17th, August 1997

The Sinhala Tiger

By Punyakante Wijenaike

'When did people begin to suspect me? When did they begin to fear my son, Anthony?'

Marathina asked herself this question only when she was alone in dark of her small thatched cottage thinking or when she was out-doors keeping a fire going near her cultivation plot to scare off wild elephants. To add to her problems the drought had set in hard and there were nights when a lone elephant trampled her fence made out of sticks stolen from the jungle. He had trampled and crushed to death her corn and watermelons and pumpkins upon which she depended for livelihood. First she had created a scare-crow out of straw and put an old hat of Anthony's upon its head and stuck him right out there to face the jungle and frighten off wild beasts. Then had begun the taunting.

"Are you trying to scare off wild elephants or tigers? Are you afraid of your own son Marathina?"

She had taken down the scare-crow but kept a fire-going, sometimes all night long. She could not remember the last time she had a full night's sleep. Only when the fire burnt itself out and the smouldering began and the first streaks of dawn spread across the sky, did she retire so weary that she fell into a short dead sleep as soon she spread her legs out on her mat.

But she could not bring herself to blame the elephants just as she could never see her son in a bad light. During the drought, unable to find sufficient food, the elephant was driven to break into her rain starved plot.

Some animals ate each other for food. But not the vegetable eating kind. Sometimes she felt a sympathy for the lone elephant. He had not come to harm people but to end his hunger.

Humans were not meant to eat other's flesh. So why were they fighting and killing each other?

Maratina, a Tamil Catholic, how had she turned into a victim?

In her late fifties her hair is silver with streaks of black running through it. Her face is lined but strong with thick lips pressed often into silence. Her ears, unlike some Tamil women, were not enlarged or torn in the lobes by weights attached to make bigger beauty. She wore two simple gold ear studs given her by Anthony before he disappeared from home. Of sturdy build, her dark eyes look straight into the future without fear. They seemed to say: 'Have you come to read me? Well you will never get to know the real me'.

Her strength and resistance comes from living on the border of danger, on the border of Wilpattu Jungle. A string of rusty pins hold her bodice over suppressed breasts. Her cloth is merely wrapped tight around her without the support of a belt. It stays in place even when she walks, balancing her vegetable basket on her head on a two mile trek from her village to the main tarred road where vehicles and people passed by.

Her fellow villagers were of mixed race like herself, making a living out of mother earth, borrowed from the jungle. After felling a portion of the jungle in 1949 and 1950 they had burned the undergrowth, tilled the land, turning the soil over and over until it became soft and fertile. Then the settlements, the villages had sprung up here and there like mushrooms blooming over-night but scattered by shrub jungle.

Most of the villagers were bilingual because they were of mixed race. Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim. Three different religious festivals blended harmoniously one into the other. The peace of Wesak, the joy of Deepavali, the fasting followed by merry-making of Ramazan and the holy feasts of Christianity.

Life moved at a slow but steady pace.

But as the years moved on, an evil more powerful and stronger than the jungle came into their midst, creeping as it were from the jungle itself and from the world outside their hamlets. It was more powerful because it came from man himself, not beast nor tree.

Marathina had withstood three unsuccessful marriages but she found it difficult not to succumb to the war machine which slowly, but surely, sent tentacles around her life, like creepers entwining and trapping a tree, sucking its vitality, its strength.

The whispering and averted looks disturbed her peace and the environment. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she found herself being ignored and spurned.

People began to segregate themselves, place themselves in cages where one could not harm the other. She had caged herself in her own hut, her little plot of land and her vegetable stall on the main road made out of a few planks nailed together and then fixed onto long poles covered with a thatched roof. Here she placed her hard grown, drought ridden water melons, her kekiri pumpkins, drumsticks and long beans. Sometimes she was able to place a pot or two of fine buffalo curd and hang bees' honey in dried leaf gourds from the rafters. She squatted on her sun-warmed rock which stood staunchly by her stall.

She spoke with no one except those who halted to buy her goods.

Although a Tamil Catholic, she had lived with three Sinhala men. Because the marriages had not been made legal she had had no problems with the church. When the first man deserted her, she simply took a second. It was from this second husband that she bore a child, Anthony named after Saint Anthony. Then when his father too deserted her, she took a third husband, a man younger to her.

It was with this third husband, very close to her son Anthony's age, that she first encountered trouble of the human kind. Anthony was hostile to his step-father who looked down on his step-son in condescension. He felt it was a subtle form of insult to his mother who was Tamil. Just because Anthony was of mixed blood did that make him a mongrel? Anthony stopped speaking to her and, soon after, Anthony, a young man of twenty, left home. He went to the north where her kith and kin were. He went to his uncle, her brother, who had been angry with Marathina when she ran away from high cadjan walls with a Sinhala man to live in a border village. Yet she held fast to the belief that although her brother was a hard-core member of the LTTE, Anthony would, one day, return to her, his mother and live in peace among many races. His roots were here. Although youth had been abducted and indocrinated into hate and willingness to die for a cause, she had faith that St Anthony would guide him back to sanity. His roots were here, not there. He was not voluntarily with the Tigers, killing for them. How could he kill when he was half Sinhalese? Could he kill his own people? Were they not all one?

Yet there were those in her village who whispered that he had been seen with the marauding Tigers in a nearby fishing village. He had helped kill little children, hacking or shooting them in the presence of their parents.

'How could he kill a child?' they taunted her. 'Can he not remember being fed from your breasts? Or did you not feed him the milk of human kindness?'

More and more it seemed like they were turning on her, isolating her because of Anthony.

'Is he a true son of your womb?'

'He is my son', she defended him. 'He was abducted by the Tigers when hunting deer in the jungle.'

She stuck to her story. Her son was a victim of the Tigers. If he didn't do as they wanted, they would kill him.

(To be continued next week)

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