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This Divided Island

Life, Death, and the Sri Lankan War

St. Martin's Press

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.'

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Excerpted from This Divided Island by Samanth Subramanian. Copyright © 2014 Samanth Subramanian. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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