The Seasons of Trouble by Rohini Mohan

Author:Rohini Mohan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

IT WAS MARAN who discovered that grandfather was dead. He had gone inside their tent to look for the steel cup he liked to play with. The old man lay on his mat, turned to the left like always. As Maran stepped over him, his foot hit a hand, and something in the way it fell made the child scream.

It was 17 November and no one else was in the tent. Mother was outside, picking out lice from Kalai’s hair. Amuda was in the water queue. Bhuvi had been admitted to the Vavuniya hospital for jaundice a week earlier and had not returned. Mugil was returning from the camp office with a letter that gave her Prashant’s location in a Vavuniya detention camp. Her family would be reassured by this rare good news.

She was near her row when she heard Maran shriek. Her mind immediately conjured up an image of Tamizh’s dead body, lying in the sewage. She ran into the tent. When she saw her father, relief and guilt fought within her. She cried for hours. Grief, irritation, nostalgia and so many things burned away in her mind till all she was left with was rage. In another place, in another time, he could so easily have survived.

‘The good man, he died in his sleep,’ people said, as if the months before his death had nothing to do with it.

‘At least he did not die under a bomb, he will go to God,’ they said, as if a humiliating disease was a peaceful way to go.

It would cost 10,000 rupees, including bribes, for the body to be taken to Vavuniya for burial, and another 10,000 rupees for the funeral. Amuda said she would get a loan, at interest, from one of the richer camp inmates, but Mother forbade it. ‘We have too much debt already,’ she said. There was nothing else to discuss.

And so they buried Father on the camp’s periphery, at the bottom of the barbed wire fence. Other bereaved families seemed to have made this choice, too; there were many mounds, close together, at various angles, almost overlapping, and Mugil was afraid the men she had paid to dig would hack into a decomposing body. A family three tent rows away from Mugil’s had guided them here. Soon after arriving at the camp, their daughter had died of an intestinal rupture caused by shrapnel. She was young, ‘fair and just twenty-six’, the mother had said, and engaged to marry a boy from their village before they were displaced by war.

The death of the young was considered more tragic, which depressed Mugil because it implied that her father’s time had come. It had not, she wanted to tell them. Your daughter was going to start a family, while my father had one. Why was the potential greater than the actual? He was once healthy enough to take his grandchildren to school, to expect to see them attend college. He could scoop them up and jump into a bunker. She wanted to say she felt rudderless and alone.

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