The Seasons of Trouble (11 page)

She had been grudgingly impressed. Still they didn’t speak—it was forbidden to hang around chatting, and anyway, it never occurred to her. Who had time for boys? She and her friends in the women’s wing had things to learn, points to prove, muscles to harden. But her brother wouldn’t let it go. Whenever she met Prashant, he was always talking about Dileepan, Divyan, whatever his name was.

One day Prashant had come with exciting news. Apparently Divyan was soon going to be on Annan’s personal security team.

Mugil hadn’t believed it. Please, she had thought, it’s impossible. That imbecile among the Tiger chief’s black commandos?

But Prashant persevered with his account. He had discovered that Divyan had been learning about Annan’s daily routines and his prescription medicines. Later, when her commander confirmed the rumour, Mugil could not look at the fool in the same way again. Maybe his silence did have something to it. Her closest friend in the unit, Mani, told her that maybe it would be wise to apologise. ‘He may put in a good word for you with Annan then, should you ever need it.’ Mugil, however, wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You won’t get far like that,’ Mani had scolded.

In the Mullaitivu hospital, lying in the same ward as he was, Mugil thought she understood now why Annan might appoint a man like that as his bodyguard. Divyan had no regard for his own life. She was overwhelmed with gratitude and wanted to make amends. She couldn’t be condescending anymore. She rehearsed her apology silently, editing and rephrasing it in her head. She wanted to say sorry and thanks but also to make light of it all.

Finally, when they were both woken for lunch, she said the words out loud. ‘I never meant anything I said, you know, at training.’

‘Both of us know you did,’ he said quickly, sputtering on his rice gruel a little bit. ‘I did think that’s not how a woman should talk.’

That irritated Mugil, but she bit back a sharp retort. When the nurse left the hall, Divyan smiled. ‘But then I also thought, she’s not an ordinary Tamil woman, no? You’re a
puli
, a Tiger.’

They ate their gruel quietly. He asked for her guerrilla name. ‘Prashant only told me your home name,’ he said.

‘Thamizhazhagi,’ she said. The one who is as beautiful as the Tamil language.

When they were discharged from the hospital, her brother took her home. In a few days, Mugil was called to the office in PTK. She had a spine injury, so she was declared unfit for battle and transferred to the navigation division. She heard later that evening that Divyan, too, had been pulled off the field. He was given driving duty. They were both still cadre but would not carry weapons.

Neither really made a move to meet again, but they continued to exchange books and sometimes letters and poems about love for the country or mythological allusions to courage. When Mugil told Mani about this, her friend was thrilled. Their nickname for Divyan was ‘The Fool’. Although most of the girls in the barracks were around twenty, it wasn’t easy to talk about boys or love around them. You couldn’t tell who would snitch to the commander. Once, when Divyan came to their training facility to drop off supplies, Mugil was so afraid he would make eye contact that she did not leave the gym. She kept track of the operations he was assigned to. It might have been easier if she had asked her brother for more information, but she didn’t want to betray any special feelings for Divyan or, for that matter, for any boy. Prashant, not even a fighter yet, was becoming quite a stickler for the movement’s rules. And if there was one thing a fighter couldn’t do in those days, it was to fall in love.

At the Tigers’ inception, Prabakaran had banned marriage, relationships and sexual activity among the cadres. It was part of a rigid disciplinary code for combatants, which included bans on smoking, drinking and gambling. He enforced celibacy ruthlessly; carnal feelings were believed to distract combatants from the call of duty, and family life was considered corrupting, as it would make people selfish. Mugil and Divyan knew that Annan defamed, excommunicated and even killed those who strayed from this rule. They’d heard of couples that had been shot dead. ‘Both are not always killed,’ Mani had said once. ‘One is shot and the other is punished for life.’ One of those Prabakaran had executed was a dear
friend and a cofounder of the LTTE. He tolerated no debate on the issue.

Mugil and Divyan were finally able to get married only because at some time during the LTTE’s growth, Prabakaran himself fell in love. Several versions of this romance swirled through the Vanni, all told with varying degrees of glee and irony but always in a guilty whisper, as if even talking about his personal life might tarnish his titanic persona. According to one version that Mugil swore by, a pretty young girl came to the leader’s notice through a newspaper report. She was on a hunger strike to protest the killings of hundreds of Tamils by the Sri Lankan army, and Prabakaran sent his close friends to find out more. Eventually he decided to meet the girl himself. He ended her week-long hunger strike with a glass of juice, and then, struck by her dedication to the Tamil cause, fell in love with her.

Another less popular theory went like this: the girl had accused Prabakaran of not caring enough about his cadres and letting them die like cattle without so much as an apology for their martyrdom. She then challenged him to stop her from fasting unto death. Prabakaran was said to have abducted her to silence the accusations, but when tongues started wagging about the leader living with a girl, he announced a wedding.

Whatever the truth, Prabakaran revoked the anti-marriage rule some years after his own wedding. Still, it was only after a decade or so that several other lovers like Mugil and Divyan could surface at last.

They had a wedding in PTK in early 2005. Mugil was a Hindu and Divyan a Catholic, but both had forsaken religion upon joining the Tigers. In what had become the practice in weddings between cadres, they came to their ceremony in fatigues, and instead of tying a
thaali
or exchanging rings, Divyan tied a thick yellow thread with a golden tiger tooth around Mugil’s neck.

This was followed by an oath. ‘Even though we’re married,’ they promised, ‘we will place our nation, our Tamil soil, our Tamil people above each other. We will choose the gun over any birthday, family function, or consideration of love and kinship.’ It was an oath every Tiger man and woman had to take if they chose to
marry while serving. Mugil wore the tiger tooth as a symbol of her marriage to the cause as well as to Divyan. It was to be a promise easier to make than keep.

ON KOMBAVIL
’
S MAIN
road, some courtyards looked abandoned while others were packed to capacity. The chaos of the northwestern region had not reached here yet, but some of its residents already had, and they must have brought warnings. While children played, adults rain-proofed bunkers with plastic sheets or sat around talking in hushed voices. They were preparing for air raids and shelling. When Mugil passed by the houses, some people looked at her, puzzled. What was a combatant doing skulking around alone? One or two asked her if ‘Kilinochchi was gone,’ if what the BBC radio said about the military offensives was true.

One woman came up to Mugil and asked her tenderly if she was looking for her family. ‘If they’re not here, look near Suthanthirapuram. The army has been driving around with loudspeakers announcing that it’s a safe place. Some of our people have gone.’

Mugil had heard rumours of the no-fire zone, but this was the first time a specific location had been mentioned.

‘Why didn’t you go?’

‘Why? Am I a coward?’ the woman shot back. ‘You will always have us. We won’t abandon you.’

A baby wailed from a house nearby. Before the woman turned to run inside, she squeezed Mugil’s hand. ‘
Jeyam namade
! Victory will be ours!’

Mugil’s aunt lived a short distance from the main road, across a narrow brick bridge and beyond a row of vegetable plots. Because of the rain, rivulets had cleaved through the mud path that led to the house, and Mugil kept her eyes on the ground. She didn’t want to speak to anyone else. There were too many questions, too much speculation. People wanted information but also reassurance. She wasn’t the person to provide either.

When she finally got to the fence of palmyra fronds, she looked up. A few hundred metres from the gate, behind the lemon trees,
Mugil saw her great-uncle on a chair on the porch. He was absolutely still, his hands hanging loose at his sides. His eyes were closed and his chin nestled on his collarbone. His sarong had fallen open between his legs, exposing his hollow thighs.

Mugil threw the gate open and ran towards him. She must have screamed, because Chiththi, her aunt, came running to the door from inside, her eyes wide. Following Mugil’s gaze, she looked towards the chair.

Chiththi walked slowly towards the old man. ‘Appa?’ she called softly. Mugil stood frozen in the garden, both hands on her mouth.

‘Appa!’ Chiththi said once more, louder. She fixed his sarong, making him decent. He didn’t stir.

‘Appa!’ She slapped his shoulder as if he were a child.

Suddenly he sat up, startled, and stared at both of them in confusion.

Finally he smiled crookedly at Mugil. ‘Come, come. When did you get here, child?’

Mugil and her aunt looked at each other and burst out laughing.

That night, when they explained to him what they had assumed on seeing his limp body, he sighed. ‘It would surely be good to go that peacefully, in my sleep, under the roof my son built for me,’ he said. His son, Mugil’s uncle, had departed for Germany a decade earlier. Chiththi said he worked as a chef in an Indian hotel there, but that was only what he told her on the phone; they hadn’t seen each other since he left.

They ate rice and spinach for dinner, and Chiththi asked if Mugil had seen anything on the way there. ‘Anything we should worry about?’ Mugil knew that her aunt would never directly ask what the Tigers were planning, what job she was on, or why she was in Kombavil. She must have noticed that Mugil was alone, but she would pretend that nothing was amiss. It was the way of non-fighters in the Vanni.

Mugil replied vaguely. Her aunt, too, let it go. They spent a few hours reminiscing about other battles, as the people of Vanni tended to do, especially when they were waiting out storms such as this. Mugil had grown up listening to these stories, about temples that had become shelters, family enemies who had become
saviours, unlikely uncles who grabbed their wives from burning buildings, or aunties who had seen orphans bawling next to their dead parents. Some of them told it beautifully, describing the landscape of destruction, the flies, the way the earth sponged up blood: making miserable poems from sights they could not get out of their minds. A stranger might hitch up a sari or take off a shirt to point to a battle scar and launch into the tale of its origin. These were the common threads that bound the Tamil community: the close shaves, the what-ifs, the recasting of dumb luck as courage, pain as experience, losses as tests of character. Grief could never simply be itself because it was ongoing. As the battles continued, people needed to tell and retell these stories, gather mental energy for more strife, track back reflexive decisions that had saved or killed someone, and glean strategy from them.

As they talked, Mugil refrained from mentioning the mango orchard or the girls. The moment wasn’t yet right for that story.

When night fell, they spread the straw mats on the floor to sleep. For as long as Mugil could remember, a few chairs and one wooden kitchen shelf had been the only furniture in this house. Her own house in PTK was the same. Except for some of the most elite families, few in the Vanni bothered furnishing their homes. Plastic chairs were ubiquitous items—cheap to purchase and easy to leave behind.

Mugil wanted to change out of her camouflage shirt, and Chiththi gave her a printed cotton blouse. She didn’t sleep well, but it was a relief to lie down on an even floor in a dry place.

Next to her mat was the cloth bag Chiththi had packed with papayas, a pouch each of rice, dal and red chillies, a packet of pickle and
karuvaadu
, salt, sugar, some milk powder, tea, and a Coke bottle filled with well water, just in case Mugil wanted to leave without saying goodbye.