The Seasons of Trouble (29 page)

When Isabel went to her desk, Randy and the other staff explained to Sarva what NP did. The NGO protected journalists, human rights defenders, whistleblowers and any civilian under threat from violence. They were headquartered in Brussels, with offices in conflict areas around the world. They specialised in unarmed protection, which meant keeping civilians in safe houses, providing security, and sometimes helping them secure political asylum in European countries. Sympathetic immigration authorities, embassies, civil servants and locals helped them anonymously, and there was always the fear of repercussions from the government,
ranging from cancelled visas to arrests or even physical harm. The staff admitted that since 2008 they had been on shaky ground in Sri Lanka. Their director, Tiffany Easthom, a Canadian national, had been deported just a few months earlier, and they knew they were all under state surveillance.

A recent experience had made the NP more jittery. Someone named Senthil had sought protection, claiming the TID had tortured him. The man had been in prison for six months. But after Randy did a background check and Isabel interviewed him, they discovered that Senthil was a TID mole, planted to observe their methods, expose their safe houses and uncover their network. The infiltration had sent a ripple of panic through the organisation, as they realised they’d almost taken on a spy. It would have greatly endangered not only the employees but also the people they helped.

Ever since the war intensified in the north, the government had wielded sedition and anti-terrorism laws against humanitarian agencies. NGOs like the NP worked under outrageous constraints: their projects were subject to approval and monitored at every stage by the state or armed forces, the very bodies they were often taking on. Since 2007, the principal threat had come from the state and its armed forces. Farcically, the Ministry of Defence and the presidential task force appointed themselves regulators of groups documenting this violence. The threat of deportation hung over their every move, hampering their work. NGO licences were cancelled, and the visas of aid workers were revoked. The NP was thus wary of helping those accused of being linked to the LTTE. One ill-chosen case would be enough for them to get kicked out of the country.

As Isabel put it, ‘The situation was complex.’ She sifted through Sarva’s story for fact and fiction, analysing the risks of taking on a man once accused of terrorism. She believed Sarva’s account of being tortured, but was ambivalent about his vague claims about service in the LTTE. Militancy spread far and wide, often in indiscernible ways. There were fighting cadre, spies, political workers, fundraisers, forced recruits and sympathisers—a shade card of the movement’s reach. The Rajapaksa regime tarred them all with the same brush, but some NGOs knew better.

NP was not short of legitimate reasons to offer Sarva protection. His arrest had been illegal, like hundreds of others in Sri Lanka: the country saw the second-highest rate of illegal detention in the world, after Iraq. Sarva’s still-visible wounds were proof of horrific custodial torture. Even after his acquittal, the police continued to harass his family. They threatened to detain him again. In addition, Sarva’s case was well documented. The Red Cross had registered Sarva’s detention after that chance meeting in the TID basement. They had made sure that a police arrest report was drawn up, after which his detention was on record, a rare piece of luck that helped the NP substantiate his claims.

Despite her doubts, Isabel was persuaded by Sarva’s acquittal. The court’s declaration of his innocence—exoneration by a body that was rarely lenient or sympathetic to an accused terrorist—was the NP’s best insurance policy.

As Isabel and Randy arranged a safe house for their new case, Sarva sipped hot sweet tea in the back of the office. It was remarkable that the NP agreed to help him. He credited it to Amma and the force of her conviction. His iron-willed mother had pulled him out of ditches innumerable times, and how quickly he always forgot. He did not deserve her.

‘Shall we go, men? What are you dreaming about?’ Randy asked.

‘It must be cool to have a boss like Isabel,’ Sarva said, grinning.

‘Okay, okay, lover boy,’ Randy said. ‘You’re my competition! This is why I have to send you away to Bataramulla.’ That’s when Sarva saw that Randy was holding two helmets.

Bataramulla was a suburb just outside Colombo, and had they taken a bus, they would have reached the safe house in two hours. But Randy was wary of army checkpoints and the police on main roads, so they rode on his motorbike. Throughout the one-hour journey, Randy spoke loudly, making jokes, telling Sarva to think of this as an adventure. Sarva concentrated on not screaming in pain. His crushed lower back felt the impact of every bump on the crooked routes off the highway.

‘How long will I have to stay in Bataramulla before going home?’ Sarva shouted over the revving of the motorbike.

‘Let’s see,’ Randy said. ‘Till it’s safe for you, till they stop tormenting your family.’

‘Okay, around a month then, I guess.’ He had no inkling then that it would snowball into eighteen months, enough time for him to lose all sense of where or who he was.

SARVA
’
S SLOW ERASURE
began in a church in Bataramulla. A dour head priest handed Sarva to a young brother, Hendrick, to be shown around.

‘You’re not Catholic?’ the friar asked first. ‘But you’re a Pereira?’

‘My father was Catholic but I was brought up as a Hindu,’ Sarva said, unsure if this would make things difficult. But Brother Hendrick didn’t seem to care either way. He was jovial, smelled of soap, and said he was hooked on Facebook. Several Tamil-speaking boys in the same parish were studying to be ordained as Catholic priests, but he advised Sarva to keep a low profile. ‘The more you share with people, the more you expose yourself,’ he warned in all seriousness, and then repeated the word
expose
with mock shock and a little giggle.

Sarva had been given a room near the kitchen, at the back of the parish house. His own space, a soft bed, a clean bathroom. He was thrilled. He picked flowers and put them by his window. Next to the Bible, on a cupboard, he placed a small idol of Pullaiyar, which Amma had put in his backpack.

He wasn’t allowed to have his own phone and had to call his family on Randy’s. The NP suspected that Amma’s phones were tapped and did not want the safe house to be exposed.

Isabel and Randy visited occasionally, bringing news from home. Plainclothes policemen had visited Sarva’s Nuwara Eliya house again, and Amma had challenged them, demanding to know why they were looking for a man who had been freed by the courts. Ignoring her, the men repeated the same questions: ‘Where is Sarvananthan? Where is his passport?’ As Amma berated them, they searched every nook and cranny in the house. Aunty Rani had also reported a suspicious man who had tried to chat up the
security guard at her Wellawatte apartment, asking whether Sarva had been to see his aunts.

‘Things are not going as we hoped,’ Isabel said. ‘You might have to stay away from home for longer than we expected, Sarva.’

The head priest suggested that Sarva occupy himself at the parish house. ‘Don’t simply sit around waiting,’ he said. ‘You can help out around here.’

So Sarva offered to cook lunch for the ten or so residents, but he didn’t last for long. They didn’t seem to like his cooking and were especially annoyed that the meals weren’t ready on time. Brother Hendrick asked if Sarva had used the whole bottle of chilli powder in the curries. Sarva was mildly offended but told himself that they didn’t appreciate his culinary experiments because they were simple men of God who wanted only bread and sambol or bland rice and curry.

After a couple of months, Isabel asked Sarva to think about going abroad. The way she said it reminded him of his mother’s attempts five years earlier to get him to leave the country. She had been frightened about his future and wanted him to get out before he was drawn into the war. Her Negombo brother who had moved to Long Beach, New York, had been ready to sponsor his visa. But Sarva was adamant. ‘What is there for me in America?’ he asked. He didn’t want to live off an uncle who was himself struggling to educate his daughters. When he finally landed his shipping job and started to travel around the globe, Amma was satisfied somewhat, hoping the foreign air would seduce him one day into settling abroad. A few years later, when relations with her US brother soured over a land dispute, Amma complained that Sarva had wasted a golden opportunity.

Ever since he had first been locked up, Sarva too had regretted not having emigrated when he had the chance. Desperate to get out of jail, he was preoccupied with thoughts of leaving Sri Lanka. He imagined the furthest place he could go to, beyond the whitewashed prison walls, beyond Colombo, away from Sri Lanka, beyond South Asia—somewhere far, far away. With his lawyer’s help, in early 2009 he made an asylum application to the Swiss embassy. He now told Isabel of this and she checked on its progress. She wanted to get him an interview as soon as she could, but
ever since the army had started its offensives in the east and north, asylum applications from Tamils had soared; the waiting list was insurmountable.

Switzerland was the only country to half-process applications for political asylum at its consulate in Colombo and issue preliminary visas for travel. For Sri Lankans, a Swiss visa was an alternative to illegal emigration. The NP had worked closely with the Swiss in emergency situations before, getting people under threat across borders on short notice. But since their director had been deported, the NP’s clout had weakened considerably. Randy kept telling Sarva to wait, that things would surely work out soon.

Another month passed. There was a burglary at the Bataramulla parish house. Very little was stolen—only a laptop and some silverplated candlesticks—but the break-in shook everyone. ‘Why would any thief waste his time with a poor church?’ Isabel asked on the phone, her voice thick with suspicion. She came the very next day and drove Sarva to a safe house in Batticaloa, in the east of the country.

There, a Father Peter welcomed them to a retreat and counselling centre. It was called The Cuckoo’s Nest. Isabel’s eyes danced with amusement at the name, but Sarva didn’t see what was so funny.

‘You know? The book?’ she asked. He didn’t.

‘The movie?’ No.

‘Jack Nicholson, the actor?’

Sarva smiled, feigning recognition to end this attempt at bonhomie. He knew Isabel was trying hard to help him, but he was sick of waiting. In prison, he had seen his mother every day and had been allowed to speak to other people. Hiding out was different. Unlike prison, it did not kill his dream of freedom entirely but cruelly postponed it, day by day, crisis by crisis. Three months of self-imposed solitary confinement, and now, another hiding place at another seminary that required discipline, silence and obedience. His affection for Isabel was eroding fast.

The Cuckoo’s Nest was busier than the previous safe house. It sheltered more than fifty poor men and women, taught them tailoring or carpentry, and fed them three meals a day. Sarva’s room was in the men’s dormitory, and was basic—a washbasin, a wall shelf,
a bed with a mosquito net. The women were in another building, and a lady warden sat on the veranda between the two hostels, her face severe and eyes hawk-like.

Men and women were discouraged from interacting and sat separately in the dining hall. The meals were bland and underseasoned, and Sarva felt that the spice had been leached from his life. He was the oldest there and was formally addressed as
anna
, in a way that isolated him. Father Peter always spoke tenderly to him, but Sarva sensed that this was not exclusive. He craved his aunt’s fish curry and his mother’s doting. When the parish sweeper once brought her toddler over, he played with the child incessantly to somehow satiate the need to see his fat little nephew and hazeleyed niece. It was surprising how much he missed them all; he had spent most of his life negotiating more independence for himself. He felt unseen now and locked in. Days would go by without his speaking to a single person. Once, when it rained, he ran out of his room to feel the drops on his face, to sink into their coolness and feel like himself again. In this place, with its impersonal kindness, Sarva felt inanimate; a thing to be protected, fed and ignored.

Then Randy came by one day and said the government had revoked the visas of several more NP employees. They had deported Isabel. ‘She wanted you to know that she will always remember you,
machan
,’ Randy said. And just when Sarva thought this was another of his friend’s jokes, he continued, ‘You were her last case in Sri Lanka.’ Randy said NP’s days in Sri Lanka were numbered. They would pass Sarva’s case file to another NGO and hoped to do a handover. All of this, to Sarva, meant only that he would be hiding for even longer. He did not respond and refused Randy’s usual offer of a glass of arrack.

Perhaps Randy realised that Sarva was depressed, because on his next visit he brought a phone and three SIM cards from Amma. It was not safe, he warned, but since Sarva was so lonely, they could make an exception. Change the number as often as possible, Randy instructed.