Island of a Thousand Mirrors (20 page)

The soldiers have left me a blank page. They used me, spoiled me, and then threw me
away like a piece of refuse. They did not expect me to survive. They should have killed
me, but they didn’t, and this is their mistake. Now the Tigers write upon my surfaces.
I learn the ways in which Tamil blood has been spilled by the Sinhala for centuries;
the myriad ways they have excluded, humiliated, and destroyed us. I learn the ways
in which they hate us. I had not thought that such ferocious hatred could exist. But
the memory of bullet-riddled cement walls, a perfect square of sky, reminds me that
hatred is real, and that between us and them, it is the only thing.

A girl called Meena sleeps in the space next to mine. She grew up in Colombo in a
family of five. She went to school with Sinhala children, played with them, trusted
them. During the 1983 riots, she hid under a bed and watched as her father, mother,
and brothers were found, thrown out of the house, and then burned to death in the
garden. She hid inside the house and survived. Then, with their screams ringing in
her ears, she came to her family in the north, looking to join the Tigers. When she
talks of it, her eyes shine with hatred. When she talks of Eelam, she looks transcendent.

I learn about our Leader. About how he has devoted his life to our people. Without
him, we would be slaves to the Sinhala, but he has shown us how to stand up and fight.
He has given us our dignity. Without him we would be nothing.

I am given a weapon. It is heavier than I ever thought possible, bouncing against
my back as I run, so that at night I am reduced to screaming sinew. But the months
pass and the muscles build in my biceps, back, and legs. My lungs learn to conserve
oxygen during the long, low runs across fields. My pupils dilate so that I can see
at night. I learn to trust my weapon and my own ability to wield it. I learn how to
track a soldier, watch him all day, close enough to touch, and how to melt into the
shadows at his first suspicion. I am becoming slowly but surely a jungle cat.

*   *   *

Six months have passed. Months of hard training and endless lessons. My days are long,
my nights sleepless. I have learned things that I had never expected to. My body,
itself, has changed; it is no longer soft, but made of a certain density.

The Commandant calls in my squadron. The officers have been questioning a Sinhala
soldier. He is tied to a chair, blood everywhere on his face and small, concave chest.
He must have been handsome somewhere else, in some other life, with thick black hair
falling over his ears and large eyes that fly from one face to another begging in
silence for mercy. The Commandant cuts him loose, kicks the chair away from him so
that he falls heavily on the ground. From his scream and the way they flop against
the ground, I know that his wrists have been broken. The Commandant points at me,
says, “You haven’t killed one yet, have you?”

The soldier crawls away dragging useless back legs, trailing blood and urine like
a dog run over on the rail tracks. He looks over his shoulder at me. His eyes bulging
red, a stream of words in his stupid, fat-tongued language, incoherent sounds interspliced
with pleas to his bastard mother, “Anaaaay ammaammammmammma, ammmmma.”

My boot smashes hard into his right lung. He flips upside down, his arms and legs
waving, helpless, red bubbles frothing at his mouth. The girls are giggling at this
grown man struggling like an upturned insect. He covers his face with his arms. I
push them away with my gun. I want him to see me. I straddle him, my boots on either
side of his face. When his pleading eyes meet mine, I put the mouth of the rifle against
his lips, push them aside so that it clicks against his clenched teeth. I hear that
click and I pull the trigger.

The back of his head explodes; blood, bone, gray stuff splatters across my boots,
splashes along my pants leg, even onto my hands. The girls around me are laughing.
Patting me on the back. The Commandant says, “Very good,” and nods.

That night, in the dark, Meena whispers, “Some girls are frightened at their first
kill. They cry and even vomit sometimes. But you…” There is admiration in her voice.
I keep my fluttering hands folded under my head; even here, even now, despite washing
over and over I feel the thick slipperiness of gore on them.

*   *   *

I stand with the girls of my class. We are Tigers now, fully formed and as ferocious
as our men, dog tags on our wrists, throats, and waist because we are not afraid to
die cut up or blown to pieces. I search the small crowd until I see Amma, Appa, and
Luxshmi. I have not seen them since I left home fourteen months ago. Even from this
distance I can see the wet pride shining in their eyes.

The Commandant steps onto the platform where we wait. He is the bridegroom, and we
the various brides. I lower my head to receive his
thali
. Instead of the ancient golden symbols of marriage, it is a hard capsule of glass
he places in the hollow of my throat. Seven seconds it whispers against my beating
pulse. Seven seconds to freedom. I test that frame of time, counting slowly under
my breath.

One to catch the vial between the teeth. A glimmer of ice from the cold drink stand.

Two to bite down, shattering glass.

Three for the shards to slice the tongue and soft insides of the cheek.

Four to send blood gushing down the throat.

Five for the poison to slip quietly into the bloodstream.

By six darkness is falling and seven brings oblivion. The cyanide makes me smile.
It will grant me victory in any battle because I am willing to die while my enemies
are not. Our Leader’s words ring in my ears, “Fear of death is the cause of all human
fears. One who wins over the fear of death wins himself. He is the one who wins freedom
from his mental prison.”

I am fearless. I am free. Now, I am the predator.

*   *   *

We move through the jungle by moonlight, whole squadrons moving through the gray,
shadowed vegetation as silently as wraiths. When we enter a village, it is almost
always unalarmed. The villagers are asleep, their gentle snores echoing and mingling.
When they wake, there is the inevitable cacophony, the loud begging for mercy, the
calling upon long-dead mothers and prayers to various deities. I hate these terrified
negotiations. The sound of Sinhala, its long syllables in these gibbering mouths,
makes my rage rise. After the pleading, there is the screaming that reaches across
the night sky.

We use the machete in these places because it paints the bloodiest picture. When the
village is found, we want our message to be writ in red. We want to leave dead babies
and bludgeoned women with streams of blood curling down the sides of their faces.
To this end, I have learned to swing my machete through the flesh of babies. I have
clutched the arm of a screaming toddler and swung off her head with a single blow
as her mother stood with outstretched arms, voiceless in shock. I have disemboweled
men and carved the breasts off their wives, sunk my knife into the hot brains of villagers.
It is just like dancing under the mango tree, the weight of the machete pulling my
body as I cut and weave and twirl through flesh. Flying blood splashes across my face,
my mouth. I have learned to lick it from my lips. Now I am not just dancing a part.
Now I
am
the Shiva Nataraja, the dancing face of death.

In this way I will never again be prey, small, trembling, and weak. We leave the villages
as silently as we came. Behind us, only the lamenting of the very old remains. We
let them live. Their fear extends our legend and ensures compliance and complicity.

*   *   *

But some nights, I fall asleep only to awaken in a bright concrete room where the
sky opens to a perfect square of blue. Fear wraps its fingers around my throat, bile
rises into my mouth. The uniforms materialize. That circle of men, their rough grasping
fingers, the sharp ends of their rifles, my head jerked backward as the ribbon is
pulled out of my hair. My braid uncoiling in rapid serpentine motions along my trembling
spine. The scream of ripping cloth and my hands scrambling to cover myself. The rifle
butt smashing into my mouth and then the hard cold floor, the first soldier heaving
over me, the sweat gathering on his brow falling slowly, so I see each drop coming
toward me, like looking up into the start of the monsoon, and I am struggling. If
it falls on my skin, it will burn, but worse than that, I will forevermore smell of
him so that all will know when I enter a place bringing unending corruption. But his
hands are so heavy on my wrists, grinding them into the ground. And now other hands
reach along my legs, rip away my underpants, and then the slap of something I can’t
recognize against my thigh, the hardness of it pushing, searching, digging into me.
And then the soldier’s camouflage uniform changes before my eyes, the formless blotches
rearrange themselves into long animal stripes, khaki and green. A searing, gutting
pain, a ripping of delicate flesh, a rush of hot blood. My head is jerked back and
I must look into the face I know so well, as it drips its slow pollution onto my skin.
The bustling mustache, the heavy middle-aged features, the reddened eyes staring into
mine, claiming my body, inhabiting it. I fight then, struggle with all my strength,
smashing myself from side to side, trying to throw him off, but his body is heavy,
his arms muscled under the fat hold me down, his hands twist my wrists even harder
into the concrete.

Moans spill out of me. They wrench me awake, return me to my mat, where I lie heaving,
heart racing, teeth clenched, the sounds stuffed into my throat where they push against
my gullet like undigested food. I wait for the cries to stop echoing in my head. Shame
rises like a beast with shining teeth that crushes the breath from my body. Shame
that the women have heard my cries and know my dreams, the extent of my sins. Know
that night after night, the faces of the soldiers change into the face of the one
I love the most in this world. Know that, now, nightly, it is not the soldiers who
rip me apart, but our Leader himself.

I do everything I can not to go to sleep. When I sleep the dream comes and it is unbearable.
The Leader is our Father. He has done everything for us. He has devoted his life to
us, and yet I cannot rid myself of this grotesque nightmare. I know then that something
is wrong with me. I am flawed, defective. I am corrupted. I am beyond the help of
all who lie sleeping peacefully, innocent, around me.

*   *   *

In the mornings, the training camp is fragrant with the scent of jasmine trailing
off the thick garlands that bedeck the portraits of the martyrs. Often, I go to stand
under these portraits.

The martyrs are one in the set of their lips, the fixed jut of their chins, the hardness
of their eyes. They look out without fear into that ultimate moment when they become
the collective rage of our people. They are our Leader’s most perfect weapon. They
are pure, with their oneness of purpose, whereas I am corrupt and insincere in the
love I profess for him.

*   *   *

In the Tamil villages we are served rice, lentils, some pickled vegetables on banana
leaves. The villagers sit on their haunches and watch us eat. We try to make them
understand that we are fighting for them, that we are making a new future for them
and their families. But they are stupid people, civilians. They look terrified of
our guns, our uniforms. They do not understand that we fight and kill and die for
them.

Their women hover in the background, casting sidelong eyes at us—the female cadres
with our weapons, our cinch-waisted uniforms and rugged boots. They watch the way
we walk. In the next months, we know, some of them will appear in the training camps
ready to fight. We eat sparingly, knowing that whatever we leave will fill their children’s
bellies.

When we leave, we take the children of the dead. We take the children of the disappeared.
But we also take a child from every family. This is the price of war. Sometimes they
give us the child quickly, easily, but sometimes we have to negotiate and threaten.
I hate these scenes. I hate ripping a child from his mother’s arms, but it must be
done. This is war and to fight we need bodies. So we take the children. We wipe the
tears from their faces and take them because they are hungry, or because they have
no shelter. But sometimes we take children from their families by force.

We take the children because they are easily trainable, eager to follow orders after
a few weeks, small and agile enough to slip over the land unseen, and catch the enemy
off guard. We take them because soldiers, no matter how battle hardened, always hesitate
before children. And that moment of hesitation often grants us victory. As we leave,
the villagers avert their eyes. They know that without us the children have no hope,
yet still they are silently distraught.

*   *   *

Sometimes when I am by myself I miss the taste of our well. Water filtered through
our small piece of earth, its exact mineral consistency, the taste of home. It is
the only thing I allow myself to remember.

*   *   *

In the evenings, we watch old videos in which a younger version of our Leader performs
heroic feats, running, jumping, falling to his knees, and spraying machine gun fire
at an unseen enemy. I feel the women’s love for him, their ardor rising in waves around
me.

Sometimes we watch videos of martyrs. They are young men and women with eyes like
steel. One of them, a girl younger than me, says, “This is the most supreme sacrifice
I can make. The only way we can get our Eelam is through arms. That is the only way
anyone will listen to us. Even if we have to die. As the Leader says, we will fight
even for a hundred years for Eelam. But if we are willing to kill ourselves it will
take less time.”

Our Leader fills the screen. He is older now, chubby like a favorite uncle, but still
with the dangerous eyes of a revolutionary, his hunger for justice unabated. He is
giving a speech at a Fallen Heroes Day rally, the parents of martyrs in the front
seats. He bangs his fist against the podium and says, “We have sown the seed of an
ideal. We will grow it by irrigating it with the blood of our martyrs. It will grow
into a luxurious tree and make our martyrs’ dreams a reality.”