The Seasons of Trouble (27 page)

Suddenly all the months of analysis, of finding out what was happening, what had happened, how many were killed, who was a Tiger, who was a civilian, all of it was irrelevant. All Mugil wanted was certainty. She wanted a roof over her head, a life. She wanted to go home.

Everyone wanted to go home. Protests broke out regularly at queues, where the crowd gave people the anonymity they needed to speak up without direct consequences. Why does the government still lock people up in camps, they asked. By July 2009 only about 4,300 had been sent home, mostly people with specific
needs, including the sick, university students, pregnant women and the elderly. Only about 9,000 more were cleared to leave, from close to three million refugees. Politicians from the Tamil National Alliance spoke out in Parliament and even came to Zone 2, in pristine white outfits, bringing cartons of bottled water and food. They patiently heard the inmates’ pleas. But everyone in the camp was aware that the politicians had no power. No one did except the president and his army.

Most of the Tamils in the camps hated President Mahinda Rajapaksa; they had never voted for him. He became president when the LTTE made the grave mistake of enforcing a boycott on the 2005 elections, which he subsequently won in a landslide, defeating a candidate more sympathetic to the Tamils. Mahinda then launched a three-year-long war on them, and his brother Gotabaya, as the defence secretary, had a blank cheque and the liberty to conduct the battle however he thought best. Surprisingly, in May 2009, after the end of the LTTE, President Rajapaksa’s speeches had stirred many Tamils. They had been startled to hear words few state leaders had ever used before; he called them equal citizens and spoke of inclusion. He recognised the often ignored distinction between the LTTE and the Tamil people. If he seemed sympathetic enough to realise that not all Tamils were terrorists, they thought, maybe things would get better. Father had once even made excuses for the president, recalling that the Tigers had once attempted to assassinate both Rajapaksas. ‘And they took their revenge,’ he had said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

But as the months wore on, apologists like Father wondered if they had been gullible. The president continued to make promises about rehabilitation and resettlement, but as they suffocated under his rule, these words rang hollow. Posters with his photo—a clean face and toothy grin—littered the camp. Mugil felt as if he was physically there, actually turning every knob, pressing every button, controlling every move of the Vanni Tamils.

An emergency had been declared and extended indefinitely by Parliament, and it was the president who now called the shots. The presidential task force directed the activities of Manik Farm and
other camps, determining matters such as how aid agencies could engage with the displaced. It was dominated by high-level defence officials and was chaired by another of the Rajapaksa brothers, Basil, who was also the minister for nation building. Tamil- and Muslim-dominated districts were run not by the elected legislators but by the Sinhalese central executive, appointed by the president. On 12 July 2009, Major General C. A. Chandrasiri replaced Dixon Dela, a civil administrator, as governor of the northern province, which included the Vanni and Jaffna. Of the country’s nine provinces, only the northern and eastern ones—where most minorities lived—were governed by retired army officers. These appointees and the president’s office said that the refugees would have to wait until their villages were entirely cleared of mines before they could go home. The army, meanwhile, was moving into these evacuated areas, gradually establishing military bases in Mullaitivu, Vavuniya, Kilinochchi and Mannar.

Mugil felt caged in the claustrophobic half-truths of the president’s rhetoric, which only seemed to intensify following international pressure to resettle the displaced Tamils. With the visits of global leaders, the inmates’ emotions surged in waves of hope and despair. On the days when the United Nations teams came and went, the inmates prepared to chant Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s name in case he approached their tents. But he had visited only the ‘showcase area’, as the inmates named the misleadingly habitable model rows of Zone 3.

Then the politicians from India arrived, mostly from the southern state of Tamil Nadu. They shed tears, recited moving Tamil verses, professed anger at the ill treatment of their ethnic kin. Mother was not just dismissive of them, she saw in their goodwill a bad omen. ‘We will not hold garlands and stand up for the Indians again,’ she said, remembering the late eighties, when the ecstatic welcome of the Indian army into northern Sri Lanka spiralled over the next two years into a bitter war with the LTTE. To the Tamils, the Indian army was synonymous with rapists and torturers, and the Indian government was a selfish and unreliable big brother. They expected more from Tamil Nadu, but it became apparent after 2009 that these politicians were only play-acting an old friendship.

In July, the president had pledged to release and resettle up to 60 per cent of the displaced Tamils in the camp by November: ‘That is our plan. In 180 days, we want to settle most of these people,’ he said, but then clarified, ‘It’s not a promise, it’s a target.’

‘How much they talk!’ Bhuvi said. ‘Words, words, words. If this was food, our stomachs would explode.’ Most Tamils in the camp had been lashed by some moment in the history of racial hatred and discrimination—a riot, a murder, a rejected college application, a whizzing bullet, a death, a lost eye, a dead child or parent—but this now was a whole community trapped together, three million people, with no options. Never before had they felt walled in by indifference like this.

MUGIL HAD BEEN
in the camp seven months when the presidential election was announced, a choice between two candidates who filled her with dismay. The Tamil National Alliance strategically threw its weight behind Fonseka, the former army general, in exchange for guarantees to end military rule and relieve those affected by the war. Most Tamils wanted to cast their votes in favour of the TNA, the only Tamil alliance in the fray—other than the largely mistrusted pro-government Eelam People’s Democratic Party—but they didn’t expect a free or fair election. The state assured the inmates that it would install voting booths inside the refugee camps; the men who robbed the refugee Tamils of freedom now wanted to bestow upon them the right to vote.

Only a few thousand internees had been sent home, largely to the north of Mannar. The largest contingent from the Vanni remained in the camp, wading in knee-deep water. Mugil’s tent leaked, and while they were allowed to cook for themselves now, dry firewood was hard to come by. A throbbing headache had lasted so long she had forgotten how she felt without it.

Tamizh’s bronchitis worsened in the damp tent, and he had wheezing attacks every other night. Mugil had nightmares about waking to find her child’s body cold and blue in the morning. In her row, five out of ten children had died of respiratory tract infections in the previous month. Amuda had managed to get some medicine
from the camp dispensary for her own wheezing and shared half the tablets with her nephew. At this rate, neither would get well, Mother said. Every time someone in the camp said, ‘Oh at least your children are alive,’ Mugil bit her tongue, crossed her hands to her ears, as she would at a temple, and hoped that Pullaiyar hadn’t entirely forsaken them.

But divine compassion was in short supply. Almost every week some Tamils were arrested, sometimes dragged out of the camp, for allegedly having served in the LTTE. Young men simply disappeared. ‘There are eyes everywhere,’ Bhuvi would say. Inmates informed on each other to the army or police in exchange for small freedoms: a few weeks of unmonitored peace or an extra packet of rations. Bhuvi’s cousin had been taken away by the TID. He said a woman in his tent had betrayed him so she could speak to her husband in the detention camp.

Mugil was sure she’d be disappeared, too, any day now. She had been careful not to reminisce aloud about the Tigers or let on that she had the skills of a trained combatant. To keep the lie as close to the truth as possible, she admitted to being a photographer in the communications wing. ‘Those who recognise you,’ Amuda consoled her, ‘are probably hiding themselves, so there’s nothing to be afraid of.’ But the fear of being found out remained. One day, when Mugil hopped over a puddle without breaking her stride, Bhuvi quipped that she was as agile as a tigress. Her heart started to thud loudly, and she made a bad joke about being a lame tigress. How much did Bhuvi guess?

Mugil was concerned about Divyan and Prashant, too. When they surrendered, the army said they would be taken to a special camp for ex-combatants; but there had been no word since then. In July, along with hundreds of others, she had submitted a request for information about surrendered relatives. Every week, when the army produced a list of ‘surrenderees’ held in detention camps, Mugil returned disappointed. She was now afraid that her comment to Divyan about being shot point-blank had been too close to the truth.

IT WAS MARAN
who discovered that grandfather was dead. He had gone inside their tent to look for the steel cup he liked to play with. The old man lay on his mat, turned to the left like always. As Maran stepped over him, his foot hit a hand, and something in the way it fell made the child scream.

It was 17 November and no one else was in the tent. Mother was outside, picking out lice from Kalai’s hair. Amuda was in the water queue. Bhuvi had been admitted to the Vavuniya hospital for jaundice a week earlier and had not returned. Mugil was returning from the camp office with a letter that gave her Prashant’s location in a Vavuniya detention camp. Her family would be reassured by this rare good news.

She was near her row when she heard Maran shriek. Her mind immediately conjured up an image of Tamizh’s dead body, lying in the sewage. She ran into the tent. When she saw her father, relief and guilt fought within her. She cried for hours. Grief, irritation, nostalgia and so many things burned away in her mind till all she was left with was rage. In another place, in another time, he could so easily have survived.

‘The good man, he died in his sleep,’ people said, as if the months before his death had nothing to do with it.

‘At least he did not die under a bomb, he will go to God,’ they said, as if a humiliating disease was a peaceful way to go.

It would cost 10,000 rupees, including bribes, for the body to be taken to Vavuniya for burial, and another 10,000 rupees for the funeral. Amuda said she would get a loan, at interest, from one of the richer camp inmates, but Mother forbade it. ‘We have too much debt already,’ she said. There was nothing else to discuss.

And so they buried Father on the camp’s periphery, at the bottom of the barbed wire fence. Other bereaved families seemed to have made this choice, too; there were many mounds, close together, at various angles, almost overlapping, and Mugil was afraid the men she had paid to dig would hack into a decomposing body. A family three tent rows away from Mugil’s had guided them here. Soon after arriving at the camp, their daughter had died of an intestinal rupture caused by shrapnel. She was young, ‘fair and just
twenty-six’, the mother had said, and engaged to marry a boy from their village before they were displaced by war.

The death of the young was considered more tragic, which depressed Mugil because it implied that her father’s time had come. It had not, she wanted to tell them. Your daughter was going to start a family, while my father had one. Why was the potential greater than the actual? He was once healthy enough to take his grandchildren to school, to expect to see them attend college. He could scoop them up and jump into a bunker. She wanted to say she felt rudderless and alone. But she said nothing because she was the person who had not known where to bury her father.

An armed soldier hovered nearby as they dug the grave and Amuda abused him under her breath. They would have to get a death certificate soon, and this soldier would be the witness. This was something else the family of the twenty-six-year-old had told them. In a register, the girl’s parents had entered the date of death as well as the age and identification marks of the deceased, but the cause of death, usually filled in by a doctor, was added by the soldier.