The Seasons of Trouble (47 page)

Politicians from the Tamil National Alliance, the most prominent coalition of Tamil parties, however, countered that many more Sinhalese had now returned than had left, and that the Colombo analogy was disingenuous. Tamils there didn’t get allotted land or houses from the state as the Sinhalese did in the north.

There was an avalanche of land disputes in the local courts. Some challenged the new Sinhalese takeover of Tamil land, but a majority of ownership claims were against the military. As the war wheeled to a finish in the summer of 2009, sixteen of the nineteen brigades of the Sri Lankan armed forces—more than 100,000 troops—were stationed in the north-east, mostly on the Jaffna peninsula. To accommodate them in high-security zones, land had been commandeered from Tamil civilians without consent, due process or compensation. Close to one-fifth of the Jaffna peninsula was now occupied by the armed forces, while the land claimants were sent to thorny forests or shabby refugee camps.

By mid-2012, thousands of Tamils were protesting this indiscriminate land grab. As the military expanded, Mugil, like thousands of others, found that she had no claim over her property. When some refugees were permitted to settle in uncontested parts of PTK, her family wondered if they, too, should try to recover their land. Mugil was against it—for a few months now, she had been thinking about the missed boat to India, wondering if staying had been her worst decision ever. She had made her peace with not going back to PTK; she did not know of a single case of a Tamil successfully claiming land back from the military. Amuda, too, said she had neither the resources nor the energy to start again. As the eldest in the family, Mother advised that they ‘let it be’.

Divyan promptly disregarded their advice. He was tired of manual labour and had failed to find a driving job. Seeing other families apply for permission to cultivate their land, he wanted to follow suit. Prashant was the only one to support him. Mugil suspected that her brother meant to use their land as collateral for a loan. Prashant wanted to emigrate to Saudi Arabia with three of his friends on fake passports, and needed to pay the agent in advance before his planned departure in November 2012.

When they were alone, Mugil warned Divyan about Prashant’s plans, but he wasn’t worried. ‘He can have any designs on the land he wants. We don’t have to think about that,’ he said. ‘I just want to go back home.’

She asked him not to be nostalgic. ‘PTK will not be the place we knew. You will not be able to bear it.’

‘We can build it up slowly. It’s not like we are strangers to hardship.’

Mugil reminded Divyan that they had bought the plot in 2005. ‘What if the government says that it is not legitimate?’

Divyan twirled his hand in a ‘what to do’.

‘What if there is a Sinhalese family on our land? Or some army camp?’

‘
Che che
, nothing like that will happen.’

It had happened to almost everyone they knew. A few of Mugil’s acquaintances from near Nilaveli in the east had complained to the district officer that Sinhalese families had unlawfully occupied
their land—in a village where Tamils were excluded. The officer said the new colony was legal. The divisional secretary had assigned plots of land for cultivation and residence to the Sinhalese families, following orders from the Eastern Province governor, a former military general. In Mannar in the west, too, when 285 Tamil families were displaced from Mullikulam village in 2008, navy officers had moved in, and subsequently their families. When the refugees protested this illegal takeover in 2009, a few were offered compensation and replacement homes elsewhere, but their access to the sea and to their fertile ancestral farms was lost.

‘We’re not special, you know,’ Mugil told Divyan.

‘Since when did you start giving up without even trying? Is it not worth trying?’

Mugil didn’t reply. Her hopes were frayed, but she didn’t want to dash his.

Divyan wrote to the village officers in both Point Pedro and PTK, giving the address of their plot of land. A couple of weeks later, at the Vavuniya revenue office, an official told him that no land documents remained for the area; the Tigers had burned all the records for the Mullaitivu district. The government had also issued a land circular ordering that land lost during the conflict would be used for security purposes and ‘development activities’. As Mugil had feared, any purchase or sale made during the conflict was considered void and made ‘under terrorist influence’. The officer said that if Divyan had any of his own government-certified records, perhaps some appeal could be made in court. Otherwise the land would be deemed unclaimed. The new records would say the owners were not traceable.

‘But we’re claiming it now!’ Prashant shouted. ‘How can you say there is no owner when we are standing in front of you?’

The officer said these were his instructions. Unless there was proof of ownership, the government would keep the land.

Divyan looked askance at the officer. Their family had left everything behind, including their documents, when they ran from place to place in the war zone. As the officer turned to the person waiting behind them in line, Prashant’s frustration boiled over. He pounded the desk, shouting abuse at the Tamil official, calling him
a lapdog of the president. Some other disgruntled petitioners in the queue joined in, venting their anger.

Divyan expected to be thrown out, but the officials paid little attention, looking as if their mouths were sewn shut. They were powerless against the will of the military and the regime. Prashant’s was surely not the first tantrum they had seen. With no written record, Divyan was just one among hundreds of thousands who had been kicked off their own land. He was not special.

WHEN HE GOT
home, Mugil did not ask Divyan how it went at the revenue office. Instead, the next day, she told him that Sangeeta had decided to move to India. Some days later, Mugil said she had contacted an uncle in Chennai in southern India and he had invited them to visit. A few weeks later, she said the uncle was ready to put their family up for a few months should they want to move there. If they wanted to stay in the government-run refugee camps for Sri Lankan Tamils in Tamil Nadu state, the uncle advised they go to Trichy, where the tents were kept in better shape.

Divyan was unresponsive to these hints, so Mugil finally asked him directly: did he want to leave Sri Lanka?

‘Leave here?’ Divyan asked. ‘Permanently?’

She told him it had been a recurring thought ever since the military had taken over school administration. She wanted a different childhood for her sons, one that did not involve the normalisation of guns and armies. India, easily reached by boat and just half an hour’s flight away, was the only foreign country they could afford to emigrate to. Divyan knew all this; they had talked about it under fire at the Mullivaikal lagoon. Their future was no more certain now, but at least the family was together, in one place. She wanted to revisit the idea.

‘You’re the one who didn’t want to go last time,’ Divyan said.

‘Everything has changed,’ she said. Couldn’t he at least think about it?

They had only received their new Sri Lankan IDs the previous month, he pointed out.

‘I don’t feel connected to this anymore,’ she replied, pointing to
the ground. With the last patch of her beloved hometown snatched from her, she was living in someone else’s house, in someone else’s country.

Some nights later, when Maran and Tamizh were asleep in their parents’ laps, Divyan said he was ready. ‘We will have to borrow a lot of money somehow,’ he said. But his face glowed. ‘I have heard that the Srirangam temple near Trichy is beautiful.’

27.

November 2012

WHILE SARVA SERVED
his jail time for entering the United Kingdom illegally, his immigration lawyer applied to the UK Border Agency on his behalf. Wheels turned to start his asylum process, and after two months and four days of incarceration, he was released.

He was driven to a refugee facility in Cardiff, Wales. When Sarva asked where that was, the van driver pointed to a picture of Princess Diana on his dashboard.

‘Diana, do you know?’

Sarva nodded, he did.

‘She was the Princess of Wales. I will show you the castle on the way.’

Sadly, the castle was behind an enormous stone wall, but the Cardiff Sarva saw through the van window intrigued him. The capital city of Wales was quaint and bustling with tourists and students. On signs outside pubs, offices and shops was the image of a red dragon standing on its hind limbs, clawing the air with its right front paw. If it held a sword, he thought, it would look uncannily like the Sri Lankan flag’s golden lion, the symbol of Sinhalese pride. He stared at the street names—they had English lettering but he was unable to read them. ‘What is that?’ he asked, pointing to CAERDYDD.

‘It’s Welsh for Cardiff,’ the driver explained. ‘In Wales, the language is Welsh.’

‘Wales is not England?’

‘No!’ The driver laughed. ‘And don’t you dare call a Welshman an Englishman!’

Sarva was impressed—he had assumed everyone in the UK spoke English. ‘Then this place is like Jaffna in my country,’ he told the driver. ‘I am from Sri Lanka, but I speak Tamil, you know.’ The driver, who worked for the agency, said he had driven hundreds of asylum seekers from a dozen countries, and he rarely met a Sri Lankan who was not Tamil.

The driver dropped Sarva off at Lynx House, a transitional shelter for asylum seekers. As he shouted ‘Good luck!’ and drove away, Sarva decided that when—if—he settled down in the UK, he would drive a taxi for a living. The roads in this country were silk.

The sheer number of refugees at Lynx House astounded Sarva. In jail, he had met thieves, burglars, chronic violators of traffic regulations, trespassers and other petty criminals. But here was a horde of the biggest rule breakers: men and women who had shed their citizenship to creep across the border of a developed nation. In every room, brown, black, white people sat: a country of outsiders, their eyes shining with immigrant hope. How many nations had given them reason to flee to this alien land? What were their wars? Whatever they had run from, here they could count on three meals a day at the canteen, TV programmes in the common area, health care at the nurse’s station. Sarva had expected competition among the refugees, like hundreds of creatures converged around a shrinking watering hole. Instead, he felt camaraderie.

Sarva shared room 113 with four others. Prathipan, a diffident thirty-six-year-old plantation Tamil from Sri Lanka, was a handsome hypochondriac with a propensity for marathon naps. His sinuses were agitated by winter and summer alike, and the joke in their room was that Prathipan was born wearing his turtleneck sweater. He soon became Sarva’s wingman and confidant.

His second roommate, a gaunt Pakistani farmer with endless legs, had two unpronounceable
q
s in his name; Sarva just called him Pakistani. He was in many ways Prathipan’s opposite. He
was never in the room, rarely wore more than a shirt and trousers even on the coldest of days, and resisted Sarva’s boyish charm. They conversed in broken English, neither much bothered by their incomplete understanding of each other. There were two more refugees sharing the room—a gay student from Libya and a middle-aged Chinese man—but both were moved to another location before Sarva had been there two weeks. For days after they were gone, Sarva kept up the crude mockery of an imaginary character that was a combination of their former roommates: a gay Chinese man. It was this running joke that would eventually win Pakistani’s affection.

During his twenty-eight days at Lynx House, Sarva befriended five other Pakistanis and a Sinhalese couple with a toddler. Sarva was surprised about the latter. Why would a Sinhalese man want to leave a nation that was tailor-made for him? In time, he found out: the Sinhalese husband was a vernacular journalist who had been threatened for writing pieces critical of the government. The last article had been on the demolition of mosques and churches by a new hard-line Sinhala Buddhist group called Bodu Bala Sena. As a devout Buddhist himself, he had written about his shame when Buddhist monks had attacked people of other faiths. The police had raided his house, and a few weeks later he had left Sri Lanka with his wife and child. Sarva liked the couple but he didn’t bring up his own reasons for leaving.

The canteen was Sarva’s classroom for learning about life in the UK: he could drink cold water but not hot water straight out of the taps. He learnt to chew with his mouth closed and eat dinner at six thirty in the evening, not nine. To fit in at the dining table, he tried to master cutlery. It was embarrassing when a European child smiled to see him slyly use his left index finger to nudge the last of his peas onto his spoon. Shoes were not taken off at the door and were even permitted on the sofa. He discovered the power of ‘please’, ‘would you’ and ‘thank you’. Accompanied by a smile, these words worked like magic on the icy administrators of Lynx House. In his room, however, Sarva lived as he always had: barefoot, speaking loudly and sitting cross-legged on the floor. He missed home for its small freedoms.