The Seasons of Trouble (8 page)

The men were still speaking. ‘You have false teeth. You are a spy. You know Sinhala, Tamil and English. How can you not be a spy?’

Sarva couldn’t find any meaning to stitch their words together. Everything seemed false and simultaneously true. They were repeating things, changing tiny facts here and there, alleging massive things, screaming, beating. Every time he said, ‘It is not me,
ayya
!’ the baton came down. The pain was one thing, but the fear befuddled him, made him unsure of what to confess and what to deny.

After what felt like hours, the men left. Before bolting the metal door, one of them said, ‘Think about what you’re going to say to us when we come back.’

Sarva considered saying yes to everything. But he wasn’t sure that would improve his standing with the men. They wanted him
to plead guilty so that they could beat him some more, with more reason, greater moral superiority. He didn’t want to end up like Kanthan, who had experienced the cowardly shame of accepting all accusations, being spat upon and losing a thumb in the bargain. If the judge had not acquitted him of all charges, his friend would now be rotting in jail, losing more fingers. But even after his release, Kanthan had to be on the run. The court’s verdict meant nothing to the cops; it was as if being outside the legal limits of custody, investigation and trials freed the Terrorist Investigation Department to attack Kanthan more severely. Prison might be safer than this secret place. But he wasn’t sure that pleading guilty would keep him alive long enough to see the courts. He reminded himself of the things he should not utter.

After some time the men returned. One of them ran at him like a cricket bowler and kicked him in the groin.

They asked why Sarva had only fourteen numbers in his mobile phone. ‘That must mean you have all the other numbers of your contacts in your head. You must have memorised them all.’ A boot cracked into his face. His mouth filled with blood and he passed out.

He came to with a tight slap to his cheek. Before the high-pitched ringing in his ears subsided, his blindfold was ripped off and a plastic bag pulled down over his head. It was drenched in petrol. Someone tied a rope around his neck, and shook his head hard as if to swirl the petrol around. The fumes funnelled into his nose. Sarva gasped and tried to suck air with his mouth, but that made the fumes sting his trachea. He felt his legs thrash about and flashes of light sliced his head. His eyes were on fire. He was sure all of this meant death.

Finally they took the bag off and left him.

Every few hours, some men returned. They asked him the same questions and he gave the same answers. The petrol bag reappeared. He tried to figure it out, learn to breathe in it, but there was nothing intelligence or patience could do when petroleum flooded your insides.

He was losing track of time, of their words, and where the batons and boots landed on his body. Sometimes he fainted. He pleaded for water, but wasn’t given any. The thirst made Sarva retch. Some
bile spilled out. He cried, and worried that his tears would finally kill him.

If the white van hadn’t got him, he would have been in Greece, in the harbour of Piraeus he’d heard so much about—a place that deserved to be called foreign. What would Athens smell like? Of baked bread or perhaps freshly tarred roads. It would be a vision of valour, power, gladiators.

Sarva had grown up believing that the ghost of one who died unnaturally roamed the earth as an
aavi
, a translucent spirit that held life memories. He felt his
aavi
would surely go to Greece if he thought about it in his final moments. He would like that. Or perhaps he would be happier taking the bus up the tea-leaved hills to his home in Nuwara Eliya, a cool mist spraying gently across his face.

SARVA
’
S BODY, PERHAPS
the only thing he had built himself and treasured, had betrayed him, giving his tormentors power over him. If only he could have willed his spine to be unbreakable, instead of aiding them in shattering his resolve.

He felt daylight piercing his cornea. Against the light stood a uniformed man. Sarva tried to focus on the badge. Silva. He found himself seated at a table opposite Silva.

The inspector set a glass of water down. Sarva’s handcuffs were taken off to let him drink. They were in a different room now, and through the window was a clear sky.

The inspector pointed to a man in the corner of the room, near the open window.

‘Identify him.’

Sarva looked. The man was short, thin, clean-shaven. He was looking at the floor.

‘I don’t know him at all,’ Sarva said.

‘Really? In 1997, did you not learn Sinhala from him?’

Sarva turned to the floor-gazing man again. He asked for more water. He insisted he had never seen the man before. ‘I learnt Sinhala because I lived in the hills. Because I was in Colombo. Because … I just learnt it,
ayya
. Even my mother knows it.’

‘Does your mother know you were in the LTTE?’

Sarva looked at his interrogator. He was a hefty man. The light from the window behind him gave his balding head a halo but blurred his features. All the earlier baton-wielding men had been leading up to this one. Silva spoke in an unhurried manner, like he could do this, play this game, forever.

Faced with this man, Sarva felt sure his body would shame him with its fragility. All he could control now was his own mind. He had worked to predict the cops’ moves, to guess where they would aim their boots or batons. He tried to remember pictures of men showing their scars in Tamil newspapers. Which blow left which mark? But this was pointless. He could not run, he could not dodge, and with handcuffs and no food, he definitely could not defend himself. He would succumb soon, and his back would break. Paralysis? Death? What was in store for him? After the petrol bags, his eyes seemed to both shoot flames and swim in darkness. He thought he heard his baby nephew in the room, the experience so real he could smell a baby scent. His own childhood returned to him in flashes: the day he caught a chameleon and put it on different coloured surfaces to watch its skin adapt. Lights and colours appeared at unpredictable moments, swirling forms that seemed to draw him into exhaustion, into a state of half-life. He was drowning in waves of consciousness; he had to get a grip before he went insane. He had to focus his mind, rein in his fear, vaporise the pain.

He found himself, to his own surprise, thinking of God. Oh well, if that was what his mind wanted. He prayed quietly, trying to recall the words he used to utter as a boy when dragged to the Navali temple. ‘The words will cast a
kavacham
, a protective armour around you,’ his grandfather would explain. ‘You will be like Superman, strong. No harm will come to you.’ Sometimes the sacred words came to Sarva. More often he just thought of that moment in the temple when, after all the rituals and must dos, he sat quietly with his grandfather by the mossy temple tank. He focussed on the reassuring taste of the
prasadam
they ate: usually sliced bananas with coconut shavings and jaggery, and the distinct whiff of
tulasi
that made this taste holy.

Silva told Sarva to stand up and bend with his stomach on the table. Even before he was fully down, the baton landed behind his knees, making him buck, throwing his head back. Another officer then cracked his forehead with a pistol. When he fell on his knees, they hit the soles of his feet. Again, when his head flew up, they went for his face. A man swinging at each end, like a morbid seesaw.

As he sobbed on the floor, Silva paced in front of him. ‘Let me tell you a story.’

Before he had joined the Terrorist Investigation Department or TID, he said, he had been in the army’s intelligence wing. A regular military man, just following orders. It was wartime, but there were rules. Rules the LTTE broke first, he growled. He talked for a while about the LTTE taking him prisoner during the battle for Jaffna town in 1994, and torturing him. He had pleaded that he would cooperate, would tell them what they wanted to know, but they had still beaten him. He said they called him and his people ‘savages’. Then moving suddenly closer to Sarva’s face, he said, almost smiling, deliberately emphasising each word, ‘You people only taught us all this. So don’t lie to me.’

Sarva kept silent. He hung on Silva’s every word, trying to figure out what the story meant for him. He did not know if he believed the commander, but he was sure this elaborate monologue was leading somewhere horrible.

That same day, more thrashings later, Silva brought a pistol and threw it on the table. ‘Didn’t you have this in Colombo?’ he asked. Sarva shook his head. Silva goaded him, ‘You know how to use it, I know. Pick it up, let’s see.’

Sarva did not touch the gun. That would be all the evidence they needed, a weapon with his fingerprints on it.

In between bouts of violence and interrogation, Silva sometimes stroked Sarva’s head paternally. ‘Please understand,
putha
,’ he would say, almost apologetically in Sinhala. ‘Help me do my job, son. Don’t you want to see your family?’

That evening, some men dragged a limp and half-conscious Sarva out of the building to a deserted seaside location. From the raised embankment, he saw the harbour across the sea wall; groups
of seamen worked by the sides of ships, hauling ropes. Where he stood, the sand was hollowed by a jagged rock. His eyes burned from the petrol bag, and everything he saw appeared smoky. Then the inspector stood before him, seeming to materialise from the haze. He pushed Sarva down till his bare knees fell on the rock. Silva put a gun to Sarva’s head. It was the first time a firearm had been aimed at him since he had been taken.

Silva said he could kill Sarva right now and throw the body into the sea. ‘You will be finished,’ he said.

To Sarva, it seemed like salvation.

AT AROUND SUNSET
—perhaps on the same day the gun was pointed at him, perhaps the next—a constable led Sarva back to the lonely basement. By this time, his left foot was almost useless, and Sarva needed to put his arm around the constable and drag himself forwards. It was slow going, and they stopped often to catch their breath. They had just reached the ground floor corridor when they ran into a white man with a bag stuffed with files.

The cop accompanying Sarva froze. His free hand twirled with the English question before he asked it. ‘Hello? Permission?’

The white man nodded calmly. His shirtsleeves were rolled up in typical Sri Lankan style, perfect to keep sticky sweat out of the crooks of arms. His beige chinos were wrinkled. He wouldn’t have inspired a second look if not for the circumstances in which he had been spotted. His so very white and untimely presence in the police station and his possession of who-knew-what files would make any cop break into a flop sweat.

‘Office closed, sir,’ the policeman stammered. He seemed undecided about whether to intimidate this intrusive foreigner or to be cautiously nice to him. Finally, he stretched his lips in a fake smile and said, ‘Sir, you wait, okay?’ and ran towards the office.

When he was out of sight, the white man walked closer to Sarva and, unexpectedly, addressed him in rapid Tamil.

‘Don’t worry. I’m with the ICRC?’ Sarva had heard of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The man continued, ‘I was told by a prisoner I met here earlier that you were brought four
days ago. He saw the sacred thread on your hand and recognised you as a Tamil.’

Sarva’s frayed sacred thread had been on his right wrist since the previous year. His aunt had tied one for him at home, praying for his employment and divine protection. It had been bright red then. It was a dirty yellow now.

‘I speak Tamil, you can talk to me,’ said the white man, in case Sarva hadn’t cottoned on.

This had to be either a trap or a dream. Sarva wasn’t sure how to respond. Had it really been only four days since this madness began?

The man touched his arm. He said he didn’t need to ask if they were torturing him. ‘I can see it. But did they arrest you?’

Sarva said he didn’t know.

‘Okay, how did you get here?’