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| Jaffna exodus : courtesy / Facebook.com/Jeyakumaran |
By Jeyakumaran Chandrasekaram
Today (October 30) marks the 31st anniversary of the tragic internal displacement of Jaffna, a northern city in Sri Lanka.
I was fifteen at the time. I was living with my sister, who had just finished her Advanced Levels, and my brother, who had started practising as an English teacher. Neither of my parents was in town back then. My cousin sister hosted a Theepavali feast with delicious mutton curry and yellow rice, as was our family’s festive custom. After three or four servings, my tummy was full, and I could barely walk.
“Kaushalya akka, I never had such Theepavali lunch ever after”
It was around three in the afternoon when an announcement was made throughout the entire Valigamam region that everyone had to leave the town before dusk. Three wheelers (tuk tuks) drove through the city with loudspeakers mounted on top, broadcasting the news. The Sri Lankan Army had initiated a military operation and was advancing toward the city from the north. Rumours quickly spread that troops had already reached Achchuveli and Kopay, just a few kilometres away, leaving very little time before the few remaining routes to Chavakachcheri were cut off. Any outbreak of fighting in such a densely populated civilian area would cause a humanitarian disaster. Most of us began to panic amid the sudden announcements and swirling rumours. My sister had no idea what to do, and we hardly knew anyone living in Chavakachcheri. Where could we go?
Unfortunately, there was no other option but to evacuate. We packed our suitcases. We had two or three “posh” suitcases from the Middle East, where our father had worked in the early eighties. We packed some clothes, kitchen utensils, groceries, jewellery, and school textbooks. We tied the suitcases to our bicycle carriers with nylon rope.
There was such a dilemma over what to take and what to leave behind. Would you go for valuables? Valuables in what sense? An expensive camera over a kilo of rice? A big television set over a thermos flask and a kettle? You never knew. You never knew when you would be able to come back. Maybe the next day, maybe in a week, or in a month.
In our case, it was two long years.
My sister had only one thousand rupees at the time. My brother might have had another couple of thousand. I had twenty rupees, which I kept in my shorts pocket. I also secretly tucked my tennis ball and cricket bat into the suitcase, something my sister knew nothing about. Had she known, a bundle of drumsticks would have taken the bat’s place. I had a large suitcase on my cycle carrier, two ‘Chandrika’ bags hanging on either side of the handlebar, and, naturally, my backpack full of schoolbooks. My sister had a similar setup, as did my brother, who also carried an extra sack of belongings balanced across his cycle crossbar. Our plan was to leave early so that we could reach Chavakachcheri before dark.
Chavakachcheri was merely seventeen kilometres from Jaffna town. Under normal circumstances, it would take little more than an hour to pedal there. Or so we thought.
We set off. By the time we reached the Nallur temple area, we realised this was going to be a nightmare. The road was so choked with traffic that we could hardly walk, let alone pedal. Almost the entire population of Jaffna, hundreds of thousands of people, was crawling along the narrow road to Chavakachcheri like wounded snails.
Nothing was on our side. The sky began to drizzle. The nylon rope holding my suitcase started to slip. My Bata slippers gave me trouble, and the unbalanced weight made pushing the bicycle an exhausting ordeal. Pure chaos.
The rain was dripping, so was time, so were we. Every single kilometre consumed more than two hours. In the middle of it all, terror struck. The army began firing parachute flares over the area, the usual prelude to an aerial bombardment. A pair of fighter jets roared overhead. Fortunately, they turned back, a rare reprieve.
We were hungry, drenched, and tired. Before long, we lost our brother in the crowd. My sister and I gripped onto each other as tightly as we could, but around one in the morning, we too were torn apart. We screamed and cried out each other’s names in the dark, our voices lost among hundreds of other frantic families calling for their own missing loved ones. Luck was on our side, after half an hour of sheer terror, we found each other again. That thirty minutes separation was the worst nightmare of my life, but going through it forged a bond between us that made us inseparable from that day on.
We finally reached Chavakachcheri around eight the following morning. A journey that should have taken an hour had taken sixteen. From there, we pushed on to Palai, another three hours on the road, where we stayed for a month before being displaced to the Vanni, where we lived for the next two years.
This nightmarish, agonising exodus should never have happened. The Sri Lankan ethnic conflict was brutal and unforgiving, and both warring parties bear the blame for this and so many other humanitarian catastrophes. The Sri Lankan military should never have shelled and bombed densely populated civilian areas. For their part, the LTTE should have handled the situation far differently. It made sense to evacuate civilians from direct lines of fire, but forcing an entire population out in a single night for political optics was inexcusable.
My ordeal pales in comparison to the horrors that unfolded during the final stages of the civil war in 2009. Yet this was my experience. A brutal, searing, and probably life changing one too. My beloved city of Jaffna was never the same again.
I was never the same either. (JK/ courtesy: Facebook/Jeyakumaran Chandrasekaran)
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