The Seasons of Trouble (38 page)

After a month demanding to see Sarva in Kilinochchi, Indra became afraid that Carmel too would be sucked into the movement. She took her youngest back home. There, John and Deva could do little to pacify her; they offered no ideas, no help. The weeks of starvation had ravaged her digestive tract and she was laid up in bed. Every time she got better, she went looking for Sarva, roaming Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, Vavuniya, pleading with anyone remotely senior for his release.

Once, someone told her Sarva had been sent to Palestine for training. This wasn’t as far-fetched a possibility as it seemed to Indra; Hamas had indeed trained some Tamil militants in the eighties. Another combatant told her she should be proud; Sarva
was being trained to be a trauma doctor. Yet another said he had been sent on a foreign spying mission. Lies, she thought, all lies. The more they refused to let her contact him, the surer she became that he was being held against his will.

Driven by her manic will and a vision of Sarva’s untimely death in battle, she continued her campaign for more than a year. She shouted from the streets of Mullaitivu that the LTTE may spew great philosophy about the Tamil motherland, but their ‘hearts must be made of stone to let a Tamil mother struggle so’. She was blind to the dangers of challenging the Tiger leaders, of abusing them in a place where they wielded absolute power.

John was distraught at her mud-smeared skirt, unkempt hair and raccoon eyes: ‘Do you think they will listen to a
pichchakkari
, a shabby beggar?’ Her sisters were sure she would be shot to death. ‘What option do I have?’ Indra would scream. Were they suggesting she give up? Being a middle-aged woman and a mother made her bulletproof, she said. As she turned up at LTTE offices every few weeks, some people in the Vanni began to recognise Indra because of her antics. When she returned one day to Nuwara Eliya, a Vanni newspaper printed a news item headlined ‘
Pillaiyai thedi vantha thaaiyai kaanavillai
!’ The mother searching for her son is missing!

Eventually Indra was able to meet Commander Paulraj through an acquaintance, a friend whose brother was martyred in the Mullaitivu siege. Indra had gone to see Paulraj with the martyr’s mother, so the commander listened patiently. It was the first breakthrough she had had in a year. He offered Indra a glass of lemonade, which she refused. She wasn’t taking any chances. He said she should trust them more and that he would ‘speak to the higher-ups’. He gave her a room in the female combatants’ camp and asked her to wait for news from him.

Indra stayed in the camp for some weeks, too nervous to consume much more than a bun and a bottle of soda every day. Paulraj spoke to her often on the hostel landline, telling her not to starve, and continuing to assure her that he was doing his best to get Sarva out. One day he sent a junior around with a note written by Sarva: ‘I’m happy here, Amma, please, go home.’ The girls she had befriended
in the camp—they said Indra reminded them of their own suffering mothers—passed the note around, analysing its authenticity. Even if it was in Sarva’s hand, they said, it was probably written under duress. They advised Indra to step up her campaign and threaten the authorities, attack them where it hurt the most.

During the ceasefire, the LTTE was conducting a public relations offensive to win the sympathy of international media and aid agencies; the Tigers wanted to undo their proscription by the US and Europe. ‘So many white people come and go with cameras now, Amma,’ one the hostel girls said. ‘You should do some drama in front of them.’ So Indra bought a bottle of poison and waited. When some foreigners—activists, peace-talk negotiators or journalists, she didn’t know—were in the camp one day, Indra ran out of her room. Waving the poison in the air, she swore to drink it if she did not see her son in ten days.

One of the foreigners in the camp was from the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, or SLMM, an independent body whose Nordic members oversaw the execution of the ceasefire. They had recently denounced the LTTE’s forced recruitment. The SLMM representative got Indra to file a report with them and launched a formal search for Sarva.

Two months on, SLMM said they had found evidence that Sarva had been conscripted and witnesses testifying to the fact, but they had not been able to trace him. A local newspaper, otherwise sympathetic to the LTTE, wrote a story on the trauma of motherhood during the war, featuring Indra. A combination of the SLMM search and the press report appeared to have pressured, or irritated, the Tiger leaders, because on 24 November 2003, when she was back in Nuwara Eliya for a few days, Indra received a note asking her to go to Mullivaikal. She could have one day with her son.

Sarva was unrecognisable. He seemed taller, his neck thicker. His biceps pushed against his shirtsleeves. His hair was cropped in a crew cut so close that he had no more curls. Indra had nursed a tiny hope that he would’ve escaped the physical training, but as he stood in front of her, muscular and coal-dark, she knew that wasn’t the case. She had brought Deva’s infant son along to illustrate a point: did Sarva even know that his brother had a baby?

They had not seen each other for a whole year, but Sarva behaved as if meeting in this way was perfectly routine. He held the child in his arms and smelled its head. He hugged Indra tight, but she recoiled. Despising the iron feel of his body and the pistol at his hip, she slammed her fists on his chest and pushed him away. The months of patience, anxiety and illness boiled over. In a sudden rage, she ripped his green checked shirt down the front. How could he leave his family and live with strangers? she shouted. She fished out his letter, tore it into pieces, flung it in his face. She slapped him hard.

‘You don’t have any love in you!’ she screamed. Did he know how sick his mother had been? Did he not miss his family, not want to see his nephew gurgle and to play with him? Did he not want to get married and have his own babies? ‘What are you doing? You never wanted all this,’ she cried.

In the cottage where they were meeting in the Kaithady camp, some men in uniform stood watching, including Uday, Sarva’s immediate supervisor. Looking at him, Indra sobbed that she didn’t understand why they needed her son if the government and the LTTE had signed an agreement to stop fighting. ‘And don’t you have hundreds of other willing soldiers?’ Sarva held Indra back, shushing her. She was an emotional mess, more so because her son seemed so unruffled. His face was placid, his voice soft. He described his training: the swimming, shooting, and code-reading workshops; he told her that the leaders said he was smart but needed to be more obedient. He likened it to a nine-to-five job. Indra wondered if her son had been briefed to say these things; she wished she could undo the brainwashing.

After some time, a young combatant invited Indra for a meal at the canteen. With hundreds of others, Indra sat with Sarva and watched him wolf down a mountain of rice. She could not eat. Was he really happy here, was this what he wanted, was this his future? She did not want him carrying a gun; people did not do such things in her family. Where had he even got such an idea? She wondered if she had ever romanticised the LTTE and their cause while raising Sarva. She had cursed the Sinhalese, certainly; she might have wished aloud for a country where Tamils could be
free. But had Sarva seen enough hate to think of vengeance in this slow, dispassionate, organised way?

Sarva’s generation had grown up imbibing the fears, wishes and bitterness of the elder members of the community. Even though his family had lived outside the Vanni, he had been surrounded by films, books, songs, myths, superstitions, schools and political and religious leaders—all of them talking only of fears and threats. In her helplessness, Indra blamed herself, but the dining room was filled with young Tamil men training to be combatants. Many had experienced a recruitment that was as ambivalent as Sarva’s, somewhere between forced and voluntary.

In this era of conflict, it was nearly impossible to distinguish between propaganda and threats; the two worked together: a barrage of messages simultaneously seducing, inviting, demanding, arm-twisting and threatening. When Indra was young, people her age thought about political protest or pursued an existence indifferent to the issues of the day, but after the rise of militancy, Tamil identity—as projected by the Tigers—had become acutely embattled. The air was heavy with calls to sacrifice. Victimhood morphed into martyrdom, non-participation became betrayal. The idea of Tamilness was community action, not silent suffering. Militants had usurped the voice of Tamil protest in Sri Lanka, and the LTTE, by murdering or sidelining all moderate groups, had emerged as the most prominent catalyst of political awareness. Their militarised language whipped together the images and sentiments of masculinity, feminism, equal rights, Tamilness and bravery to impel men and women to action.

When facing discrimination, youngsters were expected to be enraged. When the doors of opportunity shut on them, they were meant to retaliate. It was common for the poor to become combatants, and for middle-class men like Sarva to join the LTTE as officers, propagandists, spies, and intelligence strategists. But as a parent, Indra saw this as a personal failure. She could not believe Sarva wanted this, she was sure he must have lost his mind. To her, this had robbed her of the life-loving child she had raised.

After lunch, she begged Sarva to go with her. ‘Enough of this,
kanna
! Throw this life away! Come back home!’

Sarva was quiet, and Uday answered for him: ‘He can’t go with you, amma.’

Sarva and Uday escorted her in a van to the old Tiger base in Kilinochchi. When Indra was not looking, Sarva rummaged in her bag and filched his nephew’s bib. They took her for a glass of tea at the Pandian Hotel, which had opened after the ceasefire. She asked Sarva tearfully why he had ignored her when she was in the Vanni, demanding to see him. Again, it was Uday who replied, saying that no one had told Sarva that his mother was looking for him.

‘All parents want their children back,’ Uday said. ‘We thought you’d soon give up.’

‘Have you lost your tongue?!’ Indra yelled, looking at Sarva. He kept his eyes on the floor.

When they dropped her near the stop for the Nuwara Eliya bus, Sarva hugged his mother desperately. When Uday stepped back to let them say their goodbyes, Sarva held Indra’s hand and secretly traced some words with his fingers on her palm. Indra was too flustered to make out the letters. Listen to me, he urged, and hugged her again. In her ear he whispered, ‘Get me out of here somehow.’

Elated that her visit had changed her son’s mind, Indra went back to Paulraj and demanded that he send Sarva back home: ‘He’s told me he wants to leave.’ The commander wasn’t convinced but offered to send Sarva home on a long period of leave. After that, he said, it was up to them. Indra thought she heard the implied suggestion that Sarva desert the LTTE while on holiday.

Sarva was supposed to come home on leave a month later, but the A9 highway was often closed. In 2003, the LTTE pulled out of peace talks. The ceasefire was crumbling; the Tigers would soon be blamed for violating it 3,000 times and using the lull in fighting to rearm and recruit.

In January 2004, one and a half years after he went to Vavuniya, Sarva came home. He took a bus from Kilinochchi to Colombo and was picked up at the bus stand by Deva and John. When he left Vanni, Sarva said, he had been ordered to wait in Colombo for his first assignment. As soon as he admitted this, Indra packed a bag for him and got Deva to buy him a ticket to Kuala Lumpur. Deva was going to spend a year in Malaysia to start a travel business with
a friend, and it was decided that Sarva would leave with him. Indra wanted him to escape abroad to shake off any Tigers that might be tailing him.

‘They will still look for me,’ a nervous Sarva insisted. ‘They will want me to do things.’

‘You don’t have to do them,’ Indra replied determinedly.

On 24 January 2004, Sarva left with Deva for Kuala Lumpur, where he stayed for a year helping his brother, but keeping a low profile. He learnt to cook and clean, and watched TV interminably. Malaysia was a networking hub for the Tigers; its chief arms procurer, Kumaran Pathmanathan, operated from there, and cadres often trained at a aeronautical centre in Perak owned by a Tamil. Sarva rarely left the house, and when he did, he pretended to be a non-Tamil Indian.

That year, the rejuvenated and rearmed Tigers struck harder than ever before in Sri Lanka, assassinating Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, a Tamil politician, in Colombo. Indra read about Tamil youths being scooped up by the hundreds and thrown in jail. She broke 500 coconuts in a temple, thanking God for pulling her son out of the storm just in time.

INDRA HAD AVERTED
a catastrophe when she prised Sarva out of the Tigers, but the ghosts of his time spent training as a militant were persistent. The past caught up with Sarva in 2008, with his detention. During his interrogation, Sarva recognised a man Inspector Silva asked him to identity: a fellow trainee in the LTTE. It was he who had informed the TID about Sarva’s history, and provided the distinguishing characteristic that gave him away: his three false front teeth. During the LTTE training, Sarva had guilelessly showed these to his comrades as a trophy from a childhood fall. Their supervisor suggested Sarva use the gap behind his dentures to hide the Tigers’ standard issue cyanide vial. During Inspector Silva’s nightmarish interrogation, Sarva had looked at the informer standing against the glass window in the same room and—to avoid an incriminating confession—denied knowing him. Sarva had wanted to charge at him for his betrayal, crash through the high
window, and send them both plunging to their death. But even if he’d had the nerve to do that, he could never know why the man had snitched, whether he had succumbed to torture or bargained for his freedom. In every official statement since Sarva’s detention, Indra stuck to his version of events: he had been forcibly recruited and trained by the LTTE, but he had never worked for them. To appease her conscience, she also held on to Sarva’s whispered plea in the Vanni, asking her to get him out of there.