This Divided Island E-Book

Samanth Subramanian

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 501

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED FOR RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2016 In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to a bloody end the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere: into the bustle of Colombo, the Buddhist monasteries scattered across the island, the soft hills of central Sri Lanka, the curves of the eastern coast near Batticaloa and Trincomalee, and the stark, hot north. With its genius for brutality, the war left few places, and fewer people, untouched. What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict? What happens to the country's soul? Samanth Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, and to other battles from other times, he draws out the story of Sri Lanka today - an exhausted, disturbed society, still hot from the embers of the war. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how religion and state conspire, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories. This Divided Island is a harrowing and humane investigation of a country still inflamed.

Leseprobe

THIS DIVIDED ISLAND

Samanth Subramanian studied journalism at Pennsylvania State University and international relations at Columbia University. He has written for, among other publications, the Guardian, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Mint, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, New Republic, Foreign Affairs, The National and The Hindu. His first book, Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast, was published by Atlantic Books.

‘There is only one word to describe this book: it’s a masterpiece, a Book of the Year, even possibly the decade.’

Mani Shankar Aiyar, India Today

‘Like Philip Gourevitch’s account of the genocide in Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, this is a superbly reported book.’

Rahul Jacob, Business Standard

‘A tour de force. Written with journalistic prowess and integrity, the book succeeds in bringing the war uncomfortably close, so close you can smell the blood.’

Vaishna Roy, The Hindu

‘This is narrative journalism at its most literary, diligently researched reportage presented with poetry and flair.’

Shehan Karunatilaka, Mint

‘The best book on the subject and, what is more, a book different in kind from nearly all that have appeared this far.’

Shyam Tekwani, Tehelka

‘The book is not just a journal of reportage but is also a meditation on memory … Pick up This Divided Island; it’ll be one of the best books you’ll pick up this year.’

Aditya Sinha, The Asian Age

‘Subramanian’s This Divided Island is a welcome read, very different from any other book written on this terrible chapter of human struggle. Slow-cooked over a number of years, meticulously constructed and with a passion and sympathy for Sri Lanka and her people, this Tamil Indian writer illuminates the central dilemma established midway through the book, and around which all hinges: What did it take for an ordinary, peaceable Tamil to commit to violence?’

Gordon Weiss, former UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka, Open

‘To integrate these interviews into a broader historical narrative as seamlessly as Subramanian has done is a rare achievement.’

Keshava Guha, Scroll

Also by Samanth Subramanian

Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

First published in hardback in India in 2014 by Penguin Books India.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Samanth Subramanian, 2014.

The moral right of Samanth Subramanian to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-85789-595-0

EBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-596-7

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-85789-597-4

Typeset in Sabon Roman by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Printed in Great Britain

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For Sanjaya, who, like his namesake in the Mahabharata, opened up the world to his unseeing friend

I wish I could persuade you to regard death

as casually as we do over here. In the heat of it

you expect it, you are expecting it, you are not surprised

by anything anymore . . .

—Jorie Graham,

‘Spoken from the Hedgerows’

PREFACE

In May 2009, when the civil war ended in Sri Lanka, the world sat up and took note. Wars rarely end in such punishing victories these days, and all things considered, perhaps that is a blessing. In its crusade to section off an independent state for Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking minority, a rebel force of guerrillas—the Tigers—found itself squeezed into the northeast corner of the island, hiding behind hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians on the run. Here the Sri Lankan army, wise to its advantage, rained shells from the sky, wiping out the Tigers but also uncaringly, or even deliberately, slaying thousands of civilians. The United Nations thought more than 40,000 non-combatants must have died in this way—more than 40,000 women, children and men routed from their homes, trapped on the front, baking in the early summer heat, huddling in tarpaulin-covered bunkers, praying for survival. The shells pulverized trees and gouged out the earth. As a pebble does in a tin box, the carnage reverberated particularly loudly within this small island, this knot of rock just off the coast of India.

For a while, the sheer misery and tragedy of these events swamped any ability to think about the full arc of the war. Interrupted only by a couple of short, patchy ceasefires, Sri Lanka fought the Tigers for the better part of three decades. Unwatched by most of the world, the war raged and raged, feeding itself some strange fuel that lent it such durability; it must be among the longest continuous wars since the beginning of the twentieth century, if not the very longest.

It is curious to locate the proximate cause of a war in something as noble as a desire for education. When Sri Lanka broke free of British rule in 1948, the seats in its universities were occupied to disproportionately high levels by the minority Tamils, who through quirks of colonial history spoke better English and were better educated than the majority Sinhalese. The Tamils then went on, after university, to fill the civil service, the country’s most reliable provider of employment at the time. To the country’s Sinhalese who suddenly found themselves empowered with a vote, and therefore to the government, this state of affairs appeared too lopsided and unfair to continue.

When laws and quotas were enacted to protect the interests of the Sinhalese, the Tamils felt they were being discriminated against. The frictions between the two communities erupted repeatedly into ghastly riots; in the worst of them, the Black July riot in 1983, roughly 3,000 people were killed, many of them burned alive. Tamil houses and shops were looted and burned, and 150,000 Tamils were rendered homeless. When a clutch of Tamil militant groups had begun to emerge in the 1970s, to agitate for a free Tamil state, they found only a trickle of willing recruits; after Black July, though, they were flooded by young men and women wanting to fight, and none more so than the Tigers.

Starting as a ragtag outfit carrying out the odd guerrilla attack, the Tigers grew into a fearsome terrorist organization. They ran arms and drugs, pulled in funds from a Tamil diaspora scattered across the planet, killed thousands of civilians, assassinated presidents and prime ministers, and perfected the art of the suicide bomber. They kept their own people, the Tamils, in line by intimidation and murder. In their full pomp, the Tigers controlled vast wedges of territory in the north and east of Sri Lanka, where flat, hot, sandy coasts meld gradually into jungle. Here they ran their own country in all but name, collecting taxes and policing the streets and adjudicating disputes. But the Sri Lankan state was always just outside the door, impatient to snatch back its land, working itself up into a state of angry nationalism. Buddhism, the religion of most Sinhalese, developed a vocal right wing; its monks entered politics, pressed for a more merciless war, and dreamed of a purely Buddhist island.

The vicious turbulence of these social changes, and of the war itself, made it easy to forget that, underneath it all, there were Sri Lankans trying to lead regular lives: earning a living, sending their children to school, writing novels, playing cricket, making lunch. The very word ‘regular’ was, in such a lengthy and ferocious war, bent almost unrecognizably out of shape. A regular day came to involve keeping your children from being conscripted by the Tigers or being wary about buses that might have bombs planted within them. It came to involve messy loyalties and scarred psychologies, and being sucked into the fighting in unexpected and devastating ways. The longer the war wore on, the more it transmuted the substance of life, into something simultaneously strange and revealing. I went to Sri Lanka to discover what became of life before, during and after the decades of war, and to find out what the conflict had done to the country’s soul.

CONTENTS

Timeline

The Terror

The North

The Faith

Endgames

Acknowledgements

TIMELINE

1948: Ceylon gains independence from Great Britain.

1956: The Sinhala Only Act is passed, making Sinhalese the language of governance and failing to recognize Tamil as an official language.

1958: Anti-Tamil riots break out. An estimated three hundred Tamils across the island are killed.

1971: The government implements the standardization policy, setting higher benchmarks for Tamil students to enter universities.

1972: Ceylon is renamed Sri Lanka, and Buddhism is given ‘the foremost place’ among the country’s religions.

1975: Velupillai Prabhakaran, 21 years old, assassinates the mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiappah.

1976: Prabhakaran creates the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a successor to his earlier group, the Tamil New Tigers.

1977: Following the general elections, a fresh wave of anti-Tamil riots breaks out. Around three hundred Tamils are slaughtered.

1983: A Tiger ambush of an army convoy in Jaffna triggers the worst anti-Tamil riots yet. Although numbers are unclear, up to three thousand Tamils may have been killed. The ambush is often considered the beginning of the civil war.

1987–90: Indian Peace Keeping Forces swarm across the north and the east, trying without success to eliminate the Tigers. When they retreat, the Tigers hold Jaffna.

1991: In retribution for sending in peacekeeping forces, the Tigers assassinate the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

1993: The Tigers are held responsible for the assassination of the Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa.

1995: After a brief truce, the Tigers lose control of Jaffna.

2002: Norway brokers a ceasefire between the Tigers and the government.

2004: The Tigers, having pulled out of peace talks the previous year, go on the offensive to regain the east, signalling a return to hostilities. That December, a tsunami kills 30,000 Sri Lankans.

2005: Mahinda Rajapaksa becomes president of Sri Lanka.

2006: The beginning of the fourth—and last—phase of the civil war.

2007: The government announces that it has cleared eastern Sri Lanka of Tigers.

January 2009: The army captures Kilinochchi, which has served for a decade as the Tigers’ capital.

February 2009: Concern mounts over the welfare of civilians trapped in the battle zone.

May 2009: The government announces a victory over the Tigers, even as it shrugs off accusations of bombing civilians. Prabhakaran is killed on the final day of fighting.

2010: Rajapaksa wins re-election to the presidency.

2011: The United Nations releases a report accusing the Sri Lankan army of war crimes. The report estimates that forty thousand civilians may have died in the final months of the civil war.

THE TERROR

1

WE HAD LEFT Colombo too early for me to remain awake on the drive up into hill country. Just past 5 a.m., the streets glowed of sodium-lit emptiness, and Uncle W.’s hatchback skimmed eastwards in silence. It was late August, and there should have been damp, blacker-than-black patches on the tarmac, but there weren’t. The rains had been meagre this season, and the days stayed bright and dry. At this hour of the morning, cool air gusted through my open window, and I fell asleep even before we hit the suburbs. I remember that drive in the way we remember the images thrown off by a slide carousel: skittering frames of green banana-tree groves and a pink sky, of MAK Lubricant billboards and little Buddhist shrines, of kiosks selling cream soda and mobile phone recharges, of earthenware shops with pots hanging from the rafters, of papayas and pumpkins displayed in neat cairns on truck tailgates, and of the road’s shoulder dropping suddenly away into the valley below and then catching up with us again a few hundred metres later.

Next to me, Uncle W. hunched his bulk over the steering wheel, his eyes devouring the road, the head of the gearstick engulfed within his mammoth left hand. He was a friend’s father; this was why, in honest South Asian fashion, I called him ‘Uncle.’ Uncle W. was a Tamil and a Hindu—minority folded upon minority—and he had lived nearly all his life in Colombo. He used to import and sell prawn feed until the 1990s, when an epidemic of white-spot disease raced through the country’s prawn farms, shutting many of them down and driving him entirely out of business. He sold his bungalow in tony Colombo 3, paid back 40 million rupees in loans, and picked himself up again. Now he imported alloy wheels from China: lightweight car wheels crafted in far more exciting designs than the humdrum defaults installed by car manufacturers in their factories. ‘Alloy wheels for cars,’ he once told me, ‘are like lipstick for women.’ His voice was so bass that it bordered on the ursine.

Uncle W.’s shipments of alloy wheels rolled in from China once every two months, which left him plenty of time to pursue a line of volunteer work: organizing some of the activities of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), a group seeking to protect Hinduism from any perceived threat to its existence in Sri Lanka. Given the country’s tangled demographics, the HSS could discern such threats to Hindus—all Tamil-speaking—from virtually any direction it chose: from Sinhalese-speaking Buddhists, the country’s majority, or from the Christians who speak both Tamil and Sinhalese, or even from the population of Tamil-speaking Muslims, who are considered neither Tamil by the Tamils nor Sinhalese by the Sinhalese, and who therefore dwell in a curious ethnic interstice of their own. The HSS is an earnest but spindly body, its few thousand members acutely aware of their minority status and thus contenting themselves with good works and mild proselytization. ‘One fine morning, they’ll wake up and find out we’ve gotten big,’ Uncle W. promised. It sounded grand and ominous, but he fell instantly back to earth. ‘And then I suppose they’ll find a way to shut us down.’

Outside Kandy, we stopped at a kade for breakfast: cold string hoppers made of rice, served from behind a glass-fronted display cabinet. Then we drove on. Uncle W. skirted around Kandy and climbed further into the hills, past rubber plantations and small, bashful villages that revealed themselves as the sun dissolved the last of the morning mist. Near the village of Kandenuwara, we slowed down, searching for the local school. Uncle W. didn’t know where precisely this was, so he thrust his head and shoulders out of his window to get directions from passers-by: women returning from the market, or men on bicycles pedalling so languorously that their wheels seemed to be rotating through molasses.

We arrived into the midst of some confusion. The HSS had rented this school—and three other schools, in nearby towns—for the full duration of this Saturday, to conduct camps for children. Its volunteers had materialized early to arrange chairs in neat rows and to install, upon the pecan walls of a long classroom, portraits of Hindu deities and of other especial Hindu luminaries. But then the local police had descended upon the school and had commandeered the classroom for a hastily convened citizens’ meeting. There were already a few dozen people present when we entered, and more streamed in. The conversations around me seemed to sweat with alarm.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Ganesh, one of the HSS workers, a young, burly man who had been shifting furniture all morning.

Ganesh replied: ‘This must be about the Grease Yakas.’

For weeks, the Grease Yakas had mesmerized Sri Lanka, occupying the front page of every newspaper and the heart of every conversation. There weren’t actually any supernatural devils—any yakas—daubing themselves with grease and attacking women in the countryside at night. They had to be men, and yet that invited only further bewilderment. Which men were these? Why did these attacks occur in predominantly Tamil areas—in the north near Jaffna, or the east, or in lonely patches of hill country? Had the Grease Yakas really affixed metal springs to the soles of their shoes, to enable them to leap over bushes and stiles? Did slathering your body with axle grease truly make you more slippery, harder to hold in a tussle? Most crucially: If they were only men dressed up as greased devils, why had none of them ever been caught?

Fresh theories broke water every day. Officials of the state blamed a Marxist party that had twice, decades before, armed itself and risen against the government. (It was unclear, though, if the Marxists were being accused of being the Grease Yakas or of merely fabricating the tales of their antics.) Simultaneously, army officers and policemen denied that there were any greased beings out there at all. In the Sunday Leader, a newspaper that had published many eyewitness accounts and even an identikit sketch of a Grease Yaka, a police inspector flatly discounted the stories on the basis that ‘grease is harmful to the skin and will result in blocked pores and skin diseases.’ He sounded like a cosmetician. Some of the villagers, incredulous but nonetheless frightened, suspected that the Grease Yakas were agents of the state’s security apparatus. The hysteria was designed, they thought, only as an excuse to fortify the army’s presence in the north and the east. Some Tamils thought that the Grease Yakas were Muslims; some Muslims thought that the Grease Yakas were Tamils.

Round and round the conjecture went, a whirligig of dread and suspicion and naked distrust. The civil war had ended a couple of years earlier, after three decades of murderous fighting; the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, guerrillas who had sought an independent state for the country’s Tamils, had been defeated. But Sri Lanka still felt tense, and the peace was already curdling into something sour and unhealthy. Old fears continued to throb; old ghosts transmuted into new ones.

Ganesh and I sat in on the citizens’ meeting, perching on tiny chairs designed for smaller bottoms. He passed me a sign-up sheet, on which I absently scratched my name. Presently the meeting came to order. Three senior police officers, their uniforms rich with braids and badges, sat on plastic chairs, next to a microphone on a stand. The microphone was utterly redundant: the classroom was dead quiet, and the translator—the man the Tamil villagers really needed to hear—was unamplified. The translator summoned up the first police officer, who welcomed the assembly and told them how glad he was that they could all make it. Then he introduced his boss, the town’s police chief, and got out of the way.

On display in this fashion, before the microphone, the police chief resembled a boy in a school’s theatrical production. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he first twisted them around each other and then gave them his cap to hold. He fumbled his lines: forgetting that he needed to be translated, he set off at a furious gallop in Sinhalese, while next to him, the translator’s eyes grew wide with panic. This was not the plan. Only after a minute or perhaps two did the police chief pause long enough for his words to be rendered into Tamil, but after that he settled down, and the remainder of his speech was dispensed sentence by sentence. ‘Basically, I wish to tell you all that there is no such thing as the Grease Yaka,’ he said, before slipping into a little abstract music about communities living happily together. He advised his audience not to resort to killing anybody based on mere suspicion. ‘I know my people. I know my people are intelligent, and I urge them to treat all this as a lie. There’s no need to regard the police or the army with any doubt. We are your protectors. Don’t be fooled by these speculations.’ His people absorbed this advice without a flicker of emotion.

More speeches followed. A local community organizer in a cream-coloured T-shirt, a skein of coloured talismans tied around his right wrist, harangued his fellow Kandenuwarans in Tamil. They were being unnecessarily scared, he said. ‘We’re all going back home at 5.30 in the evening and locking our doors. The other day, I went to visit a friend at 7. I knocked on the door, and I could see him at the window, drawing the curtain back to see if I was a Grease Yaka!’ This anecdote drew some reluctant titters. ‘There’s no rule that we’re allowed to beat people up before handing them over to the police,’ he went on, ‘and you know this well. So why would we want to do that? Don’t do that.’ It was midway between a whining plea and a sturdy call to common sense.

Another policeman appeared, rangy and curly haired. It was only when he delivered his piece in uninterrupted Sinhalese, in the interest of time, that I realized what a token gesture the translator’s presence was, the gesture of a country that had just ended a war born out of linguistic grudges. Of course they all knew Sinhalese, and Ganesh confirmed this, because how would they get by otherwise? For my benefit, he whispered a translation of this final speech, his breath hot and raspy in my ear.

‘One rumour says the Grease Yaka is bald, one says he has long hair, one says he’s tall, one says he jumps a lot, one says he has an oiled body. But they’re all just rumours. Show me one person who has really seen a Grease Yaka,’ the policeman declared. He raked the room with a glare, waiting for somebody to respond to his challenge. ‘For 30 years, the Tigers were there. But now they’re gone and there’s a void, and this is why these rumours will find ground.’ Meanwhile, the police chief leaned back in his chair and took photographs, on his mobile phone, of his colleague in mid-speech, and of an audience rigid with attentive silence. They hadn’t gathered here just for information on the Grease Yakas; they were also trying to figure out how much they could trust the police to keep them safe.

Uncle W.’s Hinduism camp, anticlimactic after discussions of such dramatic moment, was an amalgam of insecurity, sincerity and blustery chauvinism. First Ganesh led 28 boys in some tuneless Tamil singalongs. Then Uncle W. spoke for many minutes, elaborating upon the grandeur of the Hindu faith. My attention started to wander, and I gazed out of the open windows. The sun was higher now, and the green hills steamed in the distance. After nightfall, I thought, these forests must turn menacing and dark. Perhaps it was easier to believe in demons then—or to believe in inexplicable evil, at any rate.

Towards the end of his speech, Uncle W. exhorted the boys not to fall into the embrace of any other religion. ‘All this while, we Hindus haven’t cared enough to stop each other from getting converted. Now we should watch out for this. And we have so much support. If the Hindus in this country have a problem, the Hindus living in 50 other countries are ready to help.’

At this point, I was reminded of something he had told me a week earlier, across a table in his alloy-wheel warehouse. We had been drinking tea, and he had been discursive about the war. ‘The problem with the Tigers was that they fought their war based on language,’ he had said. ‘That was a mistake, because language isn’t a unifying enough force. These struggles are better organized around religion.’ In the morning, Kandenuwara’s adults had been soothed and comforted; that same afternoon, their sons were being told that a low-grade fever of wariness was not wholly out of place.

All Sri Lanka was wary; this was a country perpetually steeling itself for bad news. The war had made it this way: the agonizing longevity of the fighting; the Tigers’ sneaky guerrilla tactics; the manner in which the army had finished the war, rampaging through Tigers and Tamil civilians without distinction; the government’s excesses in the two years since its victory. In such an inflamed atmosphere, rumour prompted quick violence and tragic consequences.

Up the coast from Colombo, in Puttalam, a mob accused the police of protecting the Grease Yakas and lynched—or beat to death, or hacked into pieces, depending on the newspaper you believed—a traffic constable. Elsewhere, villagers formed vigilante committees, but the army, reflexively hostile to any aggregation of Tamils under any circumstances, waded into these committees and disbanded them by force. I read about some of these incidents in grim, exact reports issued by a small watchdog group in Colombo. In the north, in Thottaveli, army jeeps thundered towards a small crowd of Tamils assembled near a church, and ‘20 officers got down from the vehicle and started beating the people. Women and children were also in the crowd and were attacked.’ Later in that same church, the report offered by way of black comedy, the army called a meeting, where a brigadier ‘ordered the people to apologize for attacking the military and for breaching the peace.’ Further east, 11 Tamil men were arrested, and two of them were beaten. ‘The officers dragged me up and asked: “Will you hit the police?’’ one of these men said. ‘When I tried to tell them that I did not hit the police, they asked me to shut up . . . When he hit my ears, I felt an electric shock pass through my body.’

Sri Lanka was a country pretending that it had been suddenly scrubbed clean of violence. But it wasn’t, of course. By some fundamental law governing the conservation of violence, it was now erupting outside the battlefield, in strange and unpredictable ways. It reminded me of a case of pox, the toxins coursing below the skin, pushing up boils and pustules that begged to be fingered and picked apart.

After a delayed lunch, Uncle W. and I and three others squeezed into Ganesh’s geriatric Nissan van, with its squeaky seat springs and its windshield decal of a crucifix with the legend: ‘My presence shall go with thee.’ (‘I bought the van from a pastor here,’ Ganesh explained, embarrassed, ‘and I still haven’t gotten around to peeling that sticker off.’) We drove half an hour to a school in Rattota, where another camp was puttering too slowly to a close. Two hours’ worth of activity remained in the day’s programme, but they had only half an hour left on the clock. Twenty-five girls were standing in rows in front of a fluttering saffron flag planted in a flowerpot, singing prayers in ragged unison. Our arrival precipitated a short break for tea, during which the girls’ instructors—three women, not even out of their twenties, from villages near Rattota—joined us in a classroom. It was inevitable: within five minutes, we were talking about the Grease Yaka.

Night fell suddenly in these parts, like a tent collapsing upon unsuspecting campers. By the time the girls regrouped in another classroom to listen to Uncle W.—who told them that Guglielmo Marconi had swiped a Hindu scientist’s notes about shortwave communication when they were both travelling on the same ship, but that they should nevertheless write ‘Marconi’ if they were asked who invented the radio in their exams—all of the schoolhouse’s lights needed to be turned on. The hills around us were consumed by the gloom, and Rattota grew enormously quiet. It was barely 7 p.m.

Outside the classroom, even as Uncle W. was winding down his lecture, a worried conversation was taking place between the three women, Ganesh and his colleagues. The girls and their instructors needed to get home, but nobody wanted to travel in the dark. Ganesh, his smile now flickering and its wattage definitely dimmed, proposed that they might all call their parents and then stay in the school for the night.

‘I thought you didn’t believe in the Grease Yaka, Ganesh,’ I teased.

‘I don’t! I don’t!’ Ganesh replied. ‘But look, there’s no point taking chances.’ Much of Rattota’s population was Muslim and relations between the Muslims and the Hindus were not good. He never outlined what he thought the Muslims might do to these young women walking or riding the bus home. ‘And then there’s always the army. It’s just better to be safe.’

An azan burst from a nearby mosque, calling the faithful to the final prayer of the day. It reminded Ganesh of a joke about an ancient contest of power between Allah and the Hindu god Anjaneya. ‘They tell this joke a lot here,’ he said. ‘Allah won the toss, and he hit Anjaneya first. His blow was so powerful that Anjaneya disappeared, and he didn’t return for 55 minutes. There were five minutes left to go in the fight, and everybody who was watching thought Allah had won. Then Anjaneya came back, and he just tapped Allah lightly on the chest. And the Muslims have been looking for him five times daily ever since.’

The joke received only broken laughter. The azan wailed on. Within our tight circle, the conversation pulsed with nervousness and fear. Above Sri Lanka, the skies brooded and faded to black.

2

IN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT politics in Sri Lanka, and therefore in conversations about the war and the peace, rumour forms the chief currency. Everybody appears to have their own particular runnels of information, flowing from indistinct sources. Even the newspapers, rather than investigating rumours, just transmit them onwards through columns of political gossip. But in the absence of definitive fact, a certain measure of knowledge can be gleaned from the outskirts of hearsay. Perhaps, like real currency, rumour even keeps things liquid, because it does not always require you to commit to an opinion or to modify your views. During the war, this must have been a useful quality.

On buses and trains, in tea shops and on verandas, in Colombo and Jaffna and a dozen other places, the rumour mill never stopped churning. The momentous and the trivial were relayed with equal urgency. The Grease Yaka was just one man on the move, criss-crossing the country on his well-lubricated tour of terror. A former president, now long dead, used to insist on being bathed by virgins. The Tigers were rearming. Gillian Anderson, the actress from The X-Files, had bought a house just outside Colombo but was now reconsidering her decision because she felt the country was too unsafe. The government was repopulating the north and the east by moving thousands of Sinhalese families up from the south, settling them on farmland snatched from the Tamils. One of the president’s brothers had installed a tank full of sharks on his lawn. In the north, the army was abducting Tamils at random. In the north, the army was not abducting Tamils at random. The opposition was being paid off to lie low. Funds stashed overseas by the Tigers were being siphoned back into the country, and so the fighting would soon begin again.

When I had newly moved to Sri Lanka, in the gummy summer of 2011, this flood of rumour was disorienting: there was too much information and, at the same time, there was not enough. I learned, over months, to sieve what I heard, just as I learned to subconsciously note the precise moment when an innocuous chat broke away into a discussion of the war. It rarely took long, and that was not surprising. The Sri Lankans I met had lived most of their lives watching their country at war with itself. In Jaffna or in Batticaloa—the north and the east, which the Tigers had wanted to peel away from the rest of Sri Lanka—it was an abject impossibility to meet anybody who had not lost a friend or a relative in the prachanai. (The Tamil word translates into ‘the problem,’ which always reminded me of the Troubles, the Irish term for their own three decades of conflict.) In Colombo too, where the Tigers had executed countless attacks on civilians and politicians, and where security policy was made, the war hovered above every conversation, waiting to insinuate itself at the most slender of opportunities. The change of topic could happen imperceptibly, or it could happen abruptly.

‘India?’ somebody would ask me in Jaffna. ‘Where are you from, in India?’

‘I live in New Delhi,’ I’d reply.

‘But you speak Tamil.’

‘Yes, my family is from Tamil Nadu. I’m Tamil too. I grew up in Madras.’

‘Madras. I know Madras. I’ve been there. I went away to Madras to live with an aunt when the fighting got very bad around here. That was in 1987.’

And then we would be off.

It never required much to begin a conversation in Sri Lanka. The very air was primed for it. In a country so full of uncertainty, all life, and all death, was rehearsed through conversation. It was a form of art, well honed and practised with skill. Just as much information was solicited as given. Threads of thought spun out into fractals. Conversations became explorations, really, shifting and moving and pushing gently at the boundaries of their authors’ knowledge. Time, never in a hurry in Sri Lanka anyway, slowed down even further.

My friend Sanjaya was one of the masters of this art. He was a big man in every way—tall and broad and nearly bald, and then with a personality that was even larger than his physical frame. Sanjaya was an intermittent journalist, having studied briefly in Madras. He would work producing news documentaries for a few weeks, nose diligently applied to grindstone; then his pace would slacken, and he would play video games and watch movies for a couple of months. It was impossible not to like him. He was curious about everything, and he told yarns tall and magnificent, embellishing on the run and possessing such a fondness for the absurd that he giggled as if he were hearing the tale and not narrating it. When he laughed, his eyes narrowed into letterbox slits, he quivered noiselessly, and his shoulders heaved. His mirth was tectonic.

When I moved to Colombo, I first stayed with Sanjaya, in his family’s house on the outskirts of the city. We had several friends in common, but Sanjaya was also a popular point of first contact for journalists arriving in Sri Lanka. It was, I think, because of his eternal willingness to sit and swap stories, to examine all Sri Lanka and even all creation over a single bottle of beer. Journalists yearn for people like Sanjaya.

‘Come, we’ll go to Machang?’ he’d say, so we’d set out for the pub, which was owned by a brewing company and served its beer in tall plastic towers with a core of ice. A dour fug of smoke hung always in its rooms, and Sanjaya added to it with frequent, well-relished cigarettes. Around us, young men in tight T-shirts inhaled their beer and ate hot buttered cuttlefish and played pool.

‘So I met this guy in Mullaitivu, right?’ Deep drag. ‘He got 25,000 rupees because he was a refugee, and he’s set up a local cinema with it! He has a 25-inch television and a DVD player and a generator and 30 or 40 chopsocky movies from the 1980s.’ Silent laughter. Deep drag. ‘And during the day, he charges mobile phones on his generator. This is his living.’ Deep drag. ‘I wonder what the other refugees do with the money they get.’

This was how Sri Lanka sucked me in deeper and deeper: by discussing itself incessantly. The more I listened to Sanjaya, and then to others, the more the country and the history of its war revealed itself to me. A bigger, clearer picture always dangled just out of reach, around the corner of another conversation or two. Sanjaya made me realize that all I wanted to do was to wander around the island and talk about the one subject that everybody wanted to talk about. The war loomed too close to hand and too enormous for my senses to grasp it properly, like a wall that spread away to infinity in every direction. But in conversations, I heard stories of individuals—fantastic or tragic or melancholic or even happy stories, stories that had human proportions, and that could be multiplied in my head to gain a larger truth.

It was like this when I had first visited Sri Lanka too, with a friend in 2004, for a week’s holiday. A ceasefire was officially in force, but the Tigers and the army still attacked each other with regularity, as if they were keeping themselves in practice for the eventual return to open warfare. The streets of Colombo teemed with metal barriers and security checks; we were advised to carry our passports wherever we went. Once, in a trishaw, we asked our driver if the fortified white building we had just passed was Temple Trees, the prime minister’s residence. He half-swivelled around and rolled a suspicious eye over us, wondering why we wanted to know.

We stayed at the Grand Oriental Hotel, near the harbour. It was once magnificent, we could see, but it had acquired that distinct shabbiness that comes to a building too deeply entrenched in the past. The ceilings were too low, and the dark-wood fixtures swallowed light, creating unsavoury corners and an atmosphere of grime. The breakfast room looked down upon the harbour, and here every morning we ate string hoppers, watched container ships come in to berth, and read in the newspapers about the slow evaporation of the ceasefire.

On our second night there, after my friend had gone to bed, I was still restless, and I went down into a club in the hotel’s basement, looking for a drink. I sat at one end of the neon-lit room; at the other end was a man sitting amidst three women on a couch. Unrecognizable music poured through tinny speakers. There was no one else around. It was the most profoundly depressing club I had ever visited.

After 15 minutes, the man loped over and sat on the next chair. He never once glanced around at me; he gazed steadily at the women and asked, in English: ‘Which one of them would you like?’

I explained that I wasn’t in the market. He shrugged affably and continued to sit beside me, both of us sipping our drinks. Then a question struck him. ‘Are you a tourist?’

I was, I said.

He nodded very rapidly, seven or eight times in a row. ‘So what do you think?’ he asked. ‘Will the ceasefire hold?’ It had been a smooth, easy transition, from the subject of prostitution to the subject of the war. I sat on for another half hour, talking politics with a pimp.

We travelled a little on that trip, down the coast to the beach in Bentota and then up to Kandy to see the Temple of the Tooth, which holds, somewhere out of sight, one of the Buddha’s canines. The hulking apparatus of a country in wartime—the endless security checks; the soldiers milling around, caressing their machine guns; the reports and rumours of violence—lost its novelty within that single week. It gave me pause when I realized this. If the extraordinary was so quick to become the ordinary, what must the routine business of life have been like for those trapped in the very heart of the war?

In its most hackneyed perception, the island of Sri Lanka is shaped like a teardrop. But it also looks like the cross section of a hand grenade, with the tapering Jaffna peninsula, up north, forming the top of its safety clip. Or perhaps this resemblance exists entirely in my fancy. I cannot remember a time when I could think about Sri Lanka without thinking immediately about its war. By the time I was able to understand the contents of Indian newspapers, the conflict was already a decade old and grinding through one of its bloodiest, most complicated phases. From Tamil Nadu, where I did much of my growing up, the nearest Sri Lankan sandbar lies just 29 kilometres away; the ties of politics and language bind Sri Lanka close to Tamil Nadu, like a tugboat to an ocean liner.

So it never surprised us when news from Sri Lanka made bigger headlines than news from distant New Delhi; in fact, that seemed only appropriate, living as we did in Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu but also of the world’s community of Tamils. The war became a constant acquaintance. It proceeded without relent as I grew older, finished school, obtained my university degrees, fell in and out of love, changed jobs, moved countries. Its constancy amazed me. Sometimes it even ripped gashes directly into the fabric of our daily lives. Once, on an overnight train from Hyderabad to Madras, my mother and I awoke with a start at 2 a.m. to find that we’d halted, unscheduled, at a tiny station. Outside our window, the platform swarmed so busily with people that it might have been noon; jumbled conversation filtered into our carriage.

‘What’s going on?’ my mother asked a passer-by.

Somebody had just assassinated Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister who had, in the late 1980s, sent peacekeepers into Sri Lanka and earned himself the enmity of the Tigers. Late the previous night, he had been campaigning in a small town just outside Madras, and he had allowed a toothy, bespectacled woman with flowers in her hair to garland him. Then, as she bent down to touch his feet as a mark of respect, she flipped a switch on her suicide vest.

I wondered about this woman—about the sort of village she came from, why she had joined the Tigers, how she had accepted the need to blow herself up. Then I wondered about the stories of other people—the displaced, the bereaved, the chauvinist, the young—that were being drowned out by din of the fighting. I grew curious about the island that was producing these stories, and that remained pitched into war for decade after decade. We all live now in societies inured to violence, but the violence of a full-fledged war is unique in its refusal to hide, in how openly it declares its intent to harm other men and women. I wondered how a country transformed when such violence started to feel routine instead of rare—or even whether it could ever feel routine—and how people tried to reclaim and lead an ordinary life out of all this extraordinariness.

Beginning around 2004, I started to visit Sri Lanka on brief trips, on holidays or to report travel articles, taking the 50-minute flight from Madras to Colombo; later still, I met and wrote about some of the 100,000-odd Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Tamil Nadu, people who had streamed out of their country and across the Palk Strait into India ever since the early 1980s. On the day the war finally ended, in May 2009, I sat in a newsroom in New Delhi, unable to look away from the images flashing on television. By this time, reports had leaked out of Sri Lanka about the steep toll of the war’s last months, and about the army’s uncaring shelling of Tamil civilians as well as Tiger militants. The United Nations would conclude that 40,000 civilians had been killed in the army’s push to wipe out the Tigers. The television showed snatches of these battlegrounds, on the coast in the north-east. The land looked as if it had been crumpled by some giant hand: the vegetation flattened, the earth clawed out, the water turbid.

With the end of the war, a rare window opened up—for reconciliation, but also for people to talk about their lives as they had been unable to for almost thirty years, and for a different history to be stitched out of these stories. Two years later, in 2011, I arrived in Sri Lanka in the spirit of a forensics gumshoe visiting an arson site, to examine the ashes and guess at how the fire caught and spread so cataclysmically, but also to see if any embers remained to ignite the blaze all over again.

3

AFTER A WEEK at Sanjaya’s house, through some blissful luck, I found myself an apartment on a hushed cul-de-sac off Park Road, on the first floor of a bungalow that presented to the world only high walls frosted with barbed wire and a heavy rolling gate painted a Tiffany blue. The bungalow sat on the perimeter of a large municipal cricket ground, around which I thought I might run for exercise. In all my months in Colombo, I never lapped that cricket ground once.

By trishaw, the Tamil quarter of Wellawatte was 10 minutes away in one direction; in the opposite direction, at approximately the same distance, lay the Galle Face, a strip of promenade that adhered to the shore of the Indian Ocean. I was so close to the coast that, in my living room with the windows flung open, I could smell rain even when the clouds were still out at sea. There were grocery stores and restaurants around the corner and a hospital, should I need it, down the road. It was a lovely place to live—and yet, when I told Sanjaya about it, he cackled with glee and said: ‘Ah, that’s right near Douglas’s house!’

Douglas Devananda was one of the bizarre characters that the war had helped create, and it was incredible that he had even survived long enough to temporarily become my neighbour. He had eluded death so often and so theatrically that the story of his life seemed to really require the services of a medieval balladeer to do it justice. Douglas—always called Douglas, never Devananda—had been a young Tamil leading a militant group that rivalled the Tigers. After being arrested several times in Sri Lanka and India, he made a seamless transition into politics, hitching himself to mainstream Sinhalese-dominated parties, criticizing the Tigers, and running government ministries, his newfound wealth and power making up amply for being known as a Tamil turncoat.

The Tigers tried to assassinate Douglas 11 times, and they failed with astonishing consistency. In 1998, for instance, Douglas walked out of the hospital in mere days after a visit to the Kalutara prison, when Tiger inmates set upon him and shredded his torso with shivs. He emerged unhurt—but his secretary died—after a Tiger suicide bomber blew herself up in 2007, on the premises of the Ministry of Social Services and Social Welfare, where he worked as minister. His most swashbuckling escapade came one evening in 1995, when Tigers stormed his Park Road house, lobbed hand grenades at his security guards, and raced up to his first-floor office. Douglas, the tale goes, pulled a pistol out of a desk drawer, shot out the lights in his office, and used the darkness to leap off his balcony and then vault the gate on to the road.

‘I talked to the security guard at that house once,’ Sanjaya told me, by now rocking with giggles and enjoying my round-eyed amazement. ‘He said Douglas’s sarong got caught on the gate as he jumped over it. Then the Tigers jumped the gate too. So Douglas is running down the street in his underwear and firing his gun back over his shoulders, trying to pick off the guys who are chasing him.’

This frantic clash of gunslingers was the first thing that Sanjaya recalled when he thought about the quiet pocket of the city where I had decided to stay.

Colombo never stopped feeling layered in this manner. It wore over all else a mantle of bluff charm. Its people were laid-back and so convivial that, to someone from a harder and more inhibited country, they seemed to live within winking distance of hedonism. Its houses were large, its boulevards leafy, its arrack bottomless and its pace leisurely. Even its weather abetted the city’s relaxed disposition: the day’s few hours of peak heat, when the sun bronzed the nape of your neck, gave way reliably to evening sea breezes, the air fresh and seasoned with salt. But then, in abrupt ways, the veneer would peel away just a little, and I would get a glimpse of the hidden warts and scars, the anxieties and tensions. This made Colombo constantly surprising and utterly disconcerting, a very easy city to settle into but a difficult one to get to know.

One evening, I went for a ride around the city with Indi Samarajiwa, a young blogger who had grown up in the United States and Canada and had then moved to Sri Lanka, a country his parents had left decades ago. I waited for him at the Independence Memorial Hall, a rectangular pavilion modelled on the royal audience chamber of the Kandyan kings, guarded by magnificent stone lions with arched tails, and watched over by a statue of Don Senanayake, the first prime minister. Friezes of scenes from Sri Lanka’s Buddhist history ran around the pavilion’s interiors, just below the ceiling and above the stubby stone pillars that propped up the roof. The country’s official Buddhist flag flapped atop a pole just outside the hall. It had been planted by President Mahinda Rajapaksa during the Buddhist festival of Wesak in 2010, one year after the war ended. The flag’s installation was a celebration of a second independence, but it was also a loud signal of majoritarianism—an affirmation of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhist core and its triumph in the war.

It had begun to pour by the time Indi arrived to pick me up: spheroid, obese drops of rain that popped and burst as they landed on the windshield. Indi, a year younger than me, had hair buzzed close to his head, a lightly sprouted beard, and large eyes that shone in the gloom inside the car. ‘I should show you some of the city,’ he said, and then he queued up a batch of Led Zeppelin songs, adjusted his rear-view mirror, and drove off.

The Independence Memorial Hall, Indi said, had been attacked by a terrorist in 1995, a man who had sold coconuts from a cart for three years before he strapped a bomb on to the cart and trundled it down here. This building now, this is the Cinnamon Gardens police station. It’s a lovely building, but I hadn’t even seen it properly until last year, because they had protective walls all around it. That’s the case with a lot of buildings in Colombo actually, no? The prime minister’s house, for instance, you couldn’t have seen that either, during the war, because of the walls. Ah, right here, this spot, this is where a trishaw with a bomb in it hit the Pakistani ambassador’s convoy—at least, I think it was the Pakistani ambassador’s convoy—because Pakistan was giving military aid to the Sri Lankan government. Okay, this is an area called Slave Island. You see that hotel, the Nippon Hotel? A bomb blew up a bus next to it, around lunchtime. On this side, this is the Beira Lake, and now we’re passing the building where all the tax records are kept. A light aircraft, on a Tiger bombing run, crashed into it a few years ago, although it was probably aiming for another target. Was that the bombing that nobody paid attention to because everybody was watching the cricket World Cup final? I can’t remember. And this is the Central Bank building. You must have heard of this place, no? The Tigers bombed it in 1996. They drove a truck of explosives through its gate. This is awful traffic. But Pettah is the old part of the city, and it’s always crowded like this. The riots in 1983 were particularly bad in Pettah. Shops were burned down, people murdered, that kind of thing. This road we’re on, it goes to a suburb called Maradana. On this spot, on Armour Street, the Tigers killed President Premadasa. A suicide bomber blew him up in 1993. See, now we’re driving by the naval headquarters. Four or five years ago, if you were in a car on this road, you’d be stopped again and again so that the police could check your ID. It still feels strange to drive through without hitting any checkpoints at all. On the waterfront, around this area, the army held an exhibition last year, of stuff they captured from the Tigers, even the ammo they used, that kind of thing. I have photos of some of it back home. Remind me later. I’ll show them to you.

After 90 minutes, just as the Led Zeppelin set was nearly spent, Indi pulled up to my house and promised gaily that we’d meet again soon for a beer. The rain was whipping Colombo hard, soaking me as I fumbled with the slick lock of the rolling gate. I sprinted across the yard and up into the apartment. Then I sat in the living room, with the lights still off, dripping on to the tiles and listening to the wind careen over the damaged city outside the door.

Colombo is named for its harbour. The etymology runs to the ancient Sinhalese for either ‘the port on the river Kelani’ or to ‘the port with the mango trees,’ but either way, the harbour is crucial. It is almost perfectly U-shaped, formed by the main coastline and a crooked finger of land that seems to beckon travellers from across the seas. The harbour first drew Roman, Chinese and Arab traders, then Indian Muslims—‘Moors,’ as Sri Lankans call them—who settled in Colombo, and finally the conquering successions of the Portuguese, Dutch and British empires. The empires have withered, but the harbour holds, bristling with derricks and ships with yawning holds, the docks stacked neatly with multicoloured containers, looking like building blocks in the play pen of an outsized but organized child.

The cultural force that has most deeply imprinted Colombo and Sri Lanka, however, arrived on the wings of neither commerce nor colonialism. Nine months after Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, local legend has it that he came to Sri Lanka for the first time and chose it as a haven for his religion. The Buddha visited twice more, launching himself upwards from India and landing in Sri Lanka, and travelling around the country with colossal bounds. So smitten was he with this island that, when he was on the brink of nirvana, he is thought to have told his disciple Sakka: ‘My faith will be established in Lanka.’ Later, three centuries before the birth of Christ, the Indian king Ashoka dispatched his son Mahinda to spread Buddhism in Sri Lanka, sending with him a sapling from the tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. ‘Go to convert Lanka,’ the god Indra is said to have urged Mahinda. ‘It has been foretold by the Buddha. We gods will help you there.’ Indra kept his word. Seven out of ten Sri Lankans are Buddhists, and even though Christianity, Hinduism and Islam are all present and vibrant, the state considers itself officially and unabashedly Buddhist.

The Buddha is everywhere in Colombo: in the name of Bauddhaloka Mawatha, the arterial avenue that begins a block from the ocean and hustles through the city’s heart; in the cream or white pagodas that emerge abruptly out of clusters of other buildings; in decals pasted on trishaw windshields; on banners and flex billboards, alongside the images of prominent, shaven-headed monks; on artefacts distributed throughout the vitrines of the national museum; in tiny neighbourhood shrines; or even by himself on road corners, seated cross-legged in sculpture, his amused, heavy-lidded eyes surveying the people he has entrusted with his message.

The Isipathanaramaya Temple stood halfway around the circumference of the cricket ground near my house, its loudspeakers positioned perfectly to flood my bathroom with Buddhist chants every morning. Each panel on the head-high outer wall of the temple complex was carved with the Wheel of Life and two deer, recalling the deer park in the old Indian town of Isipathana where the Buddha preached his first sermon. The temple was next to an intersection that was always clogged with grinding, belching minivans, but a limpid silence surrounded me as soon as I passed through the temple’s gate into its brick-floored courtyard. Near a modest, bell-shaped pagoda, a Bodhi tree thrust into the sky, its lower branches festooned with Buddhist flags or with talismanic strips of cloth knotted into place by pilgrims. Whatever time of day I visited, I would see at least one old woman—her feet ritually bare, her sari as white and unadorned as the pagoda—sitting in the Bodhi’s green-black shade, her lips fluttering in prayer. Inside the temple were the titanic, saffron-robed Buddhas: one reclining on its side and another seated, both surrounded by a swarm of frescoes. These Buddhas had no trace of the beatific peace that some other statues wore; instead, they looked brawny and purposeful, and the seated Buddha positively glowered at the raggedy offerings of flowers by his feet.

The Sinhalese like to think of their Buddhism as muscular. Their faith had seeded and nourished itself in Sri Lanka, and it had proven hardy enough to thrive here, even as it crumbled under the weight of Hinduism in India, the land of its birth. A politician from a Sinhalese nationalist party once described to me the Sri Lankan state’s relationship with Buddhism ‘as equal to that between the Vatican and Catholicism, or between Saudi Arabia and Islam. Actually, it’s superior to those, because our record is much older than either of these two countries.’ Sinhalese Buddhism is a coiled and wary creature, its reflex always to be aggressive in defence. Since 2006, when the Sri Lankan government had started winning the war, and after its victory in 2009, this ready Buddhist aggression had fused with military triumphalism. There were signposts to this odd and disquieting mixture all over Colombo, if only you knew where to look.

One lazy day, reluctant to work and itching to get out of the house, I called Mahesh, a friend who worked at a nonprofit nearby and whose beard reminded me of the beards of bees that carneys wore in old photographs. Mahesh had once been a doctoral student in sociology, and he had decided that he wanted to write a dissertation on ‘Urban Buddhism,’ on how Buddhism constantly reworked the city, often to its detriment. ‘I had been watching the changes around me, taking photographs, burning them on to CDs, and so I wrote up this proposal for my PhD,’ he said. First the university senate asked him to change the title and the text, because they weren’t too crazy about the phrase ‘Urban Buddhism.’ After he rewrote the proposal, the senate told his adviser: ‘This isn’t a proper topic. Ask him to change it to something else.’ Mahesh dropped out of his PhD program, but he never stopped noting and mulling over the shifting cityscape around him.