The Seasons of Trouble (28 page)

‘Bomb attack,’ the dead young woman’s mother had said.

‘From unknown causes,’ the soldier had written.

The dig took two hours. Mugil’s family stood watching. Everyone was crying except Mother.

When they were about to lower the body, they noticed a small shroud lying unattended nearby. The bedsheet bore a Red Cross logo.

Mother went over to it and slowly opened the flap. Under it was the grey face of a boy not older than six. She threw her hands up and let out a howl.

‘Take everybody!’ she wailed, looking skywards and beating her chest. ‘Oh the things my eyes have to see …’

The soldier slipped away. Without a word, the gravediggers started on another grave, this one only three and a half feet long.

When they returned to the tent that afternoon, muddy and defeated, Mother ripped to shreds the tarpaulin sheet Father had slept on and burnt it on their stove. A month later, in December 2009, a pass system would be officially introduced, allowing people to leave the camp for up to thirty days for medical reasons.

16.

June 2010

AMMA
’
S WORDS WERE
brief. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘Someone will pick you up outside the court.’ The plan was spare, but it could be no other way.

As soon as Sarva left the court building, still handcuffed, he walked with the guards towards the prison bus. From the corner of his eye, he saw his brother’s yellow car parked a few feet ahead, its licence plate removed. Near the bus door, as soon as the prison officer turned the key in the handcuffs, Sarva ran for the car.

He shouldn’t have had to run. A few days earlier on 22 June 2010, Sarva had been acquitted of all charges of terrorism. It was a miracle: Amma and the lawyer had somehow managed this feat in twenty-four months, while many others arrested under the PTA frequently remained imprisoned for much longer. After the upheaval of the past few months, it was unnerving to think that a signature and a stamp would soon allow him to emerge from the labyrinth. He was still in prison, but a formality would soon release him. Rooban had got out a month earlier, and Sarva knew that he was freed thanks to the desperate payment of 400,000 rupees to the attorney general. Sarva had wondered if Amma, too, had paid a bribe, whether his acquittal had been entirely legal. Amma
brushed his scepticism aside with a simple question: ‘Where would I have found all that money?’

Sarva was uneasy about being declared innocent. He wasn’t sure if being a man on the street made him more vulnerable to the TID. Free men disappeared all the time. His lawyer seemed to have the same concern. After his acquittal, he advised Sarva to withdraw the fundamental rights plea they had filed against the Colombo New Magazine prison for the 2009 attack on Tamil inmates. Sarva wanted justice for his friends, but it was dangerous to aggravate the government any further. And so, while Sarva sat on the bench in Court No. 2, his lawyer declared his client’s intention to withdraw the case against the prison. The judge had taken note and called a lunch break. She had then called Sarva to her office. ‘Why do you want to withdraw the case?’ she had asked in Sinhala. The question was perhaps a routine one, a matter of protocol, but for a moment Sarva felt the guards accompanying him bristle.

Accusing the authorities that held him was not safe, he wanted to say. I have had enough of these dark walls and dreary hopeless days, he might have said. But she was a judge. He was not able to form these words in her presence. ‘Miss, I just want to go home’ was all he managed.

The judge scratched her head and said, ‘Okay,
haari, mudaar
.’ Release him.

When they left the court, Sarva knew what he had to do next.

Some days ago in the prison waiting room, the lawyer had explained why Sarva was in jail despite his acquittal. The TID claimed not to have received Sarva’s release certificate from the attorney general, and insisted on keeping him in custody until then. This was a frequent ploy to delay release, the lawyer said. ‘They will never receive it, of course,’ Amma had fumed. ‘I’ve had enough of their theatrics. We’re going to get you out.’ There were no charges against him and he’d won all the big fights; now that freedom was so close and yet denied, even his mother had lost patience. She would stage a getaway. ‘Next time after the court visit, okay?’ she had said.

As he ran to the car, Sarva was afraid. He wanted to see if the police were chasing him, but he did not dare look. He imagined
TID officers watching him from the shadows, lunging at him, pulling him into a dark corner and beating him with batons. He imagined how he would suffer in silence, committing himself to one day taking vengeance. He knew he must be deranged to be so paranoid, to need the fantasy of his silent heroism, to be unable to feel an emotion as simple as relief when he shut the car door on what had been the worst year of his life.

SARVA
’
S OLDER BROTHER
, Deva, was in the driver’s seat and Amma sat beside him. They turned around to see Sarva slide in. ‘Shut the door properly,’ Deva said urgently and hit the accelerator. They were so sure of being pursued that no one actually bothered to see if they were.

Sharing the back seat with Sarva was a burly man with a wide, dark face and shoulder-length curly hair glistening with styling gel. ‘Hello, brother,’ he said, as if he were inviting him into a party. Sarva knew this was Randy, who worked for the NGO protecting Amma from the plainclothesmen harassing her. He was the only one in the car who did not look harried.

‘Is it done?’ Sarva asked anxiously. Deva was driving like a madman, and Amma was staring at the road ahead with an intensity that could only be prayer.

‘Don’t worry!’ Randy reassured. Here they were stealing Sarva away from custody, and Randy looked as if he was sitting behind a counter in a bank. What a laid-back chap, Sarva thought. If the police had followed them, they were not doing so anymore. Sarva tried to relax.

They drove directly to the beach in Wellawatte, but at a safe distance from Aunty Rani’s house, and parked opposite the railway station. Amma said they couldn’t go home; the TID had been at the end of the street when she left for court that morning.

It was about an hour after noon. Sarva, Amma, Deva and Randy crossed the railway tracks and walked onto the beach. ‘Have a bath,’ Amma said, handing Sarva a bar of soap. It was Lux, the fragrant soap his mother always bought and which her sons thought too feminine but could not be bothered to make the effort to replace;
it was the family soap. She also had a small travel bag in her hand with his clothes from home, washed, neatly folded and pressed.

Sarva took off his rotten cotton trousers and faded T-shirt and walked into the waves. He bathed in the sea, his mind empty. When he finished, he put on the fresh shirt and trousers Amma gave him.

‘You must be hungry, but we should go to the NP office straightaway,’ said Randy. Amma would not accompany them. She was going home with Deva. She had planned this rescue, arranged for Randy’s NGO to help, done everything for Sarva since his detention. She had gone beyond what she thought herself capable of, singlehandedly seeing Sarva through two years of uncertainty. He knew that without her he would not have left the first basement he was taken to. Without the reassurance of her lunchbox of rice and mutton curry and sweet-and-sour brinjal, he might have lost his mind in prison. But now, as he stood in front of her, she seemed too tired to linger over the reunion. She left without her characteristic teary goodbye or long hug. Before going, she awkwardly apologised for forgetting to bring him a change of slippers.

RANDY DROVE SARVA
to the Nonviolent Peaceforce office in Colombo 3, talking all the way. He wore a shiny shirt, and the hair near his temples was drenched in sweat. His voice was surprising: soft, childlike. He spoke Tamil, and said he was a field officer at the Sri Lanka office of the NP, a risky job with a constant threat of violence from powerful quarters. A Burgher of Portuguese descent, he joked that he looked ‘like a black bear’, which made Sarva laugh. In the next few months, as they got to know each other better, Sarva would come to depend on Randy’s humour in the darkest moments.

At the NP office, Randy introduced Sarva to Isabel, a tall, warrior-like woman. As soon as he met her, Sarva was rattled. Other than his lawyer Sumathi, this was the first young woman he had met in more than a year. She was pretty, and her smile had the warmth of welcome. He became suddenly conscious of his appearance. What she saw would not be the muscular, broad-shouldered, well-dressed man he once was. In prison, he had aged rapidly; Isabel would be looking at a patchy face, thinning hair, black rings under his eyes.
These days, he slouched when he walked. The once round cheeks were sunken. His thick pink lips, once striking against his dark skin—the hallmark of the men in his family—were chapped. To make things worse, the shirt Amma had given him was oversized, bought at a time when he ate three helpings of rice at a meal and lifted weights.

He thought Isabel was white at first, but when she sat next to him on a sofa, he saw that her skin was a golden brown. Later Randy told him she was ‘maybe South American or Mexican’.

Isabel said Sarva’s mother had briefed them about his ‘situation with the TID’. NP would first find a safe place for him to stay. Sarva understood only some of what she said; it had been ages since he had heard English, and it was hard to follow in a foreign accent. Apprehensive, he replied in Tamil, and Randy and Devi, another field officer, translated. As he listened to Devi, impressed with her fluent English, he became intensely aware that he did not sit with this group as an equal but as a victim seeking help.

Isabel said she needed to know specifics—dates, names, whatever he could remember. ‘I apologise in advance for having to ask you some sensitive questions, okay?’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Please, call me Isabel.’

‘Okay.’ Of course he would not call her Isabel.

‘At any time, if you want a break, please tell me to stop, okay?’

Sarva nodded. He was astounded an interview could even be conducted this way. He marvelled at Isabel, her even tone, her liquid eyes and the effort she made to put him at ease. He told her everything from the beginning, narrating his kidnap, detention, court cases and prison time in detail. He was describing the ordeal to another person for the first time. He mixed up the chronology and could not recall names. Isabel and Randy gently prodded him for dates.

As soon as he said the English word ‘torture’, Isabel shook her head in distress. It’s always the same nonsense, she said, but looked stricken enough for him to think this was the first case of torture she had encountered.

‘My lower back, it’s broken. Paining,’ Sarva said. He was
searching for phrases in English, attempting to level the ground, to establish a more direct connection than was possible through an interpreter. ‘My eyes, dull. Burning. Petrol bag.’

Isabel gasped. ‘Really …’ she said, jerking her neck back. When he said, ‘They beat me’, he watched her eyes widen in anger and her mouth twist, contorting her pretty face. She was hanging on his every word. Had he become so inured to pain that he could not react as she did? Isabel must be terribly large-hearted, he thought, if she felt such personal emotions as rage and disappointment for everyone she met. Or she must be soft, a lightweight. He pitied how easily she was mortified but was nonetheless grateful. When he described being chained and handcuffed in the prison’s underground remand court, it was her unconcealed horror that told him it was inhumane. He was learning to judge his treatment for the first time through her eyes and to classify the seamless string of brutalities he’d endured on the scale of human suffering. Although Isabel repeated a lot of questions in the three-hour interview, by the end he felt unburdened.

‘Thank you for being so patient with me,’ Isabel said, as if it were he who was doing her a favour. She squeezed her hands together on her lap. If he were a woman, he was sure she would have hugged him. ‘I asked so many questions because we have to be careful, you know,’ she added. ‘We can’t take on … doubtful cases.’ She let that statement hang in the air, allowing Sarva a final chance to come clean as to whether he had served in the LTTE. ‘The court has discharged me,’ he said. ‘I have papers.’ For now, that was the legal truth that mattered.