The Seasons of Trouble (33 page)

He was running across the road. He was grabbing her hand. ‘
Vaa di
!’ he was saying in front of everyone. ‘Come!’ He was pulling her to the van. She turned crimson.

The priest left them alone in the van and went off to buy groceries. Sarva held Malar and could not let go. They were hugging hard, speaking at the same time, hearing nothing, laughing nervously but feeling a floating inner calm. They held hands tight. ‘Why are you squeezing me?’ she asked. ‘I’ll also squeeze you.’

Meet my wife, Sarva said, when Father R. came back.

They spent the day walking around the seminary, sitting in the church, or taking shade under the mango tree near the poultry. They wondered if they should get engaged. But before a conclusion could be reached, two o’clock rolled around and she had to leave to get home for dinner. He gave her the saris and showed her the cut on his palm. She scolded him, then cried.

When Father R. and he dropped her off, Sarva kissed her forehead before opening the door of the van. As she walked to the bus and waved, Father R. said, ‘What? You kissed her like she was your daughter.’

Sarva was still in a trance. ‘How can it be that this is the first time we have met?’

A COUPLE OF
months later, in May 2011, Sarva decided to leave the country. Malar had helped him make up his mind. ‘Follow your dreams,’ she had said. ‘Go to America. You’re smart enough to find a job there and manage.’ Later, she could apply to study for a Master’s and join him.

He would travel with a fake passport. His brother Deva’s friend would smuggle him out of Sri Lanka with about ten others. The guy owed Deva a favour, so the fee came at a discount. Sarva would pay 2.5 million rupees instead of 4 million. It was all working out.

Shirleen and Jehaan were appalled. They visited Amma and Deva, trying to make them see reason. It was dangerous, they said, and there was no assurance Sarva would eventually get asylum. Amma sobbed as she explained that they just couldn’t wait any longer, living separately, never seeing each other, knowing that Sarva was wasting his life. Deva did not say much.

‘We cannot help you any longer if you decide on the illegal route,’ Shirleen told Sarva. How could he trust a stranger, a human smuggler, with his life? Jehaan explained the risks. Sarva could be deported from the airport as soon as he arrived—he didn’t even know where that would be. If he were sent back, the TID would arrest him the moment his plane landed at Colombo. His nightmare would begin all over again.

Sarva understood. But he was done with the safe houses. He had found the woman he wanted to marry and he wanted to get his life in order. He had given so many people control over his decisions, so many strangers had walked in and out. He needed to try it his way. He would trust his brother.

On 4 May 2011, Sarva left.

19.

January 2011

MUGIL AND HER
family were finally getting out of Manik Farm. Without explanation, an official in the refugee camp office handed her a release notice and told her to prepare to leave. She couldn’t read the form, which was written in Sinhala, and was too afraid to ask for a translation and risk triggering a familiar tirade about how it was high time the inmates learnt the first language of Sri Lanka. What she understood from the form was that she was being sent home—but the wrong home. The army was sending her to Point Pedro, the town of her childhood, not to PTK.

Confused, Mugil went to Harini Akka, a woman from the row closest to the camp office. Harini Akka spoke some Sinhala and overheard things. Mugil had buttered her up for months, always stopping to chat and listening patiently to her complain about her mother-in-law. Akka was a Dalit and her husband, an upper-caste doctor with a Jaffna University degree; his family had stridently opposed the match and disowned them when they married. In the thick of battle in early 2009, Akka had seen the doctor being picked up by the army, which now denied ever detaining him. Akka and her mother-in-law had been compelled to join forces in their hunt for him, though each took every opportunity to blame the other for their family’s misfortunes. They shared nothing but the conviction
that the doctor was alive and being kept hidden by the military. Mugil thought it was more likely he had been summarily executed, but she was not one to dash their hopes.

Mugil found Harini Akka sitting outside her tent in the mud, her legs stretched out under her frayed housecoat. She was removing black specks of dirt from a plate of rice gruel. Mugil showed her the release notice.

‘Oh, Parutithurai for you!’ Akka squealed, using the old Tamil name for Point Pedro. ‘I was praying for you to get some good news.’

‘This is not good news, Akka! Why Parutithurai? I don’t understand. I was expecting to go to PTK.’

‘Don’t nitpick, be like me. Just take the chance and get out of here.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Jaffna.’

‘But you’re from Viswamadu, no? Why are they sending you to Jaffna? I don’t know what is going on.’

Akka said the army told her that Viswamadu was not yet cleared of mines. ‘So I’ll have to live at my mother-in-law’s for a while. It’s a pain, but what to do?’

Mugil sat down next to her and started to shave the skin off some plantain.

‘Is PTK also not yet cleared of mines?’ she asked. ‘Is that why I have got Parutithurai?’ The town had not been directly affected in the most recent battle.

Akka shrugged. ‘The army has fallen in love with our Vanni now. They want it all for themselves.’

Then, dropping her voice, she added, ‘Those places … there are memories there. This government does not like that.’

The release was a fraud, Mugil thought. Bussing people to strange places instead of their homes was hardly granting them their freedom.

The camps had been open for almost two years now, but few Vanni residents had been released; the official reason was that the inmates needed to be screened for Tiger cadres and the war zone had to be demined. There had always been mines in the Vanni, but in the last stages of the war, both the army and the Tigers had
laid many more haphazardly, without keeping records. Global demining agencies had worked painstakingly slowly with former combatants and the military, and cleared several villages for habitation on the Mannar coast and on the peripheries of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu. But it was only the army and navy that had moved in there, expanding their military presence while the villagers were imprisoned in refugee camps. Even after they had started releasing a few hundred inmates every month under international pressure, most villages remained out of bounds.

Harini Akka had been chatting to people who got their notice to leave camp and had noticed a trend. A lot of families were being sent to the residential addresses they had listed on electoral registers twenty-eight years earlier, in 1982, when the last election was held in the north. These lists were the last official record because there had been no census in these parts since—owing to the violence and the government’s lack of access. The dramatic changes in the region’s demography and population had gone unrecorded. The Tigers had forced out over 75,000 Muslims and a smaller number of Sinhalese since the eighties, whittling the northern province into a proto-Tamil state. They had initially compelled Tamils from elsewhere to move into the region; but in time, millions persecuted by the state had also rushed to find safety among their own. It was a migratory pattern layered over three decades; if a diagram were drawn to depict it, the mesh of intersecting lines might form a spiderweb, at the centre of which was the Vanni. The state readopted the 1982 records because these helped legitimise the return of Sinhalese and Muslim families to lands that Tamils had occupied since, thus diluting the Tamil population in the Vanni and preventing any future claims to a separate Tamil homeland. It was a strategic decision for the government, but for the Tamils, greatly disorientating.

Because the 1982 records linked people to villages they had long left, or had been forced to leave, Mugil’s family was registered in Point Pedro. But they had moved twelve times since, before finally settling in PTK. That was her home, however convoluted the process that led to her living there. She didn’t want to be sent back to the beginning. Moreover, in Chundukuli Junction in PTK she
owned a house that she had built with Divyan after their wedding. She mentioned this to Harini Akka, who laughed bitterly. ‘
Anh
, good luck getting it back from our new army landlords!’ she said.

‘Can I move out of Point Pedro after they send me there?’

‘They apparently register us with the village office and keep an eye on our activities. So just stay put for a while.’

Akka seemed to have resigned herself to her allotted destination (she had once mentioned that Viswamadu, where she last stayed, reminded her only of death), but Mugil felt cornered. Why didn’t the resettlement ministry just ask the refugee families where they wanted to go? To value out-of-date records over individual or community choice was to pretend these last twenty-eight years of dislocation had not happened. The government was rewinding to a time before the war, before she met her husband and had her sons, before her rebellion at thirteen, before the worst riots the Tamils had ever experienced, before even the first thought of Eelam existed in Sri Lankan history. It seemed her family was not simply being sent to Point Pedro but back in time.

A few days after her conversation with Akka, a convoy of buses drove Mugil, her family and about 150 others out of the camp. She did not look back, but the miles of barbed wire seemed etched on her retinas. She shut her eyes, and it was still there. The departure was a year too late; they were three people short.

Along the A9 highway to Point Pedro, the bus dropped off other families at several points. Some were taken to their villages and accommodated in schools and churches. Others were simply let off at the start of a road, accompanied by a couple of soldiers. At noon, when one such group was dropped off just after the Omanthai checkpoint, Mugil roused herself to look out the window, Tamizh snoozing on her lap. There was no sign of life outside, and the only indication the area had ever been inhabited was the imprint of a demolished house on the ground. Its cracked red-oxide floor traced the layout of a sandy living room, two other rooms and a kitchen. A few metres away, two concrete steps stood orphaned from the threshold. Thorny shrubs had overtaken everything else, including the mud trail that led to the village the former inmates were now supposed to walk to. As the bus groaned and moved ahead,
a one-armed man who had just alighted with his daughter stared back, as if he were considering getting back on. His lost eyes caught Mugil’s for a moment, and then the bus pulled her away.

FOR MOST OF
the journey to Point Pedro, Mugil’s head was out the open window, trying to take everything in. Mother sat next to her holding Maran, and Tamizh sat on Mugil’s lap. Amuda and her children were in the seats behind them. There were mostly women on the bus.

They were on the A9, the main highway connecting the south and north, the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The more the communities were polarised by war, politics and language, the greater the A9
‘S
inaccessibility. It was a physical manifestation of the growing gulf between peoples. It was closed for long periods during the conflict, and Mugil remembered how news of its opening would excite villagers in the north. Immediately, they would plan family visits, think about shopping in the more developed central and southern towns, or attempt to tend to long-delayed chores.

Anyone travelling on the A9 was subject to intense scrutiny. A Tamil getting out of the Vanni needed a pass from the Tigers. All the way to the south, the army checkpoints would ask where that person was going, why, what she was carrying, and when she would return. When she reached the south, she would have to register her national ID at the nearest police station and state how long she intended to stay. On her return northwards, the Tiger checkpoints would do the same, ask the same questions, charge heavy taxes on alcohol purchased, and not allow more than two litres of precious petrol per head to be taken into the Vanni. The journey from Vavuniya to Jaffna, which used to take four hours, would end up taking more than a day.