Sudarshani Coorey

[Ed. Note: Manju-the name used in the following story-is only an imaginary name as the author, who is a freelance writer in Sri Lanka, says that he did not want her to use his real name.]

During the period between 1988 and 1989, it was the turn of Sri Lanka to exhibit terror to the world. It was an age of anarchy and lynching law where human blood, flesh and bones were a frequent sight to the passerby. This is the tale of a survivor, a blessed person to come home one day, after his ordeal in a prison camp.

Manju sat across from me staring glumly and struggling to recall his harrowing experience. He was about in his mid-40s. His fair skin has been darkened with age and exposure. I thought his mouth shivered, and see-through drops of sweat began to appear on his forehead. At any rate, his eyes told me that he was reluctant to talk about it even after nine long years.

In 1989, Manju was a second-year law student, and he was newly married. On one fateful day in August in the same year, when Manju’s daughter was only 3 months old, he visited the police station according to the orders of the assistant super-intendent of police to give a statement. Unfortunately, he was arrested by the police without a detention order and sent to one of the prison camps.

For nearly two years, he touched his way around a dark room. Every day about 20 young men were brought in, bound and gagged. As he recalls, later in the night when the officers are drunk enough, they would take the prisoners one by one, their eyes tightly blindfolded, and shoot them outside.

During the day, the prisoners inside the dark room would hear the cries of the victims and the flogging, hammering or beating in an adjacent room not far away.

Once when they were led to the lavatories, they noticed some maggots roaming in the corridors, only to find they were coming from a severely tortured man tucked under a bed two or three days earlier.

Eventually, Manju was spared by his torturers because of his relationship with the country’s then-attorney general. There were no U.S. soldiers, however, nor not even a Schindler to save him from the camp, yet Manju survived. His hair was silvered; his eyes were temporarily blinded. Moreover, he couldn’t speak for months, and he was physically affected by his ordeal.

When he came home in April 1991, his daughter, now 2 years old, did not recognise him, and his dream of becoming a lawyer remained only a dream. It is also unfortunate to think that Manju was threatened before being released. If he went to the courts, he was told, he would be shot. At that time, however, it was not the courts that he had in his mind: it was a doctor he wanted to see immediately. Manju told me he believed that he had been given a second life.

I did not ask him any embarrassing questions, such as whether or not he was tortured, and he did not tell me.

It took him about six months to revive himself. Now Manju works as a mathematics teacher and has a happy married life. He never gave up hope of starting a new life, although he stopped his law studies. He has taken up the challenge to live once again in a world of horror. He has once more begun to love humans who once brought him to the verge of his death. The anguished days in the camp have given him one gift though-toughness. He says that if a person can encounter death, be a victim of the mockery of death, and yet survive, that is the greatest esteem a human can retain in their lifetime.