The Seasons of Trouble (40 page)

After a while, the exhausted women started to nod off. Mugil went to the front of the bus and used a newspaper to wipe the foggedup windshield. She asked Sangeeta’s brother, who was driving, if he wanted some buttermilk or water, which she had brought along in Sprite bottles. After glugging down some chilli-infused buttermilk, he asked how she felt after seeing her husband: ‘Calmer or more tense?’ She didn’t know. ‘Any idea when they’ll send him home?’ She wasn’t sure of that either.

‘Remember how they told us before the elections that they’d free the refugees from the camps?’ she asked. The parliamentary elections had been held in 2010. ‘You think we’ll have to wait for the next election before they send the detainees home?’ That would mean another five years.

‘But they know our people didn’t vote for the ruling party,’ Sangeeta’s brother said. ‘We voted for the Tamil National Alliance, and we always will.’

‘So?’

‘So, the president has realised he doesn’t have to do anything for us because he doesn’t need us to win.’

ONCE THE EMERGENCY
regulations were lifted, Mugil’s brother returned home from detention camp. The two events were perhaps unconnected, but Mugil always thought of them together. Both were much anticipated; neither went the way she expected.

Prashant slept and ate at Mother’s house but spent every waking hour with his nephews and niece. In his florid way, he said it was a relief to bask in the daylight innocence of children after a long stay in a dark hell. He had boundless energy in playing with them and they responded with devotion. They wanted to spend the nights with him, wanted him to walk them to school and to their tutors afterwards, wanted to tag along when he was sent on errands by Mother. Chitthappa, Chitthappa, Chitthappa—Maran and Tamizh asked for him as soon as they woke up. Mugil wondered if they were somehow casting Prashant in the role of their father. They still turned to her when hurt or hungry, but they admired Prashant and craved his presence in a way she’d never seen them do with anyone else. Within days, Maran had begun to imitate his uncle, expressing a desire to grow up and be treated like a man. He wanted trousers instead of shorts. He told Mugil he would bathe and dress himself. When she walked into the house from the market one day, she saw Maran standing over Tamizh, speaking sternly. ‘I’m the elder one, so you have to give me the book. When Chitthappa is not around, I’m the man in the house. Give!’ Amazingly, Tamizh meekly handed the book over. Perhaps there was something about boys, even this young, that she didn’t intuitively grasp. They seemed to explore new sides of themselves under Prashant’s paternal influence. She began to encourage him to come over, not just to babysit but also to take over some parental responsibility. He said he had all the time she needed; it wasn’t as if he had a job.

Prashant’s joblessness was not for want of trying. He had finished the three-month army-mandated leadership workshop where,
among other things, they had taught him some nautical science. He had a knack for mechanical things, and he had fewer injuries than many other young men from the Vanni. The Rajapaksa government encouraged highway and building construction, making it the fastest-growing industry in the north. Sangeeta’s brother had recommended Prashant to a road construction supervisor. But in a few weeks it had become clear that this contact wouldn’t lead to a job. The largely Sinhalese contractors seemed more comfortable hiring and communicating with Sinhalese labourers, even if those workers had to be driven up from the south and given accommodation. This was a source of much anger among the local Tamil population, who had lost property, jobs and homes and now had next to no opportunity to be part of the biggest infrastructural development projects in their own neighbourhoods.

Like many other young men, after a couple of failed attempts, Prashant stopped applying for jobs in construction. ‘I have a fighting chance only with our own people,’ he declared, but the private sector was just as cliquish. He applied to be a salesman at a new department store in Jaffna, but the owner ended up hiring five relatives. A bank wanted a night security guard for one of its ATMs, but Mugil advised Prashant to steer clear of any contact with the police. She was afraid he would be held responsible for any robbery he couldn’t prevent; too many former Tigers were being accused of turning delinquent. She begged the cool-bar owner to give Prashant a job as a waiter, which the elderly man did, at decent wages. But after tea-sipping soldiers casually questioned the owner about ‘the new
Kottiya
’, he told Mugil he could not afford the risk of being shut down.

When Prashant was finally hired as a cleaner at a new guest house near the Jaffna beach, he was fired after two months. The management had expected him to work twelve-hour days all week and did not like his frequent requests for leave. ‘You don’t even have a wife or children, so why so many days off?’ they asked. Prashant couldn’t bring himself to tell them he was on probation. He was required to sign an army register at Point Pedro once a month, but unscheduled head counts were often held to prevent former detainees from absconding.

The army also used the register of returnees as a sort of blacklist. Whenever there was a burglary, a murder, an unlicensed meeting, a skirmish in a neighbourhood, former detainees on the list were called to the army camp or police station. Alibis and excuses were scrutinised and houses searched for arms. The process often took a whole day. If someone didn’t turn up—even for good reasons like illness, travel or work—his or her employers and family were harassed. It was difficult to hold down a full-time job while being watched so closely.

Government jobs, too, had interminable waitlists that could be overcome only through bribery or political influence. Through a friend, Prashant met and sought help from a local journalist who wrote for the weekly
Thinappuyal
, known to be run by former LTTE arms trafficker Sivanathan Kishore, now a politician. When Mugil discovered this, she was livid. Kishore was close to state intelligence agencies. She warned Prashant not to trust people like him: former Tiger leaders who had ingratiated themselves with the ruling regime. Some had even joined thuggish political parties like the Eelam People’s Democratic Party or EPDP, a pro-government Tamil outfit, which was riding the construction boom in the north with a lucrative sand-mining business across the Jaffna peninsula. Thanks to the state, the party had a free rein to wreak havoc among Tamils. A typical abuse of power involved the navy restricting fishermen’s access to the sea while the EPDP dug up the beach. The party men—co-opted Tamils and former LTTE and non-Tiger militants accused of crimes such as rape, arms smuggling and murder—bullied poor civilians, kidnapped people for ransom, and worked with military intelligence to spread fear. To seek political help was to enter a murky, opportunistic world a desperate man like Prashant could never fully comprehend.

Prashant eventually paid a Jaffna placement agency 3,000 borrowed rupees to find him a position as a driver or handyman. Until they called back, he decided to make do with part-time work in a motorbike repair shop, being paid per puncture fixed. It was barely ten rupees a day.

Mugil saw her brother grow more bitter by the day. Any news about ‘normalcy’ or ‘rapid economic development’ pushed him
over the edge. He would throw aside the newspaper and kick the mud. ‘The Northern Revival is improving lives, it seems!’ he would say, spitting the words, referring to the state’s economic plan for the war-torn northern province. ‘Their lives or our lives?’ At other times he moped around the house, no more the energetic playmate of his nephews. He grew unpredictable and moody.

At dinner one day, as he squished the pink rice
pittu
with some banana, he reminisced about the simple life they had led in the Vanni. ‘We didn’t have much, but we felt safe, and we were happy, no?’

Mugil nodded. ‘But it feels like it was so long ago. I hardly think those days will come back.’

‘I believe they will if we want it,’ he said. Mugil rolled her eyes.

Another day, as they were walking back with him from a friend’s funeral, Prashant broke down. He had been carrying Tamizh piggyback and had to set him down on the street. ‘I just can’t go on, I just can’t,’ he said, burying his face in his hands. ‘I had to give away several others, Akka, I had to give names,’ he said. ‘I could not bear the pain.’ He had focused on the future to endure the humiliation, he said, but the future was nothing but broken promises.

It was only these episodes that gave Mugil some indication of what her brother might have suffered in the camp. His only instruction on his return home had been for his family not to ask him about detention. He sometimes said he could never forget or forgive the treatment meted out in the first year, but rarely elaborated. Instead, he kept a diary. He wrote in a thick college notebook every afternoon after lunch, the words flowing so swiftly from his pen that the dots and lines of the Tamil characters were forgotten. Long sentences, many exclamations, words furiously underlined. Nothing scribbled out or corrected. Sometimes it was as if he couldn’t see the blue lines on the page: the sentences drooped with the fatigue of remembering. On one page, he drew the missiles the LTTE engineering department had taught him to design, perky arrows labelling the illustrations. On another, he listed all the artillery shells that he had identified in the war zone. He squeezed rhyming couplets into the margins. Every day, he picked a fresh topic to write about: the disabled, the former combatants, orphans,
disappearances, the president, the army, Tiger turncoats, prayer, mothers. ‘Detention’ was the most extensive section, running for almost twenty-four pages. It began thus: ‘If I had to explain how I felt in front of him, I would use this word: eunuch. No one will believe me, but I
know
. I
remember
, and it twists inside me like a knife mauling my organs.’ He referred to the entire army, the Sinhalese people, state representatives, all with the single disrespectful male Tamil pronoun
avan
. Him, he, his. ‘He is not capable of mercy’; ‘He gave us food, but we were empty shells with full stomachs’; ‘It was his plan to keep me away from my family so that I see no hope’; ‘He is teaching me carpentry but his repetitive questions about hidden weapons continue’; ‘He gives me two choices in a leader: the evil general who gave orders, and the evil mastermind.’ And the line that occurred repeatedly: ‘It is his plan to finish me.’ It was fiercely personal, yet Prashant seemed conscious of an unknown reader at times: ‘You should have seen the toilets—they were not fit for dogs, perhaps that’s why they gave them to Tigers.’

He was on his fifth such diary when Mugil found them all hidden in the back of the kitchen cupboard. She read some of his writings on and off, but it rekindled too much of what she was trying to forget.

Prashant wanted to submit his diary as testimony to an independent committee that he hoped would investigate war crimes. Global civil society organisations, the Tamil diaspora and the UN had been demanding such an unbiased investigation since the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. Assuming it would be similar to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Prashant wrote a diary entry lauding the format of the TRC but questioning its method of redress: the criminals of apartheid were shown mercy, but he did not want to forgive his abusers. ‘All my generosity has died with the thousands of victims. It might be petty of me, but real justice is punishment for all.’

When he read it out loud to Mugil, she argued with him. She wanted severe penalties for the politicians and upper ranks of the military but forgiveness for others. ‘Think as a Tiger soldier yourself,’ she told Prashant. ‘We were foot soldiers, teenagers. Should we be punished for what our leaders asked us to do?’

Prashant insisted that the Sri Lankan army was different. He recalled videos of soldiers shooting the naked bodies of suspected Tigers, laughing about the shapes of women’s corpses as they piled them in the backs of trucks. ‘They enjoyed killing us,’ he said.

‘Lower your voice, I don’t want the children hearing this.’ Some days earlier, when Maran had asked to go to the beach, Prashant had asked him to bring his toy gun along to ‘shoot the navy base down’. Mugil did not want her brother’s venom poisoning her sons.

‘Don’t overprotect them,’ he said.

‘They’re babies!’

‘They should know anyway. They’ll be feeling the humiliation soon.’

‘Be practical about the justice you’re asking for,’ Mugil continued. ‘If we ask for all of them to be killed, the government won’t even start an investigation.’

‘They’ve started, no? A practical, useless committee.’ Ignoring the calls for an independent probe, the Sri Lankan government had launched a domestic investigation into the events of the last phase of the war. Called the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Committee (LLRC), it was made up largely of retired government employees, including some who had publicly defended the state from allegations of irresponsibility during the war’s final stages. Since May 2010, the panel had been sitting in several districts in the north and east, calling for testimonies. People were speaking on record about Tiger atrocities and forced recruitment. Some NGOs wrote letters detailing the army’s illegal shelling of no-fire zones and hospitals, but without witness protection, most individuals were afraid to accuse the military openly while still living under their authority. It was clear from the beginning that the circumstances under which the LLRC was set up would skew the findings in favour of the government. In the two years since the war, after Rajapaksa had been re-elected and his coalition voted back into parliament, the state had become more autocratic. It had removed presidential term limits and any remaining independence from the police, provincial governments and human rights commissions.