The Seasons of Trouble (34 page)

The A9 shut overnight during wartime, and remained closed for long periods. People were unable to get home for years because of the closures. Since 2006, when the military launched its final attack, the highway had been shut down completely, and the Tamils in the north were caged in, darting about in a panic within a limited, threatened space.

Just before the presidential elections in January 2010, the A9 had been finally cleared for traffic; it had been open for a year now. But instead of the usual NGO cars and Tamils on bicycles and scooters, the postwar highway was chock-a-block with army vans and tourist buses from Colombo. There was a festive air. The coaches played videos to entertain the passengers and large families—grandparents, mothers, fathers, uncles, children—squeezed picnic baskets onto the crowded seats and the luggage racks.

The bus of refugees passed Kilinochchi, where three years ago Mugil had forsaken the girls and her own life as a Tiger. The town was now a trail of burnt wooden cots, broken ceramic toilets and smashed cars. They passed rows of dilapidated buildings with their roofs caved in, Tamil signboards blacked out, vans lying stripped and burnt. The police headquarters, court complex, market, temples, were all in ruins. Among a group of tourists, a man snapped a picture of one such half-building plastered with posters displaying the president’s grinning face. Mugil and her mother looked at each other.

‘How can they celebrate like this?’ Mugil whispered. ‘Why don’t they care?’

Mother placed a hand on her thigh. ‘Tch, leave it, Mugil! Our problem is ours. Their problem is over and they want to enjoy themselves.’

It had been a quarter-century since Sri Lankans from the south had set eyes on the north. The Tigers were hated, feared, held responsible for the terrorism that rocked ordinary lives. Their end led to an explosion of relief among southerners: they were finally free to move around and even to go north if they wanted. They burst upon the A9, claiming it as their own, rejoicing at the end of their nightmare.

The A9 now showcased victory. A glossy new white statue of the Buddha towered over the ruins; near it was a broken-down Hindu temple. A few hundred feet from the statue stood a tall bronze lotus, a Buddhist symbol, growing out of a wall cracked by a giant projectile. Before Elephant Pass, an armoured Tiger vehicle—a truck modified to serve as a tank—was displayed as a monument to the sacrifice of a Sri Lankan soldier, Corporal Gamini Kularatne,
who died attacking it on 1 July 1991. Next to the tank was a war souvenir shop.

The final checkpoint was at Elephant Pass, the thin strip of road where the A9 ended and the Jaffna Peninsula began. There, soldiers entered Mugil’s bus and checked the refugees’ meagre belongings. Many were being frisked but Mugil was spared. She stiffened in her seat and stared ahead blankly, humiliation stinging her eyes. When the bus moved again, turning towards Jaffna, the sign with the name ‘Yalpanam’ in Tamil script was missing. In its place, was a new sign—‘Yapanaya’, the Sinhalese name for Jaffna. Round the bend, a freshly painted yellow concrete sign read, ‘One Nation, One Country’.

By dusk, they reached the Point Pedro bus stop. The bus emptied and about twenty families got down along with two soldiers. They walked to the nearby Amman temple. This was a Tamil area, but shopkeepers stared and shoppers froze nonetheless. What did they see? Mugil wondered. The noticeable absence of men? The lack of footwear? Their haggard appearance, worn-out clothes, and white-and-blue UNHCR plastic bags? The distended stomachs of the kids? The families huddled closer.

The Amman temple was small but housed an enormous pillared hall. Its young priest was at first taken aback to see the families, but he went about his duties without a word; temples and churches had always been default refugee shelters. He brought out straw mats for them to sleep on and distributed bananas to the children.

POINT PEDRO HAD
no special point and commemorated no one named Pedro. Yet that was its official name on documents, road signs and buses. Conductors dangling from the bus doors chanted, ‘Parutithurai! Parutithurai!’ Mugil, too, knew it by that old Tamil name. Paruti-thurai, with the crackle and snap in every
r
and
t
, with the harbour and the cotton fields, with the deep-fried
vadais
crispier than anywhere else in the country.

It was the windswept coastal town her father had loved, that her family had called home till they abandoned it in a rain of shells for the forests of the Vanni. The town before the bombardment
was a moving photograph in her memory: sandpapery tobacco leaves bundled on market-bound pushcarts, anchored catamarans jerking in the waves, everything bleached by bright sunlight except the cobalt blue of the sea and the fluorescent green moss on the walls. Against that image from her childhood, this Point Pedro was surprisingly grey. It seemed scrubbed clean and simultaneously abandoned. A boat left too long in the sun. They were returning to it after sixteen years.

They slept in the Amman temple for the first few nights. Every morning, the priest arrived earlier than sunrise, waking them before the six o’clock prayer. He gave them jugs of water with which to wash their faces. When the devotees broke coconuts as divine offerings, adult refugees scurried like children to pick up the shattered pieces.

After five days, the village officer arrived with a posse of soldiers to take down the families’ names. ‘Register
panni-panniye azhichchiduvaangal
,’ one of the refugees in the queue mumbled: they will kill us with this incessant registering. It took all day, and they had only the temple offerings of a few banana slices and coconut shavings to eat. When the registrations were done, the soldiers left with the village officer. They said the UNHCR would come by in a few days to distribute tin sheets, shovels and building material. Until then, the refugees were left to fend for themselves. Most of them had only a little luggage.

On the bus, Mother had declared her intention to find their old house again, the one that was her dowry when she married Father, the one they had fled. ‘It was a house with
raasi
,’ she said, it brought prosperity to the family. So after the registration, they went looking for this dowry house, Mother gingerly retracing steps taken more than a decade ago. The family followed her quietly, a few paces behind. Mother was sort of under a spell, squealing in surprise once in a while or mumbling at a closed road or new lane that offended her by challenging her memory. It was almost eight in the evening and the darkness was perplexing. Shops were closing their shutters. A few flickering street lamps came on, and insects threw themselves at the bulbs. The porches of most of the houses were dark. Mugil hadn’t been out on a residential street at night for close to two years. It felt illicit. Miraculous.

Finally, turning left from a tobacco field and going past a T-junction and temple, Mother stopped dead in the middle of the road. ‘It was here,’ she said, swinging her head left and right. ‘Where has it gone?’ On her left was a crumbling wall. By the dim streetlights, Mugil saw that someone had drawn a charcoal door and window on it. ‘Is it really gone?’ Mother’s voice was shaking. She crouched on the road and held her head. ‘There was a beautiful idol of Saraswati on the archway in front; even that is nothing but dust!’

They went back to the temple courtyard. Mother couldn’t sleep. She wished that she had come back to see the house at least once in all the years since they left. She had expected to find squatters or to deal with some rain damage, some bullet holes. She had not imagined her home’s complete destruction.

Maran woke Mugil up the next morning, screaming that his stomach was ‘saying gurr gurr’. They walked to the closest cool bar for bread and tea. Amuda asked for glasses of iced water. As they sipped in silence, shrinking under the gaze of the other customers, the middle-aged owner left the counter and came up to their table. ‘
Sugama
? All well?’ he asked, smiling kindly. He smelt of holy ash, and his neatly parted hair shone with coconut oil.

The server brought a plate of short eats, buns and roti. ‘Eat well,’ the owner said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ As he went back to the counter, Mugil wondered how many refugees he had fed this way. She asked for some milk. It was hot, frothy, thick and sugary. The children drank up.

As they left the shop, Mugil stopped to thank the owner and fished out her slim purse. As she’d expected, he waved the money away. They hoped to see him again soon, she said. He patted Kalai’s head and said goodbye.

Outside, Mother said she was going to look for her house again. ‘There is some light now. I’m sure I made a mistake last night.’

Mugil went another way, to recharge her phone card. There was a shop ten minutes away, near the beach. Barbed wire curled all along the coastline; the military now regulated fishing in these parts. You needed a day pass to go into the sea; to get the pass you
needed a national ID card, and to get the ID card, you needed the navy or army to clear you.

Towards the north, in the distance, the navy camp was a black block. There was not a boat in sight. At this time of day, the waves were bright overlapping sheets of silver. The sand was white, fine. Through squinted eyes, Mugil saw a slim silhouette on the shore, facing the sea. Thin legs stuck out from under a folded sarong. A hand extended forward and remained there motionless, wrist bent forward, the index finger and thumb pinching something. Whatever it was, it was invisible from where Mugil stood. But she knew the man’s pose, knew the trance he was in. He was holding a fishing line, waiting for a bite.

As she walked away, thoughts of Father and his fishing stories came to her in a rush. The large sardines he caught for the market and the tiny sprats he asked Mother to fry for the children. The smell of engine diesel on his shirts. The yarns he wove about monsters at sea when she begged to go with him on night expeditions. His teasing her for shunning eel because she thought it was a poisonous snake. Parutithurai, or Point Pedro, was Mother’s birthplace, but it was Father who had brought it alive.

Mugil took a long route back, now eager to see what the town was like. She turned into a narrow lane along the side wall of a hospital. The first two houses were bordered by new cadjan fences, woven from palmyra leaves, and she heard pots clatter inside. The next had a concrete wall covered in moss. She peeped in through the gate. A goat was tethered to a tree, a couple of chickens pecked about. The next compound was overgrown with weeds, but it had a well. Before she could stop herself, Mugil went in through the arched gate and drew some water from the well. She cupped some in her palm and sipped. It was sweet on her tongue. To one side was the bungalow, unlocked. Mugil walked in. The first thing she noticed was the framed pictures of three Hindu deities high on the wall, the trio of prosperity: Saraswati, Pillaiyer and Mahalakshmi. Next to them was the black-and-white face of a clean-shaven man in a turban and dark suit. Mugil peered closer. It was a painting, the fine brushstrokes imitating a photograph. A well-to-do ancestor, a lawyer perhaps, or an accountant. If the residents left him
behind, they must have been in a hurry, she thought. Everything else seemed to have been looted. The walls were pistachio green and the kitchen looked unused. There were no cobwebs but small piles of sand everywhere. The wind tugged and pushed the metal door of the backyard toilet. She stood in the living room for a while, pressing her soles to the cool floor, noticing absences. No shutters on the windows. No furniture. No residents.

She knew then that she did not want to go back to her mother’s house or what was left of it. She would move here, to this house with the sea wind.

THE HOUSE IN
Point Pedro changed Mugil. With six rooms and an indoor kitchen, it was almost palatial, the biggest place she had ever lived in. Time expanded with the extra space. Her toddlers couldn’t get enough of the half-moon well in the side yard. Every morning, they eagerly kicked off their shorts and ran out for their bath. Mugil didn’t allow them to clamber up the sides when she yanked the rope. Their anticipation of the cold, crisp splash was stretched so taut that when the pulley whirred loose and the metal bucket hit the water below, they yelped with delight. Drenched from head to toe and shivering, Maran once told her with extravagant joy that it was as if they were back at their old house.