ALONG THE ROAD BETWEEN Colombo and Galle there were many stretches where we could see the beaches. The ocean was calm at that time of year, but still it was very beautiful. Here and there resorts appeared—on our right heading south, our left on the way home. The houses of affluent Sri Lankans or (as likely as otherwise) foreigners suggested inlets or open stretches of shoreline where, I imagined, the sand and the sea must have been especially fine. The shops near them would be neater, I thought—better frontage, better stock. Then would come another village, an ordinary place full of ordinary people and ordinary shops.
It is possible, I reflected as Shanthi and I talked in the back seat of our hired car, to stay in Sri Lanka for some time without seeing any more than a visitor is intended to see—certainly without much grasp of the place or its people or how they live. This I knew simply from chance conversations with tourists and visitors—at a bar or a restaurant, on a street, or on the verandah at the Galle Face Hotel. They would know all about the beaches at, say, Unawatuna, but they would no little or nothing about the life taking place around them.
This is by design. Sri Lanka does not present itself to the rest of the world as a country anymore. It is a “destination” for holiday-goers. It is a manager of beaches and resorts. It is a changer of bed linens, a sweeper of floors, a tender of bars, a waiter, a driver, a receptionist, a porter. It is not a nation with national institutions. It is not a judge, a police officer, a teacher, a tea plucker (except at a picturesque distance), a young boy with his mother, one or the other of them a victim. These people are hidden, because most of Sri Lanka is hidden. It is hidden behind all the laws and procedures that are still observed, if barely, behind all the forms that are still made out, all the chops chopped onto documents.
It is also hidden within the conspiracy of silence most Sri Lankans accept as an ordinary part of daily life. To observe the conspiracy of silence is good for one’s health—or so it is understood. But it also helps to keep Sri Lanka hidden from view. The war goes on “in the north,” as they say in the south, as if “the north” were the far side of the moon. The courts corrode, the police continue to abuse ordinary people, the schools do not teach adequately, and still the tourists can come (though many fewer now) and imagine Sri Lanka as a good or bad destination depending on how the tides were, how well the air-conditioning worked, and how good the service was.
In the spring of 2007 the Liberation Tigers, for the first time, managed to fly an unsophisticated jet into the south and bomb a site near Colombo. It was not an effective mission—not if measured by the number of casualties or by the destruction wrought. But it was effective in another way: It informed the south, the orderly south, that it was not so sequestered from the war and the violence as it had thought. It announced a determination to break the conspiracy of silence, to shred the curtain Sri Lanka has drawn across everything except the beaches and hotels, the cricket team, the great temples, the picturesque ruins and stone carvings from another time.
Kandy is somewhat like the south in this respect. It hides itself. The lake is always placid, the Temple of the Tooth always magnificent, the town always curious, the market lively. Among all Sri Lankans, as it is often said, Kandyans are especially blessed with good looks. And you would never know during a visit—a day, a week, more—of the suffering that takes place among them.
There is much of it. You can walk to it if you like, for it is to be found just a short distance from the hotels and the busy streets full of jewelers and textile merchants. It was in Kandy that I learned how abuse, violence, and suffering can echo down in time, one generation to the next. To maim a plantation worker or a primary school pupil today can be to maim some small part of the nation for years to come.
“One thing,” a man I knew only as Father George once said to me. He meant, “One thing I want you to know, one thing that is essential.”
“One thing, it’s not easy to get healed from the shock of torture. Inside, I mean.”
I ALWAYS STAYED AT THE SUISSE in Kandy, the hotel next to the hotel where the proprietress was the mistress of a known murderer who was in the service of the chief justice, and whom the chief justice had placed in charge of the institute in Colombo where judges are trained. In this circumstance the Suisse seemed the right sort of macabre touch. “Whatever you see,” I could remind myself as I gazed over the lake from the gleaming white verandah, “is not all there is.”
One Saturday morning I arranged to go see Father George. At the reception desk I ordered a tuk-tuk, but there was some confusion as to where exactly I was going. The Commission for Justice, Peace, Human Development, and Human Rights: Another large name, but no one had heard of it. Where was that?
“Katugastota Road.”
“It is that direction”—the desk manager pointed toward town—“but where are you going along Katugastota Road?”
I gave some landmarks, places I had been told to name.
“Indra Traders, the car dealer. Central Finance. Left at K. P. H., the hospital. Dr. Fernando Mawatha,” mawatha meaning a small road, a lane.
Mention of the public hospital did it. This the desk people knew.
The tuk-tuk drove through the center of the city and out toward the surrounding mountains. We passed the turn for Hiran’s home. Then the houses and shops thinned out, and then a sign with an arrow—“K. P. H.”—appeared. Up a steep hill I found the agency: two large buildings, both several stories. This was among the first human-rights organizations in Sri Lanka. It dated to 1964. There were branches elsewhere—three of them, with a staff of nearly fifty altogether. Father George, whose full name was George Sigamoney, had been the commission’s director for the past three years. He was middle-aged, balding, a little business-like, and always very busy.
Father George’s commission showed its age, so to say. It was concerned not only with torture and its victims, although these were inevitably a considerable part of its work. It looked at the entire social system, the system that produced the cases of torture: the villages, the plantations and the companies that employed the villagers, the schools that were supposed to educate the children of the villagers, the police who were supposed to protect the villagers, the health care system, and so on. With all of its branches, all of them in Central Province, the commission was active in twenty to twenty-five villages and estates—estates being like especially poor villages where the tea workers lived in compounds. A compound consists of twenty or so one-room dwellings lined up, ten a side facing one another, each one ten feet by ten feet, each one housing a family. A shared water spigot stands at the end of the rows.
Father George, rather typically, was busy with a group of parents and children when I arrived. So I was met by two of his staff, Asela Bandara and Trini Rayan. They were young, energetic, eager to explain. “We want to change these people. This is the object of our animation programs.”
Animation. I was instantly fascinated by Asela’s use of this term. To animate, to give life to, to enliven: This was more than a question of power and “empowerment.” It was more profound, it seemed to me. It had a larger psychological dimension. It had to do with the whole human being and suggested a very holistic grasp of the damage Sri Lankans had done themselves over many years.
“Asela, tell me about this word,” I said.
He thought about it briefly.
Then he said, “We look at many sides of people’s lives—health, education, human rights, civil rights, self-employment, meaning how people can do things on their own. We have programs for all of these. Especially in rural areas, in estates and villages, people are always staying back, not going forward.”
Staying back: Failing to develop.
This was the kind of psychological understanding of Sri Lankans I had come to view as necessary. Father George had told me, indeed, that the commission worked with two psychological counselors.
“It’s a question of people’s minds, then,” I said to Asela and Trini.
“Minds and lives,” Trini replied. “Some children have very good knowledge but are not going forward in school. Some young people have very good brains but cannot make proper use of their brains.”
We were sitting in a small cafeteria. There were flimsy card tables covered with plastic cloths, folding chairs, and to one side a small kitchen. As we spoke, the three of us, a flock of children arrived: It was lunchtime, and they took up all the other tables. They were, indeed, animated. Within a few minutes, the din forced us to move to another room. It reminded me of the schoolchildren next to Chitral’s office.
“All of those children are from very poor families,” Asela said when we had settled again. “We teach them math, English, music and dance, Sinhala, Tamil. These are children who can’t go to private classes for after-school tutoring. This is expensive but necessary in Sri Lanka, because government schools don’t provide a proper education. So we take them—a hundred of them every Saturday.”
FATHER GEORGE WAS STILL BUSY. But I was to meet a mother and son whose story, I was told, was important to hear. Trini would interpret, for neither mother nor son had any English.
The mother was named Mala Somalatha, and her son was called Ajantha Amarasinghe. She was fifty-two and looked sixty-two; he was ten and looked six or seven.
Their story began the previous spring, in a house where Somalatha had once worked as a maid. One day the elderly woman who ran the house asked Somalatha if she could help prepare for a birthday party. Somalatha went, taking Ajantha with her. Both stayed overnight. In the morning, someone—neither mother nor son seemed certain as to whom—took Ajantha upstairs.
“A lady showed me a tin box and asked me if I had taken some jewelry in it,” Ajantha said. “She gave me a bun and told me to say yes.”
It took more than an hour for Somalatha and Ajantha, who often required Trini’s help, to relate the events that followed. Of all the people I was to meet in Sri Lanka, none was so traumatized. Neither could look at me, preferring to stare into space, or at an object in the middle distance. They stopped frequently, unable to hold back tears. Their story is grotesque, and afterward, as I went over my notes—confused notes, reflecting the confusion of the mother and son—I saw that its horror lay in the way Somalatha and Ajantha had encountered profound pettiness and profound cruelty at the same time.
That morning, Ajantha denied taking the jewelry. What followed included scoldings, threats, questioning in strangers’ houses, a psychic’s testimony, accusations against the mother, digging up Somalatha’s front yard. Eventually, the police were called, which made matters magnitudes worse.
All of this was told with little understanding of cause and effect and, as I had come to expect, contradictions in the logic and the chronology of events. But in Somalatha and Ajantha’s case these problems were more extreme than any I had ever before encountered. In the details of their story and the blankness of their faces I began to recognize the totalizing effect of authority as it is often used in Sri Lanka. It seems to have a mesmerizing effect that, in turn, reinforces the totality of it. To be mesmerized is to be frozen into inaction.
Trini, who held a thick file on the case in his lap, began to speak. He perhaps more than I, recognized that in retelling their story the mother and son were suffering another kind of agony. I was prepared to stop at any point Trini might say, “Enough.”
Trini said, “At the police station, first they beat the boy with a cane. Then they tied his legs with rope and hung him from the ceiling upside down. Then they beat him again. He started yelling and screaming. The mother had to watch. She started shouting, too.”
Somalatha cut in. Her deep-brown, almond eyes were searching and uncomfortable, but she spoke with determination. “I couldn’t stand to see this. I said, ‘Kill me if you want, but don’t hit my son.’”
Trini spoke again, interpreting but, I sensed, truncating the mothers’ lengthy account.
“They brought him down, and he still denied stealing anything. At that point they threatened him with a gun. Then they brought out petrol and said, ‘We’ll burn you alive.’
“They dragged the mother by her hair into another room and beat her. Still no confession. The O. I. C. was doing the beating. They made her sit and hit her across the shins with a wooden pole. During the night they got drunk and said they’d rape her. There were no women constables.”
The mother: “At midnight I started shouting again because I was so afraid. Then they brought a lady in.”
As I listened, I had to keep reminding myself: This is a boy of ten telling this story; this is a forty-two-year-old mother of four—frail, old before her time. These were policemen wearing uniforms. This is the country where people come to stay on the beautiful beaches. This is the country that is proud of its temples and sees in itelf the greatness of an old civilization.
In the morning a doctor came. Somalatha had abdominal injuries and damage to her limbs; the boy had multiple contusions. The mother was eventually admitted to a hospital, but the boy was never seen by a J. M. O. There was no report—no two lines on a form explaining all that had happened to them.
Trini said, to me alone, “We’ll have a problem with this in court.”
I turned to Somalatha. “Do you know why any of this happened?”
“I can’t think of a single reason.”
Then Somalatha cried, not for the first time.
I asked her, “Was it difficult to come here?”
She had heard of the organization through someone on a victims’ committee in her village. She said, “It was the humiliation. Because of that I want justice, even with all the hardships.”
When I met Somalatha and Ajantha, their case was lodged with the Human Rights Commission in Colombo. The chief justice had been sent an affidavit.
ONE THING, IT’S NOT THAT EASY to get healed from the shock of torture.”
Father George was finally free. He was in a meeting hall in the adjacent building. There was a concrete floor worn smooth and dark by the passage of many feet and many brooms, and on it were rows of wooden benches.
There was a banner above where Father George stood when I entered, a panel of cotton with hand-painted block letters. It read:
MISSION STATEMENT
Empowering the Civil Society
through Animation
Accompany them on their journey
toward their total integral human development
I copied the statement in my notebook. It would be easy, I thought, to pass it off as a kind of flimsy idealism, rather useless, a greeting-card sentiment that sustained—perhaps I should say animated—the well-wishing staff of an N. G. O. but was otherwise of not much relevance.
But something in these brief, overcrowded phrases seemed important. Reading it later in my notes, I realized it made an essential connection, the connection Chitral, Kanthi, and others were also struggling to make: The personality is the true site of change. Bring it to life and you have enabled the deprived to claim their humanity in full. The question is public space, the starting point the public space within.
All this was in the banner. Nothing could be more forceful, I thought, more powerfully intelligent, more properly militant where militance was required.
Father George waited matter-of-factly while I copied down the words on the banner. Then we sat at a table in an adjoining room. I told him that, by no one’s design, I had seen a kind of “before and after” while he was busy with other things. I had seen Somalatha and Ajantha, and they had shaken me. But I had also seen the lunchroom fill with boisterous boys and girls acting as if life were a long holiday. Any one of them could have been through a trauma like Ajantha’s. Many—most, perhaps—were the children of plantation workers, living in ten-by-ten rooms in a concrete block with a spigot at the end of the shared space in front of their doorways.
It was then Father George told me his “one thing.” Then he said, “Some, at least, still have anger within themselves. They are not healed. They are angry and have grudges toward the perpetrators.”
It seemed to be among his deepest concerns. It was part of the work of the psychological counselors who were with the commission.
Father George said, “I feel in the latter stages”—by this he meant later in life, long after the experience of torture—“they might turn on any person in society. They could join an underworld group, a terrorist organization. They could do anything. So as a gradual process we are staying in touch and helping them. It has to be a process. The victims’ committees”— Somalatha had mentioned them—“they can help one another. These committees meet once a month.”
What is buried, I began to wonder as Father George and I talked. What is it that lies beneath the surface?
“We are accustomed in our society to suppressing our feelings. We think of how our families look at us, how society looks at us. So we have to show a different face. It’s a question of cultural values, religious values. Even after a trauma this is not a society in which people can expose their feelings.”
This was how Father George responded when I asked him about the psychology of authority among Sri Lankans. Shanthi had said the same thing at one of our interviews: People won’t talk about their feelings, she had whispered. What, then, lies beneath the faces that Sri Lankans present?
In New England, where I am from, a field can be perfectly cleared of stones, but over the course of a few years the winter frosts will push stones up to the surface. What was it that lay beneath the ground in Sri Lanka? Even if all the torture and violence were to stop immediately, what stones would rise to the surface later, and what would cause them to do so?
Earlier in the day I had asked Trini and Asela to talk about the future in Sri Lanka. The flock of noisy children had just come in, seizing control of the lunch room, clambering onto the chairs and waiting for their midday meal.
Asela replied, in an idiom I got used to as we talked, “My feeling is it’s not going to be so very peaceful. We want to challenge every day many sides of living. And always we want to take rights. So I am thinking, lots of struggle in the future. But a good struggle.”
IN MY EXPERIENCE, THE FIRST THING TO SAY, it isn’t only a few people suffering. Due to different incidents in our country—the seventy-one insurrection, the eighty-nine and ninety insurrection, the eighty-three riots—due to all of them, and what still happens—people getting disappeared—my family has never been directly affected by any of this, but all of my family members have seen dead bodies in the road. We think because we’re not directly affected we do not suffer trauma. But the majority of people, I can say, are suffering some kind of trauma.”
I have not asked Father Nandana Manatunge a question. This is what he said before I had a chance to pose one. And he spoke in long, disjointed phrases—articulately, but in the way people sometimes speak when they have had too much silence and have grown unaccustomed to ordinary conversation.
I have come to see Father Nandana from the Hotel Suisse during one of my stays in Kandy. And it is strange—stranger even than my visit to Father George’s organization on the other side of town. The Home for the Victims of Torture, which is attached to a church, is up a steep hill not far from the end of the lake. It is a few minutes by tuk-tuk from my hotel, a few minutes from the shops selling silk and gems to the tourists. On the brief drive to Father Nandana’s one passes from one world into another.
This is the world of buried pasts—buried traumas of the sort Father George worries will surface again like the stones in a winter field. Father Nandana and his colleagues, a small group that is spread out in numerous schools, institutions, and towns for reasons he would soon make clear to me, assist torture victims—children traumatized, children whose parents are among the disappeared, children alone, or whose parents need help as they try to put their lives back together again.
I have seen them when I arrived, playing football on the small lawn in front of the church, then gathered on the verandah waiting, as I was, for Father Nandana. Most of these children are from the neighborhood, its turns out: the children of parishioners. Two among them are torture victims. It is impossible to tell which: All these boys are in their early teens and seem absorbed in themselves and each other and the game they are playing and the banter going on between them. Whatever the problems are for whichever boys, they are not evident to me.
“I have the two outside with me,” Father Nandana explains when we finally sit in his offices, his desk between us, with a glass top and under it an assortment of photographs (happy, smiling faces, people lined up for snapshots). “There are others with other priests, some are in schools elsewhere. In Matale”—this is a town about twenty-six kilometers north of Kandy—“there are six. Due to security reasons we don’t want to put them all together. We’re handling twenty-six cases now—all of them pending, all against the police. Twenty-one of these boys are living with us. If they found out where these boys are they would target them. So we change the places the boys stay and transfer them. When we know there is a threat, then we change the places.”
They: the police, of course.
WE TALK FOR NO MORE than a few minutes at a time. One or another of the children outside always needs attention for one thing or another. It never seems important: What is important is to have Father Nandana’s attention, always to know he is there. It is the need to fill an emptiness. There will be a shout, or a knock on the screen door, and then Father Nandana is up, his white cassock flowing above his sandals as he moves across the tiled floor and out onto the verandah.
“This is the problem—on Saturdays and Sundays especially,” he tells me on one of his returns. But he is not convincing: This is only a courtesy, this remark, for this is not the problem on Saturdays and Sundays especially—it is his work on Saturdays and Sundays especially. The boys outside are extremely dependent on Father Nandana. He seems to represent some idea of order to them, some pole they are drawn to, some prospect that there is still one more reason left to place hope in people, in humanity, in those who oversee their lives. And the young priest—he is somewhere in his thirties—seems to know this. The relationships unfolding around me are complex, psychologically and emotionally, and I cannot see far into them. All I can see is that Father Nandana is incapable of saying “no” to them, and that his “yes” is one the boys will remember for the rest of their lives.
The sun is going down, and the mosquitoes are gathering around us. So we remove to Father Nandana’s rooms next door. It has a tight screen at the door.
Another man emerges in the dim light of Father Nandana’s private quarters. The slim, handsome priest, with a square jaw and fine features, busy with the small, passing problems of his charges, gradually gives way to a young man on his own, literate, lonely, at a loss to see through things, as priests are supposed to do, to the light of the sky above.
“There is, of course…” Father Nandana begins. Then he breaks off and begins again, as if in the middle of a thought.
“For example, I lose my father and mother. They were killed or disappeared. I’m faced with going through a normal life. But within myself the trauma has never healed. So as a result people have become very, very insensitive. They have someone killed: It’s another incident only. All problems are to be solved by some kind of violent means because the system has become so ineffective and corrupt. The justice system never delivers justice. It delivers injustice. People don’t expect anything just to happen in society. You know well the courts and lawyers aren’t just. You know the judges are corrupt. So you try to get things done by other means, and naturally you don’t respect anyone.”
There is another interruption, this time a long one. So I am left alone to gaze around the unfamiliar private rooms of someone I have just met, at the artifacts of a life, which always seem strange in such a circumstance, even as they are ordinary: a bed with a mosquito net, an armoire with a few suitcases stacked atop it, a rack of shoes, sandals, and trainers (one pair of formal black shoes, a priest’s shoes), a bookshelf filled with paperbacks (psychology, philosophy, technology, some science), a small music system of some kind. The desk before me is littered with small objects: a little plastic-and-aluminum sheet of pills, bits of paper with lists on them, some letters, a calculator, a plastic bottle of holy water.
A private retreat. A zone of stillness in a heaving sea of improvisation. A preserve of ordinary rationality in an irrational place. But nowhere a distinction between his personal life and his life outside the door. They are the same, the one disappearing into the other.
When he returns I ask him to tell me a little about the children.
He says, “There’s a lot of fear. They fear everyone who speaks to them. They fear all police, naturally. Most of them can’t sleep. They also become very indifferent. And inconsistent: ‘I want to change my job….’ Then: ‘No, I don’t. I want this job….’
“A contributing factor is the delay in cases. You go to court, you know very well it’ll be postponed. From 2001, not a single case has been concluded. They don’t have hope.”
“Do you, Father?”
The question comes from nowhere. I am not sure why I asked it and instantly regret having done so. It seemed almost discourteous to ask such a thing of a priest, as if it were a challenge, and I had not intended to present one.
But the question does not surprise him.
“I see what you see,” Father Nandana replies. “I get very frustrated, because I can’t change certain things. I see no hope. Sometimes I wonder what has happened. I see no salvation. We have no leadership.”
He has faith, he tells me at last, and it gets him through. But it seems almost an afterthought. In raising the matter of leadership, he has put the ordinary, temporal world on the table between us.
One hears this point about leadership often among Sri Lankans. After many weeks of discussing it, the question seemed to come down to the source of new leaders: Would the system as it was produce them, or would they spring from a younger generation—from the children playing football in churchyards and playgrounds all over Sri Lanka? It was top-down or bottom-up: The question seemed key, even if expectations among Sri Lankans were, I had found, exceedingly low.
“I don’t believe in an emerging leader coming up from the bottom,” Father Nandana says. “We’ve never produced anybody. Leadership from the bottom—I have a limited idea of this. But there are leaders not now in power who could change the system if given a chance. I’ve had some contact with them. But it all depends. Even if they came to power, its’ not clear they would have a chance.”
We had come to a common question, common not just in Sri Lanka. I had asked it many times elsewhere, a question that I have come to think is characteristic of our time. Do people change institutions, or do institutions change people? Fifty years ago, a century ago, two centuries ago—this question may not have been posed. But have we reached a point where the institutions we have built—institutions that reflect nothing more than the power of human agency—can no longer be altered? Sitting in Father Nandana’s office, I think of Sarath Silva, the chief justice. It is a brief, perverse thought: At least, I consider, he has demonstrated that people can still change the institutions in which they function.
It is growing dark outside Father Nandana’s rooms, and the lamp on his desk is dim. Down the hill, a few lights are beginning to glow among the trees. Earlier, when I arrived and was waiting for Father Nandana, I half-expected to find that the boys playing in the churchyard would turn out to be his source of hope, his inspiration, the way one can be made hopeful and inspired by discovering the seeds of resilience among the apparently broken: Mrs. Malkanthi’s smile in Galle, for instance, or the single, brief smile of her son through his flat affect. The boys outside had been laughing and shouting among themselves. Surely those among them who had suffered could come back.
Instead I find a cold realist—a man who understands the totality of fear and suffering at the hands of others because he sees its reflection in the boys he cares for, a man who has discovered that there is no guarantee of anyone, or even of Sri Lanka, coming back. It is not a loss of faith. It is a rejection of faith as some form of blindness.
“One more thing,” Father Nandana says as I prepare to leave. I look across at him, one side to the other of the small desk in his room, I in the desk chair, strangely, he in the visitor’s chair.
He says, “I have the opportunity to leave the country sometimes. Always when I go out I can reflect more. When we live in a system we become immune to it. We get used to it and we don’t try to do anything. People think this—all that we see around us—is normal. They think all this happens in other countries. So human rights, dignity, respect: Sri Lankans have to experience these things outside now.”
