Purse

Will hold anything, everything. Will hold  money. Will  hold the identity Card also.  I too have a purse. When I was ten my father bought me a purse. What I have now is what I got at a shop in Puttalam.

A pure is useful in so many ways. It fits inside your palm and you can take it anywhere.  My heart likes this purse here. It is like another hand to me. I can take it anywhere, when I travel, to take what I have have-it is useful.

My son and my daughter, they both have a purse each. I bought my daughter a purse.  When I came from Jaffna I did not bring any purse. I did not bring any money.

Nadheera—One who can  speak

displaced and displeased: fragile fragments of conversation

by sumathy, along with nazeera.

PICTURE OF IDENTITY CARD BY NAZEERA

Name                                                              Nazeera

Other names                                                Nadeera, Courage

Date of birth                                                 61. 01. 01

Previous place of residence                   Osmania College Road, Jaffna

Current place of residence                      Saltern Camp I, Puttalam

Occupation                                                  Coolie

Loss                                                               Veedu, Vaasal (house and property or house and home)

Qualities                                                        Hope, Orator, Woman who has suffered in life

Hatreds                                                         Hopelessness in my heart

Desire                                                           To bring up the children properly; To wear nice clothes.                

Memory                                                        The photo of my mother

The Doors and Chairs in my house

When we left Jaffna, I was  carrying a baby in my arm and another in my belly. At one time, when we stopped walking, I thought I was going to have my child then and there.  16 days after arriving in Puttalam I gave birth to my child.

I was happy in Quwait. I did house work there for five years. I was in the house of one Mohammad Hassan. He is a jewellery shop owner. He put jewellery on me. I can speak a little Arabi too.

With my earnings in Quwait I built a large stone house in my land on Osmania College road.  My father took a great interest in the house. He installed doors on all sides; for he said he wanted people to come from all sides to his own house. He died in the Saltern Camp.

When we came from Jaffna we first put up tent in a village near Puttalam. We had no means for a doorway even. Just put sacks up around the shed for protection. It is harder now than before. We had a house then; we had the comfort of lights (electricity). In Jaffna your own household will not know who does what in the toilet. Here the whole camp knows about who goes to the lavatory. It is difficult for us women.

Work? I want to work, anything. I work in my house. Coolie work. I have gone to the fields for onion work too. We work till 6 in the evening. Now I have great pain in my legs and cannot work. There is a growth in my eyes. Doctors used to come to the camp those days. But then I was well. Now only I’ve got the sickness.

We are safe inside the camp. If there is a fight we have help from all round. I, Nadheera, too, I will not stand for anything. If there is a fight I am there at the forefront. I am on the side of justice.

But everything happens outside the camp. We have to go to the town for everyhing. Kaccheri, police, medicine everything.

Only about 12 households have current (electriticity) here. You have to give money for it. 

You see this chair. The government is just like that. It is perched atop the chair. It is right outside our door step. But, they, the government, cannot stop this rain. They can stop the war. They cannot stop the flooding of our homes in the camp. We have to keep pushing pushing the water out. The home is also like a government

Our children suffer like us. I want them to do well, my husband to do well. I would like that.

Jaffna is in the heart [1]

I have over the years lost my intimacy with Jaffna, and its landscape, childhood monsters have turned into dwarfs. I stare hard at the gala opening of A-9 on the television screen, the streets of Jaffna that I had for years trampled on a beat up bicycle.

Over the long 15 years of exile (not displacement here), we have been witness to so much going on in Jaffna, the slow militarization and the breath of life shifting over miles and miles of bare land, sand.

I tell you, it was with a wrench that one day I realized that I no longer cared for Jaffna. I had always been critical of it, its superior assertions, its total blindness, but had longed for it, to breathe free, with all the tear drops of nostalgia. Mild sunny days, storming out of school protesting the deaths of martyrs, we neither loved nor hated. Just rebellion in my heart. When steamy prose clashed with a long line of women walking across the paddy land, to pick chillies, dreaming of other martyrs, their gaze forever trained against the sun and the Vellala men. I wrote again and again.

But today, only flitting images of Free Media, MTV, YA TV, Rupavahini fill up my head, choking all memories out. Young men training to become artistes and activists turn their lens upon land that marched forward with all its feelings toward death. Now the vultures are in, for the pickings.  There is no dreaming anymore.

A tourist visitor, here, there, everywhere, no place in my heart for any place. One day after a long dreaming day, the meaning of its touch, the memories of a people swept along in daily mutterings of ritual work, sex and travel,  were taken over by the staging of  protest  from which I was forever alienated, traumatically and dyingly. Worn clichés strung together in the dictionary. The stamp of feet, the cry, the surprise of protest, the curiosity and the repeated look of fear and hope on every face in my mind was gradually taken over by newspaper headlines, the weeping was overtaken by virtuosity, composition after composition of mourning in the press.

Everything became a hyped up media event, even deaths are deliriously celebrated in a joyful parade of media theatre. An activist protesting war and peace in Jaffna. We shall wait for a second coming.

There may be other reasons. I had grown up largely within Middle Class Jaffna, and while I related to the non-middle class sections of the people around me in charitably or genuinely humane terms, my socialization was confined to an urban setting.  And I have come to detest it, for its chatter of marriage and children, dowry and land, caste and property. And its repeated turning away from the killings, again and again. I cannot see the trees for the woods here.

Yet there are fleeting moments, when I, who has turned her back on Jaffna, forever I thought, would one day get the drift of the  accent in my corner of the world, in a secluded restaurant in Kandy, standing out in sharp relief amidst the babble of a language I had not learnt, amidst the sounds of a Tamil I now myself speak, and I caught not the words, but the very world of colloquiality, the rough and readiness, the always already contingent Jaffna, forever transient in politics, love and life:  the world of land, place, travel, possession and dispossession, of men and women watchful revealing themselves only in their unaccounted speech. a language at once flippant and profound, colloquial and refined; insular and yet visionary; ideological and perverse. I sharply turned to look at the offender, hoping for recognition, detesting him, her, myself. I knew that world, the world infested over and over with fear, ridicule, petty fogging quibbles over dowry and land. I knew how travelers from place to place, city to city, hiding in cargo ships and freezer boxes, carried their world in their hearts, in their lips and mouths, in that speech, my language, my land. We have only memories and speech, in an accent indescribably hard to beat and to erase out of memory, even when everything else has died out of our play.

Your people and my land: place and the ontology of self

I say I am from Jaffna and I teach at the University of Peradeniya in nestling among the hills in Kandy, at the English Department; much of the time there is given over to teaching Shakespeare and his likes and also battling little men in high collars at Faculty Board meetings and along the corridors of the Arts Faculty. I was also awarded a social science research fellowship to carry out a project with displaced women in Puttalam [2] . Hence my acquaintance and conversations with Nazeera. Nadheera/Nazeera and I warmed upto each other immediately. We were both from Jaffna and had left the place for that last time in 1990. We both left our home land in 1990. Nazeera  left Jaffna when  75, 000 Muslims of the north, were evicted by LTTE decree in October 1990 in the middle of a long drawn out war. I joined countless other Tamils trekking their way to the south fleeing terror from all sides, displaced and exile.

We have both been driven out of Jaffna, by the LTTE, Tamil militants, whose faces I recognize in the dowry quarrels and border battles, carried out over cadjan fences separating one mother’s plot of land from another’s, that I witnessed as a young person in Jaffna. Growing up in Jaffna is full of the excitement of taboos. The middle classness of our Tamil lives had little to do with the Muslims in our midst. There were a few trading friends of my father who greeted us pleasantly enough when we went down town, a guest at the wedding house perhaps. The people at the meat market and the tailors, all friendly, chatty and distant or an odd student now and then in the class room. An occasional literary friend and acquaintance, a lecturer at the university. This of course is my history of Jaffna Tamil Christianness, a curious breed steeped in insularity; cloistered and sheltered and yet watchful and cautious, often uncaringly, indifferently inclusive.

When we both learnt that the other was from Jaffna we did not speak. We do not speak sometimes as we hold hands in silence for there is a history of untouchability written in that touch of hands. I also lived on Navalar Road, Nallur, a long straight road  extending  into the Muslim quarters where the name changes to something else. In Nallur, along our part of   Navalar Road,  the  Muslims had resided in large numbers in pre British times, when local ‘Tamils’ had slung slaughtered pigs into the wells, turning water, salt, land, taboo. The Muslims were pushed to the margins of the city then, to the other end of Navalar Road. The margins are marked clearly on the map where Navalar becomes something else, a Muslim name I cannot recall.

Nallur is the high seat of worship for many Hindus, the site of a popular point of pilgrimage, the Kandaswamy Temple. The road is named after the Tamil revivalist, Arumuga Navalar, his statue adorning a corner of the road, notorious for his religious hostility and hide bound casteism. I traversed this road daily on my way to school passing a number of temples, Osmania College and finally Pommai Velli on the very outskirts of the city, where the lower classes of the Muslims lived, before we hit the bare stretch of road to Kallundai.

When  the LTTE drove out the  Muslims out of the north in 1990, in most places they gave about 2 days’ grace for them to leave. In Jaffna peninsula itself it was 2 hours. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; The centre was splitting at the seams perhaps for the LTTE, as happens in every postcolonial society. From Ireland, Nigeria to Sri Lanka and Jaffna,  the centres of the empire and culture have posed great problems of stability [3] . Now what do we have? Terror stricken LTTE, unable to hold the centre together, Jaffna in its grip of brute force and manipulation, doles out 2 hours for them to prepare their leave taking [4] . 

I have no means of returning to Jaffna, there is nothing left there. If we all had returned, then I could have too. We ran a hotel by Osmania College junction. Now, he, my husband does coolie work in Vavuniya. Its only a shed we have here. But we need a proper roof. When it rains the cadjan comes apart and the thatched roof gapes wide.

I went about four months back, in January, 2004 or so. The house has been razed to the ground. Even the stones on the walls had been taken out and sold. We do not know who has done this.  Only the floor is there. I am trying to strike a bargain for that floor only.

Our house is by the side of a burial ground---on one side there is a cemetery of the people of the Vedam (Christian). Problem is, your people will not take land by the side of funeral places will they?

Place becomes land, ethnicity and I too recognize in Nazeera’s words,  Jaffna, my land, the wretched ethnic conflict, my home and my place, (mis)taken as Hindu, and as LTTE. We need other places and other travels, other sites, other houses and homes, other selves and other peoples, other lands and places and other worlds.

Home