The Seasons of Trouble (32 page)

Just like Sarva, Jehaan was running. But whereas Sarva’s flight would stop eventually, presumably after a few years, and he would
be free to live his life, Jehaan would accompany other fugitives through forests to safe houses again and again, till the Sinhalese-dominated state, incensed at the defiance of one of their own, turned its wrath on him.

18.

October 2010 to May 2011

BEING INVISIBLE WAS
exhausting. In less than a year, Jehaan took Sarva to eight different safe houses: Bataramulla, Hatton, Madulsima, Colombo, Kalaeliya, Dikoya and two other locations Sarva couldn’t even name. A succession of priests opened their doors to him. When he met the love of his life later that same year, he would tell her God must have approved of his hanging round His premises.

In truth, Sarva had not been entirely passive during all that time spent in churches. Though his father’s Catholicism had made little impression on him as a child, now, with nothing else to do, he gave religion a shot. One just had to go through the motions, he decided, the deliberate, slow string of ritualistic actions. The soft one-knee genuflection, the loud amen, the mumbled amen, the choral amen, the sign of the cross over one’s chest, the sitting and standing for choir, the saying of grace before a meal, the unfussy silent use of the fork and spoon—he wanted to master it all and fit in.

Sometimes, out of boredom and also gratitude, he attended daily mass. On Sunday, it pleased him to see well-dressed families occupying the pews sway to the choir, nod to familiar faces, and mumble parts of the prayer they had memorised. Afterwards, they would elbow each other, lining up for juice and snacks. People left their shoes outside, as he would do in a temple; he had never
noticed this before. They were quieter than visitors to Hindu temples, and he wondered how devotion could be so muted. He liked worship to leave him buzzing, to overwhelm his senses and to leave its camphor smell on his clothes.

When he said this to a young priest in Badulla, the man laughed: ‘You just want to break coconuts and scramble to get a piece!’

Sarva agreed. ‘There is joy in getting even half a banana from the temple priest!’

‘Okay, okay. But let me see a Hindu temple putting up a fugitive like you.’

It was only a joke, but to Sarva it rang true. He saw many broken people seeking shelter at these churches. Journalists and aid workers would stay the night, and social workers delivered documents, food and money intended for people stranded in zones cordoned off by the army. It was almost self-destructive how much the priests risked simply by allowing human rights work to be conducted on their premises.

Sarva stayed for almost four months in a seminary in Hatton. Here he met Father R., a thirty-something priest with whom he formed a strong bond. After dinner, they would have long philosophical conversations about duty, morality and what it meant to have faith when your world was crumbling. Father R. said that, in his experience, suffering was as likely to make someone reject God as turn to Him for comfort. But they all grappled with the same questions: why is this happening to me? What have I done to deserve this? The greatest challenge of his life, Father R. said, had not been finding God but reconciling his spirituality with the violence of war. He was a Tamil, raised in a village near Jaffna, and, after being ordained, had worked for two decades in the Vanni areas, teaching and counselling youngsters. After several years, he found that he had taken sides and chosen to support the Tamil separatist movement. He abhorred their violent ways but had begun to wonder if there was any other way to fight generations of discrimination, and decided it was impossible to work in such a polarised society without taking a political stance.

‘Then what is the difference between you and a Tiger?’ Sarva asked.

‘Maybe as much difference as there is between a Tamil and a Tiger,’ the priest said. He did not speak Sinhalese and believed that without his cassock he was no less vulnerable than an ordinary Tamil civilian. The army rarely stopped his church van, but he was always terrified of harassment. Once, in Colombo, he had been out without his vestments, wearing trousers and a shirt, on his way to meet his relatives. The soldiers had not believed he was a priest even after he had showed them his ID card. They had stripsearched him and he spent the night in a police station cell. Since then, he never left the church without his cassock.

For the priests and nuns, their vestments were armour. Their robes commanded respect from the armed forces, some of whom were Christian. Buddhist soldiers, many of them rural boys brought up to venerate saffron-clad Buddhist priests, often extended the same courtesy to members of the Christian clergy. This gave nuns and priests greater access to closed spaces like refugee camps and detention centres. Father R., in addition, made maximum use of the privileges his church gave him: chauffeur-driven cars, access to village authorities, an international network of contacts, even the church’s usually large premises. In heavily patrolled regions, church and temple compounds tended to become hangouts for friends, venues for NGO meetings, places with secure boundaries where people could sit alone in silence.

Many people who knocked on the parish door needed more than prayer. They suffered from post-traumatic stress and as the presidential task force rarely approved NGO projects for psychological counselling in war-affected areas, church group sessions were frequently the only therapy on offer.

Public funerals and memorials were banned, leaving thousands with no way to deal with loss. In May 2011 Jehaan and some of the priests had organised a silent prayer for one of their number who had died in the war. It was held in Kilinochchi, the deceased’s birthplace, but refugees from all across the north came to the renovated church where the ceremony was held. As the priest prayed for the souls of those who died in pain, there was the rare spectacle of people bursting into tears, mourning for the first time in public.

Exercising this privilege was not without risks. One of Father R.’s colleagues from Jaffna, a priest who ran an NGO focussed on the rights and safety of war widows, received death threats on a weekly basis, and he heard the giveaway clicks on his office landline and mobile phone indicating that they had been tapped. A western province priest who had accompanied some foreign journalists to a camp woke one morning to find navy booths on either side of his street, keeping watch on him. Some priests delivered straightforward, apolitical religious sermons, helping people find peace without controversy through God and family. When Sarva stayed with such priests, he noticed their deliberate indifference towards him, his story, or the reason he was hiding. But they fed him, gave him shelter, and did not give him away.

ONE NIGHT AFTER
dinner, Sarva told Father R. about Malar, the source of an obsessive love that had preserved his sanity through the long months of hiding. Malar had entered his life at a time of crisis. After Shirleen and her friend had applied on Sarva’s behalf to a Danish university, a grave technical mistake occurred. He gained admission, and the fee had to be paid in advance, which Amma did, but the money didn’t reach the university on time and his student visa was not approved. He would have to wait another semester to apply again. That meant six more dreadful months in hiding. And that was when Amma had mentioned Malar.

Amma and Malar had met at a convention in Nuwara Eliya on studying abroad. Malar was a schoolteacher and had spent a year in Switzerland and Germany on an exchange programme. To Amma, she looked kind and respectful. She wore her chiffon sari modestly, neatly pinned to her blouse. Her fingers were patchy with blue ink. She spoke English and Tamil and said she could understand ‘a little Swiss’. Amma had trusted her with Sarva’s story, and she had agreed to give him some tips on applying for courses abroad.

After this, every time Sarva called Amma, she insisted that he speak to this lovely girl, Malar, to learn more about opportunities in Switzerland. Amma adored Shirleen but unfairly blamed her for
the rejection of Sarva’s visa. ‘They don’t know about these things,’ she said, and gave him Malar’s number. ‘She is very smart, so don’t try your broken English with her,’ Amma added.

He called her. She didn’t pick up but called back at night. They talked till dawn.

The next day he messaged her in transliterated Tamil. ‘Thank you for stealing my sleep!’

‘I’m sure you’re used to it!’ she replied, with a wink and a question mark.

‘This has never happened to me before,’ he typed, adding a smiley. ‘I swear on my mother’s life.’

They spoke again that evening, after Malar got home from school. He explained his situation and she shared hers—her brother had taken a boat to Canada but was struggling to get asylum as the country was tougher with refugees than it used to be. Her parents were retired, her mother was ill. She was the only breadwinner in her family.

A week later, he admitted to her that it was ‘love at first sight’. She cried.

For months, as he went from safe house to safe house, they spoke on the phone. About what, he couldn’t say, but it was not about Switzerland or universities. Amma knew that much when she got his monstrous mobile phone bill. He asked Malar to get a SIM card from the same mobile company so that they could talk for longer. It would be cheaper if they were both using Dialog.

While he marvelled at their compatibility—they were late risers, both put family above everything else, loved movies, liked travelling and the hills—he would ask her why she had chosen him over other men. She said it had started with shock at his experiences, and amazement at his survival. It might have begun with sympathy, but this wasn’t pity-love, she assured him. She liked his childlike nature, his ability to joke at the worst of times, his greed for joy, his strength. Yet, she felt like caring for him, shielding him from the elements.

When Sarva was housed in Kottayena, Jehaan told him he would be moved to Hatton next. Excitedly, Sarva told Malar that he would be getting closer to her.

‘I think you’re beautiful,’ he texted later that night. ‘I want to know if I’m right.’

She did not reply for two days. For those forty-eight hours, every morsel of food was mud, everyone he saw was ugly, boring, annoying. Was she insulted? Had he blown it? ‘Sorry,’ he texted in transliterated Tamil. ‘Was that out of line? Please, I’m a decent guy, don’t misunderstand me.’

The third day, as he dragged himself to breakfast, the phone beeped. Her picture. A yellow floral-print sari. Long wavy hair with a shiny clasp. A toothy smile that was simultaneously shy and mischievous. She stood near a window, and her head reached the curtain rod.

‘You are tall!’ he typed. He was impressed.
He
was tall. This was perfect.

‘???’ she replied.

‘It is a compliment! You are more angelic than I imagined.’ And so on. All day, he raved about her beauty. He sent her YouTube links to ballads by A. R. Rahman.

Finally, her reply: ‘Can I see you?’

He had sent her an old photograph of his, posing in front of his house, healthy and wearing his best trousers. In a few minutes, guiltily, he sent her a recent one, taken by Randy near a waterfall on one of their trips between safe houses.

She called at night and they chatted for hours. The proctor who had a room next to Sarva’s knocked hard on his door: ‘Quiet!’ The lovers giggled uncontrollably. The next day, Sarva jumped the parish walls and bought her two saris, one cream and another maroon. He cut his palm scaling the wall on his way back.

Hatton, his next destination, the closest he’d come yet to Malar, was where he had gone to high school. As if association worked some magic on him, he became a teenager in love, single-minded and relentless. Sarva loved being in love with Malar. He felt like his old self: playful and always in a good mood. The jitters left him, his appetite returned. His eyes were always wandering to his phone, hoping to find an incoming message. He was happily distracted, and reeling with a sensation he hadn’t savoured for ages. After more than a year in hiding, he was tired of being tortured, hunted, of
being the man with medical problems and no family. Malar made him handsome, funny, normal. She knew what they had done to him in the basement. She understood that if Sarva did not heal entirely, the two of them could probably never have children. She loved him nonetheless. She was everything he needed.

Without Randy around, Sarva couldn’t think of anyone to confide in. But the moment he blurted out her name to Father R., the priest unexpectedly squealed with delight. From then on, Malar was all they really talked about. It was Father R. who convinced him to meet her.

It was arranged for the second of the month. Sarva and Father R. took a van and parked it opposite the Hatton bus stop. Her Nuwara Eliya bus would arrive that afternoon. She had told her family she was visiting a school friend in Hatton.

The first time he saw her, she was standing near the petrol pump, attempting to cross the road as buses wound this way and that, people milled and trishaws meandered, their drivers hoping to pick up a fare. She towered above them all. She was so tall.