The Seasons of Trouble (5 page)

The girls were screaming in Tamil, except for one, who was repeating the word
epa
like a loud and shrill chant. That was not how the Sinhala word was usually used, but it was an expression Mugil had often heard Sinhalese policemen and the army lob at civilians.
Epa
! when they didn’t want you to sell apples by the road in Jaffna.
Epa
! when you tried to drive on at the checkpoint at Vavuniya.
Epa
! Don’t! The girl’s voice seemed to ring through all of Kilinochchi. But through the shelling, bombing and chorus of wailing in the forest, no one would hear. Mugil had grown up with war since she was a teenager, but this moment was unlike anything she had experienced before. This latest phase in the conflict had begun two years ago, when the Tigers had forcefully closed the sluice gates of the Mavil Aru waterway on the east coast, cutting off the water supply to some 15,000 villages. In response, the Sri Lankan air force had attacked the Tiger bases. At the time, Mugil had assumed it to be just another stage in the twenty-six-year-long cycle of attacks and counter-attacks between the Sinhalese armed forces and the Tamil Tigers. She had gone about her life unbothered, until August 2008, when the LTTE had sent her to the field after almost a decade of injury-induced retirement. Now, the entire might of the Sri Lankan armed forces, led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, was engaged with the LTTE across the north and the east. From the unprecedented brutality around her, one thing was clear: the army wasn’t just attacking the military might of the LTTE. It was laying siege to the idea of the Tamil homeland, the very inspiration behind the Tigers’ leadership.

MUGIL
’
S FATHER HAD
always said that in Sri Lanka there were some districts where the army or government could not hurt even a Tamil fly: Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, part of Mannar, north Vavuniya, and southern Jaffna—collectively the Vanni. It was the core of the area separatists marked out as Eelam, the separate Tamil homeland that was the dream of most Tamils and the sworn goal of the Tigers. Tamils came to these places to escape the army on the eastern and northern coasts, or the Sinhalese mobs rioting in Colombo and Nuwara Eliya. Here, they hoped, the armed Tamils would shield them from the armed Sinhalese. Her father would say this with dramatic emphasis, bringing his right index finger and thumb together with a tiny gap that represented the Vanni’s Tamil fly protected by the Tigers.

As a teen forced to move to the Vanni, Mugil had suspected that this was her father’s way of talking up their thatched hut and searing-hot village, named Puthukudiyirippu, or new settlement. She was twelve when they moved there, leaving their harbour-view house in breezy Point Pedro after shrapnel started flying in through the windows. They had left in a rush, but since her mother had packed only two sets of clothes for each of them, Mugil had assumed they would return soon. As they fled, she had seen her first bomb crater: a giant elephant footprint on their street.

They’d taken a shaky crowded boat from across the Kilali lagoon and disembarked at Kilinochchi, where they’d stayed with relatives. Then all of them, including the relatives, had walked for two days to Puthukudiyirippu. It was just a shrubby jungle then, with hundreds of people flowing in like an infestation of ants.

The heat had been unbearable. Mugil was not considered fair-skinned unless compared with her sisters, but the harsh Vanni sun seemed to take that as a challenge. She watched her skin gradually burn to an even coffee char, the hair on her legs grow thicker, and the soil coat her toenails with a permanent shade of rust. Even before she had fully comprehended the place, it had entered her skin and made her one of its own. Like most others who thronged the town then, Mugil’s family never left. PTK, as they called it, became home.

Life in the Vanni was an odd combination of freedom and scarcity. They had government post offices and public phones, but except for some Tiger officials, no one had personal satellite or radio telephones. People had plenty of access to food, but because cattle herding was sometimes a border security issue between the Tiger- and government-controlled areas, milk was generally available only in powder form. Many families had bicycles and some had motorbikes, but since fuel was heavily rationed, they often rigged the latter to run on kerosene.

The Tigers—alternatively called the Eelam Movement—became the biggest employers in the region, hiring people for their courts, cooperative societies, banks, vegetable farms, orchards and teak plantations, to work in publishing, filmmaking and engineering, to fish and to drive. If you were a cadre, the movement took care of everything, from your underwear to your housing, and provided for your family if you died in battle. People who established their own shops or garages paid sales taxes to the movement. The Sri Lankan government still ran the schools, registrars, hospitals and ration shops, and these somehow coexisted with the Eelam institutions.

The movement leaders wanted a Tamil homeland in which no one would starve, beg or steal. Thieves were rare in the Vanni, not only because people had few possessions but also because a burglar nabbed by the Tigers’ blue-uniformed police would get a public flogging. Within a few months of moving to PTK, Mugil saw a man paraded through the streets: he wore a garland of soiled shoes and slippers, was naked except for briefs, and his head was shorn so badly it was covered in bloody nicks. He’d been caught stealing jewellery from a house. Mugil wasn’t allowed to join the crowd that followed the shamefaced man, but her brother and father went. At dinner that night, they reported seeing the burglar tied to a lamppost and whipped with a belt. On the way to school the next day, Mugil took a detour to see the scene for herself. The man’s body slumped from the lamppost; he had been beaten to death. A woman, perhaps his mother, sat at his feet, staring blankly into the distance. Mugil had run home crying. When she described what she had seen, her mother said, ‘But you are never going to face this situation. No, Mugil? That treatment is only for the bad guys.’

The Tigers controlled everything from discipline to food supply to mobility; but unlike Colombo residents who lived in dread of suicide bombs and air raids, most Vanni Tamils did not consider the militants a presence to fear in the initial years of the movement. Then, the Vanni’s people revelled in their relative freedom, and relished promises of more to come. In contrast to the Sinhalese-dominated south, where language parity was the law but not the practice, here everyone on the streets and in the offices spoke, read and wrote Tamil. Vanni Tamils felt no language-based anxiety about going to the police, politicians or government agencies; miscommunication and discrimination were not everyday experiences as they were for Tamils living in the rest of the island. Only a handful here even spoke Sinhala, the national language and the only official one until 1987. Few had even met a Sinhalese person other than the occasional government official.

Here they were among their own. Within these borders, unlike in the Sri Lankan nation, Tamils were the dominant community. In this forested bubble, people largely lived in thatched huts. But they had aspirations, and indeed were confident of equalling Singapore’s enviable economic growth, India’s cultural vibrancy, and Europe’s standard of living.

The Vanni was as much a safe house as a battlefield. By the time she was thirteen, Mugil had learnt that if you heard a howl from the sky, you scurried into the six-by-fourteen-foot bunker in your compound. If you saw streaks of smoke in the air every few days, it would be wise to move several kilometres elsewhere. If the LTTE radio channel announced an expected air raid or there was a siren, parents scooped up their children and fled to the nearest village. They locked their houses and buried their jewellery, expecting to return in a few weeks. Running away never got easier, but it did become routine.

And in September 2008, that is exactly what the people in Kilinochchi did. They evacuated all the villages around the town, from Akkarayankulam in the south to Paranthan on the other side of the highway. By October, Kilinochchi town stood empty. Whole neighbourhoods had gathered their essentials in plastic bags and bedspreads and were now fleeing east from the approaching Sri Lankan army.

Cowering behind the tree’s foliage, Mugil thought of her husband Divyan, who would be on the field somewhere, driving the cadre around. How he could be working she didn’t know. No one seemed to know whether they were coming or going. Several Tiger high commanders had surrendered to the army, and it was nerve-wracking to keep track of who was trustworthy and who was playing double agent. The counter-attacks, too, seemed vastly disproportionate. One time, Mugil counted the army shoot sixty rounds in reply to a single round of fire from the Tigers.

Her parents were still in PTK. She had been meaning to find out if they were safe; they were also looking after her two sons, whom she hadn’t seen in weeks. Maran was three and wouldn’t miss her, but Tamizh was barely two. He would bawl if she were gone for more than a few days.

How much might these girls’ parents worry about them? Mugil could still hear them screaming and there was nothing she could do. Through the rain-drenched leaves, she watched an army boy snap off the girls’ cyanide capsules from around their necks. Another shorter man rammed the butt of his rifle into a girl’s hip. As she clutched it and crumpled to the ground in pain, he kicked dry leaves and sand into her face. The front of his boot hit her nose. Writhing in pain, the girl folded her hands towards him. But he was already unzipping himself and pushed her on her back. Mugil looked away. The girls were only as old as she had been when she joined the Tigers, perhaps younger.

ONE AFTERNOON IN
1993, when Mugil was thirteen, her school cancelled the after-lunch classes. Some athletic-looking men and women, wearing long untucked black shirts and trousers, walked into her class. They advised the students to get good grades, and joked about the rotund headmistress. Mugil stared at them in awe, knowing they were the Liberation Tigers.

When they’d lived in Point Pedro, Mugil had only heard about these people. Her father had owned a press there, and he printed pamphlets and notices for the Tigers. He also drove his minivan for them, distributing printed material and other goods to Jaffna,
where most of the Eelam groups were then based. He didn’t talk about it after they moved to PTK, but Mugil knew that her father had also worked for the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam, another militant group. In the late eighties, he had escaped to India for a few years when the LTTE was rooting out and killing those loyal to other militant Tamil groups. Her mother had even ordered the children not to speak to anyone about their father’s job or his whereabouts. A middle schooler then, Mugil had been amazed that there were people even her father feared.

Having moved to PTK, Mugil understood his feelings. There was a perfection to the Tigers, a confidence and sincerity that commanded respect even from people much older than the combatants. When her family reached the Vanni, starving, confused and petrified, the Tiger cadres led them to safety. They taught them to build underground bunkers in their home premises and held survival drills in her school. Despite the government’s blocking supplies of essentials into the Vanni, the Tigers had managed to smuggle Coca-Cola there. They had guns attached to their hips, but they spoke respectfully even to children. The girls rode motorcycles and wore jeans; they could stand up to any man. A few months into her life in PTK, Mugil started to wave to the older girls when they passed by on bicycles or motorbikes; when the
akkas
waved back or smiled, it made her day.

The Tigers were young, but it was clear to Mugil that they had seen blood and war and knew how to deal with the Sinhalese and Indian soldiers, who seemed to want to eradicate all Sri Lankan Tamils. They would lay their lives down to protect their community. Some people whispered that the Tigers also took lives as easily, but Mugil agreed with those who said that there was no other way this fight could be won. It had to be all or nothing. You couldn’t create a separate country by requesting the existing government cede it—otherwise, the old
satyagraha
politicians would have already created an Eelam.