Note.

i should’ve noted here that when i talk about how jarring this boy’s appearance was to me, it isn’t because we were in places like, for example, Kandy where you’d expect the soldiers to look well-rested because they have nothing to do, but because we were in the East, where there was real violence, just not to the extent that there was violence in the North.

i keep forgetting to make explicit the country’s regionalism. i’ve started to take it for granted that people would already know that about the island, when the truth is that even within SL i’d have conversations that denied it.

– July 8.

i set up spaces that start to suck in so much meaning that i can’t return to them after a while: old emails; and people i used to know; and some books; and, since i’ve come back from sri lanka, certain folders on my computer.
but i looked today, and apparently i’ve written nothing about sri lanka since June 5. that’s a month today — but it’s not like the stories haven’t writhed every day in the back of my mind. it’s not like i don’t go to sleep every night guilty with the thought of all the work i’d intended to do, all the work i’d said do. it’s not like i’ve stopped wanting to do those things.
but somewhere, the hurt is profound enough that i cannot bring myself to touch it just yet. i’m not sure why. i lost next to nothing there, just took on more than maybe even i had prepared myself for.
but it’s counterproductive to wallow in self-pity like this. when it’s death you’re dealing with, even when the deaths are decades old, time is of the essence. so i’m trying to write about sri lanka, and i’m trying to learn to do something productive with grief.

for weeks now, i have been talking about writing, and i have been doing little of it. i know i’ve promised a few people articles i haven’t delivered. i’m hoping that putting up drafts will help trigger some sort of process to get this shit started. it’s not like everything’s not already too late, but it’s also not like everything is not vitally important right now. this is some sort of experiment, making public things that i’m afraid i’d never complete otherwise.

- July 5, 2009.

—
Draft 1.
Written May 30, 2009. I spent the latter half of April in Pottuvil, which is the closest I came to the actual war, which is closer than nearly everyone I met in Kandy and Colombo.

I think this was the morning we were driving out of Pottuvil, or the last afternoon I drove through its main street. This is where you found the highest density of soldiers from the Special Task Forces. They’d be strolling through the street, or standing in clusters under the shade of trees and store canopies, or grouped around the checkpoints. The van, or maybe the three-wheeler, that I was in that day was making its way down the street, either we were leaving for Gampola or I was going to the post office, and we drove by two soldiers walking past us. I remember they were both young, teenagers, their faces still clear. Thin boys in full army regalia: camouflage trousers and jacket, guns and clips slung over their right shoulders, one hand on their straps. I remember the one on the right in particular, the way the sight of him made something in me twist. He looked unlike anything I’d have expected anyone, let alone anyone in the Task Forces, to look. There was nothing untoward about his uniform or his demeanour: two young boys, two young soldiers, walking through a coastal village in eastern Sri Lanka, laughing, the sun hot on all our skins. It was something about his face and the transparency of his smile. He looked like a girl, and he didn’t. Hair cropped close to his scalp, unblemished skin, and soft cheekbones flaring up below his eyes. Nothing effeminate, only something so untouched and so youthful that I stiffened as though stung. Simultaneously, I drew closer, trying to force the sight of him into imperishable memory. The image I have of him now is the sight of him passing my window, the sun’s light so bright in his eyes that they shone blinding and black.

They were boys, the recruits they got into the army. Teenagers, recruited from the impoverished South. The country’s private schools boasted innumerable cadet troupes, but few of those students would ever join the army, however much military discipline and nationalist rhetoric they’d absorb during their training camp sessions. Ultimately, the army was manned by young men who had nowhere else to go, boys who wore their youth so unselfconsciously on their skin that nothing, not even five pounds of accumulated artillery, could counter it. But these were boys, after all, at work in the more peaceful parts of the East. It was the ones in the North, towards Trincomalee and further north still towards Mullaitivu whom I wanted to see, the boys who were killing that I wanted to see.

Map of Sri Lanka