The scars in Kumar’s hands are zipped-up wounds. Though the flesh is repaired, the marks are alive. You could almost reach out and open them, see the blood trickle out softly to tell a story.
He moves in the kitchen like a predatory tiger: swift, hungry and unnoticeable. I worked with him years ago in a tiny-but-charming restaurant in
He used to address my co-workers in confident broken English, and if you didn’t understand his machine gun of words, you were asked, “Do you speak English?!” He came from
I later learned that he owned the place. He was 26 years old. Kumar* began his work in the kitchen before he knew what onion was in English. To him, cooking knows no language, anyway. It’s all movement and instinct.
One day, while I was waiting on a dish he was cooking, I asked him where his scars came from. I waited for small stories; wounds acquired in the kitchen.
“From the war. Oh, and refugee camp.” He brought a calendar to work one day. It had lovely, balletic Tamil lettering and a group picture of scowling army soldiers in full military
regalia.
There’s an eerie feeling about their collective expression, quite implacable.
He proceeded to show me a community newspaper. Casualties littered the pages, but none of the images were as concrete as the last page, that of a Tamil family lying scattered in a raided house. There was blood everywhere, but that was no longer unusual.
The story was in the mother’s skirt: blood below the waist, confined.
Kumar asked me to imagine the soldiers in the calendar, their lives after the camera flashed. He said he forgot most times, but the slightest ponderous gaze in the distance charged his face.
The calendar, he later told me, commemorated the lives of suicide bombers.
An August 2006 BBC headline, “Dispute over
planes roaring over the heads of teenage girls, about to explode inside an orphanage.
BBC admitted the difficulty in reporting the truth about the Sri Lankan civil war.
"Lots of the worst things that happen go on well away from the eyes of independent journalists,” BBC’s South Asian editor, Bernard Gabony, stated. “In other words, a lot of lying goes on, but unless you have the proof of who is lying, all you can do is report what the different sides say.”
Kumar’s friend, Siva*, 33, had one such story. When he was 16 or 17, Siva went to school at St. Patrick’s College in Jaffna, taking shelter under a tree when he heard the all-too-familiar roaring plane overhead, felt the tremor of the blast and saw the dust, rising. A few kilometers away, people ran to take cover inside
But this time, the air raid didn’t target a school. The pilot of the plane could see where the people were taking cover. The sacrilegious bomb found them there.
And the caved walls of
Instinct told survivors to run, lest they find themselves eclipsed by a creeping airborne shadow-bearing fire. A stronger instinct told them to dig.
“There was no time to be emotional. Your brain tells you to find people who are still alive,” Siva said.
Passing vehicles took those injured by flying debris to the nearby hospitals. Siva? He shoveled dead bodies into a truck.
When he was 17, Siva, would disappear for days, not out of teenage rebellion but out of the government’s fear that he was connected to the Tamil Tigers, a declared terrorist organization, according to the Stephen Harper government back in 2006. If Siva was connected to the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan government wanted to know.
The military took him, blindfolded and hands tied, to a remote place two to three hours away. There, they fed him gruel. “Sometimes I’d find a rusty nail in it,” he said.
But that was the least of his worries.
The interrogations were the main event. They would involve a bowl of boiled chilli pepper and, later, a bucket of gasoline.
“They make you breathe it,” Siva recalled. “My eyes and throat burned from the chilli, and the gasoline made me pass out, but not for long. They hit me to wake me up, then they continued with the questions.”
Siva’s mother, who made only 3,000 rupees a month, was extorted 50,000 rupees in exchange for her son’s freedom. “My mother had to sell our land to pay them off,” said Siva.
After two incidences of these days-long questionings without a warrant, Siva ran away to Batticaloa to live with his uncle, then to
Siva told me the worst stories. “I know someone who almost died,” he said, adding that these kinds of torture happened on a regular basis in
“They hung my cousin Kamma* from his thumbs, with just his toes touching the floor. Then they hung him upside down from one ankle and beat him with PVC pipes filled with sand,” Siva continued.
“They do that so that you don’t get scars. You just bleed inside.” Kamma was hospitalized for three months and, to this day, still gets chest and back pain from the beating.
When asked about the validity of these claims of torture by the Sri Lankan government to the Tamil people,
his country.
“I deny these claims,” Jayasekara told Excalibur. “People can say anything.
They can show scars, but that’s not a solid proof. They could’ve gotten that anywhere.” Jayasekara said that, with the civil war ending last May, there is now peace in
Jayasekara further emphasized the optimism he has for achieving unity between the two ethnic groups, and ensured that Tamil-Canadians will be met with equality if they decide
to go back to
“I don’t like saying ‘Sinhalese’ and ‘Tamils,’” he added. “We’re all Sri Lankans. We have to move forward. We need to forgive and forget.”
Some Tamils in the
“When a Tamil activist goes back, anything can happen. I feel terrified,” said Raman.
Raman further stated that, though the violence between the government and the rebels is over, the cause of the conflict is far from resolved. “I would love to hope that there would be peace now, but displaced victims of the war will be resettled away from their original homes and still stripped of rights,” he said.
“I think it’s going to take decades because the problems are not solved. Until all the voices in the country are heard, true peace can’t be achieved.”
*Names have been changed to protect identity
