The Seasons of Trouble (19 page)

As she approached Valipunam, the smell of burnt flesh made her retch. An eerie silence pressed on her ears. The houses were abandoned, their roofs blown off, and the palmyra trees were decapitated. Tents smoked. Hastily dug and discarded bunkers were collapsing wetly into themselves. She tried to find her way to the middle school, which the Red Cross had converted into a temporary hospital for civilians. Perhaps Prashant was there, helping.

The place looked nothing like she remembered. The once lush paddy fields were barren. Plastic bags, bits of clothing, toothbrushes, combs, toys and utensils stuck out from the soil, household items overtaking the land like weeds. Through the thick smoke, in the distance, she saw a woman rocking on her knees, her hands on a small boy’s body. Her shrill
oppari
pierced the air.

Swollen bodies lay in the streams of rainwater. A few hundred metres away, some boys were straightening the corpses, fixing the clothes of dead girls, moving the bodies away from the centre of the road, where they could get run over by tankers or jeeps. Mugil guessed they were workers from the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation, or TRO, a local NGO attached to the Tigers. This was their way of preserving the dignity of the dead.

By the looks of it, Valipunam, touted as a no-fire zone, had been hit by repeated air raids. Mugil hoped she wouldn’t find her brother here. But if not here, where could he be? She was unable to process the sights and smells. Fallen trees were still smouldering. The shelling was past, but the burning present. She held her hand to her nose and mouth. Below her, the body of a young man, face
down in a culvert, bobbed slightly. His camouflage shirt was torn and his sarong ballooned. In panic, Mugil took a step closer and turned the body on its back. The boy’s thin chest hair was clogged with blood, grass and mud. Below it, where his stomach should have been, was a large cavity that was still bleeding. It was only then that she looked at the boy’s face. Just a second ago, she could have sworn it was Prashant.

She turned around and ran.

It took a day for Mugil to reach her family. They were preparing to leave for Matalan. Divyan had apparently sent word that he would meet them on the way there. He still couldn’t trace Prashant but assured them he would soon.

‘We told him you’ve gone to look for your brother,’ Mother said.

Mugil said she had been unable to find her way to Valipunam.

‘Really?’ Mother asked incredulously. ‘You took a whole day to get lost?’

‘Be glad that at least she came back alive,’ Father mumbled.

As they packed small bags, mostly with food rations and firewood, Father put his arm around Mugil’s shoulder. ‘I meant to ask you … Do you have a skirt, Mugil?’

Mugil knew what he meant. She was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a long blouse. She was dressed like a Tiger.

‘No skirt,’ she said. ‘But I will find something else.’ She undid an old housecoat that Amuda had wrapped around some vessels and pulled it on. The longish housecoat not only hid her sinewy calves and scars but also changed who she was in the eyes of the world. In a series of impulses, she had gradually shed the façade—the gun, the cyanide, the tiger tooth and now the uniform. Each act had taken only a few seconds, but eventually the effect was like shedding her skin. She was setting aside the only life she had known since she was a teenager.

As the family left their bunker, their neighbours stared at Mugil. After fifteen years, the proud female cadre among them had changed into civilian clothes. The men and women Mugil had grown up with seemed to judge her, their eyes smiling and their lips curling in vindication at her eventual hypocrisy. Here is that woman, their eyes seemed to say, that great combatant who just a
few years ago hunted down traitors and deserters, and now a deserter herself. Here is the limping combatant who was so disgusted with her sister for refusing to join the Tigers. Where are her morals now?

Nothing in the Vanni was valued quite like self-sacrifice. In this regard, Divyan and Mugil had been role models for the youngsters at every opportunity. They had always walked a few steps above the ground. She had visited her neighbours’ homes and lectured their sons and daughters, speaking of the virtues of serving Annan, selling them the dream of Eelam before they ever thought about engineering, teaching or accounting. ‘Take part in the making of a better tomorrow’—how many times must Mugil have uttered those words to wide-eyed teenagers? Of course the others would avenge themselves with their stares in this moment.

‘Ignore them,’ her father said, sensing her shame. ‘This is no time for self-pity.’ He thrust a coughing Tamizh into her hands. ‘Look at his face every time you feel some doubt. Now it is all about family, that’s all.’

11.

February 2009

INDRA HAD WOKEN
up before everybody else. She made herself some black tea with three spoonfuls of sugar. She opened the balcony door to let in some cool air. Colombo was hot even at sunrise, even in February. Her sister Rani was still in bed. She had better wake up soon. If they wanted to get the food to Sarva by lunchtime, they had to leave for the prison in two hours.

She downed her tea, soaked some rice in a pot of water, and put some
paruppu
in the pressure cooker. She made another cup of tea, covered it with a saucer and got ready for a shower. As she passed the bedroom, she pulled Rani’s toes, which stuck out from under the blanket.

By the time Indra was out of the bathroom, Rani was sitting on the balcony sipping her tea. ‘Shall we take some mussels, too? I heard the fish vendor call from the street.’

‘Good idea. Remind me to make some buttermilk as well.’

Rani asked if Indra had slept well. ‘Just take those sleeping pills,
akka
.’ Rani said. ‘I don’t know why you won’t.’

Indra had spent the previous day at the lawyer’s office and then visited several pawnbrokers to see how much they would lend against her gold bangles. She had returned exhausted and gone straight to bed but had tossed and turned till dawn. The sleeping
pills would have helped, but she felt somewhat guilty taking them. How could a mother sleep soundly when her son was still in prison, lying on a hard floor every night? ‘I got a few hours, it should do,’ she said feebly. In the puja corner, she lit an oil lamp and smeared some holy ash on her forehead. These days she cooked only after a bath and a prayer, pious habits of her own mother that Indra believed would bring good luck to her family.

Sarva’s lunch menu had been decided the previous evening: mutton curry,
mallum, rasam
and rice. Rani had prepared the mutton before she went to sleep. She had roasted and ground coriander, cumin and dried red chillies and massaged the mixture into the mutton. She added salt, turmeric, cinnamon powder and crushed cardamom pods, as well as tomato puree to cut through the fat. The meat had been marinating in the fridge all night.

In the morning, Indra took over. She added oil to a clay pot—Sarva could always tell when she cooked meat in this vessel, he said he smelled its earthiness. She threw in chopped onions and garlic, ginger for the zing, and slit green chillies for heat. She roughly tore—never cut—curry leaves and pandan leaves and they hopped in the oil. Immediately the aroma sharpened, and she knew the curry would be perfect.

Her mother had taught her cooking like a science—flip the
dosai
when brown, cut the meat in the direction of the muscle, lift the ladle against light to see if it is steaming, add the iron-packed spinach water to the lentils, slam the garlic cloves flat and pull the skin—and Indra had fortified it with her own philosophy. To her, there were no shortcuts and no do-overs; the fate of a dish was determined right at the beginning, when the onions were sliced and the first ingredients chosen. If something was forgotten then or a step was missed, nothing could save the dish in the end. Some cooks might think clever substitutes or new techniques could fix anything, but not Indra. If the curry was not sour enough, you couldn’t add more tamarind bit by bit; you had to accept that you made a mediocre curry that day. Once you burned the oil, everything you put in it would reek of your mistake. She was aware of the possibility for error and she focussed with the intensity of a trapeze artist to avoid it.

The mutton went in. Water was added, the pot closed with a lid, the flame reduced. She checked the curry every five minutes, gave it a stir, waited till the oil surfaced. After half an hour, she added fresh silken coconut milk. Many in Sri Lanka used Maggi instant coconut milk powder, but Indra despised it on principle. The powder did the job all right, gave density to the curry and moistened the meat, but it lacked the sweetness of freshly squeezed coconut milk. Extracting it was a labour of love, but so what? This mutton curry—meat on the bone—was the favourite of both mother and son. There could be no shortcuts.

Rani had gone downstairs to buy mussels, an indulgent addition to the menu. The large fleshy ones were expensive, so she got a handful of the pebble-sized ones. The sisters worked quietly, never having to taste or measure at any point, both led by the memory of their mother’s recipe. As Indra slit the beans and
bajji molaga
, Rani steamed the mussels. They were fresh, and the purple-ringed shells snapped open in minutes. She sautéed them with the long strips of beans and
molaga
as well as some spicy chilli and tamarind extract. Indra then cooked some rice and made a quick green salad with chopped mallum leaves, small onions, green chillies, lemon and shredded coconut.
Rasam
was served every day, so Indra had bottled a thick concentrate of tamarind, pepper, cumin, turmeric and garlic and stored it in the fridge to last a week. Now, to a spoonful of the concentrate, she simply added hot water and curry leaves sputtered with mustard seeds. In a big steel tiffin carrier, Indra packed all this food and poured the
rasam
and buttermilk into small polyethylene bags.

The bus to Borella was at 7:10 a.m., so the sisters were out the door by seven. Rani’s son, who had woken up as they were leaving, asked if there was any food left. There is a plate with rice and rasam on the dining table, they said. Next to it was a small bowl of mutton curry for him, without any of the meat.

After changing buses three times, they reached New Magazine prison at eight. As they entered the gates, a guard checked their belongings and noted their national ID numbers. Then they joined the long queue of relatives, mostly mothers and wives. The prison officials would let in visitors only after eleven thirty, but everyone
came early to find a spot in the queue. During the long idle wait, mothers exchanged pleasantries and worries. There were many familiar faces ahead of Indra, women she had been seeing for months now. She had befriended a handful whose sons were in the same cell as Sarva. One of these women, Grace, walked over.

‘So, is it meat day or vegetarian day?’ Grace asked. Indra knew Sarva shared his lunch with some of the inmates, including Grace’s son. ‘Mutton,’ Indra replied. ‘Ah,
that
Sarva won’t share with anyone!’ said Grace with a smile.

For some time, Grace had come on these visits with her pregnant daughter-in-law, but a month earlier the police had arrested her, too. She was with the TID for interrogation now, and family were not allowed to visit. The daughter-in-law was in her second trimester when she was detained and had already developed some complications. Worried sick, Grace had been struggling to find a lawyer and an NGO to help secure a release as soon as possible on medical grounds. ‘I hear you found Sarva a good lawyer,’ she said to Indra, and asked for the number.

Indra found Mr Vel’s office number in the palm-sized diary she always had with her. Usually it was in her handbag, but since phones and handbags weren’t allowed inside the prison, she would stuff money and the diary inside her bra. The tattered pages were filled with numbers, names and addresses for every office, commission, activist, lawyer, politician and journalist Indra had met in the year since Sarva had been arrested. It was mostly her own large Tamil letters leaping over the lines, but some people had written their details for her in English as well. Between the pages, several business cards stuck out, collected in compulsive hope. On the central pages, Indra had written the dates and times of every intimidating visit the plainclothes police had made to her house. Ever since she had understood the deniability built into everything the police did to her son, she had started to make lists, note things down, put everything on record. They wouldn’t give her a single document, so she created her own. She had learnt to be meticulous, because as in her kitchen, here too there were no second chances.

When the gates opened, there was the usual push. The guards sometimes shut the gates midway through lunchtime, citing some
security lapse or a breach of discipline. So people shoved to enter the visitors’ hall, only to be held back by shouting guards. It happened every day, and each time, Indra felt ashamed. The people in the queue, in coming to see their loved ones behind bars, shed every ounce of dignity. She saw elderly women sob and throw them selves at the feet of guards half their age, begging them to reopen the gates. Only few like Indra spoke Sinhalese and had homes in Colombo. Most others had come from places as far away as Kytes Island in the north or Batticaloa in the east and were living in cheap lodges or rented houses, just so that they could bring food to their sons or husbands every day.

In the corridor leading to the visitors’ hall, two guards stood on either side of the queue, each with a bench in front of him. They wielded a steel spoon each. The approaching women had to place their lunchboxes or steel carriers on the bench and display the contents. The guards would then run their spoons through the containers, one by one, checking for banned substances hidden in the curries and rice.

Indra bristled. Everything inside the lunchboxes had been prepared with care, love and even prayer, and in one moment it was defiled. It made her retch to see the same unwashed spoon going into every box, touching yoghurt to
rasam
, rice to
puttu
, dregs and droplets moving from one box to another. On Fridays, Saturdays and Tuesdays, her family was vegetarian because she visited the temple. On those days, as the spoon rose from other people’s meat dishes and plunged into her vegetables, she uttered an apology to God. Sometimes the guards had a mug of water next to them to clean the spoon, but once she saw the oily brown liquid inside the mug, she wondered whether the daily lunchbox was worth all this trouble, and why her son could not just eat prison food.