. It was supplied with a moody heater, a TV that never came on and sofas whose cushions held the imprint of the previous tenants. In the kitchen, the vent above the stove was broken and the carpet reeked of mould. The two-storey cottage was perhaps only a few decades old, but it had suffered severely from the coming and going of its temporary inhabitants.

  There were two great marvels in the house, however: glorious hot running water in the bathrooms and a separate room for every man. Sarva picked the single room on the ground floor, Prathipan the triangular one on the landing, and Pakistani the attic. Two Eritreans already occupied the master bedroom. One of them, a scraggly young man with a bouncy walk and goofy grin, introduced himself as Takloum. The other, whose name Sarva didn’t catch, became The Other Takloum.

  Most of the houses in the vicinity were rented to the UK Border Agency for refugee occupancy, and the only remaining locals were working-class. The street was clean but bore tell-tale signs of neglect. The dustbins on the pavement bulged with overstuffed garbage bags, and the odd beer can rattled about. Mattresses, TVs and patio tables discarded on the pavement vanished in minutes. The street was bookended by a small car park and an abandoned cinema. The house was a fifteen-minute walk from the bus station and a ten-minute bus ride from the community centre for asylum seekers. Most grocery shops, phone booths, video arcades and hair salons in the area were run by immigrants. In this refugee cocoon, Sarva was not expected to speak English or to understand the currency. If he was lost, someone brown would appear on the street and help him out. He disappeared into the neighbourhood’s heterogeneity.

  Before he left Lynx House, the Sinhalese couple had given Sarva the numbers of other Sri Lankans who had been sent to Swansea. After spending the first week scrubbing his house and familiarising himself with the town, Sarva called a young Tamil family that he knew lived nearby. They had moved to Swansea a few weeks earlier. Bagi Annan welcomed Sarva to the town and invited him to come over for lunch that very day, if he had the time. ‘I’ll tell my wife to make extra,’ he said. ‘It must have been a long time since you ate our food.’ It had been two years.

  After shopping for everything from soap, bed sheets and towels to kitchen basics with their first benefit cheques of £90 each, Sarva, Prathipan and Pakistani walked to Bagi Annan’s house. His wife, Kajini, opened the door and her jaw dropped. ‘Oh,’ she said. It was clear she had expected only one guest. ‘Which one of you is Sarva?’

  The lunch of sweet-and-sour fried brinjal and chicken biryani was the beginning of a friendship that became Sarva’s lifeline over the next few months, as he learnt to live without the certainty of sunlight. Kajini and Bagi Annan were asylum seekers, too, with the same limited means, but they opened their doors to him, soothing his restless spirit
with their calm domesticity. They were from the Vanni, and their son, Niru, now four years old, had been delivered in the thick of war in a bunker half-filled with muddy water. Perhaps it was the circumstances of his birth, his age, or his resemblance to Sarva’s own nephew, but the doe-eyed boy brought Sarva the kind of solace even his mother’s voice no longer provided. Niru reciprocated, singling Sarva out as his favourite uncle, imitating his guffaw and calling him over when he wanted to play horse or tell him a secret. Sarva told Kajini she was the sister he had almost had. He occasionally cooked for her, in gratitude for all the meals she invited him to. She presented him with a picture of Lord Shiva and Parvati, which he hung in his room next to his Shiva calendar.

  Once a week, when they had to sign in at the community office, they staged a relay. The unlimited day ticket on the bus cost £5, and after Bagi Annan and Kajini had used it, they called Sarva to come to the bus stand, where they handed him the travel card. When he returned, he gave it to Prathipan, and he in turn shared it with Pakistani. To make the most of the day ticket, all errands in the city—visits to the post office, refugee council or butcher—would be scheduled on the same day. The community centre had recommended a local physician who worked with immigrants, and Sarva spent an hour at the clinic every week receiving physiotherapy for his feet and back.

  The group lived like intertwined creepers, awaiting the same fate, though no one shared his story with the others. Bagi Annan and Prathipan knew from Sarva’s injuries that he had suffered some form of physical abuse, but they never knew the details. Bagi Annan and Kajini did not describe what they had endured in the war or how they had escaped the Manik Farm camp and escaped to the UK. Prathipan had an iPad that he had bought when he was a student at an obscure university in England, but he did not explain why he had overstayed his student visa.