Noontide Toll Read online

  ‘What is the word for “security”?’ he asked when we got to Omanthai. And ‘minefield’ when he spotted the small red skull-and-crossbones signs stuck in the ground.

  Sepala was not so keen on the vocabulary Chen was collecting and kept pointing out the lovely green shoots in the paddy fields, the temples and the new lotus monuments of victory we passed. I tried to give the boy a steer without curbing his enthusiasm. Language plays hell with our politics. Always has. A young mind, like a young heart, is so easy to break.

  We were heading for Mullaitivu. I had never been there before. Not many people had in the last thirty years, unless of course you were LTTE cadre, or a local farmer, or one of the 350,000 human shields, IDPs, or what have you, that were shepherded in at the final stage of the war. ‘Shepherded’ is probably the wrong word, given what happened. But then, shepherds do that sort of thing in the end, don’t they, even with lambs? Before that though, before the endgame of the war, this was one of those remote areas where young government officers were sent on their first postings. My last boss, Mr Samarasinghe, said his father spent three years in Mullaitivu before WW II. He had black-and-white photographs of wide open spaces and long clean beaches set like large stamps in a cardboard album which he showed me once. He said they lived like kings, those officers. It is something about this country, I have noticed. We are proud to be a republic, and yet everybody wants to live like a king. Maybe it is the China model. A communist republic where every child, they say, is becoming an emperor. But a land of a billion can-can emperors is a very far cry from an island of childish hugger-mugger kings.

  I listened to Sepala tell his group that Mullaitivu is where our thirty-year war ended and that we are going to see the stock that the LTTE left behind. This was a new kind of tour for me. What stock? I wanted to ask. And why would the Chinese want to see it? But it was not my place to ask and our po-faced delegation did not have any such questions. They nodded and exchanged cool glances. All of them, except for Chen, had that look as though nothing but money would impress them.

  We had to go through Kilinochchi and all the way up to Paranthan before we could turn right and head east. The coast was about fifty kilometres away. The Mullaitivu highway is made of flat red earth. I have never been on an unpaved road like it: so wide and straight.

  ‘Who built this road?’ I asked Sepala. ‘Did the Tigers build this, or is it a British road?

  He looked at me aghast. For him, only the government made roads, with a little help from Beijing. The Tigers made trouble and the British had been reduced to penny-pinching tourists or paedophiles. And drivers were meant to drive, not ask questions.

  We passed a checkpoint but they didn’t stop us. The paddy fields on either side of the road were the brightest green I had ever seen.

  Then a mile or two further on, we passed a couple of lorries toppled into a ditch. At the next checkpoint we did have to stop and show our papers, but Sepala had all that sorted.

  ‘Now you will see what we can offer,’ he said to Chen, waving a hand and urging him to quickly translate his comment for the delegation.

  Big trees shaded the sides of the road. I picked up speed, raising a cloud of red dust behind. I felt I was in a movie. The old-fashioned kind I used to see as a boy at the Regal. Westerns with John Wayne or Rock Hudson. My van was the stagecoach in Gun Fury.

  A few minutes later, I felt we had slipped into a war-movie set: the trees cleared and we saw fields packed with broken bicycles. There must have been tens of thousands of bicycles in a block half a mile long and twenty feet high. A scrap heap of bicycles. I don’t think even in Mao’s China there would have been so many piled together like this.

  ‘You see that?’ Sepala asked Chen. I slowed down.

  Chen leant forward. ‘Why bicycles? Why here?’

  ‘Confiscated enemy vehicles. Tigers used them all over the north. Now they are scrap for you.’

  Chen spoke to the others in Chinese. I have no idea what he said, but if it was a translation, it seemed to me a little long-winded. Maybe it was to do with the Tigers. The Chinese, I understand, have a thing about them. The furry kind. Especially their tails and penises. In a quicker translation, I suppose it might all get a bit confused. ‘Guerrilla’ doesn’t help and ‘terrorist’ is a word that always seems to cause more complications than it is worth. But these are clever people, so I suppose it might have been something deeper.

  The next scrap heap on our long straight road was a graveyard for buses, lorries and vans. Some newer than mine, but all crumpled and mangled and toppled over each other.

  ‘Look at the lorries,’ Sepala said. ‘They used these to ram through our defences and blow up a town. You see the sheets of metal on the insides? All armoured.’

  He was right. Some of the lorries had metal sheets for windscreens like rusted eyelids with only a slit for the driver to look through. Such a narrow view, but our visitors were impressed.

  There was a hubbub of high notes in the back seat. They must have had currency converters screwed into their skulls.

  ‘A lot of metal here,’ Sepala said. ‘The sheet metal comes from the hull of a ship they captured. We are going to see it. Farah-3. There is a lot of metal for you, if you can collect it.’

  Chen frowned and pressed the pink bridge of his spectacles in with his finger. ‘Mr Zhou says if there are many more fields like this, then there might be an economic case. But the problem is that your people will have to get it transported to a harbour. To our scavenger.’

  ‘Can it not come to the coast here? The ship they captured is on the beach. Just waiting in the sand.’

  ‘We cannot bring a scavenger to the beach. It is big, like a tanker.’

  ‘What about your junks? Can’t you ferry it all in junks?’

  Chen looked baffled.

  We passed a row of container trucks with buckled carriages. It seemed as though the transport of a nation had been gathered here and turned to scrap. I have heard that there are places in America and England and Germany where you have mountains of obsolete cars and refrigerators and machines of all kinds, but I can’t imagine they are as eerie as this. In our country, if a machine doesn’t work, someone hangs on to it and fixes it. They don’t get dumped like this. They are always in the limbo of a repair shed. My friend has a car where every component has been salvaged from a different vehicle. He calls it ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ and wants to race it when the Grand Prix comes to Hambantota. But I am afraid war seems to have changed the attitudes of the younger generation. They have become more used to the idea of a disposable society. For them, racing is now all Ferrari and BMW, not the old crocks of yesteryear. This scene gave me hope. It made me think perhaps the desire not to waste runs deep, even in the army. We are the home of Monster Inc.

  ‘These have been brought here, no? Collected, I mean. The owners didn’t drive them here, did they?’ I asked Sepala. Even if in China they had no questions, I had plenty.

  His laugh was more of an ass’s whinny. ‘You think they parked here? No, Vasantha, this is confiscated property. Stuff the military have captured all over the Vanni and brought here. They have to clean up the place, no? So, now the idea is to recycle it somehow. Mustn’t waste, no? Resources on the planet are limited and we are developing a first-class eco policy.’

  There were a dozen twisted buses plunged in a flooded field of oily water. Eco policy? What had happened here? We all know something happened, but what? It has nothing to do with conserving resources or green shoots.

  A little further on, we came to a crossroads with an information centre. Sepala got down and went to get directions. When he came back, he said we can have a refreshment stop at a military camp. ‘We’ll go to the swimming pool,’ he said brightly. He could be a tour guide for a luxury operator.

  Our refreshment stop used to be an LTTE cantonment, but was now a regular army camp. Neat, clean and peaceful. The swimming pool was where the Sea Tigers used to do their workouts. I parked by the cafeteria.
The four Chinese gents in their dark business suits fanned out like some mafia formation. Chen in his short-sleeved white shirt and pale chinos looked more like a hostage than an interpreter. I had a wood-apple juice while the others all drank colas. The air was still. But under the camouflage trees, not too hot. The guys behind the bar were all smiling. Maybe because of the mafia, or maybe because of the end of the war. Or maybe it really is just our island’s refreshing upbeat style, as the brochures say.

  The pool was huge and deep but empty. There was a crack in it. Mr Zhou, the tallest of the group, stood at the edge and contemplated the baby-blue emptiness. He said something in Chinese and the others laughed for the first time. Only Chen didn’t. He backed away like a boy afraid of deep water.

  ‘Nothing there now,’ I said. I wanted to reassure him. Nothing. Not even water. But he could see that for himself.

  *

  The road to the beach was another unerringly straight road. I’ve heard about Roman roads being straight but they couldn’t be straighter than this. If that was the way the Romans ruled, then you could see the aspiration here. We passed a church safely tucked under a canopy of trees and a Hindu temple out in the open that had been blown apart. Further on, rows of coconut trees with burnt tops lined the road like tall stumps of blackened fingers accusing the sky.

  ‘You OK?’ I asked Chen.

  ‘Sure, sure.’ His head tilted, not quite as buoyant as he had been at the start. Perhaps he was too young to know any of the gruesome history of his own homeland. Maybe there they don’t talk about the terrors of invasion, the herding of people, the famine, the ideological culling, the suppression of the decent. All that probably disappears in the harmonious joy of economic development. At least that’s the idea, I think.

  We came to a turning. There was an arrow painted in white. Sepala nodded and I took the corner. If architecture is said to be frozen music, then what was before us was frozen pandemonium. Cars, vans, lorries, buses, cycles, scooters, every kind of vehicle jumbled up and abandoned in creeks and ditches. Whereas the junk fields we had seen before were like a catalogue collection of a mad museum, bizarre but sorted by type and size, this was the headlong rush of a mass of vehicles petrified in the past and whose occupants had vanished.

  The set had switched to that of a disaster film and all the actors had been vaporized.

  Sepala consulted the paper he had been given and guided me on a zigzag route using hand signals. No words. We drove through what once might have been a settlement or a camp. There were a few shells of buildings, but the rest was random rubble and charred vehicles. The mafia troupe said nothing. Even Chen was reduced to silence. We came to some sand dunes. I followed the road through them and we arrived on the beach.

  *

  The blue sea glinted three hundred yards away, and the sand stretched as far as one could see to the right and to the left. This, I reckon, must have been the No-Fire Zone, or was it the combat zone? How can you tell: the sand is all pristine white now. I would have asked Sepala, but then dead ahead I saw the huge hulk of a wrecked ship, a monstrous cadaver gnawed through in places and listing in the shallow water with large graffiti sprayed across its rusted broken hull. We all stared, but it was not the most surprising sight.

  In front of the ship, out on the sand, about a dozen youngsters were singing and dancing to music thumping out of a silver Pajero. There were a couple of other vehicles nearby that seemed to rock to the beat while a film crew with large cameras and sun shades wheeled about.

  ‘Film location?’ Chen asked.

  ‘No, no,’ Sepala said. He climbed out slowly. I did too. ‘Wait here,’ he said to Chen and his bemused delegation, patting the warm air at waist-height like some platoon commander on a raid.

  Chen blinked and looked at me.

  ‘Let’s see,’ I said. When Sepala had started across the sand, I let Chen out and we followed him.

  Sepala went up to a young man who was trying to plug his curls into a tiny peaked cap. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘Filming, machang.’ He had a clipboard tied to his belt.

  ‘What filming?’

  ‘Pop video, no? What else?’

  ‘You can’t do that here?’ Sepala swept his hand around to and fro as if to shoo away a bunch of flies.

  ‘Why not? Perfect place, no, machang? If only there was more water on this side of that thing for the girls to jump into, we could shoot them skinny-dipping.’

  Sepala’s face sagged. ‘Do you know where you are? Do you know what this place is?’

  The young man took off his cap, and waved it at the long wide beach. ‘Amazing, no? So fucking empty.’

  ‘Don’t you know what happened here?’

  ‘Happened? Are you talking history? We are the future, machang. The fuckin’ A future, no?’

  Someone shouted, ‘One more take, from the top.’ There was another round of top-of-the-voice singing. We retreated to the van. I reckoned if it is pop videos now, tourists must be next.

  ‘They look happy,’ Chen said. Of course he was born after the Cultural Revolution in China, after the mad sixties. He was also the future. He couldn’t afford to look back if he wanted to make something of himself in the new economic order. But yet, I could see he was a future that still carried questions in his head. I looked back at the van. Mr Zhou and his companions had not moved. They could have been those terracotta warriors turning into news after a thousand years in the tomb of an emperor. They were old men. They must have worn those blue Mao tunics you saw in pictures, and ridden only bicycles once. I wondered whether they still had the old clothes, the old bikes, packed away somewhere with the rest of their revolutionary past. Or were all those dumped too, and turned to scrap and recycled into iPhones and big fat watches? Is that how it works? If only I could speak Chinese already, I could ask Mr Zhou direct. He looked like a man who had seen stuff like this before. Or maybe not like this, but stuff. Things that happen as our lives move on. I didn’t want Chen involved. He was young and eager. He didn’t need to know yet.

  Roadkill

  The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi, I was a little apprehensive. Most of us living in the south had come to think of this town as the nerve centre of terror. As Mr Wahid, my first Malaysian client, said, in English even the name sounded brutal—like the kind of town where you could imagine a Clint Eastwood character striding in and notching the stock of his rifle with yet another senseless killing. In reality, Kilinochchi had been the capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for years. Here the Tigers had had their civic centre, their secretariat, their press conferences. This was the place where Tiger stamps, LTTE travel passes, GCE school-exam papers, landmines, and black-stripe grenades were issued. The Eelam bank was here, Swiss style, before it came to a swift end in the final stages of the civil war. This was the place the Tigers then destroyed, toppling the water tower and blowing up the municipal buildings, before evacuating into the ever-diminishing jungle as the Sri Lankan army marched in, guns blazing, for the showdown of January 2009.

  But now, two years later, I turned off the highway, teeming with road hogs and pot rodents, into the brand-new forecourt of the Spice Garden Inn, and it could have been the latest incarnation of the Colombo Hotel Corporation in full flutter: a northern cousin dolled up with coloured flags, ribbons and streamers. A glass-walled cafeteria shone, and the reception desk overflowed with coconut flowers and bougainvillaea. The scent of wax polish, disinfectant, and karapincha leaves fried in sesame oil masked the lingering spoors of the vanished big cats. This hotel signalled the new era of the old town.

  Mrs Arunachalam, who was seven months pregnant and spread across the middle seat of my van, wanted to make the eleven-hour journey to Jaffna in small stages, like an ant on a sugar trail. She ought not to have been travelling at all, the way she sighed and swooned, but her husband was very keen to show her a property in Jaffna that he intended to buy and develop as the new family home, and so she had come.

 
; ‘Vasantha, can’t you go slowly around the bend, please?’ she kept saying, in an infuriating refrain, from the moment we left Rajagiriya on her journey of a lifetime.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ I’d reply. Yes, yes, yes. I am already around the bleeding bend.

  When she saw the flags and streamers, she was jubilant. ‘That’s the place. That’s the place we booked for the night, Kollu. Isn’t it pretty?’

  Her husband leant forward. ‘That’s right. You’ll be able to rest very quietly here.’

  Within half an hour, they had tucked into the best part of a pot of chicken curry and gone to their room upstairs to gently burp and gurgle their antenatal intimacies. By the time I got to the cafeteria, it was empty except for the creepy-crawlies on the wall and one sulky waiter massaging his neck.

  ‘Dinner put.’ He pointed at the curry pot and the basin of boiled rice. He was more suited to the job of a traffic policeman, one of the automaton types we used to have before we modernized into a mania for red–amber–green multi-spots.

  I took a plate and helped myself to the last bits of scraggy chicken bone and a couple of spoonfuls of rice. I’ve had worse, but not much worse. One of the things you notice when you drive up and down the country is the variation that’s possible in something as simple as boiled rice. Sometimes it feels like you are eating pebbles; other times it’s like cotton. At the Spice Garden Inn, the rice was definitely on the rocky side. But after the war and the wall-to-wall fighting in the town, it was hardly surprising that even rice would turn to rubble. The thought of what might have been done with bullets and mortars in this very spot chastened me. I needed a beer.