Lion or tiger

Sri Lanka lives in its women. Whether they are sewing buttons on shirts in garment export factories, trudging up hill slopes with heavy sacks on their backs to hold the two leaves-and-bud their fingers expertly pluck from the tea bushes in Nuwara Eliya, or cleaning the homes of oil-rich Arab families across West Asia and sending back their earnings as remittances, women have been the economic pillars of Sri Lanka. They have also held together the broken spine of the island’s nationhood, joined as they are — despite their ethnic separation — in the way that the civil war left its imprint on them as mothers, daughters and wives.

So it had to be that two of the three protagonists in Rohini Mohan’s The Seasons of Trouble , a powerfully narrated tale of post-war Sri Lanka (but one that actually begins in mid-2008, when it became apparent that the LTTE's defeat was nigh), are women. Both are Tamil. Through the struggles of these two women, and the third protagonist, the son of one of the women, Mohan, a journalist, puts together a vivid account of the country that famously won the war but lost peace.

Indira is the mother, born in Jaffna, married to a plantation Tamil from the high country in central Sri Lanka, whose son Sarvanathan or Sarva, is picked up by the Terrorists Investigation Department in 2008, a year before the war ends, and detained under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act. Driven by the fear of never seeing her child alive again, Indira throws herself into the task of saving him from a system in which everything is black and white, Sinhala or Tamil, Lion or Tiger, with us or against us. She had once before moved heaven and earth to pull him back from the brink of a different situation. Ten years later, she has to do it again.

As the Sri Lankan military powers on toward a victory over the LTTE, the battlefields are in the north, but the entire country has turned into a Tiger-hunting ground. Anyone with the faintest whiff of LTTE in their past is vulnerable, even if they have moved on to settle down, marry, raise children and lead normal lives. There is no telling how you will be betrayed or who will betray you. Trapped in this vortex, there is only one option left to Sarva. The force of his mother backing him, it is that option that Sarva will finally exercise.

Mugil is an LTTE combatant who decides to burn her uniform one day in October 2008, and go back to bringing up her sons. She had become disillusioned with the Tigers. They were conscripting children who could barely hold their rifles, and had no commitment. She could see where the war was heading. On the day she quit, she had seen five teenaged girl combatants raped and killed by soldiers. But life on the other side of the lines in the last few months of the war is terrifying, more than she imagined. Joined by her husband and brother, both LTTE fighters too, one injured and the other separated from his unit, Mugil’s family flees the bombing of the Vanni by the Sri Lankan forces, moving from their hometown Puthukudiyirrupu to anywhere they could be safe, and eventually to the ‘no-fire zone’ beyond the Nandikadal lagoon in Mullaithivu, their dream of Eelam and their faith in the LTTE unravelling with every painful step. As they struggle to cope, her husband and brother decide to take up the Sri Lankan military’s offer to combatants: turn yourself in, we will treat you well. It ends a long inner struggle for her husband. Her angry brother chooses to see his surrender as an act of defiant heroism in abject defeat. Mugil buries her affiliation to look after her children.

Their separation as they get sent to different detention camps, their struggle to be released, the coming together as a free family, only to discover that their new situation remains as fragile, and in some ways, more so, leads them to the same conclusion as Indira and Sarva: the state will not allow Tamils, especially those with a “past”, to lead normal lives in post-war Sri Lanka.

Mohan uses the writing device now popular with long-form journalists, alternating between the two stories to tell the whole, building both towards a fast-paced denouement. But the book did not work for me in the way intended by the author. Once she had me hooked to the Indira-Sarva story, I ditched the carefully wrought but formulaic method, skipping alternate chapters to read that in its entirety first, and then separately the Mugil one, joining the dots between the two as I went along.

Graphic in its descriptions of people, places and their situations, including about what happens in the basement of the TID building in Colombo and to women combatants of the LTTE when they come face to face with Sri Lankan soldiers, Mohan’s writing is unflinchingly precise and non-sentimental in its depiction of the two tragedies, which are really one. In each of the details, and the sum of them, the stories are representative of the individual and combined experiences of every Tamil who has lived through three decades of Sri Lanka’s brutal war. But as this is essentially a book of reportage, I would have also liked a little more explanation about Mohan’s choice of protagonists, other than the line offered at the beginning that their articulation was the most powerful among the several people she interviewed.

There are no Sinhalese in this book except for soldiers, cops and government officials, and in telling us two powerful stories from one side of the ethnic divide, Mohan perhaps ends up perpetuating the same lion-tiger paradigm to which her protagonists fall victim. Sarva’s brief interaction with a Sinhalese NGO activist is the only time the reader gets a hint of a world beyond this divide. Then again, as the Sri Lankan State stubbornly refuses to see beyond its triumphalism, these are perhaps the only stories to tell.

Nirupama Subramanian is Senior Associate Editor, The Hindu, and author of Sri Lanka: Voices from a War Zone. She was a Sri Lanka correspondent (1996-2002) .

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