Laughter in a War Zone (Jaffna, Sri Lanka)

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https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784

For photos, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

­On November 11, 2019, a twin-engine turboprop landed near the northern tip of Sri Lanka.  It was the first civilian flight to land in 41 year­s at an airport that had been restricted all that time to military aircraft.  

Known as Palaly since it was built for the RAF in World War II, the airport in 2019 was now Jaffna International.  It had a new terminal building, a small, Spartan but clean metal shed.  Two months later, when I arrived in January, 2020, the airport had two civilian flights daily.  One was a domestic flight from Colombo, roughly 200 miles to the south.  The other was an Air India flight from Chennai, about 200 miles to the north.  I was on the Air India flight, and my carry-on was checked very carefully, first by military personnel and then by men and women who appeared to be civilians.  They were polite, but they radiated doubt that anyone would come to Jaffna without business or family ties.  The scrutiny was even closer a few days later when, returning to Chennai, I was searched at a wooden shed several hundred yards outside the airport grounds.  I was searched again once I was inside the airport

Foreigners can’t drive in Sri Lanka without a special license obtainable only in Colombo, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to get a self-drive car.  There were no buses, but a few unofficial taxis were waiting.   I stayed with one throughout my visit.  Like ninety-nine percent of the residents of Jaffna, the driver was a Tamil, which means he was probably a Hindu.  He might have been a Christian (about one in five Sri Lankan Tamils are).  He almost certainly was not a Buddhist (though seven out of ten Sri Lankans are).  

I think he would have been most comfortable with “none of the above.” He had endured the crushing onslaught of the Sri Lankan security forces in 2009, and he had been trapped as an aid worker in the charnel house of the infamous “no-fire zone,” the place where the Sri Lankan military had obliterated the outgunned Tamil Tigers.  

My driver and I never got farther than 15 miles from Jaffna, which means that we were never close to the no-fire zone, which is on the east coast about 50 miles south of Jaffna.  Still, we saw plenty of destruction.  We would be driving down a road, and he would say “more ruins.”  He always said it in a wildly inappropriate tone, as if we were passing a lovely patch of wildflowers or a blizzard of butterflies.  After a while I found it irritating, but I had the sense not to tell him to stop.  Ten years after the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, he still lived in fear of the Sri Lankan military, and he believed that his life would be forfeit if he ever discussed in public some of the things he had seen.

Jaffna is about a dozen miles south of the airport, and for the first few miles we were on a one-lane road with almost no traffic.  Perhaps because I was tired, I didn’t wonder why the road was so quiet, but during the civil war, which ran atrociously from 1983 all the way through until 2009, the Sri Lankan military evicted everyone living near the airport.  Ten years later, in 2019, the military allowed landowners to return to what was still categorized as a high-security zone.  Many people returned to find their homes ruined.  Others found that their home was still occupied by the military, which held it without compensation or redress.

Some were lucky enough to move back into a habitable place.  They often erected a sheet-metal privacy fence, but the fence started a foot or move off the ground, so soldiers on patrol could be sure that nobody was hiding behind the fence.  The soldiers were doubly nervous, because they spoke no Tamil and couldn’t tell what people behind the fence were saying.  Ironically, the refusal of the dominant Sinhalese population to declare Sri Lanka a bilingual nation had been the main cause of the civil war. 

A few miles from the airport we graduated to a two-lane road, newly paved with funds provided by foreign donors.  The island’s railroad, completed to the northern tip of the island in 1902, had been destroyed in the war but like the highway had now been rebuilt to a high standard.  I never saw a freight train.   I did see the passenger train that ran daily to Colombo with equipment that would have been scrapped decades earlier in wealthier countries.  Most people took buses.

The electricity supply was stable, but for every intact building another was seriously damaged or destroyed.   Many damaged commercial buildings, almost always of one or two stories, hid their scars behind billboard-sized wooden signs.  Perhaps half were in English: “Style Park,” “Food City,” and so on. The few new commercial buildings were owned mostly by Diaspora Tamils, the only people willing and able to invest here.  They probably could have found more profitable opportunities elsewhere, but, like Diaspora Palestinians, they were determined to maintain their attachment to their emotional home.

A few old houses survived intact.  Typically, these were L-shaped bungalows, with heavy tile roofs over plastered brick walls painted shades of tan.  Many were trimmed with ornamental columns and pilasters.  Some had wooden bargeboards running around the eaves like the edges of doilies, and though most sat in bare ground, or behind desiccated lawns, a few had carefully tended gardens, with palms and furiously blooming bougainvilleas.  

A few even older homes dated from the Jaffna kingdom, which was brought down when the Portuguese in 1619 beheaded the last king of Jaffna.  Don’t shed too many tears for him.  He was a usurper who killed not only the young, rightful king but every other prince of the royal family.  The king’s palace proper is gone, but a massive pediment remains at the street. Nearby, I saw a more complete example of a house in the same style.  Abandoned but intact, it was called the minister’s house and was complete with pediment, covered walkway, and empty house. The pediment and walkway were the most opulent bits, with coconut and perhaps banana flowers carved into supporting beams. 

A major cement plant had opened in 1950 on the coast a few miles north of the airport, but it had closed during the war, and its machinery had been surreptitiously sold off.  Leyden Industries, an old underwear factory close to the center of Jaffna, was now an empty, burned-out hulk.  Cut-and-sew factories are common farther south on the island, where they have been spread into the countryside, rather than concentrated near Colombo.  I saw none here, other than the old underwear factory.

A few tourists wandered around, mostly young and either walking or riding a bicycle.  Jaffna does have beaches and diving opportunities, but there are other spots easier to get to.  Jaffna and its neighborhood also contain many Hindu temples, but they are new.  The ancient temples that might have drawn visitors today were wantonly destroyed by the Portuguese in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Many temples were rebuilt during the more tolerant British period, but during the civil war the temples were once again damaged or destroyed.  

The region’s most important temple, the  Maviddapuram, was unlucky enough to be only two miles from the airport.  Completely destroyed, by 2020 it had been rebuilt, but replicas don’t draw tourists, especially when their elaborate ornaments look as though they were ordered in bulk from a discount warehouse. 

Jaffna’s prime attraction is probably Jaffna Fort, built by the Portuguese in 1618 and commandeered by the Dutch 30 years later.  Dissatisfied with the simple Portuguese rectangle, the Dutch completely rebuilt the fort on a grand scale as a star with five mighty bastions, a moat, and outworks, much like the fort that they also built and which still stands in Cape Town.  

A few years after completing the fort, Holland agreed in the Treaty of Amiens to cede Ceylon to the British.  It must have seemed like idiocy to the Dutch soldiers stationed in Jaffna, but they were told to abandon the fort without a fight, and they followed orders.

The fort remained intact for 200 years until the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military in 1995 managed between them to destroy everything except the fort’s wall.  I bought a ticket to go inside.  It was a waste of money except for the fact that I had brought with me  a copy of Growing, the first volume of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography.  It’s the one covering his years as a junior official in what was then the British crown colony of Ceylon.  

Fresh from Cambridge, Woolf in 1905 moved into a bungalow atop one of the fort’s bastions.  I wanted to see if I could find it.  I succeeded, though there was nothing left except some waist-high walls and a young banyan, perhaps the descendant of the huge banyan that, Woolf wrote, was home to a devil that terrified his servants.  

There was a good view from the same bastion over the moat toward the city’s nondescript skyline.  Looking the other way, into the fort, there was a view over the rubble of the building once called the King’s (or Queen’s) House, where visiting governors were accommodated.   My 1984 Lonely Planet guide calls this house “an excellent example of Dutch architecture of the period.”  C’est la vie: there was nothing left except some fragmentary walls.  There was a view, too, of the ruins of a Dutch church.  There wasn’t much left of it, either, though archaeologists had erected a sheet-metal roof over the bits of surviving wall.

The church floor had once been paved with elaborately inscribed Dutch tombstones.    They were all gone, but I saw one such stone outside Jaffna’s small and makeshift museum.  I say “makeshift” because Jaffna before the war had had a museum housed in what my old Lonely Planet guide calls “itself a fine old Dutch building.”  That building was gone, too, though a still greater loss in the eyes of Jaffnans was the destruction in 1981 of the Jaffna public library.  A Sinhalese mob that year set fire to the building and destroyed its unique collection of old newspapers and even older palm-leaf manuscripts.

The library had now been rebuilt, though with a less valuable collection, and Diaspora Tamils had funded reconstruction of many of the town’s churches.   The Anglican church of St. John the Baptist, for example, had been very handsomely renovated with slim, wood-framed Gothic windows that pivoted on a central, vertical axis.  Inside, artfully curved beams supported a steeply pitched, tiled roof.  A plaque on one wall recalled a young man who had come from England and worked as a customs officer before dying seven years later at 29.  Another recalled a missionary’s wife who died at 33.  I later found out that her husband married again—twice—before eventually returning to England, where he was still alive at 94.  How’s that for the luck of the draw?

The churchyard was locked tight, but the warden had the key, and so I went hunting for the grave of the “rajah of the north.”  Percival Ackland Dyke had been one of those British colonial officers who, like the bog barons of southern Sudan, exercised almost dictatorial powers, mostly because they were so isolated that they were necessarily on their own. I assumed Dyke would have the biggest monument, which was a cube about six feet on a side, but most of the cube’s marble sheathing was gone, and bullet holes were sprayed across the remaining bits.  I looked around the graveyard at other contenders and was on the verge of giving up when I went back to the cube and peeped behind a cast-iron bathtub that had been propped up against it. Sure enough, there was an inscription: “Percival Ackland Dyke, more than 40 years Govt. Agent of the Northern Province, born in 1805, who died in his tent at Koppay.”   

Kopay is only five miles from the graveyard where Dyke is buried, and it’s hard to believe that Dyke didn’t just return in the evening to his palatial home, the so-called Residency, but five miles in 1867, the year he died, was farther than it is today.  Besides, one might say that tents aren’t always tents.  One author records that Dyke traveled “in pomp, with a retinue of horses, bullocks, carts, palanquins, tents, luggage carters, coolies, cooks, butlers, torches, messengers, and writers.”

Percival Ackland Dyke, in short, was the model of a colonial satrap.  A successor about 1900 wrote that “it is doubted if there is or ever has been a government agent so thoroughly feared.”  Dyke was known to smile in a kindly way as boys who doffed their caps, but important men were said to step into Jaffna’s roadside drains when Dyke swept past.  

According to an apocryphal but revealing legend, Dyke, who had been born and raised in Ceylon, eventually decided to visit England.  On arrival, he was so infuriated by the casual familiarity of a London cab driver that he returned to his ship and went straight back to Ceylon. It’s a good story because it reinforces our contempt for the transcendental arrogance of colonial bigshots.

Whether that’s a conviction or a prejudice depends on whether we’re willing to concede that there’s another side to the story.  I’m thinking that 30 years after Dyke’s death, Leonard Woolf found to his surprise that the British kept the peace in Jaffna without any troops and with hardly any police.  

Dyke in any case lived in a mansion.  Apparently he built it with his own money.  He certainly thought of the house as his personal property, because he bequeathed it to his successors in perpetuity.  As late as the mid-1960s, a government agent named Vernon Abeysekera was still living in the building.  In a memoir, Abeysekera describes it as having “pillared verandahs, lofty archways, and timbered ceilings.  The showpiece was the drawing room upstairs, so immense that it could only be furnished with two sets of furniture, one in each half of the room.”  

Abeysekera writes of a plaque memorializing Dyke, but I could not find it.  I did find the residency in ruins at the edge of a well-tended patch of green called the Old Park.  Columns survived, along with bare walls and a few roof beams naked under the sky.  The house is only about a mile from the fort and Woolf writes of cycling every day from his house on the bastion to the government office adjoining the Residency.  That office too is in ruins, though a grand porte cochere still stands and has managed to resist not only bullets but banyan roots. 

Woolf writes that he regularly had tea with John Penrys Lewis, the Government Agent of the day, and with Lewis’s wife, who Woolf describes, unsurprisingly, as “formidable.”  Woolf didn’t  have a lot of choice when it came to company, because, as he writes, Jaffna had “a White population of ten or 12 government officers, perhaps 10 missionaries, a retired civil servant with a daughter and two granddaughters, and an appalling ex-army officer with an appalling wife and an appalling son.”  By the word “appalling,” Woolf probably meant racist.   One of the first words Woolf heard on arriving in Jaffna was what we circumspectly today call the N-word. 

Abeysekera, the government agent of the 1960s, eventually retired from the civil service and emigrated to Australia.  He died there, in Melbourne, in 2005.  By accident, I found in Jaffna another Melboune connection.  Just offshore, and plainly visible from the walls of the fort, there’s a good-sized island that can be reached by a two-mile-long causeway.  The north end of the island has a village called Kayts.  Just outside the village there are ruins of a Portuguese fort, with a rectangle of damaged walls enclosing an area about the size of a basketball court.  It’s underwhelming until you notice that the walls are made of cobble-sized blocks of many species of coral, each patterned in its own elegant way.  The rock is so delicate that cleaving it into rough-hewn cobbles seems barbaric.

Kayts also has what at first I thought was an absurd number of Catholic churches.  The oldest, St. James, from 1715, was painted in shades of gold.  A few hundred feet away, in an intense blue, St. Mary’s had been built in 1895.  In a different direction but still within a few minutes’ walk, there was St. Anthony’s, from 1920 and painted in pale magenta.  Two miles down the road there was St. Peter’s, from 1909.  It was pink, not a bad color for a church whose high façade is stepped and trimmed like a wedding cake.   

Why so many churches?  Part of the answer of course is that missionaries over the course of centuries were able to convert about a fifth of the population around Jaffna, but a more surprising part of the answer is that the Jaffna Tamils who converted to Christianity kept their Hindu sense of caste.  And so, just as the famous temple at Maviddapuram excluded low-caste Hindus, so did St. Peters.  

This came as a shock to me, even though I knew that the Buddhists of Sri Lanka are also caste-conscious. The priest at St. Peter’s added that his church now admitted low castes, but this wasn’t because people had become more tolerant.  It was because high-caste Christians had been wealthy enough to emigrate.

That was the other Melbourne connection, because the priest himself had just returned from a decade at a parish in Melbourne.  I asked why he had returned from what must have been a more comfortable posting, and he replied matter-of-factly that his work in Melbourne had been a failure.  I must have looked puzzled, because he went on to say that he had been unable to convert a single person.  Worse, he said, he could not even get young Tamil Catholics to come to Mass.  The only people who attended were the elderly, thinking of their own mortality.  He added that American accents were easy for him  to understand, and with a good-humored smile said, “Good day, Father,” in a theatrically emphatic Ozzie accent.   

I wonder now if he knew much about the history of Jaffna College, which has a history somewhat like his own.  The college, still very much in operation today, opened in 1867. It did so in the buildings of the Batticotta Seminary, which American missionaries had established in the 1820s and which the last principal had closed in despair in 1855.  The closure of the seminary had nothing to do with academic standards. We know this because Ceylon’s colonial secretaries in the 1840s, Emerson Tennant, praised the school’s eight-year course of study as bearing fair comparison to European universities.  

The problem was that the seminary students wanted to learn how to get ahead in colonial society, not how to be missionaries.  They were all high-caste Hindus, which is to say that they were members of one elite who wanted to join another.  They were all high-caste Hindus because only high-caste families could afford the school fees.  The principal might have admitted low-caste students on scholarships, but then the high-caste students would all have withdrawn.  

You have to sympathize with the principal.  He happened to be a New Yorker, E.P. Stebbing.  (In one of those striking Six Degrees of Separation stories, he was married to a sister of Grover Cleveland.)  A dozen years after the school closed, a group of alumni banded together in 1867 and reopened the school as the Jaffna College.  Oddly enough, they offered the job of principal to Mr. Stebbing, who ran the school for another 17 years.  I’d love to find some correspondence between his wife and her brother, the future American president.  A main staircase in the building still displays prominently the words, “Jesus Christ, the Light of the World.”

American missionaries also set up a girl’s school five miles to the east at Uduvil. The school’s church has a plaque for Eliza Agnew, another New Yorker.  She was principal at Uduvil from 1839 to 1878.  Known as “the mother of a thousand,” she never returned to the United States, even in the five years of life remaining to her after she retired.  Her bungalow on the school grounds is still in great shape.  It’s a long building one room deep and with plastered masonry painted white under a tile roof.  A long arcaded porch overlooks a driveway lined with a brigade of palms and potted ferns.  

Was Eliza Agnew any more successful in winning converts? I suspect not, but my evidence is very then.  I’m thinking of a memorial plaque on one classroom building.  It commemorates Ariam Hudson Paramasamy, who in 1941 became the school’s first so-called “national principal.”  Ms. Paramasamy was the daughter of a Jaffna College professor.  She held a master’s degree from Ohio’s Oberlin College and–and this is the point–she was the only Christian in her own family.  

I asked my driver to take me to the coast, about six miles to the north.  We were too early in the year for paddy, but we passed fields of bare and dry earth, freshly plowed and red as iron ore.  The fields were square, which sounds normal to Americans but which is unusual in Sri Lanka, where paddy fields are usually contoured.  The fields here were square, of course, because the countryside was almost perfectly flat.  

Meanwhile, the skyline was green with coconut and palmyra palms, and there were scattered fields of resplendently green tobacco and also of fruit and vegetables, including exotics like bitter melon.  Irrigation water a century ago would have been lifted with well sweeps—the shadufs of the Middle East—but today it came from small engines parked next to open wells dangerous to anyone drunk or careless.  

Every now and then, my driver would gaily point and say, “More ruins!” but otherwise the landscape seemed tranquil.  Agrarian landscapes always do, like the scene at the end of Seven Samurai, when the war is over, the bandits are dead, the samurai are no longer needed, and the villagers are once again singing in the fields.

We drove along a coast dotted with small fishing ports.  The boats were about the size of a dory, so the industry was absolutely artisanal—a polite way of saying primitive.  There’s about thirty-five miles of water between this coast and India, and during the civil war the Tamil Tigers were resupplied across these waters by fishermen who knew the waters well.  

We passed the almost deserted Thalsevana Holiday Resort, run by and for the Sri Lankan military.  We passed luxury homes built for senior officers, though these appeared unoccupied.  We also passed collections of huts built, as people here say, for displaced people.  

Some of these people were casualties of the civil war, but others were casualties of the 2005 Boxing Day tsunami.   Disaster relief here apparently came very slowly.  The flat fields of the neighborhood had offered no refuge that day after Christmas 15 years ago.  One man told me that he was alive only because he got so drunk the day before the tsunami that he remained unconscious when the wave picked him up from his bed at dawn and left him wedged against some attic beams.  He had been injured, he said, but he had survived, unlike friends who were awake enough to fight the water.

Tracing the coast for about ten miles, we came to the town of Velvettihurai.  If I had been on my own, I think I would have ignored the large mango tree growing in the middle of the road.  I would have ignored it despite the adjacent kiosk, also in the middle of the road, with a colorful poster of an enlarged 15-rupee Indian postage stamp.   It showed a middle-aged man smiling behind wrap-around shades under a white woolen cap shaped like a flower pop.  Every fan of Indian cinema will recognize M.G. Ramachandran, so famous that if you google the initials MGR he’s the first thing that pops up.  

You might think that Velvettihurai was the home of an MGR fan club, but my driver suggested we turn right onto a narrow lane.  After passing a dozen or more homes we came to an empty lot, overgrown with shrubs.  There was nothing to indicate that there was anything significant about this spot, but my driver said in a tone of respect just shy of reverential that this was the site of the family home of Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE or Tamil Tigers.  The government of Sri Lanka would never permit a monument to him, but it did tolerate a monument to a Tamil film star who entered politics and as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu across those 35 miles of water provided the Tigers with arms and refuge. 

Nobody here was going to speak openly to a stranger passing through, but one man told me that Prabakaran, contrary to news reports, might be alive.  He also assured me that Prabakharan was a gentle soul.  Even during the war, this man said, Prabakaran would sometimes come home unannounced and quietly walk along tthrough the neighborhood.

 I mentioned that twenty miles west of Chennai I had once seen the memorial on the spot where Rajiv Gandhi had been blown up one in the literally hundreds of suicide bombings organized by the Tamil Tigers.  I also mentioned Rajini Thiranagama, a medical doctor trained in the UK and a Tiger sympathizer who helped injured fighters.  The Tigers could hardly afford to lose doctors, but she had openly criticized Tiger atrocities, and so in 1989 she was gunned down by Tiger assassins outside her home, her children hearing the shots.  The reply I got was that it is in the nature of violence to escalate.  

I don’t know when the Sri Lankan government obliterated Prabakaran’s house, but I did several signs in the neighborhood urging everyone to forget the past.  There was no mention of reconciliation or of reconsidering the root causes of the civil war.  Over on Kayts, however, I saw an elaborate monument built to honor General Denzil Kobbekaduwa, once the most popular general in the Sri Lankan army.  He had been blown up with his retinue in 1992, and to remember that event a concrete monument had been built with large color photographs of the dozen or so officers who died with him in the blast.  Next to it was the preserved wreckage of two military vehicles destroyed so totally that I couldn’t even recognize them as vehicles.  

Life goes on, and one day I got a bicycle and rode over to Jaffna’s main fish market.  It’s only a few blocks from some ruins that are all that’s left, I suspect, of the house occupied by Sir William Twynam.  He was the successor to  Percival Ackland Dyke as “rajah of the north” and he served from 1869 to 1897.  That’s a good run, too, and Twynam liked the position so much that he apparently had to be shoehorned out of his post.  Even then, he did not leave Jaffna, instead moving to a house on Beach Road, where he lived until his death, in 1922.   He must have been the retired civil servant Leonard Woolf mentions.  Twynam's house, I suspect, became the Grand Hotel, which had fallen on hard times when Lonely Planet published its Sri Lanka guidebook in 1984.  By the time I came by, only one gable-end wall remained.

 The fish market was just a roofed space across a narrow road from a seawall.  Dories came abreast of the wall with their floorboards piled with fish, and men used plastic buckets to scoop up the catch and dump it on the concrete floor of the market.  A scrum of men negotiated the sale of tuna and barracuda, crabs, shrimp, and fish so small you could swallow two at a time.  The near-shore water was blanketed with floating trash offset by a brightly painted billboard urging Jaffnans to keep their city clean.