The Seasons of Trouble (12 page)

OVER THE NEXT
three days Mugil walked, eating the papayas and a few handfuls of the milk powder. She wore Chiththi’s blouse over her trousers. When, at the crack of dawn, she had buried her camouflage shirt a few paces away from her aunt’s house, she had
been grateful for the darkness—she didn’t want to see what she was doing. She told herself that if there were army around, she would not be taken prisoner. She wore her plait down instead of bunching it up on her head. She put a
pottu
on her forehead.

She walked till she was close to highway A35. The masses heading for Mullaitivu were camping on either side. When she emerged from the thickets into the crowd, no one even glanced at her. There were lorries and tractors stacked with rice, flour and cereal revving their engines on the narrow roads but only inching forward. These were trucks from the government agent, the chief administrator of Kilinochchi district. They were trying to take supplies to where everyone was going. But hungry and impatient men, women and children were milling around the vehicles already, trying to grab their share before the supplies ran out.

Thousands were trudging eastward, in the same direction she was going. Many others were resting a few metres away from the crowd. It was just before noon, and families were emerging from their bunkers to cook lunch.

She was one of very few women on their own. Most were holding children, sitting beside their husbands, or helping their ailing parents. Many families had radios, which seemed to pick up short-wave frequencies. There was BBC Ceylon and the national station, Swarnavahini. Through the state-run radio channel, the government of Sri Lanka made announcements asking Tigers to surrender for their own good. They assured Tamil civilians that the army would guide them to safety.

Like the Kombavil woman who promised Mugil that the people would stand by the Tigers, come what may, many civilians here, too, were inviting cadres into their bunkers, giving them food, and retying their bandages for them. An aged uncle was offering his own rice gruel to a young fighter, hoping to help him to regain strength, but the youngster was trying to walk away. Mugil remembered this happening to her often when she was a combatant. People were proud of the Tigers, especially the female combatants, and wanted to support them. The movement promised them freedom and an end to the war. What was a cup of tea or a plate of rice in exchange?

Moreover, the cadres had things you could get in return for your kindness. Like the use of their satellite phones, at 1,000 rupees per call, to areas under government control or abroad. Local calls cost 500 rupees, as much as three kilos of rice. The fighters also had more motorbikes than the civilians, and you could hitch a ride if you couldn’t walk or had an injured family member. Today, however, people were giving up gold jewellery just for milk powder or drinking water.

Despite these changes and the no-fire-zone announcements, people stuck with the Tigers even if it could lead them to the battlefield. They couldn’t yet trust the force that was waging war in their villages. The Tamils couldn’t be sure that the army would not just shoot or burn hundreds of them and bury them in mass graves. To Mugil, too, the Chemmani massacre felt like it had happened yesterday. The army’s grandstanding about taking over the Vanni territory and decimating the Tigers had been going on for twenty-six years. The Tigers had outwitted them all that time. What could change now?

So despite the surrender orders, Mugil saw people shielding the Tigers among them. Familiar faces dotted the crowd, some in uniform and some not. LTTE bunkers were visible between the civilian tents. Fighters walked in small groups, carrying food supplies on their backs or on the motorbikes or bicycles they pushed. They were like black specks in rice, trying in vain to blend in. It was on their instructions that people were going towards Mullaitivu instead of the places the army suggested.

Mugil began to collect some wood chips and twigs to build a fire before it rained again. She would boil half a fistful of rice, lace it with some crumbs of the fishy, salty
karuvaadu
and eat it with her aunt’s gooseberry pickle.

She had barely begun when she heard a deep hum from the sky. Very quickly, it got louder. Others around her were also looking quizzically upwards and at each other. This was not a sound they recognised. It was thicker and deeper than the sound of a plane and not as clattering as a helicopter’s. It wasn’t a long-range missile’s whistle or the crack of a bomb. It was a hum, as if emanating from a wasp the size of a fighter plane.

Reflexively, people ran back into the bunkers. Mugil crouched in one, about fifteen feet long and five feet deep, lined with stumps of coconut trees and covered with their large leaves. Husky coconut halves were holding down flimsy plastic bags that covered the gaps in the leaves. An entire tree had been dissected for this ephemeral safety. The children used to sing a rhyme about this: how generous the coconut tree, how tall it stands, how it sacrifices every part of itself.

Because of the rain, the wet mud was falling in clumps into the bunker, threatening to loosen the tree stumps. A man next to her started to pat the clay back with his palms, pasting it on the wall like cement. He did it slowly, as if he knew the futility of the exercise. His daughter, who looked to be between eight and ten years old, was copying him, patting the clay with her small fingers.

They must have stayed there for an hour, until Mugil heard people on the ground above her. They were coming out again, going back to cooking or fetching water. The danger had passed; there had been no explosion. She heard someone say that it must have been some new technology. ‘Not bad, the army is keeping up with us these days,’ the man in the bunker said, smiling. ‘We’ll try to figure it out when it comes next time. Or maybe by then, our boys will have built one of their own and will deliver a fitting reply!’ People were laughing, making jokes about the army’s dud fireworks.

Mugil smiled, but her mind was on that hum. She wanted to memorise the sound, its length, its timbre. Its newness made her edgy. Sounds from the sky always came with fire. Thunder and lightning. Whistle and blast. What would follow this noise?

After the hum faded, lunch preparations continued. The afternoon sun beat down, and people started to nod off under trees and makeshift tents. The bunkers were unbearably hot, so few went inside. Most children remained at ground level, running around.

A blinding flash and then an explosion; when the missile hit, no one was expecting it. They had ducked from the hum, only to stand around in the open, easy targets for the shelling that followed. They didn’t know what it was called then, but the unfamiliar hum had
been a drone. The army’s eye in the sky. The harbinger of a shower of missiles. The Sri Lankan forces had never used one before.

Mugil stayed in her bunker, only surfacing after an hour. She walked in a daze around the bodies frozen in ugly shapes on the ground. Some who had made a late dash for a bunker were curled halfway near its mouth. The man who had patted down her bunker was calling out for his daughter. Mugil heard the words, but she couldn’t internalise the girl’s name. Her shin throbbed. Something had ripped into her and stayed inside.

She walked into a cluster of trees, sure only that she wanted to go home. There would be no more stopping, no more talking to people. She felt stupid. The deaths around her seemed ridiculous. Those girls in the mango orchard, their contorted bodies shrieking till death took them, and here, these people dropping face down on their lunch plates. Dying in shameful ways, walking naively into traps. One would think this was a people who had never seen a battle before.

She turned off the A35, wanting to avoid the main roads, and went into the jungle. As she entered the canopy, she took off her chain with the tiger tooth and dumped it in a muddy stream.

7.

July 2008

WHEN THEY DROVE
Sarva out of the harbour area in a police van, his single fear was that Silva would bolt out of the station to say there had been a mistake, he was not to be let out yet, there was unfinished business. As they drove further and further away, this fear was replaced by disbelief. By the time the van pulled onto the premises of the Colombo Magistrate’s Court, Sarva’s relief was bordering on exhilaration. Was this the beginning of his march to freedom? He started to run the events of the past ten days through his mind. He would complain to the judge that justice had been denied him and demand to know why he had not been treated with the respect due to any citizen. He wasn’t sure he should name names, however, just in case they sent him back there. He would not raise his voice and would remember to be clear, chronologically correct, and absolutely confident.

The courtroom was at the rear of the building on the ground floor. Sarva and his police escort walked side by side along the corridor, their arms and fingers entwined like lovers. The handholding replaced handcuffs, and several accused men stood at the back being similarly intimate with policemen.

At the bottom of a stairwell, Sarva’s escort stopped near a lawyer and raised his hand in a gesture somewhere between a friendly
hello and a wobbly half salute. The lawyer barely responded. They seemed to converse minimally, using familiar, routine words. Sarva, in his nervousness, missed most of the exchange except the lawyer’s bored last words: ‘After lunch.’

There was more than an hour to kill. The police escort took him to a tea shack on the first floor. Lawyers, policemen, clerks and legal service vendors stood around the all-purpose shop, slurping tea or biting into rolls. Some of them sat on a couple of benches inside, eating rapidly from rice-and-curry lunch packets. The escort handed Sarva a small glass cup of black tea while he himself tucked into a chicken roti. The tea was just as sweet as Sarva liked it.

They sat there for a while, sipping their tea quietly. It was half past twelve, and the humidity of July was trickling down Sarva’s back. His T-shirt, the one he had been wearing the day he was grabbed off the street, displayed overlapping rings of sweat, new and old. He was embarrassed to look so slovenly in a court of law. In the van, he had picked out the dried mud from the sodden hem of the shirt’s front, but it hadn’t done much good. The police had left him no option but to look like scum, and he would be at a disadvantage from the second the judge set eyes on his T-shirt, hanging shapelessly from his drooping shoulders. His trousers, too, slipped hazardously from his waist.

As Sarva nursed his tea, looking down at his unkempt self, for a brief moment the policeman let go of his hand to pay the cashier. Sarva’s heart thudded loudly in his chest. He felt nauseous and stared at the back of the escort’s head. The moment seemed to grow longer, as if expecting him to respond, react, do something. He knew he would think of this moment later, in a future where he would not be afraid to run. But now he sat there, heat rising from his neck and his feet stone cold.

The hand gripped his again just as securely as before. It was almost a relief to be spared the responsibility of making a decision.

The buzz around the shack had died down, and they walked to the court downstairs. He had expected the court to be a large hall with wooden benches and an elderly judge who banged a gavel saying, ‘Order! Order!’ Indeed, an impatient judge did sit atop an elevated wooden podium, and a bored clerk on his left called case
numbers and passed him files one after another. When people left the courtroom, they bowed to the judge and walked backwards out the door. Lawyers addressed him as ‘Your Honour’. The colonial style was truly preserved, including the architecture of humiliation. Sarva was taken to the far end of the room and thrown into a cage with iron bars painted silver, within which stood all the accused. Family members and visitors sat on rows of benches with their backs to the cage, and occasionally they turned to look at the men behind bars. It was demeaning to make eye contact with strangers this way, so Sarva kept his gaze fixed on the judge.

A lot happened very quickly and with casual finality. The policeman accompanying Sarva gave a sheet of paper to a grubby lawyer, who in turn handed it to the judge. Sarva mentally readied himself for his speech at the three-sided dock, but the judge mumbled an English word and stamped the paper without a second thought. He had not even glanced at Sarva, let alone asked him a question. A decision seemed to have been made. He was led out of the court into another building and dragged a few floors down. The escort was almost running now; he had another accused to go hold hands with. Sarva’s head was spinning, and his lower back was shooting arrows of pain down his legs. The stairs seemed to multiply with every step.

Finally, in a dark corridor, his escort let go of Sarva’s hand. ‘Go inside,’ he barked, opening a metal gate. In front of them, a room, ten by twenty feet in size, was packed with men. It looked like all the passengers and hawkers hanging about the Pettah bus stop had been forced in here. There was nowhere to sit. Sarva’s legs and back were useless after days of interrogation, and the arrows were now flying from his spine all over his body.

From behind him, the escort’s voice boomed, demanding that the comatose men move their asses and make room. They all looked at Sarva but no one moved. Sarva shuffled to the centre of the room and continued to stand. The policeman locked the gate with a clatter.

Some men went back to their conversations while others stared blankly ahead in the dark. That was when Sarva realised there were no windows.

Straight from the solitariness of the police station’s basement, through a whirlwind of hope, to a room with men who lay head to toe, packed like beedis: here was a new form of torment for the government’s prisoners.