This Divided Island: Life, Death, and the Sri Lankan War by Samanth Subramanian

Author:Samanth Subramanian [Subramanian, Samanth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia
ISBN: 9781466878747
Google: 9D-pCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-12-15T18:31:48.095000+00:00

6

IF JAFFNA HAD been caught unawares by the events of that October, it had not been paying attention. The rupture of goodwill between the Tigers and the Muslims had begun already that summer in the east, in and near Batticaloa. The news must have drifted up north, but perhaps the Muslims of Jaffna had just ignored these terrible signals, or perhaps they had thought that the contagion would never be blown their way, which was pure delusion.

I went to Batticaloa, which sits right on the sea, on a filament of land that is so slender, and that is separated from the mainland by such an extensive web of lagoons, that it seems on the map to be of Sri Lanka and yet not of it. An amphibious town. The train from Colombo took a full night, and it brought me to Batticaloa on a moist, grimy morning. Batticaloa was always moist; perspiration was always one minor exertion away, and the air tasted sweat-sour. After the first few days, I saw that it was perilous to venture out in the afternoon; the sun and the humidity drained the life out of me, as if by some osmotic procedure. So I sat on the terrace of my rundown hotel, leaking sweat even when I positioned my chair next to a pedestal fan. Over the balustrade, in the courtyard below, a television crew was shooting audition reels for a reality show involving singing children. The crew sweated, the parents sweated, the heavily made-up kids sweated even more, especially when they were backed up against the trunk of a coconut tree and prompted to belt out old Tamil film songs. We were all bound together by sweat.

Batticaloa felt as limp as I did. As a town, it has been cuffed repeatedly by the hands of nature and geography. Its marshy terrain gave it the Tamil name of Matta Kalappu, or ‘muddy swamp,’ and the Dutch, who snatched the town from the Portuguese in 1638, called it ‘a vile and stinking place.’ Its lagoons teemed with crocodiles, their teeth sometimes so large, a visitor wrote in 1861, ‘that the natives mount them with silver lids and use them for boxes.’ Smallpox plundered life out of the local population. The low-slung skies hurled storms and cyclones at Batticaloa. An 1878 flood rolled away a herd of elephants, and a cyclone a century later levelled everything in sight. The 2004 tsunami, twitched out of tectonic plates under faraway Indonesia, killed 13,000 people in Batticaloa and the adjacent district of Ampara, close to half of Sri Lanka’s total death toll. Many old photographs show bridges and roads drowned under floodwater, as if an ancient lease had expired and the ocean was preparing to take Batticaloa away from Sri Lanka and back into itself.

One road leaving the Batticaloa railway station runs due south, spans a stretch of water, and proceeds into Kattankudy, a town that was, in the summer of 1990, almost 90 per cent Muslim. That June, a

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