The Seasons of Trouble (9 page)

He briefly described being whisked off the street.

‘So people at home don’t know where you are? Give me your home number, quick.’

Sarva reeled off his aunt’s Colombo landline number. ‘Please call my mother,’ he added. It was the first time since his arrest that he had thought of her.

The cop hadn’t returned, but the white man hurried away, muttering something about contacting the family.

That night in the locked basement of the TID, Sarva was occupied with thoughts of his mother. He couldn’t be sure how Amma would react to the news of his arrest. She would be worried, of course. But surely she would blame him, too. ‘What did you do?’ she might ask, as she used to when his grandfather or his aunts mockingly threatened to stop taking care of him. Everybody else had raised him, cajoled him, spoilt him, but Amma had the monopoly on scolding.

5.

July 2008

THE AMERICAN TOOK
one sip of the plain tea and set it aside. Pity, it was good tea. John had noticed too, and had already begun his spiel about how people abroad are probably used to a different Ceylon tea, a lighter one that came from the tiniest, youngest leaves sprouting at the tip of the shrubs. Their family always used tea dust, he was saying. He got five kilos free from the factory every month, you see. It had the strongest flavour.

The American smiled apologetically. He was sitting at the very edge of the sofa in Indra’s sister’s living room. ‘It’s just that I don’t take this much sugar,’ he said.

Oh, how good his Tamil was!
Seeni
, how he said it so sweetly. Unbelievable! If not for his extreme perspiration and red face, Indra would have thought this was a Burgher. The American had even known to take his shoes off before coming into the apartment.

Except for John, who was going on about Ceylon tea, everyone stared at the American in silence. After waiting eight days for news of her son, Indra could not bring herself to ask the questions she urgently wanted answered. Where had he seen him? How had he found him? What had happened?

She was hoping he would broach the subject. She asked him where he learnt Tamil.

‘I learnt on the job,’ he said. ‘I’m with the ICRC. Do you know it?’

John looked away. Indra nodded. ‘Red Cross, I know it; you give medicines, no?’

‘Yes, but as ICRC, we also work with war-affected people, prisoners, missing persons. You understand?’

‘Yes, my son is missing; we filed a police complaint,’ Indra said. ‘But, how did you find us—my number? You called me.’

‘Your son gave it to me. What is his name?’

‘You know my son, but you don’t know his name?’

Indra’s sister Rani interrupted with a bottle of Fanta. ‘You’ll have this, no? Since you’re not having tea.’ She poured the neon orange drink into a glass.

The American said he would start from the beginning. ‘When I went to the Harbour police station a week ago to visit some prisoners we work with, one of them tipped me off about a young man who was quickly hidden in the basement before I got there.’

‘What are you saying? The police have him? Why didn’t they tell us?!’

‘I don’t know yet—I just met your son. He was handcuffed.’

Indra’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Is he okay?’

‘I don’t know, he only had time to give me your number.’

John had walked out onto the balcony. Indra sat back in her chair, confused. The American was showing her a form, saying his organisation would keep an eye on her son. If things went well, he would arrange for her to meet him.

‘They haven’t followed procedure—they haven’t informed the family when he was arrested, and I don’t think they’ve put him on the records. That’s how they do it.’

‘Who?’

‘The TID, Terrorist Investigation Department. So first, we need to go ask them why they took your son.’

‘Then he can come home?’ Indra asked.

The American clicked his pen and looked at the form. ‘Shall we start from the beginning? What is your son’s full name?’

AFTER THE AMERICAN
’
S
visit, John returned to the Nuwara Eliya estate. When he left, he asked Indra if she’d be okay in Colombo’s summer heat. He could’ve said anything else—if she’d be okay dealing with the police alone, if she had enough money, if she’d prefer him to stay—but he had enquired about the weather. Indra told him she did not like wearing her sister Rani’s chiffon skirts, and that when he came next, he should bring her cotton ones.

Every morning, Indra stood on the balcony of Rani’s seventh-floor apartment in Wellawatte, staring at the top of the road as if at any moment her son might appear. Occasionally she ran through the kind of abuse she would rain on him when he turned up. She made a deal with Lord Pillaiyar that if her son returned unharmed, she would break 101 coconuts at the temple. Every day, she added another hundred.

Every form she filled in and every document she signed gave her the impression that she was inching closer to her son. But weeks went by. The American would help her, she knew, but she also understood that all he could do was make sure Sarva was not hidden from his family. The wait was tiring, but it seemed obscene to talk or think about anything else.

They’d all grown so independent, her sons, fashioning lives only loosely connected to hers. They had private jokes, secret friends, well-guarded pursuits of which she knew nothing. She, too, thought it best that way. It was daughters who had to be protected; sons had to be free. Otherwise they’d become weak mamma’s boys, as her brother had warned long ago.

But now Indra wondered if this moment she faced with Sarva, this black mark on their family, had come because she had at some point decided it was okay to look away. She had repeatedly pulled him out of the worst situations a Tamil boy could get into, but perhaps that wasn’t enough. For all the thoughts she wasn’t privy to, all the times she knew he had lied to her, all the missed opportunities, she felt an aching guilt.

She pulled out old photo albums to remember the children they had once been, easier to keep from harm. Most of them were black-and-white pictures of Deva, in the crib, in the rice-feeding ceremony, crawling, walking, crying at the ritual head-shaving,
going to school in uniform. Sarva’s pictures were only a handful, but all in colour: a posed family photo taken in a Negombo studio when he was barely a few days old, a fungus-infested picture with his grandparents in the Jaffna house, and a couple of passport-size photos taken in primary school. By the time Carmel, her last, was born, the family owned a Minolta camera, a gift from her brother, who had emigrated to America. These pictures were in full colour, from Carmel sleeping to his dribbling attempt to eat mangoes; from Carmel running in a temple to his riding an uncle like an elephant. Even her sister’s son Darshan, six years younger than Sarva, had baby photos from India, where they had stayed for a bit just after he was born and before his father left for Dubai. Of her grandchildren there were countless pictures, and more filed away on Deva’s laptop.

Of all her children, Sarva’s childhood had been the hardest to record. Her family had been uprooted again and again while he was growing up, their very existence then under question. How many times had she run with him from the battle and fire that raged around them—dangers from which she could not really protect him? They took photos to celebrate, document, and freeze moments worth remembering—but larger tragic events had upstaged so many of Sarva’s milestones. Most of his moments had been unphotographable, happening against a background one didn’t want to immortalise in a photograph and amid the disarray of their constant migration.

ABOUT A MONTH
after Sarva disappeared, someone who worked with the American’s office said they had received permission ‘for immediate family to visit the detainee’. Indra asked if she could take Sarva some food. She got his aunt Rani to make a fish curry the way he loved it. All her emotion, she invested in a lunchbox.

Early on 26 July 2008, Indra and Rani went to the Green Pass police station. They did not notice that it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the July 1983 riots.

In the police station, there were several others like them, the distinct dejection and confusion on their faces setting them apart
from other visitors. A social worker, a Tamil from a missing persons’ community group, accompanied them. He said Sarva was being brought here from Harbour police station.

At around four o’clock, a circle of policemen brought in a hunched man. He was handcuffed and seemed unable to walk. The policemen were dragging him slightly. When he lifted his eyes to look around, his swollen left eyelid stayed shut.

Indra rushed to him with a wail. Someone held her back and dragged them both to a bench in the corner. She was feeling everything but the relief she had anticipated for weeks.

‘What is this,
kanna …
?’ she asked, holding his hands. Sarva began to cry. She had brought him the lunchbox, but starvation did not seem to be her son’s biggest problem. There were cuts on his face, his hands were bruised, his eyes hardly opened. He was wearing a putrid shirt and someone else’s slippers. His feet were turned in.

‘Get me out, Amma,’ he said. ‘Help me.’

Indra looked at the police around her and shouted, ‘Are you animals?!’ They stared back blankly. Across the room, the social worker, who was riffling through some papers, motioned for her to calm down.

‘Get me out, Amma. I can’t bear this any longer,’ Sarva said.

She wiped his face with both hands, ran her fingers through his hair, and gently touched the gash on his cheekbone. ‘Are they hitting you?’

He looked at the floor.

‘What are they saying you have done?’

‘
Puli
.’

Indra breathed out in exasperation. ‘My son is not a
puli
! Catch the real Tigers!’ she shouted at the police in Tamil. She thought of how she had almost killed herself six years earlier trying to pull Sarva out from hell to avoid this backlash. But she did not mention it to the police—it would only make things worse.

‘Why are you catching my son?’ she yelled in Sinhala.

A constable walked towards them. ‘That’s enough, Amma,’ he said.

‘Amma, please,’ Sarva sobbed. ‘Just get me out. Please.’

They dragged him away, leaving Indra and the other parents stranded and disconsolate. Some of them were already asking the police when they could see their sons again. Without a word, everyone was handed more forms.

Indra was furious. She had not raised this child for twenty-eight years so that someone could burn his dreams down in a moment. She had never raised a hand to him, so who were these people to hit her son?

She began filling in a request for the next meeting. The American had explained to her that if Sarva were registered as a detainee, he would be safer. He would still be in prison but out of the secret basement at least.

Marshalling her limited Sinhala, more limited English and full religiosity for her son’s cause, Indra tried everything during the next few weeks. She needed to get him out, put him on record everywhere like the NGOs were saying. The government wanted to hide Sarva, make people forget him. But she loudly announced his absence from her life to everyone who would listen and many people who wouldn’t.

First, there was the police, but they sent her home with false assurances and insults. Then, the local politician, but he had her wait for three days on a promised appointment before leaving the country on holiday. So she wrote him a letter and left it at his office. She went to Sarva’s employers, the ship bosses. She got nothing better than a shrug, and was told they would provide any employment documents she wanted but no more. They advised her to find a lawyer.

The lady from the house at the top of the street told Indra to go to the Kali temple in Mayura Place every day and do an
archanai
there or make an offering of a dozen bananas to destroy the evil eye that afflicted her family. Another mother she met through the Red Cross told her to go to the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission and register a complaint. Indra didn’t ask her how she knew; anyone who was aware of that sort of thing would want to keep details to a minimum.