The Seasons of Trouble (20 page)

She entered the visitors’ hall, and saw Sarva waving behind the wire mesh. A guard took the tiffin box and passed it through a shaft to another guard on the other side of the mesh, who handed the lunch to Sarva. Immediately her son put his nose to it. A grin lit his face. Over the din of other men thanking their respective mothers and wives, sending loud desperate love to their children, Sarva shouted, ‘Amma!’ and gestured as if he were cracking a bone with
his teeth and sucking the marrow, the way she had taught him to eat the best part of the mutton.

There, that is why she spent eight or nine hours of her day to bring him one meal. To give him that memory. To make him do things normally just as he used to, like greedily smelling his lunchbox. He had earlier tried to save some of it for dinner, too, but when it had spoiled one day, he had been unable to forgive himself. Indra believed the smell and taste of home, the sight of his aunt or mother once a day, kept him motivated and hopeful. For her, it was an opportunity to ensure his good health and safety. In the CRP, he had been beaten brutally and she had not known for weeks. That could not happen again.

It was almost three o’clock when Indra and Rani got back home. They absently ate some leftovers, did the laundry, watched some news and started to prepare for the next day.

SARVA
’
S BROTHERS HAD
begun to complain that he had taken over their lives. ‘You have every freedom, no one has put you in jail, no one has broken your bones,’ Rani once scolded her son Darshan, who was unemployed after completing a filmmaking course in India. ‘Go fix your life. You have no excuses.’

The energy and finances of the entire household were focussed on Sarva and his well-being. He consumed so much attention that, on 7 February 2009, when Indra’s daughter-in-law Priya called her to say some plainclothesmen were dragging Indra’s son out and arresting him, she was confused. ‘Inside prison?’ she asked.

‘They’re taking Deva, Amma!’ Priya yelled.

Her other son. Someone was kidnapping her firstborn. Indra rushed to Deva’s apartment a few streets up. Three men were pulling him into a van. Priya stood frozen on the street, tears streaming down her face.

Indra ran to the men. ‘Please don’t do anything to him,’ she cried. ‘He’s just a travel agent. Please!’ One nightmare was unfolding to reveal another. ‘Stop please, tell me what it is!’

Ignoring her appeals, the men thrust Deva’s head inside, closed the van door, and sped away.

Upstairs in the apartment, Deva’s children sat dumbfounded on the sofa. The house was a mess, chairs pulled out of place, curtains torn down, shattered glass on the floor. Priya stood over the debris looking crushed. Her right hand gripped the bottom of her bump, and Indra thought her daughter-in-law would go into labour right then and there.

‘Are you okay?’ Indra asked. Priya did not reply. She was in a trance, pointing around the house, describing the men doing their search, throwing stuff around. They had taken Deva’s laptop. They knew about Sarva’s detention. They said they suspected Deva’s involvement and wanted to ask him some questions.

Priya looked straight at Indra. ‘It’s your stupid jailbird son’s fault!’ she said. Her voice was harsh. ‘He is dragging everyone down with him.’

Indra had been hearing this ever since Deva’s wedding, when she had run off to rescue Sarva from the trouble she rarely spoke about. She wanted to erase the memory of those days, but Deva and his wife would not let it go. They insisted that she only cared for her middle son, an accusation impossible to counter. Shall we weigh my love for each of my sons on a scale, Indra would ask. She had hoped that her sons would look out for each other as she had for them, but over the years they had grown more detached. Indra blamed the rich, demanding daughter-in-law for tearing the family apart. Deva always told his mother that she was being dramatic, but Priya knew exactly what Indra thought of her. Every time Indra asked Deva for money to pay Sarva’s lawyers’ fees or to buy Nuwara Eliya-to-Colombo bus tickets, Priya had raised questions.

‘Mother and son together are killing the whole family!’ Priya was shouting now.

Indra knew how powerless Priya must feel at this moment, but couldn’t she see that as Deva’s mother, she too was upset? Still, Indra began to apologise, saying she was only doing what she was supposed to do with Sarva, she hadn’t anticipated all of this, she loved all her sons equally.

‘Enough, stop it! I’ve heard all this a hundred times before, what is the point now?’ Priya said. ‘At least you have done this before. Tell me what we should do now.’

Together they went to the Wellawatte police station. By this time the cops recognised Indra and knew that one of her sons was in jail under PTA. ‘Hmm, now what happened?’ asked the first policeman she met.

Indra had a feeling they already knew the answer.

‘They have detained my first son.’

‘Who has?’ the cop asked. The others were staring.

‘The TID, who else?’

They laughed, just as they had when Sarva was taken. ‘He must be a
Kottiya
,’ one of them said. ‘His place is in jail.’

‘He’s just a travel agent—he has done nothing wrong!’

A policeman said he saw Deva ‘stylishly walking around’, driving a car, taking millions from people to get them visas for trips abroad. ‘How come he’s so rich?’ They were implying that Deva’s agency was a front for smuggling and other fundraising businesses.

Indra started to sob. One of them said it was her fault. Raise two terrorists and then cry, he said.

For the next few days Indra asked her sisters to take lunch to Sarva and threw herself into the search for Deva. She spent the nights at Priya’s house and sent the children to Rani’s. She told Carmel, her youngest, to stay at a friend’s house and not venture out. She was sure he would be next. It would be relentless; she would be running again from prison to police station, lawyer to activist; in the end, nothing she did would ever be enough. She was fighting a force she could not comprehend.

Indra’s lawyer had his juniors call the TID office. They were told that no Deva was being detained there. But that’s what they always say, insisted Indra. The lawyer suggested that Deva might not have been taken to the TID office yet. As was the practice in such illegal abductions, the victim would be kept in an abandoned house or garage, where interrogation could occur without the restrictions of custodial rules. Indra had come to understand that these unrecorded hours were when the most brutal torture occurred. And because there were no witnesses other than the police, the incident could be entirely denied.

The country had seen abductions for recruitment or vendetta since the southern insurgency and during the LTTE period. But
one didn’t exist today and the other was crumbling in the north; it didn’t stop youths from dying or disappearing. Had she not seen the men dragging Deva away, Indra might have suspected both the TID and LTTE. As it was, the Tamil militants were losing the war in the north, and the state had launched a covert operation to sweep for sympathisers and cadres everywhere else in the country. Since 2006, these kidnappings, especially of Tamil boys, had increased exponentially: the UN had recorded some 10,000 cases but many more went unreported. Indra herself knew many mothers who beat their chests for years over vanished sons. They had seen unknown men take their kids away, but once a police report had been filed, the mothers had discovered that the investigating authority was usually the same TID or army department suspected of the kidnap. These agencies said no one was arrested, no one was tortured, no one was held in custody secretly. A court could only go by evidence, and when that was obliterated, all that was left was a family member demanding truth, investigations and other rights that were a nuisance to a military-backed government prioritising national security concerns above everything else.

Enforced disappearances, the NGOs called these cases. To Indra, it was simply a fight against a spectre of lies. She imagined that soon her picture, too, would be in the newspapers, with dishevelled hair and a tear-streaked face, holding passport photographs of her sons, showing the world that they existed, that she was not insane.

Four days after Deva went missing, Priya received a call from an unknown number. The voice asked her to pay 2 million rupees, failing which they would hurt her husband. Indra had not expected this. She instructed Priya not to pay because that would still not guarantee Deva’s safety.

The lawyers had connected Indra with an NGO that provided protection to civilians under threat of state violence. She told them about Deva, but the activists said they were flooded with such requests and needed more time to do background checks. They suspected that while Deva’s kidnap was intended to look like classic detention, it could also be an attempt at extortion. The demand for money was a dead giveaway, they said, and it had happened to several other aggrieved families.

Indra felt lost, spinning out of control. She kept the news of Deva’s disappearance from Sarva; she didn’t want to make him feel unduly guilty. If this were indeed extortion, perhaps they should pay? She had no one but Priya to discuss this with, but her daughter-in-law was already shutting her out, saying she didn’t want to have anything to do with Indra or with Sarva’s case.

On the eighth day, Indra heard that Deva was back home. She rushed to his flat. His forehead was bleeding, his chest black and blue. That morning, Priya had paid 2 million rupees to the kidnappers and they had sent Deva home. Indra was not told any more.

‘We’d better do things separately now,’ Deva said, not meeting Indra’s eye. ‘You deal with your son, I’ll deal with my life. We don’t have to all sink in the same boat.’

12.

March 2009

MUGIL WALKED TOWARDS
the coast, one child in each arm—a dot in a sea of people inching along laboriously. Heat rose from the earth, burning her bare feet. It was almost two months since she had left PTK. As monsoon turned to summer, the displaced families around her had trebled. Some two million had abandoned the first no-fire zone in Suthanthirapuram after it was shelled by the Sri Lankan military. As they fled, the army declared a second safe zone on 12 February. This one was on the north-eastern coast, a narrow strip of fourteen square kilometres stretching from Putumutalan down to just before Mullaitivu town. Loudspeakers every few kilometres promised safety and food, as they had for the first no-fire zone. The government announcer, perhaps an army man, said, ‘Go to Putumatalan! There will be no shooting there.’

Few bought what he was saying. The first safe zone had turned into a battle zone and potential relief had led to further trauma. Yet with nowhere else to go, the swarm—including Mugil and her family—trudged on towards Putumatalan. Mugil was merely following whoever was in front of her. Charting a route wasn’t possible, especially with the little information they had. But even as she stuck to the herd, she could not shake off the thought that she was walking into a trap. She recalled what she saw in Valipunam, at
the tip of the first no-fire zone: the burning flesh, the woman crying in grief, the disbelief. The army had killed thousands of innocents, claiming to target the Tigers hiding among them.

Several cadres had indeed exchanged their uniforms for sarongs and shirts and had mingled with the families. But were they still a threat?

The man who gave Mugil directions to Valipunam, for instance, was a combatant until three years ago, when he contracted tuberculosis. He wasn’t even armed anymore. Did the army consider him an active Tiger and someone to be targeted? Devayani
akka
was still in uniform, but she had given up the cause—how would they define her?

Mugil herself had trained as a teenager, but her longest stint in the LTTE had been as a photographer. Her father printed pamphlets for the militants but had not carried a gun once in his sixty-six years. Her mother had quite possibly fed every hungry cadre who knocked on her door. Their PTK neighbours, two middle-aged doctors, had skipped the basic ten-day arms training compulsory for Vanni people, but they had saved the lives of innumerable fighters. It seemed as if the army now considered non-combatant, sometime supporters, such as Mugil’s parents and their neighbours, as part of the Tigers’ military operation.

How far back would the army go in the twenty-six years of conflict, how broad a brush would they apply? The children conscripted in the final hour, having trained for just a day or two; the women pretending to take part to deter sexual predators; the men posing as fighters to get rations—they were all terrorists, the president claimed. Were they so dangerous as to warrant shelling them in a safe zone, along with those who were unarguably civilians? The boundary between civilian and militant had always been difficult to discern in the Vanni. Mugil herself was often not sure where the line should be drawn. But that doubt, in the mind of a Sinhalese soldier or general steeped in generations of hatred and with heavy weaponry at his disposal, was bound to wreak havoc.