The Seasons of Trouble Read Online Free PDF

not survive there with an infant. The Sinhalese owner had given her four minders: one Sinhalese and three plantation Tamils. They were meant to protect her, but when the moment came, they were nowhere to be found.
    As soon as she heard the ‘get lost’, Indra started to run.
    She ran to the Sinhalese owner’s house for refuge, but he told her to save herself, and shut the door in her face. Indra froze for a second, then ran towards the estate. She tried to climb a tree but couldn’t get a handhold.
    She heard the buses screech to a halt at the gates. Between the tea shrubs, she put baby Sarva on the ground and lay on top of him, holding her torso up slightly, lizard-like, with one arm. With her free hand, she covered his mouth.
    The ground was soggy. Something crawled between her toes. Above, she heard horrific screams, dull whacks and thuds. Women sobbing, begging. A steel utensil clanged and rolled down the steep steps of the line-house colony for what felt like a whole minute. She crouched lower.
    Alongside the northern Tamils, the ones the Sinhalese were really pursuing, plantation Tamils were attacked. These workers—poor and largely illiterate, underpaid—were neither the Tamils the LTTE fought for then and claimed to represent nor the ones scholarly Tamil politicians demanded a place for in Parliament.
    By noon, a deathly silence had descended over the estate. Gingerly, Indra lifted her head. One of her bodyguards, a young Tamil worker, was lying a hundred metres away, slashed and stabbed. In Indra’s still arms, Sarva had fallen asleep.

    AS AN ADULT , all Sarva knew of that day in July 1983 was that he had slept through the bloodiest anti-Tamil pogrom, which killed 3,000 people and led hundreds of thousands of Tamil families to flee the country. Even decades later, ‘God saved me,’ was all his mother wanted to say about that day. She never told him that it was the loneliest moment of her life.
    Twenty-five years later, when Sarva disappeared, Indra knew that nothing had changed. Her husband was immobile with worry; her eldest son would help only in his spare time, and her sisters waxed and waned in their support. They all wallowed in the paralysis of grief. Indra was not shy about berating them for it, but this didn’t change how alone she felt. With just as little warning, Indra was now once again a petrified mother trying to save her baby from an unseen horror.
    Five days after Sarva’s disappearance, a man telephoned Indra to say in fluent Tamil that he had found her son. When the caller came to see her a few days later, Indra exploded with inappropriate laughter. The Tamil-speaking man was the whitest American she had ever seen.

3.
October 2008
    LOOKING DOWN FROM the mango tree into the abandoned orchard, Mugil cursed herself for having lost her T-56 assault rifle. She hadn’t fired it in years; who knew if it still worked, but it gave her an extra swagger: every second step, her hip swung to the left to avoid hitting the rifle slung over her right shoulder. She liked to refer to it as her crab walk.
    The T-56, stolen from a burning Sri Lankan army camp in Mullaitivu in 1998, was a souvenir from Mugil’s first successful operation in the Tamil Tigers. She was eighteen then, the second-in-command in one of the squadrons. She had been part of a great triumph and had made sure every one of the nine girls she led had come back alive. They had looted everything from the camp complex, taking every item except the Sinhalese books and the pornographic magazines in the soldiers’ quarters. They had then cleared the way for the seized army tanks and bulldozers to be driven into Tiger territory. The incredible ambush had made Annan Prabakaran, the supreme leader, call her name out during a formal celebration and shake her hand in front of other combatants; he praised her for being the kind of woman the Tamil homeland needed.
    And now she had gone and lost the rifle to the same army, toSinhalese boys who