The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

  They said they were from the TID. The local policeman accompanying them explained that Prashant had been arrested under terrorism laws. He and two others had drawn an LTTE flag on a red cloth and hoisted it up a flagpole.

  Mugil wasn’t able to understand whether Prashant had done this in Valvettithurai before he left or in Colombo the day after he got there. Of course things were unravelling now, when they had found a way out. It had to be her brother who put a spanner in the works. She kicked herself for letting Prashant out of her sight on 26 November, Martyrs’ Day. She had thought his Saudi plans would restrain him.

  She asked where he was, if she could see him.

  ‘Don’t look for him, we have him,’ they said. They warned her not to leave the house for the next few days.

  After the TID left, Mugil fished Prashant’s diaries out of the kitchen cupboard and found the drawings Maran had saved from their secret memorial in May. She burned them in the backyard in a pile of dried leaves.

  The next afternoon, the TID officials came again. They searched the house and, finding nothing, interrogated Mugil about Prashant. She told them they perhaps knew more than she did, that her brother had been in the LTTE once but had already served time in the rehabilitation camp. When she told them he was even let out early for good behaviour, they chuckled.

  They asked for Divyan, who was out working. They went to Mother’s house, posing to Amuda the same questions they had asked Mugil. Both were asked if they had ever been in the LTTE. Both said they hadn’t.

  Divyan went to the Valvettithurai police station the next day to be questioned. The police asked him for the details that had come to define him now—his LTTE days, when he surrendered, how long he was in the rehabilitation facility. He showed them a copy of his release certificate. They reminded him that he had better not leave town.

  Divyan was furious with Prashant, who knew how keenly the police watched for signs of militant dissent. He knew that Prashant’s sentiments were mere nostalgia, but the authorities wouldn’t make that distinction.

  The state that came down hard on former combatants and those still obsessed with the Tigers did not invest time or money in rehabilitation and counselling in the detention camps. It had wasted opportunities to win the trust of the Tamils. Instead, it criminalised any recollection of the past. Memorials and commemorations were classified as acts of terrorism, warranting detention without bail. For the past few years, the government had been raising the bogey of an LTTE resurgence, with rarely any evidence to justify the mass detentions and curfews that followed. President Rajapaksa’s regime needed an excuse to exert more control, curb more freedoms and claim more power, and what better way to do that than the tried and tested paranoid fear of the militants’ regrouping? Severely oppressed, some Tamils did reminisce about the LTTE. But few, Prashant included, had the will, capacity or need for another conflict. The state, however, just didn’t want to acknowledge this.

  The interrogations, house searches and threats then were to be expected. Mugil and Divyan knew the drill and submitted meekly to it. By now, they knew not to ask questions. There would be no answers, only repercussions.

  Five days on, a different set of TID officers parked their pick-up van near Mother’s house. They summoned Mugil. Divyan, too, was at home, but guessing what would happen today, he did not accompany her. His presence would only exacerbate the situation.

  As Mugil left for Mother’s house, Maran ran after her. Divyan did not stop him; a child might soften the TID’s heart.

  When Mugil reached Mother’s gate, she noticed Prashant sitting inside the van. The door was only half open, but she saw the outline of his face and the edge of his rubber slippers. His handcuffs glinted in the dark. One of the TID officers asked Amuda to pack a bag with a few of Prashant’s clothes. Turning to Mugil, he said her brother had admitted to keeping five brushes and red paint in the backyard of Mother’s house. Could she get them? They were what he had used to paint the LTTE flag.

  When she returned from the backyard, Mugil saw one of the officers speaking to Maran. ‘Yes, Chitthappa used to draw the flag,’ her son was saying. He then looked inside the van. ‘It is wrong, no, Chitthappa?’

  The officers took the brushes and the bag of clothes and drove away. Maran clambered on to Mugil’s hip and started to cry.

  Mother sat down on the threshold. ‘The ground is swallowing us up,’ she said.

  FOR A WEEK after the incident with the van, there was no word from the police. It was a confusing, sleepless time. Accusations ricocheted between the family members; the fragile thread of optimism that had united them snapped. Mother pulled her hair out and threw a fit about being left with nothing, that her children did not give her a moment’s peace, that she would rather take a whole bottle of sleeping pills than remain in this hell anymore. She left for her cousin’s house in the Vanni.

  On 17 December 2012, fifteen minutes before midnight, there was a knock on the door. Mugil opened it. Divyan woke to the TID officer’s loud voice telling Mugil, ‘Come with us!’ When Mugil stepped outside, Tamizh leapt into her arms screaming. Divyan pleaded that there were children at home. Could they please spare her? She had done nothing wrong. Mugil’s eyes were on the ground, her shoulders drooping; she looked resigned. She waved sadly at her sons. ‘Amma will come back soon, okay. Be good boys when amma is not there,’ she said.

  ‘We will bring her back tomorrow,’ an officer promised politely, as if it were the truth.

  At one o’clock the next afternoon, two officers came to the house. They gave Divyan a letter that said Mugil was being detained under PTA, the anti-terrorism law. During his interrogation, they said, Prashant had revealed that Mugil had served with the Tigers. ‘She was a child then,’ Divyan wanted to say. ‘What has she done now? Does four years of being a good citizen mean nothing?’ he wanted to ask. ‘How can you trust a man who will fly an LTTE flag?’

  But he couldn’t. The words would not form in his mouth; he seemed to have forgotten how to argue. Instead he begged. ‘Please, can I see her? Please, don’t do anything to her, she has small children …’

  Unmoved, the officers handed Mugil’s mobile phone to him. ‘She won’t be needing that anymore.’

  After they left, Divyan dropped off Maran with Amuda and took a bus to the Valvettithurai police station with Tamizh. Every officer there asked him for his details repeatedly, going back to his youth, to his Vanni days, to his time in detention. At any moment, he expected them to accuse him of drawing an Eelam flag or singing a Tiger song, or none of that but throwing handcuffs on him regardless.

  He and Mugil had switched lives. He spent that night and all of the next day outside the police station, on a bench with three women waiting to see their husbands. Tamizh did not demand food or water. A TID officer told Divyan he was wasting his time. ‘Go bring some clothes for her to take to Colombo,’ he said.

  When Divyan returned with the bag in the evening, Mugil was already in a van that stood in the parking lot. She was handcuffed and bent over with exhaustion.

  Divyan called her name almost at the same time as Tamizh screamed, ‘Amma!’

  She looked up and shuffled toward them on the seat. She beckoned to Tamizh to come, awkwardly extending her handcuffed hands. Tamizh and Divyan started running towards her.

  Surprised, the van driver quickly slid the door shut, forcing Mugil to pull her hands in. The windows were tinted and she disappeared from view.

  ‘Go inside, ask inside! Go, go!’ the driver told Divyan, blocking him from the door with one hand and pushing him towards the police station with the other.

  In the station, the TID officer told Divyan he could see Mugil in a couple of weeks, but only in the TID head office in Colombo. ‘I’m sure you know where it is,’ he smirked.

  29.

  March 2013

  THE DAY OF the asylum interview was one of the windiest Sarva had seen in Cardiff. On the radio, the disc jockeys were astonished at the raging winds and complaine
d about the bitter cold of minus one degree Celsius. On the twenty-five-minute walk from the train station to the UK Border Agency office, his cheap rubber-soled shoes slithered on the ice. His jacket billowed and wrenched him backwards, an uncooperative sail. Speeding snowflakes felt like pinpricks on his face. Pedestrians on the other side of the road were almost running, propelled by the wind; one young woman was walking backwards to stay stable. Seagulls swooped down from the tops of multi-storied buildings, playing, letting their wings catch the chilly gusts. Sarva took his jacket off to regain his balance, folded his hands in front of him, bent his head and trudged ahead like a bull.

  The interview was scheduled for nine that morning, and Sarva arrived at the glass and red-brick building half an hour early. He waited in the lobby with other tense applicants. One of them was shivering in the cold; another rocked back and forth. Everyone avoided eye contact. Sarva had taken the five-thirty train from Swansea. He had not had breakfast or coffee. No one offered him any here. Mobile phones had to be left at home, so Sarva picked up the nearest newspaper, The Western Mail, ‘the national newspaper of Wales’. A quarter of the front page was plastered with an advertisement for English-language classes. He kept it aside and, like the others, stared absently at walls adorned with posters about immigration. He tried to divert his attention to a mental image of Pullaiyar, the god of wish fulfilment. He wished that, for just this one day, his nerves would not hamper his speech. ‘Bless my tongue, Pullaiyar! Bless it, bless it, bless it!’ he chanted. Another part of his mind ran through his time in Latin America as if on fast-forward. What if they asked where he had been before coming to the UK, why he didn’t come here directly? What if they wanted a list of the places he had passed through? He was afraid that all his illegal border crossing would count as a black mark against him. What if they cared more about his breaking the law than his problems in Sri Lanka?

  By nine thirty, Sarva had been to the water cooler in the corner five times. He had to pee but didn’t dare go to the men’s room, in case the interviewer came out to call him when he was inside.

  At nine forty, a white middle-aged man in a suit walked into the lobby and gestured for Sarva to follow him. Sarva slapped his thighs, hopped up and scurried after.

  In the clean white office, the interviewer pointed Sarva to a chair beside a table. He himself sat to Sarva’s right and pulled his chair in. ‘Does he have to be so unsmiling,’ Sarva thought. They had spoken a few days earlier on the phone to cross-check documents, and he knew he would be hearing a brusque tone. The craggy-faced interviewer pointed to a computer monitor where a streaming video showed a young brown man who introduced himself in Tamil as the interpreter. The agency had accommodated Sarva’s requests for both the interviewer and interpreter to be male and for the proceedings to be recorded.

  First, the interviewer collected the documents Sarva had brought, asking about their relevance and for the notarised English translations. Sarva had to remind himself to wait for the interpretation before he answered, even when he partly understood the interviewer. The Eritreans had advised him to stick to his mother tongue and not shift between languages. ‘However okay you think your English is, you might be saying something wrong, and he will put that on record, and later you’ll have problems.’ Sarva tried to follow Takloum’s wise advice.

  When all twenty-eight documents had been discussed and verified, the interviewer called a break. Once he was gone, Sarva sat back in his chair. It had gone without incident so far; the documents were the easy part. His palms were sweating and his mouth was dry. He had to be on his toes but was worried he would let himself down. He sipped from the glass of water in front of him. In the clinical whiteness of the room, he felt as if he were about to undergo exploratory surgery.

  The interviewer returned after twenty-five minutes. ‘Happy to continue?’ he asked. The interpreter on the monitor translated this into Tamil. ‘Yes,’ Sarva replied. He smiled politely and wondered if that was inappropriate.

  ‘I have been sent a witness statement by your solicitor,’ the interviewer said, showing it to Sarva. ‘Do you recognise this?’

  ‘Yes.’ His lawyer from Elder Rahimi Associates had recorded a statement with his account of the detention, trial, imprisonment, emigration and arrival in the UK, in chronological order.

  As the interpreter started to translate the next question, they were disconnected. When they retrieved the connection, the video went down. From then on, the interpreter was just a voice. He repeated the question: ‘Does this witness statement contain all of the reasons why you are claiming asylum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I notice that you mention an older brother. Where is he currently?’

  ‘He’s in Colombo now.’

  ‘Does he work in Colombo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has he had any difficulties with the authorities?’

  ‘Yes. He had a problem when I was in jail. He was abducted and beaten. He sold his travel shop and gave that money to his abductors.’

  ‘When was he abducted and released?’

  ‘I don’t remember the exact date. I think after 2008.’

  ‘Why was he abducted?’

  ‘Because I was involved in the LTTE, he was abducted by the TID. But they took his money, so it may have been partly for extortion that they abducted him.’

  ‘Who abducted him?’

  ‘Probably the government authorities.’

  ‘Do you know this for sure?’

  ‘I think … because they questioned my brother about me, where I was. Only government authorities knew that.’

  ‘Has he had any further trouble with the government?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not to my knowledge.’ Sarva knew part of the assessment would be to check if his family was still being harassed in Sri Lanka, but he was irritated at having to speak about his brother. Deva had backed off from helping Sarva or his mother, and it was difficult to show concern for him now. He was relieved when the interviewer got off the subject.

  ‘Okay. You joined the LTTE in 2003, correct?’

  ‘In 2002,’ Sarva corrected him.

  ‘Do you remember the date?’

  ‘May 2002.’

  ‘Are you sure it was 2002?’

  Sarva was dead sure until a few seconds ago, but now he felt doubtful. ‘I think 2002. But I forget dates these days.’

  The interviewer tried another tack. ‘What year did Sujeevan steal your stock from your shop?’

  ‘2002.’

  ‘What year did you go to the Vanni to retrieve it?’

  ‘2002.’

  ‘Your witness statement says it is 2003. Is this a mistake?’

  ‘I can tell you it was 2002. I may have given 2003 wrongly to the lawyer. When we spoke, I was in tension because of my problems. That may be why I gave the wrong date.’ The interviewer’s face was unreadable. Sarva had done dozens of interviews since his detention—the violent kind, the sympathetic, investigative, superficial, cynical kind—but this was by far the most dispassionate.

  ‘Why did you join the LTTE?’

  ‘I was forced to join them,’ Sarva said.

  ‘Your statement at paragraph thirteen says that you were quite taken with LTTE ideas. It makes no mention of your being forced to join. Can you clarify?’

  ‘Initially they took me by force. But because they gave me some lectures on their ideology, I was attracted to that. After they gave me the lectures, they took me for training.’

  ‘Then how were you forced to join the LTTE?’

  ‘They asked me to either get the training or work for no pay on their farm as punishment.’

  The interviewer took notes. Sarva knew he had given muddled responses—he had not sounded believable. He was not lying anymore, but the reality of his two years in the LTTE was not black and white, not easily compartmentalised as voluntary or forced.

  ‘You were trained in the use of weapons, is that correct?’

  Sarva said yes.


  ‘Which weapons?’

  ‘Initially the AK-47, and different AK families. And also physical training and working as a sentry, checking people. We also had lessons on politics. This is the basic training for three months.’

  ‘I want to talk about the AK-47. How many bullets did the AK-47 hold?’

  ‘Thirty rounds.’

  ‘How many in the magazine?’

  ‘Twenty-nine. It has been a long time. The numbers may be wrong.’

  ‘What is the effective range of an AK-47?’

  ‘Three hundred metres.’

  ‘How many settings does an AK-47 have?’

  ‘Auto and single. There is a switch. One for auto, one for single, and a safety.’

  ‘Does one switch do all three, or is there a separate switch?’

  ‘One switch.’

  ‘Which side of the gun is the switch on?’

  Sarva imagined holding the gun. His right hand moved. ‘Right-hand side. Because it is made for right-handed people.’

  He had not thought or spoken about these details for years. Jehaan, Shirleen, Randy, his lawyer Mr Vel, his friends in Swansea—he had told none of them about the LTTE apart from the bare fact of his conscription. He had been too afraid of being abandoned and having to pay forever for his mistake. Not even Amma knew about his having become a willing trainee for a while, let alone his proximity to AK-47s. The truth was dangerous in Sri Lanka, but here he knew that lies were the things that could get him deported. For the first time, moreover, he felt safe enough to confess.

  ‘Where is the cleaning equipment kept for an AK-47?’

  ‘Underneath the front—the barrel. There is a rod. There is something for cleaning the barrel kept in the butt of the gun.’

  ‘How would you adjust the sights of an AK-47?’

  ‘There is a clip on the AK-47. You can adjust it to one hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred metres. Like that … I used AK-2 more. But I have seen the AK-47.’