My first entry into the great district of Trincomalee situated in the north east of Sri Lanka was extraordinary. It was again on a research tour that I made her acquaintance, and it has been a flirtatious, passionate love affair since. The short-lived ceasefire agreement between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) was still on then and this made travel into hitherto inaccessible parts of the country, such as the ones controlled by the LTTE, possible for many of us of a different ethnicity.
The Trincomalee Harbour – the only natural harbour in Sri Lanka, and in this part of the region I think, did not fail to take my breath away on first view. She looks onto the great blue-black and exotic Indian Ocean, rich in uncommon sea creatures and a perennial wisdom that only the ocean and sky share between them.
The purpose of our research found eight of us, my colleagues and I, balancing on a narrow boat suspended on overhead ropes for support on either end. We were crossing a lagoon known for sucking in human beings to satiate her appetite and perhaps a kind of protestant anger towards the atrocities committed by us humans for decades on either side of her banks against one another. We all let out loud sighs of relied once the boatman got hold of the bank to tie the boat onto a pole on one end, feeling not-so-wanton and ridiculously brave all of a sudden.
We made our way through patches of freshly cut jungle, scattered here and there with structures that took the form of probably houses at one time, ages ago. Many were just cemented flooring with a moldy concrete wall or two, overrun with foliage, entirely bullet-riddled. Even the inanimate structures such as these seemed to be weeping in pain, almost as though they were watching us with accusatory eyes. It was, to me, a mixture of anger, sadness, pain and despair, and strangely, even suspicious hope that perhaps the Sri Lankans living on this piece of serene beauty had at last knocked some sense into their heads.
We were welcomed by a cadre in civil clothes, who seemed to both smile warmly and yet regard us with so much distrust, all at the same time. I didn’t blame him. With very few words and mostly nods and gestures he led us to a tiny little hamlet that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. There was only one formal structure, and there seemed to be no houses in sight at all, although in an area of about 500 square feet there were a lot of people, mostly urchins, hovering about with makeshift play things, armed with sticks and old tires for amusement.
We approached the hamlet cautiously. The purpose of our visit was to visit a young girl, a 14 year old, who had been harassed and violated by an adult homeowner at whose house she was working as a maid. I can’t imagine why I would have taken the information so casually, as it completely threw me off balance as I beheld the girl in person and as my Tamil-speaking colleagues translated the ordeal this young thing had been through in less than one year.
Before our eyes lay the girl on a dirty and tattered piece of cloth on the floor in the center of a rectangular plot of land. She did not seem to be quite conscious of our presence. In fact, she was writhing in so much pain, holding the large bump on her stomach, the muscles on her face stretched in pain. Her elderly mother was sitting on the floor as well beside her daughter. The girl’s younger brother, about nine years, was standing by a tree close to them with one leg on the tree trunk, chewing vigorously on a reed that he held to his mouth. All three of them were incredibly thin, sporting bulging eyes and stunted bodies – signs of the lack of nutrition and possibly severe under nourishment.
Not too far away from the girl on the ground and her mother, was a makeshift space that could only be assumed to be their home, if it could even be called that. Shockingly, it consisted of four sarees tied together to four jungle poles erected on the hard ground, with a large plastic sheet for a roof. Inside this incredibly flimsy hut were some dirty pots and pans. To the left of the hut were some stones covered in ashes in the center – the family hearth.
I asked the mother in my non-fluent Tamil how many children she had altogether to which she responded she had nine in all. If I was shocked out of my senses, I struggled hard not to show it on my face. I knelt down on the ground next to the girl, facing her mother, held her hand and asked softly what had happened to the girl. The mother took my hand in hers and looked at my face long and hard. Then as a tear rolled down her left cheek, she explained that since she hardly had any work in the fields due to the ensuing drought and due to the tension and fear in Trincomalee that prevented rural folk from venturing into the towns in search of other coolie work, she had to depend on her younger children to increase their income. This was inspite of Sri Lanka’s well-established social welfare system – which include a free education system in which primary and secondary education is free of cost and compulsory by law until 14 years, as well as a well developed but poorly administered social security system that includes monthly dry rations, livelihoods loans and compulsory savings for the 30% of Sri Lanka’s families that live below the poverty line (defined at families with a monthly income of less than Rs.2600 or roughly US $25.)
Her elder children were married and lived in the vicinity, but as they had children and families of their own, she could not burden them with dependence. She pointed to a frail and thin man a distance away, dragging on a beedie – a local cigarette – sitting on his haunches on the ground next to a few other younger men, talking. She identified him as her husband. She told me that he had a bad back and could not do any hard work anymore and whatever money he earned doing this and that would all be swallowed down in the bottles of poison he consumed daily. She threw a sidelong glance of disgust at him, accompanied by another big tear down her other cheek.
She went on to explain that although her daughter and younger son were both in school, her daughter voluntarily dropped out of school so her younger brother could continue his schooling and took up a job as a maid in the house of an assistant school principal in Trincomalee town. She was resident there.
Several months into her work, one day while the mistress was away, the assistant school principal called her to his bedroom to delegate some chore. However, as she entered, he had closed the door behind her and had raped her. He had slapped her mouth shut so that her screams were muffled. She was scared and beaten so hard during the entire horrific episode that when he was through with her, she had lain there completely traumatized and motionless. He cleaned himself up and sneered at her, telling her to keep her mouth shut, since he knew that her family was the most important thing to her. She dragged herself out of his room and cried until the mistress of the house returned.
Upon her return, the girl went running in tears to retell the entire sordid story. She was unprepared for what ensued – the mistress hit her hard against her cheek and told her to stop spreading such lies and to go back to work. The girl never told her mother, afraid she may lose her job and more afraid that her younger brother may have to quit school and start working instead. Therefore, she obediently stayed on. It baffles me still whenever I think of this part of this incident the amount of familial love, kindness and immense sacrifice that exists among families, regardless of economic circumstances. Human love wherever it exists is still the greatest miracle of all.
By this time, I was clutching the mother’s hand so tight, my knuckles were turning white. Then she told me that her daughter had attained age some years ago, but that she was so innocent in her ways, she hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary when she started missing her period over some months. It was only when she was getting dizzy spells and nausea that the mistress in the house had figured out that this child was pregnant. Without a word, the girl was paid her last salary and sent back home.
It was at this point that both she and her mother knew that she was carrying a baby in her womb. The girl that lay before me was eight months into her pregnancy. In my head I could hear a voice reverberating ‘No way! She’s fourteen! She’s ONLY fourteen! She’s just fourteen! She’s a child! She’s a child!’ Tears stinging all our eyes, we forced ourselves to concentrate.
The girl had never been to see a medical officer; the local public midwife had visited them once several months before and had given some useful advice on how to keep her rested and fed with a consistent and healthy diet. But in a family that managed barely one meal a day, that too consisting of some rice and a vegetable, they were unable to provide the girl with any remotely nutritious food, let alone what the midwife had recommended. The girl’s will to survive and even manage a weak smile at me, somehow gave me hope that her child will also fight its way into this world, even against all odds.
We had to leave this family as time was running out for us and we still needed to cross the lagoon and make our way through a dirt track along two and half hours’ drive into the town where we would compile our report. I remember we took much longer to get into town, as we were forced to detour from the normal route to avoid traveling past an LTTE training camp, on the off chance that those of us from the south turned informer to the Sri Lankan Army.
We were poorly paid researchers, however, we emptied all we could from our stipend and managed to secure a couple of kilograms of rice, sugar and milk packets from the only grocery in the vicinity, to hand over as our contribution to the family. This seemed a better alternative to giving them money, which would probably have been snatched away anyway by the head of the household to sustain his habit.
As I look back on my frayed notes of that day, many years later, I notice the scribbles on my notepad of my observations of the environment around the girl’s home. The drought and water scarcity was so severe there that the red earth had large cracks running across it. Next to no vegetation existed on the dry bare ground, excepting a few large trees and some thorn bushes. The cruel sun beat down on the earth mercilessly, leaving every living thing parched below it. As though poverty and neglect from the powers that be were not hard enough to suffer through, the climate and environment were forces that seemed to have little sympathy on these communities as well.
That young girl’s face and her plight are burned into my memory. I remember wondering what that strange and horrible world we had entered into was, upon reaching the location where the girl lived. I remember wondering how this remote, dry, barren area could be a part of Sri Lanka – so rich in resources and full of life in most parts? With such a well-administered health care and education system across most of the country, how is it possible that within just 65,500 square kilometers of area consisting all of Sri Lanka, we could have missed this village, when a young girl and her family suffers with such burning need? At the time, with the existence of a ceasefire agreement, however shallow and short lived, what were we doing without getting much needed help to those who needed it the most? How could we ever forgive ourselves?
Today, we are back at war, but communities in the deep reaches of the country remain chained and suffocating from a more sinister enemy than what we have made each other out to be – cruel poverty and debilitating hunger have encroached our villages and the neglected patches of our beloved little country. Every child shackled with the fierce effects of malnourishment, every mother stretching herself to protect her children from a worse fate than hers, every father drinking himself to death every night punishing himself for his inability to provide for or protect his family from all the monsters that roam freely in our world, every young girl whose childhood is stripped from her and is forced to reckon with a reality she never chose, every young boy with a storm brewing in the deep crevices of his heart, furious at the injustices all around him, the ever-fleeting inaccessible opportunities to dream bigger and freer, ensnared into the only real option of violence to occupy some space to live and breathe – theirs is a world that to many of us don’t even exist, a figment, a tall story, a reality in a distant land unknown to us. But the truth is closer to home, in fact, is right here in our home.
The Trincomalee Harbour – the only natural harbour in Sri Lanka, and in this part of the region I think, did not fail to take my breath away on first view. She looks onto the great blue-black and exotic Indian Ocean, rich in uncommon sea creatures and a perennial wisdom that only the ocean and sky share between them.
The purpose of our research found eight of us, my colleagues and I, balancing on a narrow boat suspended on overhead ropes for support on either end. We were crossing a lagoon known for sucking in human beings to satiate her appetite and perhaps a kind of protestant anger towards the atrocities committed by us humans for decades on either side of her banks against one another. We all let out loud sighs of relied once the boatman got hold of the bank to tie the boat onto a pole on one end, feeling not-so-wanton and ridiculously brave all of a sudden.
We made our way through patches of freshly cut jungle, scattered here and there with structures that took the form of probably houses at one time, ages ago. Many were just cemented flooring with a moldy concrete wall or two, overrun with foliage, entirely bullet-riddled. Even the inanimate structures such as these seemed to be weeping in pain, almost as though they were watching us with accusatory eyes. It was, to me, a mixture of anger, sadness, pain and despair, and strangely, even suspicious hope that perhaps the Sri Lankans living on this piece of serene beauty had at last knocked some sense into their heads.
We were welcomed by a cadre in civil clothes, who seemed to both smile warmly and yet regard us with so much distrust, all at the same time. I didn’t blame him. With very few words and mostly nods and gestures he led us to a tiny little hamlet that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. There was only one formal structure, and there seemed to be no houses in sight at all, although in an area of about 500 square feet there were a lot of people, mostly urchins, hovering about with makeshift play things, armed with sticks and old tires for amusement.
We approached the hamlet cautiously. The purpose of our visit was to visit a young girl, a 14 year old, who had been harassed and violated by an adult homeowner at whose house she was working as a maid. I can’t imagine why I would have taken the information so casually, as it completely threw me off balance as I beheld the girl in person and as my Tamil-speaking colleagues translated the ordeal this young thing had been through in less than one year.
Before our eyes lay the girl on a dirty and tattered piece of cloth on the floor in the center of a rectangular plot of land. She did not seem to be quite conscious of our presence. In fact, she was writhing in so much pain, holding the large bump on her stomach, the muscles on her face stretched in pain. Her elderly mother was sitting on the floor as well beside her daughter. The girl’s younger brother, about nine years, was standing by a tree close to them with one leg on the tree trunk, chewing vigorously on a reed that he held to his mouth. All three of them were incredibly thin, sporting bulging eyes and stunted bodies – signs of the lack of nutrition and possibly severe under nourishment.
Not too far away from the girl on the ground and her mother, was a makeshift space that could only be assumed to be their home, if it could even be called that. Shockingly, it consisted of four sarees tied together to four jungle poles erected on the hard ground, with a large plastic sheet for a roof. Inside this incredibly flimsy hut were some dirty pots and pans. To the left of the hut were some stones covered in ashes in the center – the family hearth.
I asked the mother in my non-fluent Tamil how many children she had altogether to which she responded she had nine in all. If I was shocked out of my senses, I struggled hard not to show it on my face. I knelt down on the ground next to the girl, facing her mother, held her hand and asked softly what had happened to the girl. The mother took my hand in hers and looked at my face long and hard. Then as a tear rolled down her left cheek, she explained that since she hardly had any work in the fields due to the ensuing drought and due to the tension and fear in Trincomalee that prevented rural folk from venturing into the towns in search of other coolie work, she had to depend on her younger children to increase their income. This was inspite of Sri Lanka’s well-established social welfare system – which include a free education system in which primary and secondary education is free of cost and compulsory by law until 14 years, as well as a well developed but poorly administered social security system that includes monthly dry rations, livelihoods loans and compulsory savings for the 30% of Sri Lanka’s families that live below the poverty line (defined at families with a monthly income of less than Rs.2600 or roughly US $25.)
Her elder children were married and lived in the vicinity, but as they had children and families of their own, she could not burden them with dependence. She pointed to a frail and thin man a distance away, dragging on a beedie – a local cigarette – sitting on his haunches on the ground next to a few other younger men, talking. She identified him as her husband. She told me that he had a bad back and could not do any hard work anymore and whatever money he earned doing this and that would all be swallowed down in the bottles of poison he consumed daily. She threw a sidelong glance of disgust at him, accompanied by another big tear down her other cheek.
She went on to explain that although her daughter and younger son were both in school, her daughter voluntarily dropped out of school so her younger brother could continue his schooling and took up a job as a maid in the house of an assistant school principal in Trincomalee town. She was resident there.
Several months into her work, one day while the mistress was away, the assistant school principal called her to his bedroom to delegate some chore. However, as she entered, he had closed the door behind her and had raped her. He had slapped her mouth shut so that her screams were muffled. She was scared and beaten so hard during the entire horrific episode that when he was through with her, she had lain there completely traumatized and motionless. He cleaned himself up and sneered at her, telling her to keep her mouth shut, since he knew that her family was the most important thing to her. She dragged herself out of his room and cried until the mistress of the house returned.
Upon her return, the girl went running in tears to retell the entire sordid story. She was unprepared for what ensued – the mistress hit her hard against her cheek and told her to stop spreading such lies and to go back to work. The girl never told her mother, afraid she may lose her job and more afraid that her younger brother may have to quit school and start working instead. Therefore, she obediently stayed on. It baffles me still whenever I think of this part of this incident the amount of familial love, kindness and immense sacrifice that exists among families, regardless of economic circumstances. Human love wherever it exists is still the greatest miracle of all.
By this time, I was clutching the mother’s hand so tight, my knuckles were turning white. Then she told me that her daughter had attained age some years ago, but that she was so innocent in her ways, she hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary when she started missing her period over some months. It was only when she was getting dizzy spells and nausea that the mistress in the house had figured out that this child was pregnant. Without a word, the girl was paid her last salary and sent back home.
It was at this point that both she and her mother knew that she was carrying a baby in her womb. The girl that lay before me was eight months into her pregnancy. In my head I could hear a voice reverberating ‘No way! She’s fourteen! She’s ONLY fourteen! She’s just fourteen! She’s a child! She’s a child!’ Tears stinging all our eyes, we forced ourselves to concentrate.
The girl had never been to see a medical officer; the local public midwife had visited them once several months before and had given some useful advice on how to keep her rested and fed with a consistent and healthy diet. But in a family that managed barely one meal a day, that too consisting of some rice and a vegetable, they were unable to provide the girl with any remotely nutritious food, let alone what the midwife had recommended. The girl’s will to survive and even manage a weak smile at me, somehow gave me hope that her child will also fight its way into this world, even against all odds.
We had to leave this family as time was running out for us and we still needed to cross the lagoon and make our way through a dirt track along two and half hours’ drive into the town where we would compile our report. I remember we took much longer to get into town, as we were forced to detour from the normal route to avoid traveling past an LTTE training camp, on the off chance that those of us from the south turned informer to the Sri Lankan Army.
We were poorly paid researchers, however, we emptied all we could from our stipend and managed to secure a couple of kilograms of rice, sugar and milk packets from the only grocery in the vicinity, to hand over as our contribution to the family. This seemed a better alternative to giving them money, which would probably have been snatched away anyway by the head of the household to sustain his habit.
As I look back on my frayed notes of that day, many years later, I notice the scribbles on my notepad of my observations of the environment around the girl’s home. The drought and water scarcity was so severe there that the red earth had large cracks running across it. Next to no vegetation existed on the dry bare ground, excepting a few large trees and some thorn bushes. The cruel sun beat down on the earth mercilessly, leaving every living thing parched below it. As though poverty and neglect from the powers that be were not hard enough to suffer through, the climate and environment were forces that seemed to have little sympathy on these communities as well.
That young girl’s face and her plight are burned into my memory. I remember wondering what that strange and horrible world we had entered into was, upon reaching the location where the girl lived. I remember wondering how this remote, dry, barren area could be a part of Sri Lanka – so rich in resources and full of life in most parts? With such a well-administered health care and education system across most of the country, how is it possible that within just 65,500 square kilometers of area consisting all of Sri Lanka, we could have missed this village, when a young girl and her family suffers with such burning need? At the time, with the existence of a ceasefire agreement, however shallow and short lived, what were we doing without getting much needed help to those who needed it the most? How could we ever forgive ourselves?
Today, we are back at war, but communities in the deep reaches of the country remain chained and suffocating from a more sinister enemy than what we have made each other out to be – cruel poverty and debilitating hunger have encroached our villages and the neglected patches of our beloved little country. Every child shackled with the fierce effects of malnourishment, every mother stretching herself to protect her children from a worse fate than hers, every father drinking himself to death every night punishing himself for his inability to provide for or protect his family from all the monsters that roam freely in our world, every young girl whose childhood is stripped from her and is forced to reckon with a reality she never chose, every young boy with a storm brewing in the deep crevices of his heart, furious at the injustices all around him, the ever-fleeting inaccessible opportunities to dream bigger and freer, ensnared into the only real option of violence to occupy some space to live and breathe – theirs is a world that to many of us don’t even exist, a figment, a tall story, a reality in a distant land unknown to us. But the truth is closer to home, in fact, is right here in our home.
Sometimes, sleeplessness, restlessness and deep discomfort that lead to proactive action are perhaps the only antidote to right the wrongs that we have collectively, globally, contributed to create and breed. We may never be through in a lifetime, but at least we would have started.
