The Seasons of Trouble (41 page)

But Prashant was especially hurt by Tamils who pointed a finger at the Tigers. ‘The army may have destroyed the Tigers, but our
people are destroying the Tigers a second time,’ he said. He had been to see Prabakaran’s childhood home in Valvettithurai—there were rumours that Tamils had helped demolish it. ‘Where is their sense of respect?’ he asked, his pitch rising further. ‘And why all this talk about forced recruitment? They are talking the government’s language.’

‘It is not a lie, though,’ Mugil said softly.

Prashant’s eyes flashed. People must be getting paid off to trash the LTTE and court the military, he said, and if Annan were around to see Tamil women talking and flirting with the army, he’d have them shot on the spot. ‘You would not have been spared for speaking so ungratefully, Akka,’ he said.

Mugil listened, astonished at how easily he insinuated that she flirted with the army. Did all men speak this way? No, Sangeeta’s brother was exasperated, too, but not vengeful. Why was Prashant struggling so much harder? What had they done to him in the rehabilitation camp?

When combatants surrendered in droves, their families worried they would all face trial and execution. But when the government spoke in softer terms, of disarming, demobilising and integrating former combatants into society, they had expected some psychological and employment help. However, the Ministry of Defence ran the rehabilitation camps to privilege security concerns over counselling. No distinction was made between the leaders and ordinary cadre—all were interrogated repeatedly about sleeper cells, weapons stashes, and global underground networks. For the heavyweights in detention, cooperation was proportional to freedom. Some had found places in the cabinet. For lower-rung cadres like Prashant, rehabilitation was plumbing and welding workshops and Sinhala patriotic song lessons. One nationalism to stamp out the other.

Prashant was still itching for a fight because he had not had the opportunity to adapt. Straight from the war zone, he had been slammed into detention, prodded and thrashed for information for more than two years, treated as a terrorist, punished as a national shame, and then sent home. It wasn’t a surprise that he blinked in the glare of the real world. He could not accept that life had
changed permanently, that they could not go back to PTK, that they would never be able to demand the equality they had once dreamt of, certainly not as they did in their uniforms in the Vanni. There was no battle, no leader for him to cheer, but the conflict raged on the streets every day. He had come home in a climate of increasing militarization—surveillance, accusations, threats. There was a trigger for his outrage, a reminder of his impotence, at every corner.

When he spoke of politics, his body quaking with frustration, Mugil’s greatest fear was that he would rip through their family’s veneer of calm. They had toiled hard to move on, battling the same challenges that defeated Prashant. He resented being vulnerable to arrest; but instead of lying low his instinct was to provoke. In the evenings now he didn’t lounge in the side yard with his nephews but hung out with men of his own age, who were also struggling to find work. Somebody was always coming to Mugil’s gate, calling for Prashant. ‘What do you do with them?’ Mugil asked once.

‘We have things to discuss. We share the same pain,’ Prashant replied.

‘And what, your family won’t understand? Tell me what it is, I’m your older sister.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it to you,’ he said.

‘Someone told me they saw your group walk right past a soldier in the market. Just cross the street and walk on the other side, no? Why are you challenging them?’

Prashant didn’t say a word.

She walked up and put a few rupees in his shirt pocket. ‘I know it is not easy,
da
, it is tough for me, too. Every few days, something happens to my head and I want to explode, and punch their faces, but I remind myself of my boys, of you all.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want to get into trouble.’

He looked in her face with absolute incomprehension. ‘Is that all you think about?’ He seemed to be searching for more words, but a friend called him again. ‘We’ll talk later,’ he said and walked out the gate.

Mugil knew that he was with an idle, discontented group of returnees from various rehabilitation centres. Some had a new
drinking habit, but Mugil didn’t worry about Prashant taking to drink. Her brother had railed against alcoholism more than anyone she knew. ‘The soldiers try to corrupt us by inviting us to drink with them!’ he would fume. Raised in the prohibition years of the LTTE-controlled Vanni, Prashant thought of drinking as a solely Sinhalese vice. To his mind, the growing alcoholism among Tamils after the war was a symptom of cultural erosion. Mugil was concerned about the resultant domestic abuse and what a waste of money it was, but as long as Prashant’s stereotypes kept him sober, she didn’t bother asserting her views.

Some of Prashant’s friends were also planning an escape to foreign countries—borrowing from moneylenders against ancestral property or at heavy interest, leaving aged parents or young wives to repay their debts for years while the men settled down with visas in faraway countries which their families could not even find on a map. Prashant had not yet brought this up, but it was only a matter of time. He was a ticking bomb now. She would rather he were gone. If this was how the men returned from detention, she would have her work cut out for her with Divyan.

23.

September 2011

AT THE RIYADH
airport, after he had called his mother, Sarva called Malar. There were tears, blown kisses, assurances, encouragement and a rehashing of their dreams of freedom. Outside an airport bookshop, he had stared at a world map in the window display: the big and small countries, great expanses of ocean, squiggling rivers, red-dot cities and the blue roads that joined them.

He had then flown a great distance—far enough for the language and the shape of people’s faces to change, for the air itself to feel different, for the women to be as beautiful as they were back home but more knowing. He wondered at how a red-eye flight could introduce him to a populace with skin only a shade lighter. The final destination was America, he knew. But he had not even dreamt of the worlds in between. A couple of air tickets, a bus perhaps, some tolerable struggles, and then a stealthy dash across the Mexican border: this is what he had imagined. He had heard of the Indonesia boat route and the Nepal flight route, but not the less common route he was being led along.

For months after Sarva left Sri Lanka, he couldn’t tell where he was when he opened his eyes in the morning. That it was South America was all he grasped. He was made to shift houses every few days, travelling to different towns, each divided by a short bus trip
from the next. The agent’s ‘chaps’—there were so many, all seemingly recruited for their apparent lack of scruples—took Sarva to neighbourhoods whose jumble of poverty wasn’t too different from the tea estate slums he had grown up around. People from all over the world were jammed into tight neighbourhoods of disrepute; here anyone could slip into safe anonymity.

The dingy apartments he was put in were packed with runaway Sri Lankan Tamils, from mousy fishermen to urbane students. They all had a depressing reason for leaving and a vague dream of success abroad, neither of whose details Sarva wanted to know. Early on, he decided he didn’t want a fellowship of misery; he switched to what he thought was his arrogant face and stuck to monosyllables. It was bad enough that they smelled each other’s fear all day.

On some mornings, a chap arrived with a box of food, usually a type of burger, chicken dish or subdued biryani. On the days he didn’t come, they starved. Most of the time the men slept or daydreamed. The new sobbed into their arms at night; others chatted nostalgically about their childhoods. If there was power, they watched TV, a feature surprisingly present in every house. They stared at the local programmes that looked just like Tamil and Sinhalese soaps, dramatic and emotional, but with actors and newscasters speaking rapidly in a musical foreign tongue. To avoid the TV and stretch his legs, Sarva sometimes paced the building corridors. The man in the one-bedroom downstairs said he spoke Portuguese. The old woman next door said she spoke Spanish. Just like back home, he thought.

It was funny how much he thought of home when he was running from it. When he left Sri Lanka, he felt as if he might go anywhere, to a trillion possible future homes. Yet, a squalid room once again became his universe. If he left it, anything could happen. Unknown police could subject him to unknown laws or ask him the two questions he had to avoid at all costs: ‘Where are you from? Do you have a visa?’ He yearned to phone home but had no local currency. He considered speaking to some locals but didn’t know the language. He wanted to go on the street, but stories of deportation had worn away his courage.

The agent Siva rarely came, and when he did, he subjected
everyone to the same wilful neglect and pretentious care. ‘I’ll get fish for everyone tomorrow, okay?’ he’d say. ‘I used to be like you all, so I feel your pain,’ or ‘One must lose something to gain something.’ It mattered little that Sarva called him
anna
, knew Siva’s relatives in Negombo, or that Sarva’s brother was Siva’s friend. The discount Deva had wrangled from Siva actually seemed to cause some resentment. ‘The money won’t go far,’ he would often say. ‘Your brother thinks I owe him something, but expenses are going up, so I’ll do what I can.’

On his ninth or tenth move, emboldened by some others who were openly accusing Siva of fraud, Sarva demanded to know the larger plan. It had been five months, about time he gave up on the futile formality.

‘I’m trying my best, you ingrates!’ Siva said. The Mexico–US border was heavily manned and he hadn’t found a coyote, one of the Mexican people-smugglers he could pay to take them around the checkpoints, walk them across the Arizona desert, and put them in a shelter from where agents would take them to claim asylum. The US anti-smuggling laws and Arizona state’s aggressive anti-immigration policies had hardened criminal penalties for smuggling, and to compensate for the risk, coyotes were demanding 3,500 dollars, twice the amount Siva had accounted for in the fee he charged Sarva and the others.

The room was quiet. The migrants had not imagined such a dangerous journey. The hundreds of miles of physical barriers, security infrastructure and highway checkpoints along the US–Mexico border left only the southwest desert as the entry point. But the scorching, waterless desert itself was a daunting natural barrier: about 250 people died every year crossing it. There was a slim chance of making it across even with the coyotes, and going without them would be suicide. Until the men coughed up more money to pay the smugglers, Siva said, they would stay in Latin America, constantly moving base to avoid suspicion.

Siva’s self-importance was grating, but this was the first nugget of real information. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t send you to the places in South America where you could get shot,’ said Siva. ‘But
veliyila pona, ponathu thaan
.’ If you go out, you’re gone.

‘Where are we going next?’ Sarva asked.

‘Peru. To a town just across the border.’

Pucallpa was a bustling modern town with a broad brown river, but Sarva’s gang was taken straight to a shantytown on its edge. Here they were handed over to a stocky middle-aged Tamil man who wore faux gold chains and oversized football jerseys, like the rappers in Carmel’s YouTube videos. The fat rolls on his neck glistened with sweat. He was one of Siva’s senior chaps, in charge of receiving new men or taking some away every few days. To any questions from the men, he never said more than ‘I will have to ask Siva.’ The chap existed for this reason, to be the dampening buffer between the agent and the hopefuls. He had a room in the same house, where he spent the nights with several women he called his girlfriends. The younger men were impressed, but Sarva was sick to his stomach. His disdain built up for weeks till it exploded in a string of accusations: ‘You act like this is a hotel and you’re on vacation! This is a brothel for you! You forbid us to call our families and you are not even working on our situation.’ The chap left the house with a smirk and didn’t bring food or water for four days.

When he punished them, Sarva thought, it was to rub in their powerlessness. Everyone in the house had paid millions. Immigration was a transaction, but the chap treated them like they had been trafficked for prostitution. ‘Our madam,’ someone called him on those hungry days, and the name stuck.

A little over a month later, Sarva and two others were picked to leave. The chap boarded a bus with them. Sarva read the board, but the name didn’t mean anything to him. When the bus reached its final stop after a day’s journey, the chap asked them to wait till after midnight for their next step.

At two in the morning, he started to walk and the others followed. They reached a wide highway and skulked along the dry undergrowth at its side. ‘A few kilometres down is the unpatrolled section,’ the chap said, where they would cross the border.

‘To where?’ someone hissed.

The chap pointed to the darkness beyond. ‘Ecuador. It’s that country.’ Sarva had not heard of it. ‘Just remember you don’t have
a visa,’ the chap said. ‘So if someone comes to check, be
paavam
, innocent, say you’re lost.’

It seemed like a lame excuse, one the border police might have scoffed at a hundred times. But they nodded; they had no other plan. Perhaps they would take a flight to America from Ecuador, Sarva thought. He would call his mother and Malar from there.

He made it across to Ecuador without incident, but for another month he continued to take buses, cross highways, run across fields in a mad scramble, crawl under barbed-wire fences and jump borders between Ecuador, Peru and Brazil. Throughout this time, he was unable to call home. In Peru, he fell down a flight of stairs and hurt his back again, ran out of money, and even got mugged. In Ecuador one night, gun-toting thugs looking for Siva broke down the door of the abandoned restaurant where they were sleeping. They shouted abuse in a blend of Spanish and English, saying over and over that that bastard Siva owed them money, that they would cut all their balls off if they didn’t tell them where he was hiding. None of the boys knew where Siva was, but they were gagged and tied, thrown in the back of a car, and abandoned in a dumpster. Later that night, when Siva rescued them, the petrified young men rained abuse on him, but he was unmoved. All he said was that he would send them somewhere safer.