Sathyan wiped the camera lens with the edge of his shirt. The Anti-Landmine Lobby wanted photographs of the victims to go with the testimonies he was collecting. He had a spare disk in his pocket as a decoy in case the Army showed up. Ellie had once taught him how to eject a disk and insert it into his thick watch strap, a sleight-of-hand that required practice. Two years after she had left Sri Lanka, it still hurt to remember all the dimensions of her sleight-of-hand.
The driver, Rick Woodham, stopped the jeep outside the refugee camp. He was ex-Australian military and now drove supply trucks for whoever paid the most—the Army, the Tigers, cashed up journalists and foreign NGOs. The other passengers, like Sathyan, would have offered a hefty fee to visit the camp. Rick had taken them off-road in the war zone using a network of paths through the trees and riverbeds. For hours, they had listened to the jungle brushing the windows of their jeep, interred by the shroud of a camouflage net. Each passenger had been lost in their own work and thoughts. Two journalists, two human rights lawyers from Amnesty, and Sathyan.
Now, Rick pulled the camouflage netting off the vehicle and hurried them out. He called his contacts on his satellite phone. Sathyan couldn’t hear the words, but the tone was that of a negotiation.
‘We’ve got an hour, no more,’ Rick said, ignoring the muttered complaints from the group. ‘The Army’s coming. ETA three hours. The doctors are packing up. They’re moving those that can move.’
‘And the rest?’ Sathyan asked. He saw doctors, nurses and others, their faces covered in grime and exhaustion. This camp had been set up in a school hall and Tamil families had collapsed around it, pitching small tents with plastic sheets. They were enclosed by rusted bikes, dilapidated cars crammed with entire households, and emaciated donkeys that were now being loaded with towers of items strapped together with rope. ‘The rest?’ he repeated when Rick didn’t answer.
‘Not your problem. Get your interviews and then we’re out. I need two hours to clear this camp and put a safe distance between us and what’s coming.’ Rick set the timer on his watch.
Sathyan watched as Ameena Fernando did the same, and he copied her. She had sat with him on the drive up from Colombo and they had talked a little, but when the jeep left the demilitarised zone and entered the war zone, everyone had fallen silent.
He had recognised her immediately, and when she had gotten into the vehicle, he hadn’t been able to hide his surprise. He’d seen her last week on the television, commenting on the rocketing rate of unemployment while the President employed his extended family in the government. Jobs for the boys had become jobs for the cousins. She was a regular on panels, discussing the erosion of the rule of law in Sri Lanka, criticising both the President and the Tigers. He wasn’t sure if he had felt safer or more vulnerable with her in the jeep.
Ameena was more beautiful in person than on television. Her face was bare and tired, but he liked the determination in it, the efficiency of her hands as she did a quick inventory of her bag and equipment, and the economy of her answers to his questions. It was what he liked about her articles—they were brave. They said what he thought but was too afraid to say.
He tapped his pocket to make sure his decoy flash card and spare battery were there and began his work.
The wooden shutters of the hall had been removed and used for firewood a long time ago. The noise hit him first, a kind of low-level humming. As he got closer, he realised it was the sound of people, adults and children, crying and moaning. Then came the smell. He recognised the cold, metallic tang of blood. He could see the drip and drag marks, rusted and ground into the earth. The pathway looked like an abattoir floor, blood pooled in the divots and undulations of the earth.
He stopped for a moment at the hall entrance, its walls pockmarked with shrapnel. Ameena, who had walked ahead, now turned back towards him, her face shadowed in the dim light. She stood frozen. His eyes adjusted and he realised why when he saw the horror on her face.
Sathyan touched her arm. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much time.’
•
‘How can you listen to these stories day in and day out?’ Ameena asked. She lit a cigarette and passed it to Sathyan. Everyone smoked to mask the smell. ‘We’ve interviewed thirty-two people, most of them parents without their children.’ She lit another cigarette for herself.
Their children. Left in fragments by the roadside. Was that better than no pieces? No body? He had wanted to hold his brother one last time.
When he said nothing, she prompted him. ‘You handle it well.’
‘I’ve been listening a long time.’
‘You’re not old enough.’
He shrugged. He had worked out that he was younger than her, but he felt old beyond his years. He’d been listening to the stories of the dead and the dying ever since his father and sister had disappeared in the middle of the night. ‘It helps me—to listen. And I think it helps them to talk. I record each story, give each child their name, age, ancestral village, their family lineage and one comment. Then I write up each case study and send it back to the NGO. But I also keep a logbook for them.’
‘Like a wedding register for the dead? That’s a little perverse isn’t it?’
‘I suppose. I read the names from time to time and try to remember their stories. Srini Manmohan, aged twelve, played cricket, fast bowler. Rajani Kesavan, aged seven, was convinced she was a fairy.’
‘Why?’ Ameena drew from the cigarette again and held the smoke in her chest.
‘Because all of my case studies are about where they died and how they died. What kind of device was it, mine, gunfire, mortar fire, Semtex explosion? Did the injury kill them, or the blood loss and secondary infection? What kind of treatment were they given and where? I record the demographics of the injury. Not the details of the injured.’ He pulled out his clipboard and flicked through the sheets. ‘I want to remember who they were before they became a statistic in a human rights report that no one will read.’
‘Why do you keep doing this if you think no one will read it?’
‘Why do you?’
Ameena smiled. ‘I’m self-absorbed and attention-seeking, of course. I’m a terrible mother and a worse journalist. Haven’t you heard?’
‘Aside from that?’
‘Because I keep thinking that someone might read what I write. Someone with real power and they might do something about it. Because if you put it down in words, you hold people accountable for their sins. You might not be able to punish them; you might not be able to prevent it from happening again. But we are all of us accountable to each other.’ She exhaled a long stream of smoke. ‘I want to give words to grief and loss and injustice. You?’
‘Me?’ The smoke spiralled away from him as he considered whether he would give her the truthful answer or the polite one. He chose truth. ‘I seek out the dismembered because I feel dismembered, and recording the losses of others helps me make sense of my own. There will be no cemeteries for my people. No memorials or national days of remembrance, no records of family trees or family histories. No records at all, in many cases. Birth certificates, photographs, school reports, medical reports, driver’s licences. Everything’s destroyed. That’s how amputation works. Complete removal of the limb that burdens the body. No record and no memory of the loss.’
‘Their families will remember,’ she said.
‘Sometimes an entire family walks over a landmine together. Or cluster bombs fall on an entire village—generations, gone in seconds. Sometimes it’s better that way.’ He reached for another cigarette. ‘I met a mother once who carried the torn foot of her dead child for twenty kilometres wrapped in a banana leaf, like some weird parody of lumprice,’ he said, weakly attempting levity.
‘What?’
‘You know, lumprice—except inside the banana leaf was a foot instead of curries.’
‘Thank you for that,’ she said ruefully. ‘I’ll never be able to eat lumprice again.’
‘Made you laugh, though.’
‘What happened to the lady?’
All levity abruptly disappeared. ‘She went mad with grief, attacked a soldier at a camp and begged him to kill her. He pushed her back with his rifle and pointed it at her. It was bayoneted. She threw herself onto it. That’s what I heard. I wasn’t there.’
‘I’d probably do the same, although that wouldn’t be my preferred method of suicide-by-soldier.’
‘No? What would you do?’ Sathyan asked.
‘Probably try to contrive a firing squad. I’m squeamish. Not all rifles are bayoneted, so she must have thought about it beforehand. Funny how in this world of abundance and scarcity, there are so many ways to be killed but actually not that many ways to kill yourself.’
They were silent again. He watched the smoke curl in front of him and drift with the evening breeze. ‘You have children?’ he asked.
‘I do—three. Chitran, Niru and Rohan. Maybe that’s what makes this harder for me. When each of my children was born, I held them and counted their fingers and toes. I ran my hands over their arms and legs and ears. I marvelled at how complete, how whole they were. It seemed like they would remain that way forever.’
He didn’t have children but he once had siblings. He imagined that if he were a father now, he would look at his children and think: If only your beautiful, dirty feet were not battered by the roads and the jungles and the walking. If only you could walk another path, another road. Where some bastard hasn’t hidden a landmine.
He inhaled the last of his cigarette and ground it into the dirt with his whole foot.
•
Patient number thirty-two, name Pradeepan, aged two. He photographed the scrap of paper pinned to the child’s t-shirt. Status: Critical 7. The child lay on newspaper on the floor, his sweat, blood and urine seeping through it into the earth beneath. Sathyan wondered how many levels of critical there were before you were dead.
The boy’s head was cradled in his mother’s lap. She fanned him gently with the pallu of her sari, flicking away the flies that darted between his wounds and his face, exposing her blouse without care.
Sathyan touched her arm gently. Ameena looked at him, dazed and exhausted. Tear tracks stained her face and ran small rivers down her dusty skin.
She licked her cracked lips and asked, ‘Enne, enne vehnem?’ What do you want?
Sathyan wanted to know how a two-year-old boy ended up with a leg blown off. He looked at the mass of dirty bandages wrapped tightly around the stump, blood soaking a hungry red stain over the bandage and up the remains of his thigh.
Sathyan called for the nurse, Sister Punitha, who came over with fresh bandages and gave him instructions. He lifted up the stump. The child cried out in pain, jerking up from his mother’s lap, his eyes suddenly wild and open.
‘Vedengo, vedengo,’ his mother said. Leave him.
Sister Punitha looked at her and then the child. She took the fresh bandages away and returned with a plastic bag that she tied around the stump. Infection containment for the others. Her face contorted and then she regained control. She was still young enough to weep for her patients.
‘What happened?’ Sathyan asked the mother in Tamil. ‘Where are you from?’
Tears fell from her eyes onto the child’s face. She rubbed them into his skin, cleaning the dust from his cheeks and arranging his hair neatly. It was plastered to his head with sweat. She tore her eyes away and looked at Sathyan.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Sathyan Navaratnam. My people are from Teliveddy. This is my friend, Ameena. We want to write about what happened to your son.’ He showed her his clipboard and digital recorder. ‘We want people to know what’s happening.’
‘Why?’
‘So that maybe we can stop it.’
‘You can’t stop it.’ She shook her head. The rise and fall of the child’s chest was becoming shallower and slower.
‘Tell me, please. We can’t help Pradeepan. I am sorry. I am so sorry. But we can try to help others. Please tell me what happened.’
The mother stared at her son’s face, his eyes now open, looking unseeingly up at her. ‘Padango mahan,’ she soothed him. Sleep, son. Sathyan’s mother used to say the same thing to him. To his brother. She didn’t take her eyes from her child as she spoke. ‘We are from Manipay. Do you know it?’
Sathyan nodded and switched the recorder on.
She spoke slowly and clearly in Tamil. ‘We have been moving for a long time now. Our village was shelled twice and we stayed, hiding in the fields. When it was over, we returned to bury our people. We didn’t know where else to go. Eventually when we couldn’t find enough food, we left. The fields and plantations were bombed. They wanted us to starve.’
‘Who? Who was bombing you?’ Sathyan asked.
‘Helikaptar.’ She took her hand from the child’s body and with one finger made a swirling motion.
Only the Army had helicopters.
‘Helicopters bombed you?’ he asked, moving the recorder closer to her. The hum around him was getting louder, and he didn’t want to miss anything.
The woman seemed to be listening to something inside, one hand returned to her son’s chest, the other still stroking his hair. She smiled at Sathyan kindly. She shook her head with patience and relief. ‘Helikaptar,’ she repeated more emphatically. ‘Ippe varar.’
Helicopter, coming now.
He reared back, dropped his recorder and toppled into Ameena.
‘What is it, what did she say?’ Ameena asked.
Sathyan stood just as three nurses rushed in. They were terrified but efficient, loading medicines and bandages from patients into soiled pillowcases and plastic bags. More people came in, families locating their injured. Some were carried out, some were left behind. People on the ground cried out for help; others were too tired to cry. The hum swelled towards them. People outside screamed in terror.
Rick burst through the doors. ‘We have to hustle now. Now!’ Three children ran past him to the mother beside Sathyan. ‘Come on. This place is gone. Now, now, now!’ He ran down the aisle, stopping at Ameena.
‘What about these people?’ she shouted back. ‘You said we had more time. They had more time.’
‘Can’t trust the fuckers,’ he snapped. ‘Time’s up. Get your gear and get into the jeep. I’m starting the engine in three.’
Sathyan looked at the mother and her dying child. The other children were cowering around her, crying and shaking. Two young boys, maybe five and six, and a girl, slightly older. ‘Come with us.’ He tried to lift the dying child, who was slick with blood. The boy’s head fell back over Sathyan’s arm.
He was about to stand when the mother pulled at his arm. She shook her head.
‘Vedengo, mahan.’ Leave him, son.
He hesitated and then placed the boy gently back on the ground, back in his mother’s lap. She nodded and pushed her remaining children towards him.
‘Pohngo, pohngo,’ she cried. Go, go.
Sathyan looked at Ameena, and without speaking, they pried the children’s small hands away from their mother and ran out of the school as its walls began to vibrate like the chambers of a broken tin heart. They didn’t look back.
Outside, people were running, grabbing meagre belongings, stuffing shopping bags with clothes, cooking utensils and bags of rice. The cars had already left. A man smacked a donkey on its rump and then its hind legs, urging it to walk.
Sathyan ran around the mess, checking that Ameena was still with him as they reached the jeep. The doors were flung open, the others already in, seatbelts on.
‘What’s this?’ Rick pointed at the children. He cursed and jumped out of the jeep.
‘We’re taking them. We can take them. There’s space,’ Ameena shouted above the screams around them.
‘Doesn’t matter, we’re not allowed. There’s no fucking way I’m getting through the checkpoints with them.’
‘I’ll pay you more money when we get to Colombo,’ she said desperately. ‘My paper will pay. I can pay.’ The children were holding each other, the smaller boys crying into the older girl’s chest.
‘Fuck the money, I can’t get them through the checkpoint!’ Rick shouted. ‘You’re not hearing me.’ He tried to push her into the vehicle, but she pushed him back.
‘Then take them as far as you can take them and drop them in the jungle,’ she insisted. ‘They’ve got a better chance that way. You said it yourself, this place is gone.’ She shuddered as an Army helicopter flew ahead and the ground burst with machine gun fire. She pushed the children into the jeep and then turned back towards the camp.
‘Ameena, get in,’ Sathyan shouted.
She shook her head. She reached up to speak into his ear above the noise. ‘I have to write this.’ She ran back into the crowd as the first bomb fell.
‘Take the children, instead of us,’ Sathyan said to Rick, who swore again.
‘Two of them for two of you,’ Rick replied, pushing the boys deeper into the jeep, then pulling the girl out.
Sathyan didn’t have time to argue. He grabbed the girl, turned and ran after Ameena, pushing through people to catch her hand. Ameena was about to say something when the helicopter passed over again, banked left and returned. This time he could see the machine guns mounted on each open door, the Sri Lanka Army soldiers at their helm.
The helicopter dropped towards them. The crowd surged at his back, pushing him forward. He stumbled and Ameena steadied him. She spotted the child clutched in his other hand and looked at him for an explanation, but he shook his head.
The child tripped and he lost his grip on her. Ameena bent down to pick her up as another volley of bullets hit the ground. People scattered. Sathyan covered Ameena’s body and the child’s with his own. He could hear screams and realised they were his own. The thrum of the helicopter blades receded. It would turn and come back.
‘Come on!’ He stood and pulled Ameena and the girl in her arms with him, checking them both for injury. Ameena was by his side, running, her breath heaving. He took the child from her and they kept pace with each other, passing families, being overtaken by others. ‘Which way?’ He stopped and looked at the crowd. Was there safety in numbers? The child’s arms were tight around his neck, her breath fast against his cheek.
‘The road. The road’s that way. Follow the people.’ Ameena pulled at his shirt.
‘Rick brought us off-road for a reason,’ he countered. ‘We go back and find his path. We should have followed him out.’
‘Please Sathyan, we follow them. They know where they’re going!’ she cried, dragging him with the mass of people.
‘No one knows where they’re going, Ameena.’ He saw a second helicopter, its shadow like a winged metallic monster. It swooped, then swerved left, a teasing gesture. It circled back and did the same thing again. People screamed and ran to the right. Towards the road.
He looked ahead and saw doctors and nurses also shepherding people that way. His heart was pounding, sweat pouring into his eyes, blurring his sight. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t hold on to the thought. It swooped towards him and then suddenly banked left, like the helicopter.
‘Okay,’ he nodded and they followed the crowd. Running, walking to rest, shifting the child from one hip to another until they hit the road.
‘Church, church,’ a woman said as she stumbled against him. Her left arm was shredded by bullets. Ameena took the screaming child from Sathyan and he held the young woman up. It was the nurse from the school hall, Sister Punitha.
‘Church?’ he asked her in Tamil.
‘St Paul of the Cross,’ she whispered. Blood on her lips as another nurse came and took her away. Sathyan stopped. His side covered in Sister Punitha’s blood, warm and sticky.
‘Keep going.’ Ameena pushed him forward. Around them people were running, families unable to carry their injured, leaving them to save their other children, to save themselves.
He couldn’t move. ‘I just need a minute,’ he said, coughing. He raised his hand to cover his mouth but it was bloody. He wiped it on his trousers in confusion. His hand was intact. Shaking and red, but whole.
He looked up into the skies but couldn’t see the helicopters. He looked around. Nuns, nurses, doctors. He couldn’t identify the others. It didn’t matter.
And then he heard it. A dull explosion, like thunder under water. People screamed. They all looked up. Nothing in the skies.
Then more explosions. Three ahead and one behind.
Bish, bish, bish, bish.
Like dark magic. People exploding from their feet up. Then the screaming. So much screaming.
So much blood. A crimson geyser reaching up to the indifferent heavens.
‘Don’t move.’ Sathyan tightened his grip on the child and put an arm out to stop Ameena.
An explosion went off in front of them. Burning hot earth sprayed into his face, singeing his skin, stinging his eyes, choking him.
Don’t move, he tried to scream again. He vomited dirt, his body heaving forward onto his knees.
Ameena caught him and held him upright. The child slipped from his arms.
Sister Punitha lay on the ground with her hands over her stomach. Nothing lay below it. Pieces of her spilled out.
‘Landmines!’ someone shouted.
‘Don’t move!’ Ameena was still frozen at his side, holding his hand. Where her skin met his felt safe. Only then did he realise that the child had let go of his leg. The little girl had recognised someone behind the remains of Sister Punitha.
It was her mother.
Sathyan shouted in Tamil, but too late. The girl ran towards her mother who was shaking her head and crying. The woman’s sari was soaked with the blood of her infant son. Her feet, bare and torn from running, stood on something metal, hidden under the dirt. So small and hard.
The little girl threw herself into her mother’s arms. The movement made the woman rock a little. Just one step back. The child was in her arms.
Bish, bish.
Sathyan watched the woman crumple to the ground. Blood gushed in a pool around her. Red running mercury. She held her daughter as long as she could, then the child slipped towards the ground. Sathyan lunged a step forward. He was almost there. He could catch her. He could save her.
Bish.