The War Souvenir

Waking up in the middle of the night, his lips dry and his throat parched, he wonders if it is the silence in the apartment that scares him more than the constant sounds of war. His mind always alert, was suspicious of the lack of sounds of distant violence: the dull thuds of mortars as they hit the dry earth and the silence that always follows as life extinguishes in its wake.

             The bedsheets under his palms feel warm. The fan whirring above him helps dissipate the thick air of the room and he can feel each muscle in his body tense and battle ready. He tries to control his breathing; picturing his lungs filling up with air as he breaths deeply and then emptying like a deflated beach ball as he exhales. And as he feels his breath slowing down and his heart that had been pacing like a wild animal in captivity calming down, an image flashes and then explodes in a deep corner of his half-awake mind. 

            Now, he has no control over the shivering that envelops his body like a wet blanket wrapping him ever so tightly in concentric circles as he feels the world around him going into a dizzying whirl. He scrambles to his feet and rushes to the bathroom. But before he reaches the toilet the contents of his stomach explode from his mouth; falling on his naked upper body, on the dirty clothes lying on the floor and on the white tiles of the bathroom. There’s nothing he can do to control the force of the spasms that keep wracking his body. The room is filled with the acrid smell of bile and semi-digested food. Weak, he now sits on the floor his head bent to the inside of the commode. He knows that the worst of it has passed.

             After a few minutes, he stands up and then walks to the sink and cups his hands under the tap to catch the water before he splashes it on his face. It feels cool against his skin and for a moment he indulges in this simple pleasure. As he sees his reflection on the mirror he notices the dark circles under his eyes, and the leathery look of his skin as it stretches over his cheek bones. The arrack he had drunk earlier in the evening had left him dehydrated and he knew that a headache would now follow in the wake of the vomiting. He splashed more water, this time over his thick curly hair, some of which started dripping down the sides of his temples. Looking at the floor of the bathroom he wondered what to do with the mess. As his body dry heaved one more time, he decided to wait awhile.

The living room of the small apartment was bathed in the blue light from the street lamp outside the window. Familiar objects seemed ghostly and intimidating as he started walking slowly to the small kitchen in one end of the room. He opened the fridge door and looked inside. It was empty except for four plastic bottles of Coca Cola and Fanta. That was the doing of his roommate who seemed to have a penchant for forgetting half-empty, fizzled out bottles of soda in the fridge. He had never bothered to complain since he spent time at the apartment so infrequently to complain about this odd habit. But now, he cursed under his breath as he felt his throat dry and papery. 

            Still no water. He opened a cupboard and took out a glass tumbler and filled it with water from the tap. As he drunk the water he realized how changed he had become from the man who had returned to Sri Lanka almost two years ago. His refusal during those first few months to drink water unless it was bottled now felt like the actions of an amateur. There had been looks from others around him as he insisted on gulping down from overpriced bottles of water in a country where most couldn’t afford the luxury. He had been stubborn, refusing to see his own impracticality. But then like many before him he had learned soon enough. 

               He recalled the feeling of rebellion as he acted against his parent’s wishes who had been blind-sided by their son’s decision. The sound of his own voice ringing true in his ears as he told his parents his plans to return to the country that they had left almost two decades ago. The look of frustration and fear in their aging faces that he chose to ignore as he explained to them his reasons for leaving his steady job. He had been completely confident in his own destiny.

             The glass still in his hand, he walked to the sofa and sat down suddenly feeling exhausted. His limbs felt numb as if he had been walking too long without rest. And in his stomach, he could feel a dull throbbing pain. In the blue shadows of the room he wondered if his mind was to blame more than the alcohol. There was a feeling that he was fighting a losing battle. Disillusionment seemed to have taken root unbeknownst to him somewhere deep in his psyche. What he had experienced in the war zone had chipped away each day at his naïve optimism. 

          He kept the glass on the table in front of him and let his body sink into the sofa, feeling the texture of the material rubbing against his exposed skin. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Maybe sleep would finally come to him and take possession of his overwrought senses. In the quiet, he heard a train passing on the tracks that ran behind the building. He remembers a memory from his childhood. Of waiting for the sound of the train to signify that everything was normal. The smell of the moldy cramped room that he had been told to hide in adding to his fear as he waited in the darkness. And just beyond the fragile safety of the walls, the sounds of men shouting angrily in the garden. He had bit into his forearm as he controlled his urge to scream for his parents. And all the while he had waited for the sound of the train, its familiar rhythm to serve as a sign that the horrors had been dissipated by the very magic of its banality. 

             His parents had left Sri Lanka a few months after Black July taking with them whatever money and possessions they could to build a new life.  The violence in the city had erupted so suddenly that it had taken a while for them to understand that they were being hunted like animals. By the time they had gone to a Sinhalese neighbor’s house to find refuge, the billowing thick black smoke from burning stores, houses and bodies had dominated the skyline. It was a week later that they emerged from hiding only to find that their house had been spared but that the family’s livelihood had been destroyed. The jewelry store that his father had taken pride in had been looted and consumed by fire. Instead of rebuilding their business his father had decided to do what many Sri Lankan Tamils had decided to do that year; join the exodus out of their homeland. Even as Kavi left behind everything familiar, the smell of the dark storeroom would become the only keepsake that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. And when he was finally too old to recall the details of what he had experienced, the ghosts of his trauma would remain with him like a hidden scar. A macabre memento from a distant past.

The next morning, he woke up to the noise of the fridge door shutting abruptly in the kitchen. He felt his body respond to the shock of the sudden sound, even though his mind felt muffled and cotton-woolly. Somewhere in the kitchen he could hear his roommate mutter to himself as he opened and closed the cupboards in what felt like an endless search. 

“Hey………Kavi! Do you know if we have any bread in the house?” Daniel yelled at him from the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. 

“Huh?  I……. I don’t think so, man.” Kavi managed to say groggily.

“Shit!........I’m starving.” 

“Why don’t you go to the bakery close by……. I’m sure they will have bread.”

“Too lazy to do that man!” Daniel whined. 

             By now Daniel had walked towards the sofa, his skinny legs sticking out from underneath a pair of boxer shorts. He was wearing a polo t-shirt, the collar of which was frayed. The scraggly beard on his lean face gave him a look of being strung-out. Having grown up in Colombo, Daniel had taken it upon himself to introduce Kavi to all his favorite hangouts during the first few months of their acquaintance. At first, Kavi had been amused with his roommate’s enthusiasm but before long he had grown tired of the cavalcade of colleagues and friends that Daniel introduced him to each evening. And when he was finally assigned to the work at the government hospital in Jaffna, Kavi’s enthusiasm to start his work in the war-zone had taken Daniel by surprise.   

“Do you really want to go work in a hospital in Jaffna?” Daniel had asked in disbelief over a cold beer that he had been nursing in his hand as he held a cigarette with the other. They had been sitting across each other on plastic chairs in the small balcony of the apartment. 

“That’s what I came here for. I thought I’d be there already but there’s so much bloody red tape even if it’s to provide much needed help.”

“Geeze man, you sure are a saint.” Daniel rolled his eyes exaggeratedly as he looked at the railway tracks just beyond the wall of the apartment building. Protecting the tracks, a wall of giant granite boulders stood as the only barrier against the crashing waves of the Indian ocean. The air smelled of brine and dust. 

“I came here to do a job. The sooner I start the better.” Kavi had said matter-of-factly.

Daniel took a satisfying drag from the cigarette and let out a low Sheeeeesh from between his lips.

“I know plenty of buggers who come here for humanitarian purposes and decide instead to have a good time……… enjoy the warm weather and the cheap booze.” Kavi was unsure if his roommate was displeased that he had indeed turned out be one of those buggers who kept his promise. His interactions with Daniel always left him feeling a little unsure about the moral compass of the man with whom he shared an apartment. But then again who was he to judge.

“You look like crap.” Daniel said looking directly at his roommate now. Kavi’s deep set eyes looked hollow and dull and his cheekbones stood out underneath his sun-burnt skin. 

“I know……bad food.” Kavi said as he shrugged his shoulders and tried to stand up. It was an easier explanation than the truth of what had happened to him in the night. Immediately, he felt dizzy, his body struggling to support its own weight. He wondered if his roommate believed in ghosts. The ones that did not make spooky sounds like in the movies but stood at the periphery of one’s everyday life. Their silent unmoving stare directed at your very soul. The ones that did not jump-scare you when you least expected. Ghosts with glowing brown skin and almond eyes that made one want to see the bottom of a bottle of arrack like a melodramatic hero in an old Bollywood movie.

That kind of ghost.

“Maybe you should see a doctor…….” Daniel said absently swatting a fly that had settled on his arm.

“I’m okay…….” Kavi waved his hand to dismiss the suggestion. 

“Oh I forgot, you are a doctor.” 

 Kavi smiled weakly. 

“Don’t you have family in Colombo? What if something happens to you?”

“My parents will be notified.”

Daniel nodded his head satisfied with Kavi’s answer. 

“Well now that you are up, do you want to join me to get something to eat?”

Kavi nodded his head to say yes.

It had been only two weeks since Kavi had returned to Colombo when the images of the terrorist leader’s body had begun to flood mobile phones and TV screens. Kavi had been sent back with one of the last convoys of injured civilians sent by boat as the army closed in forcing the terrorists and their civilian hostages into the narrow strip of land between the waters of the Jaffna lagoon. He remembers the smell of the sea spray that had hit his face from time to time as the boat cut through the choppy waves once they had left the lagoon. 

           The photo of the dead man. The fleshy brown mustachioed face, now pallid and waxy seemed oddly out of place lying amidst a patch of brown mud. Dull and boring, bereft of the terror and loyalty he had commanded while alive. Just another body among many other’s in a battlefield that had been littered by both combatants and civilians. Each connected by fate to that one moment in time. The dead man’s uniform had been miraculously untouched, the serial number “001” clearly visible on a card clipped to his chest. 

        “The bastard’s finally dead.” Someone said in English as Kavi studied the image on his phone. Kavi had turned around to see who it was only to be met by the dead-stare of a middle-aged man. Kavi had smiled awkwardly and turned back to his phone. But soon enough there was the sound of firecrackers being lit in different parts of the city. There was a celebration of sorts. The war had ended.  But Kavi felt a shudder run through his body like a quick-silver snake. The ending of war was not the beginning of peace. It was simply a lull in the movement of the multitude of cogs in a tireless machine.             

           Kavi had lasted longer than others in the war zone. He had somehow managed to not break down each night after a day of treating toddlers with wounds pockmarking their young faces, their eyes glazed, while flies swarmed around them. He had managed to not stare into empty space after days of reassuring grandmothers holding the malnourished bodies of orphaned grandchildren in their laps. The children far too young to have watched their parents being killed by a shell that had fallen next to where they slept the night before. Many like him had returned from the war zone physically intact but mentally marked; their gaping wounds visible only to a practiced eye. 

           What he had not realized was that he had returned from the war zone with a ghost in tow. His own souvenir of the war. While others returned with spent bullets, photos or terrorist propaganda posters, Kavi had returned with a memory of a love and heartbreak that had been fleeting. A mere blink of an eye.                                                                          

            For Kavi, it would always be the teenage girl who died in his arms, her face decorated with an intricate pattern of shrapnel wounds as the shell exploded next to where she had laid down to sleep for the night. He would always remember her smile, the dimples forming at the corners of her mouth when had she bid him goodnight only a few hours before. He had helped the girl and her grandmother make a crude stove and light a fire that produced the dancing light that fell on her face as she watched him closely. Even after he had returned to Colombo her face had haunted him as he drank beer from a thick frosted glass in the backyard of a colleague’s house. There was talk of the civilians caught in the cage; a vice grip between the terrorists desperate for a trump card and the military intent on winning the war. There was nothing that could make him forget her. Padma; her beautiful dark brown skin and black hair, almond shaped eyes and youth had made her stand out immediately among the sea of faces that evening.

              As Kavi chatted with her grandmother he found that they were the only remaining members of Padma’s family. Her parents had died over the years as they moved from temporary shelter to yet another as the fighting between the army and the Tamil Tiger terrorists forced them to flee in search of safety.  Padma had said that she no longer remembered what her home had looked like in the small village outside of Jaffna town. And all that remained were the stories told by her grandmother. 

              Her parents had both been school teachers. And even though her parents had pleaded with the Tiger cadres who had come to their home one morning to spare her brothers, there had been no mercy. Only the blunt end of a rifle butt as they were beaten while their children were pushed into the back of a lorry. Padma had only been spared because she had been a toddler; her legs still chubby and traces of her infancy on her round cheeks. Her brothers who had been ten and eleven years old were deemed strong enough to carry a rifle and kill. They were never heard of again. Their childhood stolen from them that morning and their parents left with the void of their lost children and the inferno of their guilt.

                Padma, had come under her grandmother’s care when her parents died. First, her father had been gunned down by an LTTE carder as he tried to help another man who had been brutally beaten for talking back. And then her mother had been killed by a shell that had exploded next to her as she walked to the Red Cross medical tent in the refugee camp. Her reaction not fast enough to escape from the flying shrapnel that cut through her internal organs, leaving her face frozen in a permanent expression of surprise. 

              Kavi remembers the look on Padma’s young face as she listened to her grandmother retell their story. The furrows on her forehead as she controlled the tears welling in her eyes and the look of age-old pain in her eyes. He had not been able to suppress the waves of guilt that had risen as he listened silently. His own life as a young boy uprooted and then forced to grow up in a foreign land seemed a life of privilege in comparison to the trials of Padma’s life. 

Overnight Kavi and his younger sister were transplanted in a new country among people who looked and spoke nothing like them. And for the first time in their lives they had experienced what it meant to be alien, what it meant to have the wrong kind of skin color and speak English with the wrong accent, what it meant to not know how to eat with a fork and knife the right way or what it meant to not know that you needed to dress up for Halloween.

              At first they had lived in other people’s houses; relatives and friends who opened their homes to them. They suffered the indignities of being permanent guests in someone else’s house. Of being the poor migrants who had just arrived in America, and of being those who had to be taught how-to. When his parents were finally able to afford their own apartment, to find jobs to afford the rent, food and clothes it had been almost three years. After a few more years Kavi could no longer recognize the young boy who stared back at him from old photographs. Instead of the wide-eyed wonder of the boy biting into his first slice of apple pie, the eyes of the teenager that looked back at him in the mirror had become jaded. It was the worldly look of someone who had experienced rejection and loneliness. 

                Growing up he had been determined to erase any signs of being a foreigner; a deep shame overcoming him every time he was forced to talk about his childhood in a country that was fading from his memory. While his parents seemed determined to preserve all that remained of the life they had left behind, Kavi and his sister Sonia refused everything that resembled that very life. And when they met other families like them, their stories identical as they retold each painful detail. The looks of sadness and loss the same as theirs during those first few years of leaving Sri Lanka. His parents would embrace those new-comers to exile, opening their home to little-known countrymen. Kavi remembers feeling ashamed for those families as they gazed wide-eyed at the sprawling strip malls and the abundance of American supermarkets. The role-reversal somehow making him feel even more uncomfortable with the knowledge that despite his fashionable sneakers, his clothes and his cultivated taste in music he would always be only a degree away from being just-another-immigrant.

 That night as he watched the families gathered in the field; huddling around their fires, their belongings close to them; Kavi knew that the void he had felt was that of the loss of home. Strangely enough not the home he grew up in but the home where he had left a tiny yet significant part of his self behind as his family joined the exodus of Tamils. He also realized that Padma, her grandmother and all those who found shelter on that field, were also that part of him that he had lost so long ago.  They were the home that he had been looking for most of his youth.

With that thought he had entered the bunker; hardly more comfortable than the open ground yet several degrees safer from flying shrapnel in the event of a shell blast, and settled in for the night. As he dozed he thought about his parents, imagining them the way they had looked in old photos from before they had metamorphosed into successful immigrants. There had been a look in their eyes that seemed to say that they belonged, that had transformed over the years in the faded colors of those same photos into a deep regret. 

             But before he could barely begin to dream artillery fire had ripped through the night air, the familiar shrill whistle of the incoming shells like a harbinger of death. And as the shells impacted and the ground and the coconut tree trunks of the bunker shook, the screams of the people who were injured and those who were scrambling for safety mixed in with the shrill whistles of even more shells that rained on the field. 

             His first instinct was to scramble out of the shelter to help those who he knew would be seriously injured, their wounds proving fatal to them if not attended to immediately. But as he crouched towards the entrance someone grabbed him by the foot. It was the UN security officer, a former infantry colonel from Pakistan. It was he who had suggested that they build a bunker with what material they could find. 

“You are no help to them dead!” Khan had screamed. “There’s nothing you can do but wait for the shelling to finish.”

“But those people are completely exposed in that field out there……there’s no shelter for them. We have to help!” Kavi said his words drowned by the sound of yet another shell impacting the ground.

“No! You need to stay. You need to be alive……. there’s more people who need your help.”

“But this was supposed to be a no-fire-zone……these people thought they were safe and they could rest for the night.” Kavi screamed in frustration beating his fists onto the earthen wall of the bunker they had dug earlier in the day. 

“Its war, Kavi.” The colonel’s tone was of grim resignation.

“Whoever is sending those shells are killing innocent civilians……. whether it’s by mistake or not, its fucking murder!” Kavi said feeling the muscles in his jaw hurt as he controlled his anger.

            Impotent, Kavi waited for the first signs that the shelling had ended. And before anyone could stop him again, he quickly crouched out of the bunker to the open field. In the east, there were slithers of crimson clouds. It was close to dawn and yet the air smelled of smoke and burning flesh. The field that a few hours before had been filled with families preparing a simple meal for the night; chatting among themselves, rocking their children to sleep and finally settling down to a night of respite from their troubles was now a burning, smoldering hell-scape. Everywhere he looked were the dead, the dying and the injured. There were moans and sudden screams of those who had been wounded, and mingling with them there was the continuous laments of those who had survived. 

                By now the rest of the team of the Red Cross officers had also emerged from the bunker, their faces dazed as they wondered where to start. After a few minutes of walking, Kavi realized that he was stepping on bodies that had scattered throughout the field; a mutilated arm, a dismembered leg. Blood and shrapnel dotted the three jeeps that had been parked next to the bunker. As he looked at the single wood-apple tree that had stood in the field marking the spot where Padma and her grandmother had camped for the night, he saw what at first glance was a child’s plastic doll. But as he gingerly stepped closer he saw that it was the corpse of an infant, her body thrown up into the branch of the tree from the force of the blast. He dry-heaved uncontrollably. 

              It was then that he saw Padma; barely alive. She was moaning in pain. As he ran to her side he quickly assessed her condition; there was nothing left to do as she bled to death from her misshapen limbs. Her grandmother lay next to her, eyes closed, a look of peace on her wrinkled face. Kavi sat next to Padma and held her head on his lap as she looked at him with eyes dazed from pain. What had been her clear young face was littered with shrapnel wounds forming a grotesque death-mask. Her breathing was shrill as she struggled to catch her breath, her face ashen from the blood draining from it as her heart fought to keep her alive, and spasms racked her body as it slowly gave up. 

             As he held her head tenderly, for a moment he thought that she recognized him as a weak smile spread across her face. Controlling his own rush of emotions, he smiled back at her.

“Padma, you are going to be okay……. rest now.” He said in halting Tamil, his voice soft and kind. But as the next spasm tormented her weakened body, he knew she would die. As she drew her last breath he wondered what sins he had committed to possess that knowledge. To know that her life would ebb away to nothingness. That she would die without the knowledge of peace nor a glimpse into a different future.