The Seasons of Trouble (4 page)

When John recounted this story, Indra realised that he was a plantation Tamil. She was a Jaffna Tamil, a community that had settled in Sri Lanka centuries ago, and the difference disturbed her. The boy she loved was a labourer. She thought plantation Tamils a poor, uneducated, uncultured lot. But the heroines in Tamil movies loved the handsome, good-hearted labourers, didn’t they? And whatever their status, John’s father was a doctor. That counted as a rise in class. But could her family accept him, his
background
? Perhaps she herself couldn’t. She continued to meet the tall boy with downcast eyes, though with growing trepidation.

After a few more clandestine meetings, however, Indra unearthed a golden nugget from John’s history. His mother belonged to the high-caste Vellalar subcommunity of Jaffna Tamils. This freed Indra
to imagine a marriage between them, it convinced her disapproving father, and it allowed their differences to—at least temporarily—melt away.

Even after their wedding, John continued to talk about his ancestors as indentured labourers, while Indra focussed on his high-caste mother and doctor father. It was as if they were speaking of two different families. So when Sarva played with the children of the tea pickers and Indra forbade him, John seethed but rarely argued. It had always been this way.

In the spirit of his birth sign, Sarva gave Indra several other things to worry about, too: hiding in the tea bushes, eating from the servant’s plate, going into the backyard to look for snakes—he was always doing what he was told not to do. Indra saw a quiet sureness in his actions, rather than defiance. He never sought permission or approval. Indra always rushed to his rescue, partly because she had never shaken off the feeling of dread that had entered her bones when she left Negombo.

That shiver of premonition meant that she was always expecting an imminent catastrophe. And this seemed to manifest itself in Sarva’s behaviour. He ate poorly and had stomach upsets. His asthma attacks began to hit at midnight. Indra became surer than ever that these were omens of what was to come.

LATE ONE JULY
morning in 1983, a few days after she returned from Negombo, Indra was alone at home in Nuwara Eliya with baby Sarva. John was in Hatton and would return later that week. As she was feeding the child, she heard a commotion down below, near the tea factory. She peeped out her door and heard a few workers shout that they’d seen four busloads of thugs driving towards the plantation. ‘They’re coming!’ they screamed.

It was finally happening. Indra had feared this ever since she had left her brother’s house. The feeling had been unshakable, especially when her nights were filled with flashes of the ugliness she had witnessed in Negombo.

She had spoken to no one about the sight of her brother being dragged out of his shop by sweating Sinhalese boys in T-shirts. They
had stripped him naked and beaten him with cricket bats. They burned his shop to the ground and strewed the stock on the road. Another mob broke into the house, too, but to Indra’s surprise, the Sinhalese neighbours smuggled her family and her brother’s out the back door in time to escape.

In the four days the neighbours helped to hide her family, they had exchanged few words. Soft
baila
from the local radio filled their silences, its good-natured thump-thumpity-thump at odds with the menace on the streets. At meals and before going to sleep, Indra’s family tuned into the news on BBC Ceylon. It said the Sinhalese mobs were furious about Tamil politicians demanding that a separate nation be carved out from Sri Lanka. Some other accounts said the mobs wanted revenge for the ambush of thirteen army soldiers by the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who were in turn responding to the Sinhalese police’s burning of the revered Jaffna Tamil library two years earlier.

The reports were guarded, and the reasons given for the violence seemed speculative. A week earlier, the government banned the press from reporting Tamil militant activities. So Indra and her family had not heard about the immediate reasons for this bloodlust. The Tigers’ number two, Seelan, had been killed in Meesalai in Jaffna in a shoot-out with the army. To avenge this, some of the other top leaders had detonated a powerful mine, killing the thirteen soldiers. Eight of the soldiers were under twenty years old.

The ping-pong of murder and counter-attacks in the north turned into mass killings in Colombo. The mobs targeted Tamils who lived among the Sinhalese: on Monday, they cornered and attacked the city-dwellers in Borella and Wellawatte, nestled between the sea and Colombo’s busiest bazaars; on Tuesday, it was Kandy, where a deputy inspector general spotted goons with short army crew cuts; on Wednesday, it was Badulla and Negombo, where Sinhalese men burned and beat fishermen and traders; Passara on Thursday. The course of the violence, it seemed, was a wave emanating from Colombo.

The radio anchors predicted that President Jayawardene would order a curfew and that any ruffians found loitering in the streets would be arrested. As the families huddled around the transistor
radio, Indra’s brother said he wished the curfew would be declared soon. His Sinhala friend clucked. ‘Are you crazy?’ he asked. ‘Then you’ll stay inside your house and these madmen on the street will know exactly where to find you.’

Indra shivered. She had not considered this possibility. How could everything turn against them like this? If people had seen this coming, why had they allowed the soldiers’ dead bodies to be brought into Colombo? The news said the police had protected Tamils in some places, like in Kurunegala, where an inspector drove away most of the mobs. But overall, the police were mute spectators, even collaborators.

The government was setting up refugee camps for Tamils on the run. Her brother suggested they go there, but his Sinhalese neighbour’s wife would have none of it. ‘Let’s wait till it stops fully,’ she said. So for four days they stayed in the neighbour’s house, eating rice and week-old
sambol
twice a day. The women took turns putting the children to sleep and washing their soiled clothes. They didn’t talk much.

The men drank arrack as if it were their lifeblood, but without their usual banter about how this MP stole that many lakhs and that councillor got this or that person transferred to get his son-in-law a job. Political discussion felt trite at a time like this, when its effects hit so unnervingly close. Red-eyed from sleeplessness and drunkenness, the men cut sorry figures: tragic characters whose gloom could change nothing.

On the day news anchors began to analyse the massacre in the past tense and denials started to pour in from government departments, Indra’s brother and wife left with their children for the refugee camp in Colombo. They planned to go from there to Jaffna, where all the Tamils seemed to be fleeing to be among their own. Rather than joining them, Indra had taken her sons on an overcrowded bus to Nuwara Eliya. When she arrived, John maintained a relieved silence; he had listened to the radio and there were, after all, police everywhere. Perhaps he knew. Beyond mentioning her brother’s injuries, Indra couldn’t bring herself to talk about it either.

A few days later in Nuwara Eliya, as Indra heard the approach of the mob, she realised she had not fled far enough: the violence
had reached the hills. There was mayhem in the line houses where the workers stayed. As Indra was feeding Sarva breakfast, she heard two sounds: the mob howling their intention to ‘cut up the Tamil dogs’ and the plantation workers shouting at her to ‘Get away from here! Get lost!’

Neither said why, but Indra understood. Earlier, someone had pleaded for her to leave, saying that if she, a Jaffna Tamil, stayed, they would all be attacked. They had asked her to go up to Tank Hill nearby, but Indra knew she would not survive there with an infant. The Sinhalese owner had given her four minders: one Sinhalese and three plantation Tamils. They were meant to protect her, but when the moment came, they were nowhere to be found.

As soon as she heard the ‘get lost’, Indra started to run.

She ran to the Sinhalese owner’s house for refuge, but he told her to save herself, and shut the door in her face. Indra froze for a second, then ran towards the estate. She tried to climb a tree but couldn’t get a handhold.

She heard the buses screech to a halt at the gates. Between the tea shrubs, she put baby Sarva on the ground and lay on top of him, holding her torso up slightly, lizard-like, with one arm. With her free hand, she covered his mouth.

The ground was soggy. Something crawled between her toes. Above, she heard horrific screams, dull whacks and thuds. Women sobbing, begging. A steel utensil clanged and rolled down the steep steps of the line-house colony for what felt like a whole minute. She crouched lower.

Alongside the northern Tamils, the ones the Sinhalese were really pursuing, plantation Tamils were attacked. These workers—poor and largely illiterate, underpaid—were neither the Tamils the LTTE fought for then and claimed to represent nor the ones scholarly Tamil politicians demanded a place for in Parliament.

By noon, a deathly silence had descended over the estate. Gingerly, Indra lifted her head. One of her bodyguards, a young Tamil worker, was lying a hundred metres away, slashed and stabbed. In Indra’s still arms, Sarva had fallen asleep.

AS AN ADULT
, all Sarva knew of that day in July 1983 was that he had slept through the bloodiest anti-Tamil pogrom, which killed 3,000 people and led hundreds of thousands of Tamil families to flee the country. Even decades later, ‘God saved me,’ was all his mother wanted to say about that day. She never told him that it was the loneliest moment of her life.

Twenty-five years later, when Sarva disappeared, Indra knew that nothing had changed. Her husband was immobile with worry; her eldest son would help only in his spare time, and her sisters waxed and waned in their support. They all wallowed in the paralysis of grief. Indra was not shy about berating them for it, but this didn’t change how alone she felt. With just as little warning, Indra was now once again a petrified mother trying to save her baby from an unseen horror.

Five days after Sarva’s disappearance, a man telephoned Indra to say in fluent Tamil that he had found her son. When the caller came to see her a few days later, Indra exploded with inappropriate laughter. The Tamil-speaking man was the whitest American she had ever seen.

3.

October 2008

LOOKING DOWN FROM
the mango tree into the abandoned orchard, Mugil cursed herself for having lost her T-56 assault rifle. She hadn’t fired it in years; who knew if it still worked, but it gave her an extra swagger: every second step, her hip swung to the left to avoid hitting the rifle slung over her right shoulder. She liked to refer to it as her crab walk.

The T-56, stolen from a burning Sri Lankan army camp in Mullaitivu in 1998, was a souvenir from Mugil’s first successful operation in the Tamil Tigers. She was eighteen then, the second-in-command in one of the squadrons. She had been part of a great triumph and had made sure every one of the nine girls she led had come back alive. They had looted everything from the camp complex, taking every item except the Sinhalese books and the pornographic magazines in the soldiers’ quarters. They had then cleared the way for the seized army tanks and bulldozers to be driven into Tiger territory. The incredible ambush had made Annan Prabakaran, the supreme leader, call her name out during a formal celebration and shake her hand in front of other combatants; he praised her for being the kind of woman the Tamil homeland needed.

And now she had gone and lost the rifle to the same army, to
Sinhalese boys who looked half her age. Boys she wanted to shoot as she watched them rip the camouflage shirts off five Tiger girls down below. Mugil hoped someone would intervene. But below her only a smouldering garden shed stood mute witness. Bullet holes pocked the mango orchard that had seemed like such a safe hideout just half an hour ago. When the soldiers had arrived, she had clambered up a tree. Now the foliage obstructed Mugil’s view of the other girls below her, but she could hear their voices as clearly as shrieking alarms.