The Beckoning Isle is the story of the degeneration of a society and the

vicious politics of retribution. But it is also a tale of two men, on opposite

sides of the battle, united only by the fatalism of their ideologies. Abhay
Sapru offers a unique perspective of the Sri Lankan War in an engaging,
page-turning account of the clash between the Indian Peace Keeping Force
and the LTTE, with voices from both sides of what will go down as one of
history’s great tragedies.
—Shashi Tharoor

The Beckoning Isle is a masterpiece in realistic settings of Sri Lanka during

the days of the IPKF. Though it follows the travails of an Indian Special
Forces Assault troop crisscrossing the path of an LTTE colonel, it takes you
through a bit of history and the whole gambit of politics, intrigue, conflict,
human behaviour and the tribulations that surrounded the war between the
IPKF and the LTTE. The style of the author who himself was part of the
IPKF is excellent and the lucid narration will keep you engrossed to the last
word.
—Lt Gen (Retd) Prakash Katoch

Abhay Sapru’s second book on war from a combat soldier’s perspective is

the real McCoy. It catches you by the scruff of your neck and doesn’t let go
till the end. A chapter of the Indian Army’s ill-fated adventure into Sri
Lanka, fought in dense jungles, against a cornered comrade turned enemy,
you can smell the fetid smell of the jungle, mixed with the smell of death,
fear, courage and strangely, respect for an enemy who was fighting for its
very survival. Only a combat soldier could have written this!
—Prahlad Kakkar

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OceanofPDF.com
© Abhay Narayan Sapru

First published 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise—without the prior permission of the author and the publisher.

This is a work of fiction and creative liberty has been taken to describe people, events and places.

The map used in this book has been worked upon by the author, is not to
scale and is for illustrative purposes only. No copyright infringement is intended.

ISBN 978-81-8328-562-9

Published by
Wisdom Tree
4779/23, Ansari Road
Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002
Ph.: 011-23247966/67/68
[email protected]

Printed in India

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 To the brave officers and men
of the IPKF who fought in Sri Lanka—
especially those who never made it back.

Col and Dolly—your memory never fades.

Ritu, Shradz and Ary—some things never die.
And to brothers in arms—serving and ex—
Pity, the best tales can never be told.

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It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong
man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The
credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred
by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes
short again and again, because there is no effort without error and
shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great
enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who
at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place
shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor
defeat.
—Theodore Roosevelt

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 Preface

On a recent trip to Sri Lanka, I remembered the landmark, a milestone next

to a big tree from where the path cut into the jungle on the Mankulam-
Mannar Road. The place hadn’t changed much, except for the shops and the
houses, all constructed in the last couple of years and the broad shiny new
highway with signboards. The jungle on either side of the road looked as
formidable and uninviting as it had years ago and I marvelled at our ability
to have penetrated that veritable mass of dense vegetation, mostly at night,
to spend days within. The Sri Lankan army never ventured into the jungles,
or perhaps they didn’t need to, as the LTTE by then had made the cardinal
mistake of shedding guerrilla warfare, in which they were masters, in
favour of holding ground like a conventional army. An arrogant mistake
that led to their final annihilation.
I had told the cab driver to go slow and noticed it immediately. The tree and
the milestone looked a bit worn out or so I imagined coming back after well
over two decades. But of the path I could see no sign. I got out and walked
up and down looking for some indication. The driver eyed me suspiciously
and was clearly worried…‘Mines Sir,’ he warned in a timid whisper. Barely
a kilometre back we had passed a demining crew busy marking out the area.
A Japanese-aided NGO (DASH) was working in the Mankulam belt. I
parted the undergrowth at random and right opposite the milestone ran into
luck. An unused path disappeared into the thick jungle. I hesitated just for a
second, giving no time for my imaginative mind to conjure up doomsday
scenarios, before stepping out onto the path. The driver followed,
wondering, as I walked ahead confidently and within twenty minutes hit the
cluster of trees where we had halted and taken harbour. I was surprised how
quickly we reached, for years back walking the same distance at night had
taken nearly three hours.
I cut through the undergrowth and hit the forest fire lane which had been the
killing area. Nothing had changed and I stood and studied the ambush site. I
could find so many faults with the siting now. It was a catharsis of sorts. My
mind latched on to concrete images of the past, as the bush came alive to a
group of young men, their faces strained and tired, some dozing, some
cleaning their weapons, while the others silently played cards. So much
time was spent in the bush that we had learnt to make ourselves comfortable
and other than a post, the only other place and time one felt safe was while
waiting for the enemy, tucked in a thicket. Memory is like water, once
ruffled, the past is stripped and lingers with each ripple. I identified the
various spots and recalled incidents and thought I had the right tree under
which I stripped.
I was heading for a quick peep through the undergrowth, when agitated red
ants started dropping from above, through the gap in between my neck and
my shirt’s collar and right in. I must have done the fastest Full Monty and
had I been Bear Grylls (of Man vs Wild fame), I would have eaten the lot,
so furious was I with the ants. For the rest of the stay, I recall dreaming up
plans to destroy them and even contemplated blowing up the tree. It was
nostalgia with a vengeance and I had mixed feelings, as I struggled to
justify all the effort, privations and risks we took. Was it worth it? Did I
learn anything? Was I a better man for the experience? Did all the time we
spend, sitting in the bush in Sri Lanka to Kashmir, contribute in any way to
the overall perspective of things, then and now? I was reminded of lines by
Emerson:
I laugh at the love and the pride of man,
At the Sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?
Literally taken, only those who kicked the bucket in such operations ended
up meeting God. The rest of us went back carrying combat or bush scars,
the latter a skin problem caused by a tiny fly in the Sri Lankan jungles,
which would get under the skin, often hatching eggs there, making it
difficult to pull out. Like a long run, the bush was a place to remember, a
place which gave man the freedom of spending time with the mind.
When I was planning my trip, I had read the following on the Sri Lanka
tourism website:
‘Plan your dream holiday and travel through an island of small miracles.
Get a tan, surf, pamper yourself, explore wildlife or find your space.’
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘how time flies! Back then, it was a nightmare trip and the
only miracle was, that unlike a lot of others, I came back in one piece. I did
get a tan, not that I needed one, and surfing hadn’t been invented in the
subcontinent I guess. Wildlife explored us on numerous occasions, rather
than the other way round and of course, quite a few of us found permanent
space on the island. Either way, for those who did a tour of duty in Sri
Lanka, the experience would echo through their lives and most, in an
inexplicable way, were changed.’
While a plot has been interwoven, most of the incidents, places and
experiences are factual. The Jaffna University heliborne operation was
conducted in the early part of the conflict, with the aim to neutralise the
LTTE leadership. The operation was a debacle with great loss of life on our
side. One of the largest clashes with the LTTE took place in March 1989, in
the Nayaru Lagoon area, very close to where the end game of the Tamil
Tigers was finally played out with the Sri Lankan military in 2010. The
skirmishing thereafter, continued for a month, as the Indian Peace Keeping
Force (IPKF) threw in a couple of brigades to evict the Tigers from their
last strong bastion in the Alampil jungles. Various estimates have been
given of the casualties suffered on both sides, ranging from over forty-five
killed and wounded on our side, with the Tigers suffering almost the same
number, if not more. While the bulk of this fight took place in and around
their main camp, as a diversion to ease the pressure in the jungles, the LTTE
attacked an Indian Army post at the village of Kumulamunai. The incident
has been described in the narrative.
It was with a bit of difficulty that I finally traced out where the camp had
been located so many years ago. It was a revelation to discover that the
village and hill were much bigger than I had imagined and in the
intervening years, cottages and schools had sprung up all over, as an
initiative by some Indian housing organisation. In fact it was an old local
watching me curiously walk up and down the path in desperation, who
pointed at a bush covered hillock with a new temple on top. ‘IPKF post Sir,’
he said. ‘We built the temple after the Indians vacated,’ he conveyed
through the interpreter, a soldier who had accompanied me from the
nearest Sri Lankan army post at Alampil.
The Indian Army went into Sri Lanka as a peacekeeping force and in no time
got embroiled in an intense protracted guerrilla war. The IPKF managed to
establish its will by sheer bulk and the so-called peace was never tenacious
and was maintained at a very heavy price in life and material. Untrained in
fighting on the local terrain, ill-equipped and burdened with a conventional
military mindset, it was the Indian Army’s Vietnam and by the time the
IPKF pulled out, it was minus nearly 1,200 men, cremated on a foreign soil
and nearly 3,000-plus wounded. In contrast to the Kargil conflict, which
was covered extensively by the media, the military entanglement in Sri
Lanka is a forgotten war—and was one even while it was being fought—
with the last vestiges finally obliterated by the passage of time.
On a trip home on leave from Sri Lanka, I was accosted at the Madras
railway station by a few locals asking for donations for their Tamil LTTE
brethren. If I hadn’t been so noticeably a North Indian, I would have
contributed with a punch to their faces, but desisted the urge, fearing a
lynching by the locals. Back up north I was asked inane questions by all and
sundry if I had managed to get a VCR player and gold. A friend even went
as far as to ask me in all earnestness, if I had managed to rape any women.
The novel attempts to capture the life and times of the army, especially the
three erstwhile Parachute Commando Units, which were used extensively in
the conflict, from start to finish. However, in the narrative, I have used their
current nomenclature of Special Forces.
If the Tamil Tigers were such an efficient killing machine, part of the credit
should rightly go to the Indian Army. For from 1983 till around 1986, under
the direction of the RAW (Research & Analysis Wing), the Indian Army
trained around 15,000 Sri Lankan Tamils from various political parties.
They were trained in various training establishments spread across the
country, with one of the premier ones being Establishment-22 at Chakrata.
The school was an American creation, post the 1962 Indo-Chinese war and
for a long time was funded by them, to train Tibetan exiles in the art of
covert and guerrilla warfare against the Chinese in Tibet. I suspect, my
father who was posted there may have perhaps been involved in training the
first bunch of Tamil fighters. For certain he was posted at the establishment
during the early stages and was more than aware of the happenings there.
Little did he know that a few years down the line, his son and his
countrymen would be fighting some of the school’s ex-students.
When I came back from Sri Lanka and shared the experiences and the
losses we had suffered, the old Colonel shocked me by raising a toast to the
former students of his ex-organisation.
That the LTTE had extensively entrenched itself in India was public
knowledge and not only before, but even during the conflict, the safe
houses, cadres and sympathisers active in the country, were never tackled
seriously by the Indian government and remained at large, especially in the
South Indian states. The Sri Lankan Tamil refugee diaspora in India was of
great support, as it was across the world, in financing the Tigers.
In fact, a bizarre postscript to the Sri Lanka episode happened, many years
later, just before I left the army in 1998, in Bangalore. The Parachute
Training Centre, where I was posted, sent across a South Indian recruit, to
help me settle in, as he spoke the language. With a local carpenter’s help, I
was putting up some paintings. I handed him a small framed Tiger flag,
which the unit had presented to all officers who had participated in
Operation Pawan in Sri Lanka. The flags were captured in a camp the unit
had busted. Needless to say, it was hard-earned and a prized possession.
The carpenter had one look at it and went ballistic. He flatly refused to hang
it on the wall and an animated conversation in Tamil ensued with the
soldier. The South Indian recruit translated it for me.
‘It’s a Tiger flag,’ the recruit explained ‘and should not be displayed like
this. In fact, he is prepared to buy it.’
‘Tell him to bugger off,’ I said, ‘it’s taken blood and sweat to get one of
those and it’s not for sale.’
The recruit translated my reply to the carpenter and then explained his
further comments to me.
‘He says that bad things may befall you, Sahib, if you insist on displaying
it.’
This was ridiculous; a carpenter was threatening me, in Bangalore, in my
own home. So I twisted his arm and snarled into his face that he was a
podiyan, a Tiger cadre, and I was going to report him to the police. At that
he simmered down, but refused to do any more work or accept payment. A
day later the flag mysteriously disappeared from the wall and so did the
carpenter.
In the end, what could be said about the Tamil Tiger as a fighter? In the
history of warfare there would probably be a footnote for the brief time they
occupied on the battlefield. But it’s the intensity they brought to the fight in
that interlude that won them the highest esteem by their adversaries, the Sri
Lankan and the Indian Army. With a majority of them looking like
undernourished, down-and-out accountants, with no romantic tales of
heroism from the past preceding them, they were neither as flamboyant nor
as physically impressive as a Pathan mujahidin or an Arab fighter.
But what the Tamil Tigers lacked in looks, they more than made up for in
the size of their hearts and could have held their own against the best in the
trade. They gave no quarter and asked none, preferring to commit suicide
like the Japanese, rather than surrender. As they say: ‘It’s not the size of the
dog in the fight that matters, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’ They had
two very essential qualities necessary to be formidable in battle—
motivation and intelligence—and when unleashed on a terrain of their
choice, the results for the enemy were disastrous. No unit that went to the
island came back unscathed, for the Tigers busted the myth of the so-called
martial races. The motto of the US Special Forces, very aptly sums up the
LTTE as a fighting force: The right man in the right place is a devastating
weapon.
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 Puliyankulam Jungle, Sri Lanka
1988
What though the spicy breeze
Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle
Though every prospect pleases
And only man is vile.
—Bishop Reginald Heber, The Island of Tears, 1811

The fire lane that cut through the wilderness was wide enough for a small
vehicle. Silhouettes of trees stood starkly etched against the clear sky. In the
narrow gaps, between the impenetrable foliage above, the firmament was
visible, studded with a million sparkling stars. A lone satellite crossed
briskly overhead, as if headed for an important errand. Dew and the dank
odour of decaying leaves hung heavy over the dark silence; the restlessness
of the creatures and the whispers of the wild remained inaudible to the
uninitiated. The jungle was quieter than a graveyard after the last mourners
had left.
If only the satellite had briefly paused, and its whirring cameras pierced the
dense leafy umbrella of the jungle, it would have picked up the presence of
alien life in that undergrowth. Tucked away behind bushes of lantana, lying
as still as the trees around, was a fighting patrol of heavily-armed Special
Forces (SF) men on a seventy-two-hour ambush operation.
Two pairs of keen young eyes surveyed the path in front with an LMG, a
light machine gun covering the prospective killing area. The rest of the
troop, split into five-man squads and spread out in a defensive perimeter,
waited behind. Captain Hariharan, a.k.a Harry, cast a quick look around,
checked his weapon and lay down right behind the two sentries.
Over a period of time, Harry had come to understand exactly how the body
and mind behaved during an ambush. For the first few hours, fantasy kept
boredom at bay, with daydreams of unleashing an orgy of violence often
being strong enough to actually imagine the bullets hitting home. Thirty-six
hours down the line, you could hardly bear to eat the rations of puri-sabji,
for most of it would have turned stale. After forty-eight hours, you
experienced a burning sensation every time you took a leak, signalling the
onset of dehydration. All thought now would invariably be about food,
water and sleep. Once, Harry had even spent Holi in the bush, when an
additional 2-litre can of water that someone had lugged was passed around
for a celebratory swig or two as everyone wished each other and shook
hands silently.
Water was a huge problem in the jungles of Sri Lanka. Over and above the
standard army litre bottle, the men carried extra water in 2-litre jerrycans
bought in Madras. The message was clear: if you were stupid enough to sit
for days in a bush, then you had to find your own means to survive; the
Indian Army had larger issues to worry about. The maps provided were
often of World War II vintage, and any kulam (ponds) on it had long since
dried up on ground. The men also ended up using water for a crap and no
amount of coaxing by Harry, to use toilet paper instead, worked, until Harry
accidentally discovered the benefits of moist old newspaper. It made
excellent toilet paper, saved precious liquid, and so what if it left a bit of the
previous day’s news on your backside! Of course, there were some old
soldiers who could go for days without taking a dump during ambush
operations, and Harry was both fascinated and deeply envious of their self-
control.
It was their third night out in the wilderness. Harry felt a nudge and opened
his eyes to see the sentry on duty uncomfortably close to his face. He could
barely make out the blur of stars through the foliage, and as his eyes got
used to the dark, he saw Sathish point a finger ahead of them. He
concentrated on the track, when he noticed a silhouette right in front of the
barrel of the LMG. There was a gentle rise and fall to the dark form and a
short grunt like a blocked nose emanated from it. In a whisper, Sathish
confirmed Harry’s fear: yes, a wild boar, probably high on some fermented
fruit. Of all the nooks and corners of the Vanni jungle, the fucker had to
choose that spot! If one hadn’t used aftershave or hair oil or eaten pickle
and raw onions, in thirty-six hours one began to smell of the jungle and
became a part of it. Harry was quite pleased; if this guy hadn’t smelled their
presence yet, then it meant they had passed the jungle warfare test with
flying colours. However, the LMG was obstructed and Harry wondered
hard how to wake up a snoring boar.
The entire troop was now wide awake and restively fingering their
weapons. What if the animal turned around and charged at them? Even a
tiger avoids an angry boar. Just a couple of days back, in Mannar, a Jat
Battalion soldier had been carried away by an elephant. As if the Tamil
Tigers were not enough, now they had to contend with all sorts of wild
animals! Worse, what a joke it would be in the unit if he mistook a person
for a beast: ‘Parlez-vous parlez-vous of all the animals in the Sri Lankan
zoo, the wild boar f…’
Harry’s poetic reverie was interrupted when the boar suddenly got up and
gave itself a mighty shake. A cloud of dust rose up into the clean night air,
and off trotted the boar, grunting as if in complaint. Twenty armed soldiers
heaved a collective sigh of relief. ‘Thank god!’ thought Harry as he tried to
see the positive side of the incident, for they were not operating in the
Serengeti National Park, where instead of the boar, it could have been a
rhino in heat!
Nervous giggles and whispers rippled through the bush as the ambush
party readjusted itself and settled down again to the never-ending wait. A
little later, a distant throbbing nudged Harry awake. Was the boar coming
back with his pals? The sentries stirred. The sound grew louder, and
instantly, without a word being exchanged, the men went into battle
stations, inching forward to the edge of the thicket, their weapons covering
a predefined arc of fire along the length of the path. The throbbing grew
louder. Hemmed in by the jungle, the sound rose along the narrow path like
a muezzin’s call to prayer. Then, in the eyepiece of the night vision device,
a small handlebar tractor pulling a trolley lumbered into sight like some
miniature prehistoric animal.
Twenty pairs of eyes watched with surging adrenalin as the vehicle slowly
rumbled closer. You heard only the slightest of clicks, as down the line,
firing levers were pushed to automatic mode and the men, with fingers
curled around triggers waited for their leader to give the order to engage.
The closeness of the killing area, the volume of fire and the sheer violence
of action that would define the moment were all in complete contravention
to traditional military teaching. But then this was Sri Lanka, where it was all
about improvisation and survival; the Tamil Tigers had turned all textbook-
soldiering on its head very early in the conflict. Harry waited, dry-mouthed
and with his heart threatening to damage his ribcage, for the tractor to cross
the point where a white polythene bag had been tied innocuously to a tree,
as the marker for the killing ground. His hands were clammy on the pistol
grip, the metal butt of the AK was digging into his shoulder and he could
hear Sathish breathing heavily next to him. Time, and his mind, both
seemed to have slowed down.
He still hadn’t seen any weapons on the men sitting behind in the trolley
and was reluctant to pull the trigger. What if they were villagers, women
and children? In the fluorescent green night vision, the driver was clearly
unarmed, as was the bunch behind, bobbing and swaying sleepily to the
motion of the vehicle. The tractor crossed the marker and went past the
ambush party and Harry was still reluctant to fire. Then, with an ear-
shattering bang, Sathish on his side opened up, clearly following the old
dictum, ‘When in doubt, empty your magazine’. Within seconds, the rest of
the team had joined him, rapidly spewing lead at a phenomenal rate and
peppering the target at a mere 10 metres.
The driver was hit immediately and the little tractor wobbled for an instant
before it crashed into a tree and overturned. By the time the last echoes
subsided, nearly 200 rounds had been fired in thirty seconds. A thin wraith
of white smoke hung in the still air, and the sweet smell of cordite was all
pervasive. Nothing stirred at the target end and nobody moved at the firing
end. Someone let off a nervous single shot, the report loud and incongruous
in the aftermath of the volley. Harry cursed softly and demanded to know
the name of the soldier. Two men then disengaged from the group and ran
down the track to provide cover, while Harry and a few others cautiously
approached the vehicle with weapons at the ready and levers switched back
to the SF preferred mode of single shot.
There were four men in the trolley, all in a lifeless heap and leaking blood
from various holes, like ruptured water pipes. Their weapons lay on the
floor of the trolley, slimy with gore. Nanjappa helped himself to a G-3 rifle,
while another soldier picked up a Chinese AK, wiping the blood off the
weapon on the dead men. Most of the team carried an assortment of
captured weapons. Harry noticed that the driver was missing and
immediately warned the others. They saw a trail of blood in the faint
starlight leading into the jungle. Harry took one look into the dark abyss-
like undergrowth and balked at the prospect of tracking a wounded Tiger in
that wilderness of entwined roots and bushes. He got on the radio to report
briefly to the team commander and then ordered a few men to fire randomly
in the general direction where he suspected the wounded Tiger would be
lurking. A few bursts later, he hoped they had either got him or that the
initial wound would turn fatal and the man, if not already dead, would meet
his maker sooner or later.

But the wound was neither fatal nor the man anywhere close to dying. For
barely a spitting distance from the edge of the path, curled up behind a tree,
and bleeding profusely from a flesh wound lay the driver. Alive, alert and
wounded, with the cyanide capsule clenched between his teeth, Silvam
listened to the activity in progress on the path. He cursed himself for not
having kept his G-3 assault rifle at the ready. He lay there waiting. Soon
they would enter the undergrowth and leave him with no choice but to bite
into the capsule. Not that Silvam feared death; he had only hoped it would
come in battle and not meekly at his own hands. He heard their hushed
voices and realised, to his surprise, that they were speaking Haryanvi, a
form of Hindi spoken in the north of India. The last time he had heard the
language spoken at such close quarters had been around two years before.
‘The sister fucker is right in there and can’t be very far,’ said a voice.
‘Doesn’t have a weapon either. Should I go after him, sahib?’
‘Negative, Sathish, you are not going in there. No hurry, we’ll wait for
daylight,’ answered a more polished voice, authoritative and clearly in
command.
Silvam heard radio static and then the man with the polished voice switched
to English. ‘Alpha two to Alpha one. Over. Contact Alpha one. Confirmed
four kills, all hostiles. One injured and probably still lurking somewhere
around. Suggest I wait till morning and then wrap him up. Over.’
Silvam was aware there were three Indian Special Forces battalions
operating on the island and from the professional manner in which these
men were conducting themselves, he was certain this bunch belonged to
one of them.
‘Orders to move out of the area before there is any retaliation,’ called out
the officer’s voice. ‘Booby-trap the bodies and wipe area clean of any
footprints and tell-tale signs of our presence.’
‘Alright, check equipment and we march in five minutes.’
More conversation followed, and the next thing Silvam heard was the
officer give an order to fire in his direction. He barely managed to put his
head down, when the undergrowth around him came alive to the whine and
angry buzz of hot lead. For a moment, the buzzing sound transported him
back to his childhood, when he and his friends had once pulled a beehive
down on their way back from school. A cloud of agitated bees had chased
them all the way home. Then as suddenly as it had started, it was all over.
Like phantoms in the darkness, they were gone. A few bold cicadas now
made a brief cry of protest at having been disturbed, and one or two
alarmed bats ping-ponged across the starlit clearing in alarm. The denizens
of the wild settled down again and a hush descended over the place, as the
jungle quickly reverted to its original state of smell and balance.
Silvam was still in shock and couldn’t believe it had all actually happened
and that his colleagues were lying dead a few feet away. Was it only fifteen
minutes back that Mutthu had berated him to drive carefully so they could
catch a bit of shut eye? And now he was no more. Slowly he released the
cyanide capsule from between his clenched teeth and put it away carefully.
He tore a strip from his lungi and tied it around the wound on his arm where
the bullet had grazed him. Still bleeding, Silvam floated in and out of
consciousness. He thought of his wife and young son, and then his mind
drifted to a different time, a different place, far away, where pine trees grew
on the mountainside and the Himalayan eagle soared in the cold wind drifts.
Just before he fainted, he thought he could actually smell the pine needles,
feel them under his feet and hear military commands being given, not in his
mother tongue Tamil but, strangely, in the language of his enemy: Hindi.

After collecting the weapons and placing a grenade under one of the bodies,
the ambush party left the scene like a bunch of guilty school boys who had
raided an apple orchard. Within minutes they were swallowed by the night,
leaving no signs to reveal the perpetrators of the deed, except for hundreds
of spent shells on the jungle floor. Harry cut cross-country for a few miles
before going into a commando harbour for the few hours of darkness. At
first light, they set out again and were still not out of the jungle when they
heard machine-gun fire at close quarters. Experienced hands recognised it
as from a fellow battalion, judging from the sound and the pattern of
twenty-round bursts.
They emerged on the main road and saw a road opening party (ROP) of
Sikh troops crawling along from the Vavuniya end like a baraat (marriage
procession) gone sour. A burly Sikh manned an MMG, a medium machine
gun mounted on top of a vehicle, which he swung at random and unleashed
a burst or two into the bushes on either side—speculative fire, which was a
safer way to discourage an ambush. Soldiers walked alongside and ahead of
the vehicles, with a couple of them carrying metal detectors and one of
them leading an obese, unhappy black Labrador, his tongue hanging
halfway to the ground, panting rapidly to cool itself in the muggy heat.
Harry exchanged a look with the others at the close call. Had they been a
little ahead, the lead would have been coming their way. If there was
anything more accurate than incoming enemy fire, it was incoming friendly
fire. At first, the Sikhs looked somewhat surprised to see a body of men
emerge from the bush, all armed to the teeth and bearded to the eyes.
Perhaps they thought a bunch of Sikhs had gone rogue. The MMG swung
menacingly to cover them momentarily; then it was all bonhomie and the
team got a lift halfway till the Jat Battalion post where they were attached
for operations. The lead vehicle had a few local women seated on it, with or
without their consent, Harry was not sure. They sat quietly on the floor,
avoiding any eye contact with the men. Harry thought it made sense to have
the locals, especially women, ride along as protection against a possible
IED (improvised explosive device) attack. One would, after all, think twice
before blowing up one’s own kith and kin and if one had to cart the locals
along, then rather the fairer sex—sensible Sikh logic.
A little ahead at the midway point, they ran into the Jat ROP. Harry took in
the scene. It was around ten in the morning. The temperature was rising and
humidity hung heavy like an unseen blanket, enervating and irritating. The
bushes on either side of the road were ablaze, crackling from time to time
when they received a fresh gust of breeze. The heat could be felt on the road
and the smoke stung the eyes. A few soldiers and civilians were scurrying
ahead with burning torches and setting every dry twig afire. An NCO (Non-
commissioned officer) stood with a cloth wrapped around his head like a
turban, wielding a rifle like a staff. At his feet squatted an abject local,
holding his ears in what they called the murga or rooster position back at
the Military Academy. Under a bare tree, a soot-blackened pot sat atop a
makeshift stone stove, its lid gently murmuring as the water boiled inside. A
radio set lay in a heap next to it.
The NCO was one of those quintessential Jats, big, brawny, cropped hair
with cat’s eyes and devilment written all over his face. One look at the
unusual colour of the eyes on his swarthy Indian face, and Harry couldn’t
help wondering if Alexander and his band of merry Greeks hadn’t hunkered
down for R&R (Rest and Recoup) in his village in Haryana long long ago.
The staff became a rifle again as the NCO saw an officer approaching.
Offering Harry a cup of sweet tea, he told him that they were clearing the
undergrowth with fire. Apparently, they had lost a few men in an ambush on
the same stretch; now it was a policy of fire and fire, he grinned, pointing at
the fire and at his rifle. ‘No bush sahib, no ambush,’ he declared, pausing to
poke the local, who had slackened his position, with his barrel.
The Jat seemed a friendly, chatty sort. A radio operator, his office was
adjacent to Harry’s room. ‘Do you know,’ he joked as they walked up to the
post, ‘that the Jats worshipped the monkey god Hanuman and so it was the
second time in history that someone was burning Lanka a la Hanumanji!’
His name was Satbir, and he had been on the island for over a year. They
walked back to the post with Satbir regaling Harry with all the incidents
that had happened in their area of operation, pointing out landmarks and
spots where an ambush or a firefight had taken place. He was full of praise
for his Company Commander Captain Sudhir, and Harry was looking
forward to catching up with him as they had been coursemates. Clearly,
Sudhir seemed to have the environment under control and was thinking out
of the box to stay ahead of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in
the game.
The next morning, Harry was woken up by the choicest abuses in Haryanvi.
Peeking through a hole in the wooden partition, Harry saw Satbir frothing at
the mouth. A thin foreign voice rang loud and clear over the radio, speaking
in broken Hindi and English: ‘Indian dogs, sister fuckers, you will go back.
Step out of your post,’ and so on. At this, the Greek from Haryana went
ballistic, challenging him to personal combat and threatening to fuck
anything Sri Lankan on two legs, regardless of sex or age: ‘And just you
wait, in a few years there will be half-a-dozen half-breed children running
around and one of them will be your whore sister’s!’
The Jat’s buddy, another potential descendant of Alexander’s lost army,
chuckled and prompted him to convey that if it was a boy they could name
him Satbir in the father’s memory and if it was a girl…er, well…then just
call her a whore. All very satisfying to let off steam, but Harry doubted the
Tamil Tiger had understood a word. Post commander Sudhir later informed
Harry that this was a regular conversation Satbir had with the unidentified
Tiger station and the evening powwow between the two was generally quite
polite. Presently, another voice broke in. It was distinctly nasal and high-
pitched and seemed tired and in pain. Harry quickly summoned Sathish
who was a South Indian and spoke Tamil.
To everyone’s amazement, the new voice spoke fluent Hindi with just the
slightest trace of an accent. He warned the Indian radio operator to mind his
language, then announced the name of the battalion and the location and
threatened to personally come and teach the Jats a lesson. For a moment,
Harry thought he had heard the voice somewhere, then, considering the
circumstances, dismissed the idea just as promptly. Thereafter the
conversation continued between the two Tigers in staccato bursts and
Sathish had to strain to decipher their accent.
When the radio chat came to an end, Sathish nodded unhappily at Harry.
‘You should have allowed me to go after the guy in the bush,’ he said. ‘That
was him, reporting the incident and confirming he was shot. He has
managed to reach one of the camps, and he is certain the ambush was
carried out by an SF team. He is talking about retaliation now.’

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 Kumulamunai to Chakrata
I have tried caution and forethought; from now on
I shall make myself mad
—Rumi

Silvam was born in Kumulamunai, a small village close to the Nayaru

Lagoon. His birth name was Sivashankar Kumaran and he was born in the
year when Sri Lanka’s giant neighbour India was dealt a shocking defeat by
the Chinese in a war along its north-eastern border, and when Tamil
politicians in his country were mooting the idea of a separate nation. It was
the winter of 1962. The core problem of Sri Lanka—that of identity—was
slowly metamorphosing into a movement where the Tamils wanted to
preserve their identity, while the Sinhalas wanted to crush it. His father was
a teacher at the village primary school and like most Tamil parents his
emphasis was on education and his dream was to see his only son work in a
stable firm or for the government in a big city. It was a time when Sinhala
chauvinism and jingoistic fervour were on a high and ‘good’ jobs were
reserved for Sinhalas, with Tamils being treated as second-class citizens.
That was a sore point, which irked the educated Tamil population of the
country and often veered the general conversation at home towards the
deteriorating Tamil–Sinhala politics. The young boy’s personality was
shaped in this all-pervasive atmosphere of mistrust and hatred. Born with
one leg shorter than the other, Shiva, as he was called, walked with a limp
and as a consequence, often got relegated to the position of an onlooker in
any game or physical activity throughout his school life. Stout, because of a
lack of exercise and hampered by a prominent limp, he was savagely
ridiculed by other children in school, as they are often wont to do. But what
he lacked physically, he more than made up for mentally. Withdrawn and
quiet to the point of being taciturn, Shiva was a thinker, with dreams of
doing big things and being recognised.
Shiva was fifteen when he first heard the name of Prabhakaran. The Tamil
community was agog with tales of his daring exploits and the party he had
formed—LTTE. However, these were early days of Tamil resistance and the
movement had yet to gain a coherent direction. Various parties were
coming to the fore and vying for political authority, both with the Tamil
population and the Sri Lankan government. Shiva finished his education at
the village school and got admission at Jaffna University to study
accounting. He was a bright and a hardworking student, with a mind made
for enquiry. When he was not studying accounts, Shiva could often be found
sitting under a tree reading poetry.
The university campus was rife with student unions which were aligned to
various parties and active in local politics. However, none approached
Shiva considering his reticent nature and possibly his noticeable handicap.
He finished college and found a job in the accounts department of a small
company exporting fish and spices. Its office was in the main Jaffna market
and he found himself a room on rent in the suburbs at Kokkuvil, 10
kilometres away. Shiva, true to his nature, was a sincere worker, arriving on
time after cycling the long distance to office and would often stay back late
after official work hours. He was acutely aware of the sacrifices his father
had made to give him a good education and he wanted to give his parents
the best in their old age.
However, sometimes the best-laid plans of man are thwarted by the gods,
for they have larger events in mind. Events, which decide the destiny of a
people and a nation, when mere mortals are often sucked into the
maelstrom, to be carried along like an insignificant twig. Such events were
unfolding and gathering momentum just then and were often reflected in the
violence that erupted from time to time between the Sinhalas and the
repressed Tamil population. Shiva could sense the hostility in his
workplace. While his performance and efforts were way better than his
three Sinhala colleagues, the end-of-the-year appraisal saw them going
home with more bonuses and salary hikes. The message was clear—this is
Sinhala country and you are a second-class minority.
Shiva thought briefly of trying his fortunes in the Middle East, but his
father was not in good health and he was the only child. On one of his trips
home, he was married off to his neighbour’s daughter who had been his
junior in school. She was a vivacious, pretty eighteen-year-old and Shiva, a
serious, brooding twenty-two. He took his young wife Laxmi back to
Jaffna, where she quickly took charge of their one-bedroom home. The
spartan room was soon converted into a bright little place, with plastic
flowers and posters of gods benevolently looking down from the walls. But
if there was domestic peace within for Shiva, it was matched with an equal
measure of turmoil without. For north-east Sri Lanka was on a boil,
erupting into an unimaginable orgy of violence. The situation in Jaffna was
rapidly deteriorating and Shiva thought it best to pack his wife back to his
parents’ house. Laxmi had never looked prettier, as she was glowing with
their child in her womb. The year was 1984.
Laxmi had barely left, when suddenly all semblance of normality
crumbled and the disaster that struck Shiva changed the course of his life
forever. If he had the slightest inkling that he was walking down a one-way
street, which ended in a cul-de-sac, he would have altered course. But how
was he to know?
On a blistering hot day, when he came back from office, he found his
father-in-law waiting for him at his house. The news was devastating. Both
his parents had been killed by Sri Lankan security forces in a cordon and
search operation. They had fired at his father and when his mother had tried
to snatch the weapon away she had been shot too. The charges against them
were all trumped-up. This was an all-too-familiar scenario with the security
forces, when they were instructed to carry out ethnic cleansing. The army
was now looking for him. ‘Go to India,’ his father-in-law urged, ‘and once
you have settled down, we will follow with Laxmi and the child.’
The rickety fishing boat designed to carry ten people was crammed with
double the number, along with all the meagre belongings each of them
could carry. They crossed the Palk Strait where a summer storm was lashing
the gunwale with ferocious waves and threatening to capsize them at any
moment. Shiva sat through the journey, impervious to the discomfort or the
possibility of death, for he was too grief-stricken to bother. They came
ashore at Rameshwaram and he found himself following the hundreds of
people making their way to the refugee camps. He felt lost and sad and a
profound loneliness sat heavy in his heart. But his was not a character to sit
idle and wallow in self-pity for too long. He soon volunteered to join the
skeleton administration team running the camp and helped them with
documentation and the rudimentary accounting they needed.
Barely a week into his new life, he was approached by a few men. They
introduced themselves as members of the LTTE and asked him point blank
if he would be interested in joining.
‘What do I have to do if I join?’ asked Shiva. He had heard of the group, of
course, and was a silent admirer of Prabhakaran, the leader of the party.
‘Fight for Eelam,’ was the curt reply.
Within a day or two, Shiva found himself a part of a group of twenty young
men, all hand-picked by the Tamil Tigers from across the refugee camps.
While they were all different in age and temperament, they had, however,
one thing in common. All of them had lost at least one close family member
to the Sri Lankan forces and were, therefore, bound by a mutual feeling of
revenge. Soon they were kitted out and escorted to the railway station by a
bunch of new men, all clearly South Indians. The LTTE leader had one last
word with each of them, ticked something on a cardboard file and handed
him over to the Indians. He looked at Shiva disparagingly for some time,
clearly showing his hesitation at the selection. Then suddenly making up his
mind, he whispered, ‘Your name now is Silvam. Remember it, for you will
take this name to your grave. You will dedicate yourself to the cause and
sever all ties with your past life, including your family. Hope you are not
married,’ he continued, ‘for the leader has banned matrimony.’
‘No, not at all,’ replied Shiva in some confusion.
‘Good then. Remember you have been picked up more for your brain then
your body. Learn well what the Indians have to teach and don’t let that
handicap of yours come in the way. Godspeed, Silvam.’
The group, closely chaperoned by the Indians, was led to a separate train
compartment at the far end of the platform and kept apart from other
passengers. A little later, the wheels clattered and clanked, bogeys jostled
each other as if in mock delight and with a final jerk, the train pulled out of
the station. A shiver of excitement ran through Silvam, for he was
embarking on an unknown adventure in a foreign country. The group was
received by a different set of people at the Delhi railway station and
transported to a large house in a very normal-looking residential colony.
There Silvam found the food, though different, was good and rooms
comfortable. However, when he tried to go outside for a bit of fresh air, one
of their handlers, dressed in plain clothes, stationed outside the apartment,
stopped him.
Two days later, after some more documentation and background screening
had been conducted by the Indians, the group was again loaded, this time
onto a large Tata bus, with curtains pulled across the windows. At the crack
of dawn, while the city still slept, the bus drove down the Ring Road,
heading out of the city and turned northwards. While most of his
companions immediately fell asleep, Silvam peered out through a crack in
the curtain at the North Indian countryside slipping by. He observed the
signboards and read their names with ease as most of them were in English
and guessed they were heading north. The sun rose, the heat increased and
with every hour the terrain changed. Five hours later, Silvam saw the
mountains before him and shortly after crossing a river at the foothills, the
bus wound its way up a narrow road. When they finally alighted, the heat
and dust had been left behind, the weather was brisk and the surroundings
sublime. The hill station was called Chakrata and Silvam just loved the
place.

OceanofPDF.com
 India
1984
You don’t become a guerrilla on a full stomach.
—Col Silvam, LTTE

The river Yamuna running its course through the mountains, finally
debouches itself in the plains at a place called Dakpathar. The fury of the
river here is contained by a dam. A narrow road crosses the river at this
point. Going past the second-century Mauryan rock edict at Kalsi, it winds
its way up the mountain into an area known as Jaunsar-Bawar. The locals
believe that the Pandavas in their journey to the mountains went through
their country and following their tradition, the local Jaunsaris were a
matriarchal society, practising polyandry. Clinging to the treacherous
mountainside, often prone to landslides, the road finally climbs up to nearly
7,000 feet through forests of conifer, oak and rhododendrons to the small
hill station of Chakrata. Established as a cantonment town, in the latter half
of the nineteenth century by the British, the town and its environs hardly
developed over the years and the single road remained a one-way route,
with fixed timings being adhered to for traffic going up or coming down.
Entry for outsiders into the area was regulated with check posts and
permits.
If development had bypassed Jaunsar, it was not by default, but by design.
For the Indian Army ran a top-secret training base here called the
Establishment 22 (called Two Two). The establishment was started
primarily to train Tibetan refugees in guerrilla warfare, which they would
then carry out in Chinese-occupied Tibet. Sturdy-looking Khampa
tribesmen could be seen climbing rocks, firing weapons and going out for
their morning runs. Over time it became a mini-Tibetan town, with the
Mongoloid-looking hill men in complete consonance with the mountains
around. No one gave them a second look. From time to time, the facility—
diverting from its original task of churning out Tibetan saboteurs—was also
used for training operatives, from various parts of the subcontinent, who
were sent by the intelligence agencies to learn how to carry out unsavoury
tasks that are sometimes required to achieve political ends.
Therefore the arrival in station, in the early 1980s, of a group of dark, frail-
looking men of South Indian origin, raised no flutter amongst the locals or
from the Indian Army instructors. Accustomed to not asking any questions,
they designed the training as per the brief received and assumed, that like the
other non-Tibetans who turned up for training, these men would also
disappear from their lives soon. But by 1984, regular batches of these dark
men were graduating from the school, learning a curriculum in violence.
Led by a tall aristocratic-looking Colonel from the Paratroops, the Indian
trainers kept their wards busy, teaching them a tradecraft which would help
them to stay alive in a volatile environment and spread mayhem.
The three-month training schedule was unforgiving—physicals, weapon
handling and explosive training in the mornings were followed by theory
classes on guerrilla warfare in the afternoons. While there were a number of
camps, mostly in Tamil Nadu, the most secretive was the Two Two
Establishment, and the initial lot of the LTTE were trained here. If there
was anything that bothered Silvam and his colleagues in this strange
mountain abode, it was the cold and the food. While they soon got
accustomed to the cold, they just couldn’t digest the North Indian fare of dal
and roti and pined for spicy fish curry and rice.
Silvam, with his superior intellect, very quickly learned Hindi and with a
smattering of English already under his belt, he soon came to the notice of
the Indian instructors. They also discovered that his portly frame and limp
were no handicap when it came to physical work, for while he was a poor
runner, he more than made up for it when it came to long-route marches.
Apart from being educated, his pluck and drive soon earned him the
admiration of his instructors. They elevated him as the group leader and
referred to him for any advice they needed with regard to the training and
welfare of the students. Silvam revelled in their attention, for he was finally
getting the recognition he had always dreamt of. But what Silvam found
difficult to swallow was the disdain some of the North Indian instructors
had for their fighting ability. Referring to them as Madrasis, the instructors
could be harsh and humiliating in their language. It only made Silvam more
determined to prove to their detractors how wrong they were. An idli-dosa
eating man could be a match to any fighter. Little did he know that his wish
would soon be granted and against the very men who doubted their martial
qualities.
At no stage during the students’ stay at the school were they allowed out of
the heavily-guarded complex, not that there was much to do in the small
cantonment town. The only exception to this rule was Silvam. Representing
the course as their leader and with a list of things to be bought, from
slippers to South Indian spices and condiments, he would regularly go
down with the rations vehicle to the nearest big city—Dehradun. The
Colonel, on these weekend runs, would often go along, hitching a ride in
the bus to Dehradun, where he had built a house in anticipation of his
forthcoming retirement.
On a bitterly cold December morning, a civilian bus stopped in front of a
house in Vasant Vihar, a retired officers’ colony in Dehradun. The curtains
had been drawn on every window of the bus and nothing of the inside was
visible. Only the driver could be seen through the windscreen. Though the
driver was wearing civilian clothes, the stamp of a soldier was unmistakable
from the cut of his face. The Colonel got down followed by a short, plump,
dark man of South Indian origin, with a pronounced limp, carrying his
overnight suitcase. Harry, the Colonel’s son and himself an army officer,
was back on leave after finishing his combat diving course with the navy
and was relaxing in the verandah reading the newspaper. The man deposited
the suitcase in the verandah and wished Harry a polite ‘Morning Saar’. The
Colonel introduced him as their new canteen contractor, who came down
quite often to Doon to collect supplies. The man had a glass of water and
then touched the Colonel’s feet and took his leave.
Harry was on a month’s annual leave and for the next four weeks, he ran
into Silvam every time the Colonel came down to spend the weekend with
his family. On each occasion the drill was the same. Deposit the suitcase,
wish Harry, have a glass of water and then before departing, touch the
Colonel’s feet. Harry found it rather strange and accosted his father about it.
‘How come a canteen contractor gives you such respect? And since when
have you allowed people to touch your feet? We have never done it and it is
not followed in the family either.’
‘Oh! Silvam,’ quipped the Colonel, ‘he has suffered some huge financial
and personal losses. He is a good man, so I gave him the contract. Seems to
be eternally grateful for it. I have told him so many times that touching feet
should be reserved only for your parents and the gods. Nobody else
deserves it.’
Only on one occasion, the day before Harry was finishing his leave and
heading back to join his unit in the hills did Silvam agree to sit down, as he
waited for the Colonel to finish his packing. Keeping to his taciturn nature
or following the Colonel’s orders, he remained tight-lipped and reserved. But
in the brief conversation they had, Harry understood two things very
clearly. One, Silvam had no idea about running a canteen and was vague in
the odd question thrown at him regarding his business. And two, he had
great respect and affection for some of the officers and men in the school,
especially for the Colonel.
A few months later, the Colonel retired and hung up his uniform and the
canteen contractor with the limp disappeared from his life forever. Much
later India Today carried an article on the rise of the LTTE and India’s hand
in training and equipping the guerrilla force. Chakrata figured in the list of
the locations where training was conducted. Back home on a short spell of
leave, Harry cornered his father and inquired about the canteen contractor.
The Colonel had retired by then and the information he had was in the
public domain in any case, so he felt no reason to deny his son’s assertion.
‘Yes, the contractor was a Sri Lankan Tamil,’ he said, ‘and belonged to one
of the many political parties, I think it was the LTTE. Raw kids when they
arrived, some hadn’t even worn a shoe in their life and they were definitely
not fighting material. But when we worked out their training schedule,’
continued the Colonel, ‘their leader approached us—the man you met—and
requested, if instead of a nine-hour schedule, could it be increased to
thirteen. I’d like to believe, we made something of a soldier out of each of
them. They should give a good account of themselves against the Sri
Lankan army. They had something very necessary for a fighting man, my
boy. They had tons and tons of motivation. In fact,’ and the Colonel looked
Harry in the eye, ‘some of them were good enough for my own unit.’ A high
compliment from the Colonel, who carried the belief that the Parachute
Unit he had served in, was God’s own gift to soldiering.

Silvam ended up staying for a year at Chakrata at the behest of the Indian
instructors. He was a great help in bridging the gap between the students
and the teachers. Sometime in early 1986, he was sent back and made his
way to Jaffna. A full-fledged war was on with the Sri Lankan army and the
LTTE was the dominant party, leading the fight. Silvam with his
unassuming scholarly looks which belied the fire in him, joined the war with
gusto. It was as if he was born to be a warrior, or perhaps his longer stay in
Chakrata had prepared him better for combat. He was calm under fire and
had a natural instinct for unconventional, guerrilla warfare. The higher-ups
in the hierarchy of the party were watching and earmarking him for greater
responsibility.
He was given command of a ten-man unit and entrusted with the task of
preparing the defences around Jaffna city. Being an educated man, his grasp
of explosives was better than most and he had a knack of selecting the most
suitable place for IEDs and mines, unlike the others, who often got the
calculations wrong and had a general tendency to overdo the explosive
content. The Sri Lankan offensive to capture the city of Jaffna was expected
to resume any time and all roads and by-lanes leading into the city from the
south had to be defended. Morale in the ranks was high, the general
population supportive and the best the Sri Lankans could throw at them, had
made not a dent in the LTTE’s military machine, for their fighting prowess
remained unmatched. Of course, they were surreptitiously helped all along
by Big Brother India. Physically the country was already carved out, for the
LTTE governed the occupied areas and it was only a matter of time before
exhaustion of resources, man and material, compelled the Sri Lankan
government to secede to their demands, for an independent Eelam.
Then sometime in early 1987, the long-standing status quo was disturbed by
the entry most unexpectedly, of a third stakeholder in the struggle. The
Indians entered the fray. First, only as observers, sitting peacefully at the
Palaly airfield, silently watching from the sidelines, how their old students
conducted themselves against a conventional army. Sometime later, with
bated breath, everyone watched the outcome of the big political powwow
happening in far-off Delhi. The decisions that were taken soon unfolded
events on the ground, the ramifications of which left great grief on either
side of the Palk Strait. For the peaceful watchers at the Palaly airfield were
languorously stirring themselves. The great Indian military juggernaut was
on the roll and not as the LTTE had always hoped, in their support, but
much to their disappointment and chagrin, against them.
The Tigers fought like demented dervishes high on hashish and the Indians
had to battle for every inch of ground to capture Jaffna. The LTTE planning
had been meticulous and the defences prepared during peacetime to hold
good against the Sri Lankans, were now paying off rich dividends against
the Indian assault. Every street corner had been turned into a veritable
fortress with roadblocks and sandbag walls to be contested in blood. Very
soon, to break the impasse, Indian tanks and BMP armoured personnel
carriers made their appearance in support of their beleaguered infantry.
Silvam was in the thick of battle with his team as a mobile reserve force,
bolstering roadblock units, where reinforcements were required.
On numerous occasions, he had a close brush with death, always coming
away unscathed and surprised at his fortune, for the battle was intense and
unforgiving. On one occasion, while he was trying to engage a tank with a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher (RPG), it turned and fired its main gun at
point blank range. The house they were using for cover in the street fight
collapsed and both his colleagues were killed. Unconscious, he woke up
after a few hours, surprisingly unhurt, except for a splitting headache. The
street had been taken, for he heard Indian voices and through the fallen
debris saw Gurkha soldiers marching past. He waited for nightfall and then
undeterred made his way back to the LTTE lines, which he noticed had
shrunk considerably.
Jaffna was a lost cause for certain and some of the cadres were instructed to
break contact and head towards the jungle camps and other towns further
south. Silvam was ordered to report to the tactical headquarters at the
university campus, where all the senior LTTE commanders were gathering
for a war council, to be presided over by none other than Prabhakaran. By
midday a large gathering of the LTTE’s commanders and rank and file,
belligerent to a man and bristling with weapons, had converged on to the
sprawling campus. Before the briefing could commence, confirmed
intelligence came in of an impending Indian raid, the objective of which
was lost on no one; to capture or kill the LTTE’s senior leadership and bring
the conflict to an early end.
The choices with Prabhakaran were limited to only two. Instruct the cadres
to disperse and melt away, leaving the area empty for the Indians to look
like fools, or lay out a warm reception. The Tamil leader didn’t have to
contemplate too long on such options. He hadn’t become the founder and
the leader of one of the finest guerrilla outfits in the world by shying away
from hard decisions or from a good fight. He decided to stay put and give
the Indians a bloody nose. Suddenly, the purpose of the gathering, from a
council of war, had altered to the conduct of one at its doorstep. The
preparations were hasty but adequate and the Tigers waited for the brewing
storm to break.
Silvam was on the roof of the main building block when the first helicopter
was heard approaching. The .50 calibre machine guns and the deployment
of the men had been done facing towards the sea in anticipation of the
expected line of flight. However, taking off from the Palaly airfield, a mere
four minutes flying time to the target, the Indians approached from the
opposite side. In the blackness of the October night, with even the tail light
switched off, the first MI-8 chopper managed to disgorge its human cargo
and take off before any accurate fire could be directed at it. Within minutes
the next one arrived, landing in a swirling cloud of dust in the football field
in front of the LTTE stronghold.
Silvam and the others had by then hopped across to the other end of the roof
and were blazing away in the darkness, more in the general direction of the
sound as nothing was visible. More choppers were heard approaching, but
by then the Tigers had got an idea of the flight path and the landing zone. In
spite of the fire being devastatingly accurate, strangely none of the choppers
exploded into a ball of fire as Silvam had expected. Unbeknownst to the
LTTE fighters, the firing had been extremely effective and most of the
helicopters which had tried to land, had been severely damaged, barely
managing to limp the short trip home.
Silvam wondered if anyone had managed to get out of the choppers, for the
firing was withering and the choppers too had hardly spent any time on the
ground. He admired the pilots for their courage to be flying blind into a
raging inferno of lead. Then the first tiny flash of light appeared from the
periphery of the field, to be joined shortly by many more pops, as the Indian
tracers started crossing paths with the Tigers’ fire. Silvam had his answer,
the Indian Army had arrived, but in what numbers was difficult to guess,
judging purely from the incoming fire.
In spite of their surprise getting compromised and the raiding force walking
into a well-laid out ambush, Silvam found the agility and aggression of the
Indians in such trying circumstances admirable. They had bounced back
very fast and were trying to regain the lost initiative. Some of them were
advancing rapidly towards the buildings and Prabhakaran wisely decided to
make himself scarce. Sometime during the night he left the premises,
issuing orders to continue the battle. The morning brought no solace to the
Indians, for the planned brigade link-up was nowhere in sight. The advance
had stalled somewhere on the outskirts of the city.
Silvam was present at the final annihilation of the Sikh troops, when they
were completely exposed in broad daylight and without any cover in the
open field. The last of the Sikhs made a courageous bayonet charge. But it
was a perfunctory gesture by a race of men known for their sheer audacity
in battle. Twenty-nine were killed and only one man survived to tell the
tale. The other troops with the Sikhs had however disappeared during the
hours of darkness. Holed up in two houses, they were now giving it back to
the Tigers and would continue to do so for the next eighteen hours. It was as
fine a rearguard action as any and for Silvam, it was his first experience of
the Indian Special Forces. His respect for them grew enormously and would
remain so till the end of his days. Little did he know that their paths would
cross often, violently, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.
Jaffna slipped out of the LTTE’s grasp and so did the rest of the so-called
Eelam country. The remnants of the Tigers silently melted away into the
jungles and Silvam joined them to continue the fight. He was, by any
reckoning, a seasoned fighter, having fought against both the Indian and the
Sri Lankan military and if he had been a member of a regular army, they
would have decorated him a few times by then, for conspicuous gallantry in
action.

OceanofPDF.com
 Sri Lanka
1988
People join us not because we are different,
But because, they are.
—Special Forces saying

While Harry was ploughing through his mandatory Young Officers course
at Mhow, his unit had been flown in to Sri Lanka. The ink on the Indo-Sri
Lanka accord had barely dried when hostilities broke out and a contingent
of the Indian Army, euphemistically called the Indian Peace Keeping Force,
IPKF, was thrown in to enforce the law and in doing so, got embroiled in a
vicious war. Harry was keeping a close watch on the happenings on the
island. The unit had taken casualties very early in the conflict and Harry
was chaffing at the bit to join them, quite unable to focus on his studies.
The moment he finished the last exam, he was off like a shot.
A twenty-two-hour journey and Harry landed in Madras. A liaison
detachment from the unit got in touch and informed him that he needed to
get across ASAP. Harry couldn’t understand the hurry, after all one
Lieutenant was not going to change the course of events if he turned up a
day or two late. The military flights were all chock-a-block, so Harry was
booked on a ship due to sail the next day. The MV Akbar was on the Mecca
route, when it was commandeered by the army for troop movement.
Designed for people who could pay well to travel in comfort, the Akbar was
definitely a superior ship to sail in, as compared to most naval vessels.
Harry spent most of his time between lying on the bunk and trips on the
deck to get some fresh air, basically to get his nausea under control. As a
combat diver, with nearly 200 hours of dive time under his belt, he was
more comfortable under water, than sailing on the surface. The ship took
more than the usual thirty-six hours to cross the Palk Strait, but finally on
the third day they sighted the island of Sri Lanka.
Harry shut the book he had been reading on the history of the island and
went up to the deck. From a distance, in the grey dawn light, only a strip of
green was visible, with tiny palm trees breaking above the foliage. Looking
at the thin wedge of land, it was difficult to imagine that a huge land mass
extended beyond. Gradually the strip broadened, to unveil signs of human
habitation and the palm trees came alive to the gentle breeze blowing inland
from the sea. Harry wondered about this ancient land, its name familiar to
every Hindu from childhood, the country of king Ravana and an island
invaded by Lord Rama.
Over the centuries the island was known by many names and one of the
earliest came from some of the Ashokan rock edicts, where the name
Tambapanni is mentioned. The Ramayana which predates the Mauryan
period and was written perhaps 2,500 years ago, mentions the current name
of Lanka. When the Portuguese took over Jaffna from the resident Sinhala,
they named the place Ceilao. The Dutch East India Company were the next
to arrive, driving the Portuguese out in 1658, followed by the British who
arrived in 1796 and promptly anglicised Ceilao to Ceylon.
There was a time when the island was joined to the Indian subcontinent by
a thin strip of land mass and then around the end of the Ice Age, the sea
level rose and the water severed the connection. But Harry was more
interested in the recent history of Sri Lanka—the first armed landing which
had been carried out in 1795-96 by the British to capture the various port
cities. The Madras Presidency, being the closest, provided the expeditionary
force to capture the three port cities of Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Jaffna.
Harry’s battalion, raised in the Carnatic, formed a part of the invading force
that landed in Ceylon sometime in 1796. It struck Harry that the second
time the unit landed on the island was after nearly two centuries, in 1987.
He had gone through the Digest of Service and there was no mention of the
casualties the force suffered then, but he was certain the butchers’ bill was
much higher in 1987, with three Captains dead and another five wounded
and the game was still in play, indeed it had just begun.
As the ship anchored at the Trincomalee harbour, feverish activity exploded
on the docks. Military vehicles pulled out honking, whistles blew and
everything below was a mass of moving olive green, for there were no
civilians to be seen. A soldier next to Harry was hauling some large bundles
wrapped in cloth and the moment the ship came alongside the quay, he
hurled one below. A tall Sikh was waiting for it and promptly loaded it into
a vehicle. The man tossed another bundle down, which landed with a thud
on the quay and split open scattering colourful Madras check lungis all
around. A Military Police Sergeant noticed and walked across. The last
Harry saw, as he got into the jeep sent to collect him, was the three of them
huddled in a parley. ‘Lots of demand for Indian lungis,’ Harry’s driver told
him as they drove away. Clearly the army had been around long enough to
start dabbling in local business.
Harry drove along a beautiful gently winding road with clear blue sea on
one side and dark green vegetation from across the road throwing shadows
on the placid water. In a few months it was going to get humid, but in
January at that time the weather was balmy. The city of Trincomalee was
built on a peninsula, which divided the inner and the outer harbours
overlooking the Kottiyar Bay. The beauty of Trinco belied the violence
lurking in the unseen shadows and it was difficult to attribute the tales of
death and destruction that Harry had been hearing about the place.
Trinco was one of the finest natural deep harbours and post the fall of
Singapore was the home of the Eastern fleet and the South-Eastern
command under Lord Mountbatten during World War II. Harry drove past
huge fuel tanks built by the British during the war, standing like giant old
sentinels, dominating the bay and in spite of repeated attempts by the Tigers
to wrest control of the place, a small enclave around the harbour remained
throughout with the government forces. The battalion’s base was on a jetty
and consisted of a few cottages. The Adjutant who had been shot in the
hand and had volunteered to get back to the island, greeted Harry warmly
and informed him he would be heading off to join Bravo Team.
A chopper and a truck ride later, Harry reported to the team at Mankulam. A
senior Captain and two Majors sat drinking rum and playing scrabble. The
quarters were in tents and the team was attached to a J&K Battalion. That
night there was a massive amount of firing, with tracers stitching patterns
above them in the sky. Knowing how trigger-happy the Indians were, the
Tigers would often send jitter parties to spook the posts into blowing up
ammo.
‘Your welcome reception,’ Major Sharma, the team commander smilingly
told Harry. However, the fireworks didn’t seem to bother the officers, as
they continued with their drinking and scrabble in the lamplight. They
brought him up to speed on recent happenings and most of the conversation
was about death and casualties. Later in the evening, Harry got a radio
message from a friend informing him about losing a coursemate Rajesh
Kumar in a rocket attack. Harry was distraught, after hearing the news. Not
only coursemates, Rajesh and Harry were from the same platoon and
company in the Academy. Harry got the impression that on an average, the
army was losing a man a day. The violence levels were high and there was
no time for a gradual introduction into operations. The very next day Harry
took charge of ‘Seven Troop’ and hit the jungle for a seek-and-destroy
mission. This was the army’s hard school. You learn on the job, learn quick
or cease to exist.
After the initial clash with the much larger Indian Army, the LTTE very
wisely withdrew from the urban centres and disappeared into their jungle
lairs, to operate as a ghost force, striking at will at the omnipresent Indian
Army. Flying in and out of Mankulam on a regular basis, the operations
continued at a feverish pace and Seven Troop was thrown around all over
the island, for area domination, or in a firefighting role, wherever a local
unit had been mauled by the Tigers. The modus operandi on such occasions
remained the same; load up and disappear into the jungle for thirty-six to
seventy-two-hour ops. The team had fallen in and Harry was waiting to give
his report, a quick summary of the patrol strength, arms and equipment and
the means of communication to be followed, before stepping out on one of
the usual seek-and-destroy missions.
A mess waiter walked up with a glass of neat rum on a tray, with Captain’s
epaulets dipped in the glass, soaking in the spirit. Harry knew the drill. In
one huge swig he drained the glass, the liquid tearing a fiery path down his
throat. He hauled out the cloth epaulets with his teeth. The team commander
and the senior JCO (Junior Commissioned Officer) then rolled them up on
his shoulder. The men clapped, shook hands and the young Captain gave the
command for the team to roll out of the post. The rest of the day, Harry was
belching rum fumes and felt light-headed and woozy. He only hoped that
the Tamil Tigers were not familiar with the smell of the Indian Army rum,
for he was sure the stench would dominate all other smells in the bush. It
was a short twenty-four-hour jaunt in the jungle, and the next day Harry
decided to roll back to camp. On the way, he got a message to check out a
few huts in a small hamlet where some hostile movement had been reported.
A couple of dilapidated huts were quickly cordoned. The place looked
devoid of human presence and was rather quiet. As Harry cautiously walked
towards the huts, a few children of varying sizes, peered and sized him up,
from behind clothes and sheets which were hanging outside to dry. There
was a sudden movement from behind one of the sheets, and an emaciated
man tried to flee. He was brought down immediately and Harry questioned
him as his children watched in utter shock. The kids were so taken with the
violence that they forgot to cry and stood clutching each other for courage,
watching their father get battered. Then the youngest started to whimper
and Harry knew it was just a matter of time before the whole lot of them
would have joined the Ceylon crying chorus. Harry didn’t like doing it in
front of the kids, so they dragged the man into the nearest hut.
It was a barren mud and thatch hovel, with a poster of a familiar-looking
god on one wall with a few utensils stacked on a shelf below it. In the
gloom, Harry saw two women in one corner of the hut. One of them was
clearly in the throes of advanced labour, while the other was kneeling next
to her uttering encouragement and instructions. Perhaps, she was a local
midwife or a relative. The pregnant woman was pinching her lips to control
herself from crying aloud as she threw a scornful stare at Harry.
Briefly, Harry stood rooted to the spot, for he had never seen a woman give
birth, and also he was unsure how to handle the situation. Labour and
delivery were never a part of the training curriculum at the military
academy. The man was still lying at Harry’s feet beseeching in a foreign
tongue his innocence and mercy. Harry could see they were poor people and
that it was too domestic and personal an environment for violence. He was
suddenly disgusted and walked out into the sunlight leaving the man
behind.
A few days later, Harry passed the huts and ran into the woman grinding
flour as her children were sitting around, the older ones helping her with the
chore. They threw him a hateful look. Through the interpreter, Harry was
informed that she had had a miscarriage. Harry consoled himself that she
already had enough kids and one less would do no harm in the long run. A
novel abortion method for sure, he thought, smiling to himself: just barge
into the delivery room, armed to the teeth dragging the husband behind. But
for sure, these acts had contributed to the vicious cycle of militancy.

There had been intelligence inputs of renewed LTTE activity south of

Puliyankulam and Harry was sent across to meet an EPRLF (Eelam
People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front) source for some information.
Harry entered the room with the EPRLF man following. The source spoke a
smattering of English and Hindi and claimed he had been trained by the
Indians. When Harry had questioned him about India earlier, he had given
an evasive answer. Harry wondered if he had picked up his Hindi by
watching movies, because some of his sentences had a very familiar
Bollywood ring to them. The source confirmed they had extracted whatever
information they could from a suspected LTTE prisoner and the intelligence
was actionable. There was LTTE movement on a disused jungle path that
passed quite close to a Tiger camp in the jungles, east of Puliyankulam.
Harry had insisted on meeting the source personally to corroborate the
intelligence inputs.
It was a tiny dark room illuminated by a shaft of sunlight coming in through
a narrow window on top. The floor seemed wet and slippery and there was
a disagreeable dank smell. As his eyes got accustomed to the dark, Harry
checked the walls expecting the prisoner to be sitting slumped in one of the
corners and then he noticed him. The man or what was once a man, was
hanging upside down from the ceiling, like a lump of meat one sees in a
butcher’s shop. There was just a slight sway as the body swung in and out
of the shaft of light; the only indication that life still flickered in him. The
EPRLF guy wearing a floral shirt and a lungi stood behind, a cigarette
dangling insolently from his lips, as the smoke spiralled lazily up in the
stillness. The sunbeam was bright, cutting across the room and one could
see smoke and dust particles hanging in limbo. In the background
somewhere, Harry could hear the loud buzzing of a fly—clearly disturbed
by human presence, it was agitated now. The setting, Harry thought would
be a film director’s delight, for he had seen it often in movies. Except this
was for real.
Harry felt no revulsion, for the man didn’t seem human anymore. He was
naked, with deep lacerations on his whole body. Clearly, whoever had
interrogated him, wasn’t too bothered about doing it scientifically and was
only keen on inflicting pain. Like a drunk butcher being creative with a
knife, he had slashed the body randomly all over. Blood flowed down those
furrows copiously and that’s when Harry realised the wetness on the floor
and the odd smell were of fresh human blood. The body suddenly twisted
and was face-to-face with him. All Harry could see were the whites of the
man’s eyes in the dark face, with the blood dripping off the lids, as they
made contact with his eyes. He thought there was an appeal in those eyes or
maybe he was imagining things.
‘Shoot him,’ said Harry sharply, turning away and shocked for the first time
at this bloody apparition.
‘Waste of a bullet Saar,’ said Lungi the informer, ‘he already dead.’
‘No, he is not!’ Harry insisted.
‘Tell me Saar what do man feel most?’ and Harry wondered where this was
leading to.
‘Let’s see…umm…hunger, sleep…sex, oh,’ Harry answered, ‘ok I give up,’
it was turning into a classroom charade with Lungi clearly pleased with his
questioning.
‘See, you react,’ he said pinching Harry’s forearm suddenly, ‘it about pain
Saar. Then see this,’ and he stubbed the cigarette on the man’s face. There
was a slight sizzle of burning flesh and no reaction, not even the slightest
flinch or muscle spasm. The man was clearly beyond pain. Point proven, he
was dead, QED. Harry walked out into the sunlight an enlightened man.
Welcome to Sri Lanka.
It struck Harry that the degeneration of a society could be gauged to a
certain extent from the degree of violence it gets inured to and its changing
mores on sex. The average Sri Lankan Tamil was way ahead in both these
aspects. There was too much death and destruction around for them to get
shocked any more and if life is uncertain and short, people tend to enjoy
themselves while they can. Harry recalled someone telling him that in
Vavuniya, Lady Chatterley’s Lover ran to a full house for months, if not
years. Only the Tigers and the IPKF were supposed to abstain from sex. But
then, the IPKF had no choice and as for the former, they didn’t need it, they
had something better; they had the IPKF to fight against, for an adrenalin
rush like no other.
That very night, Harry left for the post at Puliyankulam by road. By the time
the rest of the team flew in the next morning with the team commander,
Harry with his troop had already slipped out of the post, on a seventy-two-
hour ambush operation. The going was initially easy, as they marched along
a tar road, feeling rather exposed, under the bright light of what was called
in the old American west, a ‘Comanche moon’. Very soon the weight started
telling and the men behind in the column gradually adapted the head down,
shoulders hunched position, with the mind switched to drift mode,
sustaining itself by latching on to more pleasurable thoughts of home and
better times. Harry wondered what he would have been doing then if he had
failed his probation and had been reverted to his parent infantry unit. He
would probably have been attending one of the numerous boring parties in
the mess in some peace station, or tucked in bed fast asleep. Then his mind
drifted back to his probation in the Special Forces.

The first thing that had caught his eye as he walked into the Adjutant’s
office was a poster on the wall which said, ‘People join us not because we
are different, but because they are’. It was a standard army barrack with
pictures and the usual assortment of trophies, and a large desk in the far
corner. The Adjutant was missing, so Harry peeked out and the soldier on
duty confirmed that the sahib was inside. Just when Harry was about to turn
and leave, a thin voice from somewhere under the desk had asked who he
might be. Harry saluted and rattled off his name and rank and that he was
reporting for probation. A pair of eyes broke surface from behind the desk
and sized him up. The face disappeared again.
‘What are those elephants doing on your uniform?’
‘Sir, I have been commissioned into the Madras Regiment. They are the
regimental insignia.’
‘Don’t want any monkeys or elephants on the uniform while you are around
here and take that bandmaster’s dress off.’
Harry had found it unnerving speaking to a desk. Briefly, he wondered, if
the Adjutant was playing with himself behind the desk. The weather was
awfully cold; anything to stay warm. Half the face surfaced again.
‘What would you like to do?’
‘Sir, lunch would be fine.’
‘Fuck your lunch!’ the voice was quivering and in agitation the complete
face was finally revealed. The Adjutant seemed to be shocked by Harry’s
answer. Harry figured out that there was a heater somewhere under the desk
and the Captain had been warming his hands. He was clearly loath to be
pulled away from it.
‘I am talking about doing your PPT (Physical Performance Test) or BPET
(Battle Physical Endurance Test).’
Harry had opted for the former, as it was an easier physical test—a mile run
in PT rig (shorts and T-shirt) followed by a set of functional and flexibility
exercises. He was told to report to the PT ground at 1600 hrs. With only
thirty minutes to go, Harry just managed to dump his stuff and quickly
change. His probation NCO Havildar Jai Baksh was waiting under a tree,
hands tucked under his armpits, looking bored and disinterested. Harry
noticed, he didn’t wish him or stand at attention, nor did he ask Harry his
name.
‘What’s your age sahib?’ was his strange question, instead.
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Well, I am thirty-two and if you can keep pace with me, you will come in
excellent timing.’
With that Jai Baksh had whipped around, clicked the stopwatch button and
disappeared down the road at a fast clip. Harry had latched on to his heels
like a bored dog chasing a vehicle, disturbed by his immodest remark and
determined to make him eat his arrogant words. The road wound around the
hill, past the MI (Medical Inspection) room and the officer’s mess at a
manageable gradient and Harry settled into his stride. He kept his eyes fixed
on Jai Baksh’s feet and maintained the distance, waiting for an opportune
moment to overtake him. Then all of a sudden the road turned sharply and
the gradient rose to a steep sixty degrees. Jai Baksh smoothly shifted gear,
leaned into the slope and sprinted into the swirling mist at the top of the
hill.
The sudden burst of speed stunned Harry and he lost all confidence seeing
Jai Baksh’s form disappear rapidly from sight. Harry couldn’t believe
anybody could run so fast. His lungs were complaining as he ran down the
other side to see Jai Baksh, standing exactly the way he had met him; hands
tucked under his armpits, not a drop of sweat on his brow, not a breath out
of tune. To see him like this, when Harry was in a state of collapse, had
shaken his faith in himself. If everybody was like this man here, Harry had
thought, then it would be better heading back to the parent unit, instead of
undergoing further misery.
‘Fail sahib,’ Jai Baksh had said.
‘Can’t be,’ Harry gasped, bent over and clutching his stomach.
‘In here,’ Jai Baksh continued, ‘if you don’t make excellent timings you
fail. There are no good and fair standards.’
‘But those timings are for a flat course, clearly there must be some
compensation for a mountain run,’ Harry had retorted.
‘Where is the mountain sahib?’ Jai Baksh had exclaimed incredulously.
Soon, worse was to follow. The next morning was the dreaded BPET test. A
two-mile run carrying a small pack, water bottle and a rifle in fourteen
minutes and forty-five seconds. It was a test where even to fail one had to
exert. There were thirty other soldiers present, a majority from the Madras
Regiment and the rest from various other regiments of the army on their
final leg of the probation. Each man a volunteer and eager to be badged into
the SF. Amongst this rabble of nervous young men, with great equanimity
stood a huge ram with an old jeep tyre around his neck. His name was Naal
and he was the mascot of the unit.
Saved from the butcher’s knife while the unit was on exercise in a desert
somewhere in Rajasthan, Naal was attached to the MT (motor transport)
section, on their ration strength and attended the PT parade regularly.
However, age and senility were catching up rapidly with the old goat,
noticeable in his erratic behaviour. He had been misbehaving regularly. Just
that morning in a moment of mischief or ennui, one wouldn’t know, as the
senior JCO sat washing utensils in the tank, Naal couldn’t resist the
temptation to ram him in the butt and roll him over into the water. He was
on a punishment run then and stoically bore it like an old soldier.
Harry noticed nobody seemed to regard the spectacle as bizarre. The
Adjutant made a speech introducing him as a Madras Regiment officer and
telling the men to ensure they stayed ahead of the sahib. Then he turned and
reminded Harry, that as he was an officer and came from the same regiment
as the men around who wore elephants on their uniform, he better lead the
field. The whistle blew and the bunch took off, like little kids racing home
after school. Harry saw the big ram weave his way through the crowd
jostling for position, till he had galloped his way to the leaders. Naal was
one hell of a competitive ram, Harry recalled with a wry smile—had he
been a man he would have made a fine soldier for sure!
The entire bunch, along with the galloping goat, disappeared from sight
around the first corner. By the time Harry sailed in, they had stopped taking
the time, the men were into their second set of tests and Naal was chewing
grass, having got rid of the tyre. This was getting to be humiliating. The
Captain supervising the tests looked rather surprised, as if perplexed why a
man couldn’t run faster.
Anyway, the worst was yet to come—the dreaded speed marches—
remembered Harry. 20, 30 and the 40-kilometre timed runs, lugging back-
breaking weight. Harry remembered starting the 40-kilometre speed march,
sometime at three o’clock in the afternoon, with Jai Baksh pacing him. With
nearly 60 pounds, the distance had to be completed in well under six hours.
The afternoon faded into evening, as the shadows lengthened across the
road. Just over 30-kilometre and Harry had felt the first wave of fatigue
sweep over him, his legs seemed like lead and he slowed to a walk. He
recalled it was dark, when Jai Baksh shone a torch on his face to check for
signs of dehydration.
All along he had been encouraging Harry to maintain the pace, but then
strangely he suggested a stop. A villager on a bicycle had joined them for a
chat and Jai Baksh very innocuously asked if Harry would like to place his
pack on the bicycle. The villager agreed and offered to give Harry a lift too.
Briefly, Harry had been tempted, but his muddled mind told him there was
something fishy in the offer. He declined.
It was standard practice, as he discovered later, when at a vulnerable
moment in the speed march, the pacer would suggest shortcuts such as
taking a lift. The slightest indication that an individual had succumbed to
these offers meant it was RTU (Return to Unit) immediately. Harry vividly
remembered the faint lantern lights in the darkness ahead, as he squeezed
whatever little resolve he had left in him to make it to the finish point. The
Adjutant had driven up from behind.
‘You have seven minutes to spare. There is a bridge about half-a-kilometre
ahead, you will touch it and be back. I will see you at the bridge. This is
where we’ll see if you are SF material or not.’
That was probably the toughest kilometre Harry had ever covered. In the SF
they firmly believed in the adage that, ‘It is not possible to know how much
is just enough, until one has experienced how much is more than enough.’
The scouts stopped suddenly, jolting Harry out of his reverie. ‘Snap out of
the daydreaming,’ he reproached himself, ‘grief befalls you the moment you
lose touch with the environment.’ The lead scout pointed at a milestone
which was a landmark and they veered right to enter the dark confines of
the jungle. Another three hours and they arrived at a fire lane running
straight like a ruler north. The men took positions and Harry settled down
for the wait. On the third night, just when Harry had given up all hope of a
contact, they heard the sound of a tractor approaching. The four kills they
bagged, coming after months of toil, tasted sweet.

OceanofPDF.com
 Bihar Company Post—Mannar
If you take one step back,
You will never take another step forward.
—An American prison saying

From the road junction, Seven Troop was tasked to fly to the western coast
and was attached to a Bihar Battalion in Mannar. For now, the exultation of
the kills and Silvam’s threats were quickly forgotten in the ceaseless and
hectic pace of life and events. The usual jungle bashing commenced. Harry
wished he had a book on the local flora and fauna, for at times he felt more
like an armed forest ranger than a soldier. In the absence of any concrete
intelligence, it was a gross waste of effort he thought, bushwhacking in the
wilderness. With so much time spent outdoors, he wondered if joining the
Indian Forest Service would have been a better idea. Harry loved wildlife as
most of his childhood had been spent hunting with his father; however, after
the last contact, the Tamil Tigers in the jungles had remained elusive like
the mystical yeti. He wondered if Jim Corbett, with his tracking skills
would have got better results tracking these Tigers. After all, he was once
asked to track the notorious dacoit Sultana in the Terai belt.
The only difference there was the rations they carried. The Bihar mess they
were attached to, packed fresh tiger prawns and Harry was a little taken
aback when he pulled out his meal in the jungle. He ate the lot on the first
day, fearing they may perish quickly in the heat. Later, when they came
back to the post, he discovered the source of the prawns. The main road
connecting Mannar to Colombo ran past the post and trucks loaded with the
fresh catch of the day were stopped at the check-post for a search. As an
unofficial toll, the driver offloaded enough fish to be allowed to proceed.
In the absence of any concrete human or electronic intelligence, the usual
modus operandi was followed. A couple of prominent jungle and village
tracks were identified for laying ambushes. Those were early days of
electronic intelligence for the Indian Army and the crude direction-finders
operated by the Signals detachment gave a general direction of any
presence, suspected or otherwise, without a specific distance. Harry
suspected their equipment picked up animal interference more often than
human.
Since Special Forces do not hold ground, they depend on the local
Company Commander wherever attached, for terrain and enemy
information. No local commander willingly shared this information,
especially regarding the latter, as it reflected poorly on the resident troops if
the Special Forces guys managed to get a kill. Often the local commander
intensified his operations when the Special Forces troop arrived, to ruffle
the environment and ensure they didn’t get any results. Intercepts confirmed
that local LTTE cadres were also aware when a Special Forces team arrived
and instructions were usually to cease movement and lie low till they
moved on.
Harry heard the usual dreaded ‘Jai Hind Sahib’ and opened his eyes to see
through his mosquito net a muted Sri Lankan starlit night and the silhouette
of a palm frond flapping in the breeze, like the ears of an irritated elephant.
Harry had been dreaming of home and for a second couldn’t figure out
where he was. There had been regular dreams of home lately. No doubt
stress, privation and fear had a significant hand. Such had been the pace of
movement that it took a while on waking to get his bearings right. The night
before, Harry had got up to relieve himself and had walked into a wall
hurting his nose.
The whisper became urgent as the man shook his arm. ‘At two o’clock we
march Sahib.’ It took a bit longer this time for Harry to focus and he
couldn’t seem to explain the stars, the palm tree and the voice—familiar but
unidentifiable. Harry thought he was still dreaming. All movement was
done at night to maintain surprise and as the distances were short, on an
average 10 to 15 kilometres, departure invariably happened post-midnight.
The odd time made it difficult to get much sleep and the jungle in any case
was too uncomfortable to get any rest.
There was a quiet hustle, as shadowy figures carried out last-minute
preparations. Radio antennae were sticking out and Harry told the operators
to twist them down. The men fell in and Harry walked down the rows,
having a brief chat with the senior NCOs. He stopped suddenly, as the sharp
smell of Lifebuoy soap jarred his nostrils in the clean night air. ‘Alright,
step out whoever has used the soap.’ One of his men stepped forward.
‘Mody, you know the orders, no artificial smells when we are hitting the
jungles.’
‘Just thought I will have a quick bath sahib,’ replied the young soldier
sheepishly, ‘the next one will be after seventy-two hours. Have landed up
with a rash in this muggy weather.’
‘Well then stay back and enjoy your bath. You can’t jeopardise everyone’s
life just because you can’t handle a bit of rash. Show me the man who is not
carrying some sort of a skin problem,’ answered Harry angrily.
A final briefing followed, hushed prayers, cocking of weapons, the sound
loud and incongruous with the quietude that otherwise prevailed. The team
commander shook his hand, patted a few backs and wished them luck. The
Biharis had lent two of their boys who knew the area around and they
stepped forward to lead. The first few hours were across open cultivation
and then the dark outline of the jungle was visible.
The initial part of the operation turned out to be a complete farce. First they
lost their way and the Bihar boys spent an inordinate amount of time
chatting and squabbling about direction. A track picked at random for an
ambush was compromised as an elephant and her calf came calling. Harry
could hear her trumpeting some distance away and got the men into an
unused hut just in time as she got the whiff of human presence and went
berserk, uprooting trees and bushes. Harry lay outside hearing her run amok
in the undergrowth, with the rocket launcher cocked and ready, wondering
if the anti-tank round would be good enough for a charging elephant and
hoping he wouldn’t have to use it. In the grainy green light of the night
vision device, he could see her silhouette and the shining pinpricks of her
eyes, as her little baby stood petrified, watching big mama throw a tantrum.
‘Why is she so upset, what have we done?’ whispered Girwar who was a
desert man and more familiar with camels.
‘Probably having her periods brother,’ answered a quiet voice from behind
in a Haryanvi accent.
Harry was relieved as the elephant’s trumpeting faded into the distance. He
peered into the darkness nervously and wondered what else the island was
going to throw at them—a swarm of LTTE-trained vampire bats swooping
out of the trees wouldn’t be too out of place. But nobody wanted to step
back into the jungle then and Harry decided to lay an ambush next to a
village they had passed.
The next site was a thicket at the periphery of the jungle and turned out to be
the crapping joint for the village next door. By first light, a dozen or so
locals were sitting with them and beseeching Harry to be allowed to attend
their call of nature. That’s when he noticed the small pond behind them.
Harry gave up and headed for home. It was a relief to be out of the jungle
and be able to see the open sky. They passed the village school and some of
the older kids had already arrived early to sweep and clean the classes. The
other kids trotted along with the patrol, keeping their heads and eyes down.
The Sri Lankan Tamils took their education seriously. For Harry, one of the
most endearing pictures in Sri Lanka was to see kids of all ages trudging off
to school. Girls with oiled-pleated pony tails, a fresh flower tucked behind
the ear, and the boys with a tikka on the forehead, always in clean white
shirts, and come guns or guerrillas, bomb or bullets, the schools were never
closed. As Harry watched the kids go by, he remembered a morning street
scene in Puliyankulam. A few folks were buying vegetables, the usual
pedestrians and a few kids of various sizes, with bags on their back, were
heading to school. Suddenly there was a burst of fire from the sentry post at
the corner of the street. The gunner was testing his weapon. However, the
reaction on the street was predictable—everybody had hit the deck. The
kids were the first to get up, dust their clothes and continued towards
school; impressive commitment thought Harry.
That’s why perhaps they were so good at improvised explosives. The
education was put to good use. Harry wondered if their favourite subject
was chemistry, or perhaps a specialised course called TNT or RDX or some
such name. As they passed the village boundary, there was still scrub and
undergrowth around, and in the distance he could see cultivation and huts.
That’s when he noticed slipper marks and a half-eaten biscuit packet tossed,
it seemed, in a hurry, on a small path veering into the jungle. ‘Well,’ thought
Harry, ‘it’s too early for a villager to be eating biscuits and heading towards
the jungle.’ He decided to investigate.
‘Spread out,’ he told the men, ‘Sathish on point and careful, I have a gut
feel there is going to be a contact.’
They carefully made their way back on the narrow trail through waist-high
bush and were still some distance away from the jungle when Harry
stopped to consult the Bihar boys for direction and read the map. That was
when the team commander came on the line through their wireless handset.
He was screaming something about an ambush, so Harry started to explain,
when he was rudely told to shut up.
‘You have walked into a bloody ambush Harry.’
As the words sank in, Harry’s legs went weak and he cast a furtive look
around, as if, any sudden movement might draw fire. The panic in the
Major’s voice scared Harry and he dropped the handset with the voice still
screaming expletives out of it. His mind went numb and for some reason, he
saw his mother’s face and felt very very sorry for her. She never wanted
him to join the army. Some of the men around noticed the change in his
expression and as Harry sank first to his knees and then flat on the ground,
the whole bunch followed immediately. Harry passed the word down, put
them in a defensive perimeter and they lay doggo for the next half hour.

Silvam had spent the month recuperating from his gunshot wound in the
Mannar camp. Being closest to the Indian coast, it was the best-stocked and
often used as a transit base for the movement of LTTE cadres and their
wounded to and from India. He was heading out of the camp when the sentry
posted at the periphery of the jungle came running towards him. He was a
young boy and clearly in a blue funk, as he blurted out the presence of the
patrol coming on the path behind him. Silvam calmed him down and
borrowing the sniper rifle from his buddy, shinnied up a tree. He had grown
up climbing coconut trees and this big banyan was an easy climb. Through
the telescopic sight he saw them half-a-kilometre away, coming in from the
village end, weaving in and out through the scrub.
As he watched, his mind was working out the details of the opportunity
ambush he would lay, for he had only four fighters and the kid clearly had
yet to be tested under fire. Then again he knew the contact would invite
reinforcements from the Indians and draw attention to the camp. His other
concern was the young Indian woman journalist who he was supposed to
escort to Mannar town and who was then following behind with the second
party, at a distance. He got on the Sanyo walkie-talkie and spoke to the
senior commander in the camp, a couple of kilometres further inside the
jungle.
‘Twenty-strong and well-spaced out Anna. It’s the SF patrol which landed
two days ago at the Bihar post. I am in position to attack.’
‘How many will you get?’ the commander asked.
‘Should get the first three for sure, including the officer; the rest could
manoeuvre around me.’
‘Okay, break contact and link up with the party escorting the newspaper
woman.’
The conversation was intercepted in real time by the Divisional Signals unit
in Vavuniya and putting two and two together they narrowed it down to
Harry’s patrol out in the field. A quick call was patched in to the SF team
commander at the post by the Colonel of the Signals Regiment.
Silvam watched them getting closer. He focused on a tall man walking third
in the column. Clearly the officer, as the radio operator was just behind him.
Through the telescopic sight he looked close enough to be touched. What a
pity, Anna didn’t want him to engage. If only circumstances had been
different—the Indian woman wasn’t along, the camp not a concern—he
could have easily dropped a few of them. He studied the officer, who was
heavily bearded, with his black head cloth loosely tied in a knot around his
neck as a scarf. Nonchalantly he walked behind the two scouts, who were
wearing body armour, and the group as a whole looked extremely alert.
Something about the officer looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it and
before he could work it out, he saw the man stop and take the handset from
the radio operator.
Silvam wiped the sweat off his eyes and a second later, when he looked
again through the scope, the entire patrol had vanished. Desperately he
scanned the foreground in a sweeping arc, back and forth, but there was no
sign of them. Unbelievable, as if it was all a figment of his imagination. It
just spooked Silvam, for he got a nasty feeling that perhaps they had got
wind of his presence and may be stalking him.
Slithering down from the tree, he hurriedly retraced his steps back into the
familiar depths of the jungle. Running into the group following him, he
turned them around and hustled them back towards the smaller satellite
camp.
Shradha Seth could see the panic on everyone’s face as she was roughly
seized by the arm and turned back towards the camp she had just left. She
was amazed to see the man they called Silvam and who spoke passable
English and excellent Hindi, in spite of his handicap, set off at a fast jog.
There were other occasions in the last five days when army patrols had been
sighted, but she had never noticed any sort of panic. The present situation
was clearly different and in spite of not understanding all the alarmed
jabbering in Tamil happening around her, the purport of the exchange was
clear and for the first time since she had landed in Sri Lanka she was
frightened.
She cursed her journalistic instincts and her desire to be a frontline conflict
reporter. Why couldn’t she have stuck to Bollywood tales like so many of
her peers from the profession? It had taken her all of two months to fix the
trip and it had involved meeting the LTTE contact person in London, who
had dramatically, with a wave of his hands, pronounced how safe she was in
the hands of the Tigers and that she would be given a chance not only to
interview senior commanders, but also may participate in some live action
if she was keen. And then here she was running for her life, like a guilty
fugitive in an unknown jungle, from none other than her own countrymen!

After lying doggo for thirty minutes, Harry finally mustered the courage to
order a move forward. Within a couple of hundred yards they ran into a tree
under which they noticed footprints, boot marks and other evidence of a
hasty evacuation by a body of men. He looked up the tree and knew
instinctively where the sniper had perched himself and watched them and
the thought of how close he had come to meeting his maker made his legs
go weak and took all the fight out of him. In the previous camp the team
had hit in the Muttur belt, his troop had taken a few IED casualties and had
got stuck in a heavily-mined and booby-trapped area. They had been
rendered useless thereafter for the rest of the fight and had to wait till the
engineers could clear a path for them to come out. They had shared the
nerve-wracking ordeal with him. It then occurred to him that if there was
any experience worse than being stuck in the middle of a minefield, it was
definitely the realisation that you were in the presence of a sniper. Harry
turned to the senior NCO who had sidled up and was watching him intently.
‘What do you say Zile?’ he asked him in a whisper.
‘Any further sahib,’ answered Zile Singh, his brows knitted in concern,
‘would be asking for trouble. For sure there is a camp in there,’ he
continued, pointing a finger into the jungle, ‘and the only reason they didn’t
engage us, was to avoid a fight in proximity to the camp. If we go in
unprepared like this,’ and he looked at the body of men crouching behind
and then gravely into Harry’s eyes, ‘take my word sahib, none of us is
coming out alive. Call a gunship and take an approximate shoot.’
‘Good advice Zile,’ said Harry, ‘suggest we spread out a bit in buddy pairs
to receive any escaping parties that may come our way when the bombing
starts.’
Harry hunkered down and spread the map on the ground and once he had
worked out his own position, did a bit of guesswork on the location of the
camp, narrowing it down to a couple of grid reference squares. There were
all sorts of shoots in the army and this one, he thought with a wry grin,
would be a lucky shoot. He called for air support and passed on the target
grid references. Then he looked at his watch and waited.
Within half-an-hour he heard the distant drone of the approaching gunship.
He signalled to his men to break up and get into their positions at the edge
of the forest. Harry tried to peer through the jungle canopy to get a glimpse
of the gunship, but his vision was limited. Then a resounding bang
reverberated through the jungle, followed by the heavy clatter of the
cannons.

Shradha was sitting with Silvam in a small satellite camp where they had
stopped to get their breath back and where a few LTTE fighters could be
seen gathering and preparing to take on the Indians. Silvam gave them
instructions and then comforted Shradha who was looking noticeably
scared. The information coming from the outlying sentries was
encouraging. The patrol had halted and gone to ground.
‘They won’t dare to come any further,’ Silvam confidently declared to her,
‘an infantry patrol that came this way perhaps out of ignorance, but this
bunch has learned from experience what happens when you try and hit one
of our camps. In any case their numbers are not enough to cause us alarm.
They are all dead men if they cross the big banyan tree.’
He had barely finished his sentence when the faint drone of the chopper was
heard and immediately the whole camp exploded into a frenzy of activity.
Radios came alive, tarpaulins were pulled across open mortar pits and
everybody started rushing into the bunkers. Startled Shradha looked at
Silvam who just uttered one word, ‘Kotikai’ and then muttering the word
‘crocodile’ in English, he grabbed her by the wrist and ran out of the camp
by another path. The group had barely gone 400 yards from the camp when
the 500-kilogram high-explosive bomb hit the southern edge of the main
camp. It was indeed a lucky drop, for the explosion obliterated and flattened
everything in a radius of 20 metres. Trees crashed and mangled bodies flew
through the air like rag dolls, some landing on the other side of the camp.
The damage would have been far greater had it not been for the thick trees
which muffled the sound and impact by the time it reached the escaping
group. Shradha was amazed to discover herself flat on the ground, for she
had no recollection of having dropped to the jungle floor voluntarily. In a
daze she saw herself being hauled up by Silvam and dragged down the path
as the jungle canopy crackled to machine gun fire. Empty shell cases rained
from above like hail, searing their way angrily through the foliage and
hissing like angry snakes wherever they made contact with dry vegetation
on the ground.
They made it to the periphery of the jungle with the sounds of death
receding in the background. The group paused there, looking out over scrub
country and the habitation beyond. Silvam took stock of the situation and
swinging east had barely gone a few steps when they came under fire. He
had run into the last buddy pair deployed by Harry. Silvam detached two of
his fighters to run the gauntlet of fire by drawing their attention, while he
along with Shradha and two other men turned in the opposite direction.

Harry was standing in the open collecting the men, when he heard the
helicopter gunship and looked up. As the bird turned, Harry could see the
sinister bubble snout and the sun reflecting off its cockpit glass. He stood
there looking at it and envying the pilots—no walking, no jungles and high
enough to be safe. It was still circling innocuously like a vulture, but getting
lower. It struck Harry that perhaps it was hunting for more game and like
him, the pilot anticipated the prey to run out of the jungle after the
bombing, offering an easy strafing target. Someone from behind in the
column abused and remarked that it was going to attack. In fact there had
been quite a few occasions of ‘blue on blue’ as the army called it, friendly
fire on friendly troops, where gunships had been involved.
The Air Force had some of their choppers shot up early in the conflict
trying to support ground troops and as a consequence the helicopter gunship
made its entry to provide close air support. The only problem was that
sometimes, they got too close in their enthusiasm to be able to differentiate
between friend and foe. Among the few occasions the LTTE stations went
on high alert and their radios crackled to alarmed chatter, was when the
Indians used an 84 mm Carl Gustav rocket launcher, or the crude
improvised automatic SLR (Self-loading Rifle) called One Charlie, which
had a tremendous noise and packed a nasty punch, or when a gunship was
sighted prowling the skies overhead.
For a minute or so it disappeared from Harry’s line of sight and when it
reappeared it had dropped height significantly. Suddenly the heavy ‘thock,
thock’ of the engine turned into the scream of a banshee and Harry looked
up to see the MI-25, Akbar as the Indians called it, or the Crocodile, the
name the LTTE preferred going by its looks, dip its nose and drop into a
steep dive, like a hungry kingfisher scooping down on an unsuspecting fish.
It was coming straight at them and Harry turned back to see some of the
men at the end of the column disappearing into the safer confines of the
jungle. Within seconds the trickle turned to a mini-stampede, as the lot
scattered for cover. Harry shouted at them to stand their ground, for he
didn’t want the pilots to jump to any wrong conclusions. A couple of his
men hung around with Harry, unsure on the course of action to be taken. He
turned and saw the gunship bearing down like nemesis, the pilots visible at
the controls.
He stood rooted to the spot mesmerised by the evil-looking iron bird of prey
with the missile pods visible on its sides, as he expected one of them to
explode to life with a flash any second. He imagined the pilot flicking the
gun lever as they made a last bid attempt to verify the target with base
operations before commencing the attack. The slightest hesitation on the
part of the pilot, to use the 23 mm cannon or fire the 57 mm rockets…but
the gunship did neither and instead opened up with a smaller machine gun,
the rounds ploughing into the ground, thudding into tree trunks and
randomly zipping through the foliage in a frenzy of destruction. Just 300
feet above them, it suddenly pulled up and roared away over the jungle.
Perhaps the pilot realised he had been trigger-happy and had fired at his
own troops, for the sound of the gunship receded in no time, as it flew back
to its base in Vavuniya. Harry hadn’t moved a muscle, as he slowly released
his breath and looked back at his men, who were reluctantly popping out of
the forest cover like ferrets, grinning sheepishly. Miraculously, only one
man was slightly wounded by a splinter and he was quickly patched up.
As the troop headed out, someone noticed two people running in the
shoulder-high bush beyond the effective range of their weapons. They
reminded Harry of partridges being flushed out and he wondered if it was
the Tiger ambush squad. He could see no weapons and hesitated but the
scouts opened fire and Harry joined them gleefully in taking potshots. They
then broke apart and ran in opposite directions and he saw their heads
bobbing like rabbits amongst the thick undergrowth, till they disappeared
from sight.

Silvam paused to look back when he heard the sound of the distant firing
and knew his boys had managed to divert the attention of the patrol. Taking
a detour, he swung back east and in an hour they hit the Colombo-Mannar
main road. Hailing an empty truck on its way to Mannar, he put Shradha in
the cabin with instructions to the driver to deposit her at the Bihar company
post on its way.
‘Remember,’ he said turning to her, ‘under normal circumstances we would
have blindfolded you. Now you have a fair idea of the camp. However, you
are a journalist and we trust your professional ethics. But,’ he continued,
massaging his wounded arm which had become quite painful, ‘if people get
killed on our side because of your loose tongue, then by God I will seek you
out and slit your throat. They cannot interrogate you, so stick to the story
that you hitched a ride from Colombo and were to meet a contact from our
side who never showed up. And make sure you write nice things about us
sister.’
Shradha was taken aback by the sudden threat, delivered by this mild-
looking, handicapped militant leader and before she could respond, Silvam
had slipped back into the shadows of the forest.

An hour later, shaken and tired, Harry hit the post. Another great outing
came to an end in Sri Lanka and he worried if his poor heart could take
much more of this adrenalin-pumping excitement. The Major looked at him
expectantly to make some report.
‘Nothing much to show Sir. A detailed after action report will follow,
though I have a score to settle with a gunship pilot,’ Harry replied.
‘Perhaps you would have an answer to that,’ the Major said, looking over
Harry’s shoulder.
Harry turned around and his eyes rested on the last thing he would have
expected to see in an Indian Army post, in war-torn Sri Lanka; the figure of
a fair young woman, slumped against the burnt-out trunk of a coconut tree,
drinking tea. Handing his weapon to his buddy, he walked across and
introduced himself. She looked shaken and utterly spent and even in her
dishevelled state he found her to be pretty, in an intellectual sort of a way.
As she got up and introduced herself, he realised she was tall and
athletically built and her accent had just an insinuation of a foreign
education. She rattled off the story already mentioned to the Major, about
coming in from Colombo and not meeting her LTTE contact, but her words
and condition were bereft of conviction.
Harry looked at her and smiled understandingly.
‘You came out from there, Shradha,’ he said, pointing towards the jungle, ‘I
respect your professional ethics and so will go along with your cock-and-
bull story. But understand that in the final analysis, we are both batting for
the same team and any information that helps in reducing Indian casualties,
should justify breaching any code of conduct, or your so-called journalistic
ethics.’
Shradha didn’t contradict him, but looked away to hide her thoughts.
Neither of them broached the subject again. She weighed him up quickly.
Tall and gaunt, with humorous eyes. A shave, haircut and a bit of home-
cooked food would do him good. She could guess he had just come out of
the bush and in all probability was the man responsible for her sudden flight
and her close shave with death. She could sense strength and violence, very
delicately balanced in his quiet demeanour. As they talked, she discovered
he had a dry sense of humour and a quick wit, which came from having
soldiered, commanded and travelled. She realised that talking to him was
the much-needed balm she required, to drive away her fear and fatigue and
she also realised, that given adequate time, she would fall for him, head
over heels.
As they chatted, intermittently her mind would drift to a different place, a
different time and a very different sort of a man. The man waiting for her
back in the UK. Jagdeep was one of those well-educated, soft-spoken urban
men. Physically he was shorter, but had the pumped-up body, that comes
from working out in an air-conditioned gym. If he was balanced, predictable
and boring at times, Harry on the other hand, seemed to be tottering on the
verge of some unknown eccentricity, with an appetite for the unusual and
the risky. If Jags was intelligent, this man was well-read. But the most
noticeable difference was, that while Jags was an extrovert, Harry was an
introvert, bordering on the loner. However, man to man, there was more
depth in Harry than Jags had or would ever have. For that depth in character
came only from life-changing experiences of having suffered loss, privation
and solitude.
After a quick shower and a hot meal, Harry spent the rest of the day
debriefing his men and writing his after action report. As the sun went
down, Harry and Shradha sat out on camp chairs, enjoying rum and pani
and listening to the sound of the cicadas rise in unison in the neighbouring
jungle. That was the last cry of the wild, declaring the end of day.
The outpost where they were was a company post, strategically located,
following a standard deployment format of saddling a main road. Towards
the north and across the road, it looked out on open fields, some cultivated,
others mostly lying fallow and running down to the sea further out. To the
south and in the so-called backyard of the post, lay the thick wall of the
impenetrable tropical jungle, separated by a mere 300 yards of clear field of
fire. The trees had been felled and no undergrowth was allowed to grow in
this belt. A prior negligence to ensure that the area be kept clear of any
obstruction had cost the Sri Lankan army—who had manned the post before
the Indians—quite a few casualties. The LTTE, taking advantage of the
cover provided by the unkempt undergrowth, had promptly crept up to the
post at night and attacked.
The post itself was modest in size and accommodation. A few ramshackle,
half-finished rooms provided living quarters for the two permanent officers
in command and for any other SF units that arrived from time to time. A tin
shed in one corner of the plot, meant for storing the local produce, along
with tents pitched neatly in a row, provided lodging for the men. A
shoulder-high fence, knitted out of palmyra fronds, separated the officers’
quarters from the men’s section and allowed for some much-needed
privacy. For protection, a crude five-feet stone wall ran around the camp
perimeter, reinforced with a roll of barbed wire fence, with empty
condensed milk tins, filled with pebbles, strung along the complete length.
Mines had been placed in the most vulnerable points of ingress and the four
corners of the post had sangars (low fortifications of stone and sandbags),
with machine guns covering the dead ground in front, in an interlocking arc
of fire. The mortar pit was in the rear and the crew slept close by. The post
was the only place in the conflict-ridden part of Sri Lanka where an Indian
soldier could feel secure.
Harry glanced at Shradha furtively, finding her even more desirable,
especially after she had washed off all the grime and dust of her jungle
sojourn and with her short hair still wet. Having lost her rucksack which
had a few changes of clothes—in the mad dash to escape—she had
borrowed one of Harry’s camouflage shirts.
‘Don’t go walking around in that shirt,’ joked Harry, ‘or you are liable to
get shot. You and I have the same length of hair.’
As they talked about war, politics and travel, he discovered a woman
cloistered in a world dictated by the dos and don’ts of society, dying to
break free from its shackles. She was a soul yearning for some adventure
and risk.
‘You don’t appreciate the full flavour of life until you risk losing it,’ she
said, quoting some wise philosopher who had clearly never faced death.
‘I can see,’ responded Harry smiling, ‘your jungle experience hasn’t given
you the so-called flavour yet. Stick around some more and I guarantee, that
quote won’t be slipping off your tongue in a hurry.’
She was well-travelled, erudite and strong-willed, with views she wasn’t
prepared to change. For example, she was clear that the Indians were the
aggressors in Sri Lanka. Dubious in their dealings, in wanting to run with
the hare and hunt with the hounds, they had got themselves in a soup. And
now the bully was getting whipped.
‘Who says we are getting whipped,’ responded Harry, feeling the need to
defend the army, ‘we are just hazy about the cause for this war. You know,’
he continued, ‘I hit a small camp the other day and guess what I found
there! Bloody movie tickets of a theatre in India and a receipt from a private
clinic back home. So we are all wondering, who’s the bloody sucker in this
play and are we being played around by our own side?’
Shradha was matching Harry drink for drink and they were half a bottle
down, when Harry put the bottle away.
‘We are both tired,’ he told Shradha as she protested, ‘any more drinking
and we run the risk of passing out here. Not a good example to the men.’
‘You know Harry,’ she said, ‘you nearly killed me in there. But no hard
feelings, let me get back and I will develop a few pictures I took of the
camp and militants, if it is of any use to you. But I did get the feeling and I
may be wrong, that the Tigers are just whiling away time till the IPKF
leaves and then they can get back to sorting out a smaller Sri Lankan force.’
It was around midnight and rather late by Sri Lankan socialising standards.
Harry got up to escort her back to the independent room which had been
vacated by two officers, so that she could get some privacy.
‘I have a hectic day in office tomorrow,’ Harry said in jocularity, ‘and in
here, there is a saying, “The only easy day in office was yesterday.”’
They walked back to the room holding hands, as if it was the most natural
thing to do. In silence they stood briefly, immersed in their thoughts and
neither ready to part. Then they kissed, a long lingering easy smooch.
Things could have progressed further if the footsteps of the sentry hadn’t
sounded. The guard duty was changing and they came apart quickly. The
post, while safe, was also the last place where a man and a woman could get
any kind of privacy for intimacy.
Next morning, there was the usual activity at the post that preceded the
arrival of a chopper. A protection party went out on a patrol to sanitise the
area, while a detail of soldiers stood at standby for unloading the rations.
Another bunch stood around chatting happily with their colleagues. You
could make out from their body language and expressions, which were the
ones heading homeward on a spot of leave. Generally everyone was excited
about receiving much-awaited letters and the fresh food that came with
such sorties. Even with an untrained eye, Shradha could easily make out
the difference between the infantry soldiers on the post and the SF men. The
latter with their beards and long hair, looked lean and fit and had an
indefinable aura of those who had seen hard combat and that too, a lot of it.
They were aloof and clannish, hanging around in buddy pairs or their
allocated squads and even in the safe confines of the post, each man carried
his personal weapon. For in the SF, one’s rifle and ammo come second to
none. You can fight without water and food, but you can’t do without your
weapon, went the adage. Every man was reminded on joining the unit that
he would spend more time with his rifle, while he served, than with his
wife. Over time the weapon became an extension of the body and a man felt
naked without it.
Shradha finished a hurried breakfast as the chopper came in to land, raising
a mini-dust storm. The tin roof on the shed clattered in defiance and the
palm fronds bowed in the mighty downwash. With so many people around
and the din created by the bird, Harry barely managed to whisper a word or
two, before the Major practically pushed her into the chopper. In exactly ten
minutes, the fresh supplies and ammo had been unloaded, the leave party
had settled in and the chopper was airborne again in a cloud of dust. For the
men left behind on the ground—their excitement abated in the time it took
for all the dust to settle down. By the time the flying machine was a speck
in the sky and its sound a mere buzz in the distance, the post was already
back to business as usual—a fighting patrol to be sent out, live goats that
had come in as fresh rations to be slaughtered, ammo to be distributed and a
bunch of other activities, which go into keeping a post fighting fit.

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 India and Back
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

With Shradha out of the way, Silvam’s thoughts turned to the crisis in the
camp. By the time he returned, a semblance of order had been restored.
They had four killed and ten wounded, out of which Anna the camp
commander was the most serious case. One side of his face was disfigured,
with the skin hanging like a peeled banana and his body, as if it had turned
into a powerful magnet, had attracted shrapnel of all sizes and shapes,
riddling it into a gory mess. But he was still alive and his bloodshot
pleading eyes met Silvam’s as he stood looking down at his old commander.
Silvam turned his gaze away wondering how a man could still be alive in
that wrecked state. Why couldn’t he just peacefully die and cease that
pitiable moaning which was demoralising the others. If it had been on the
battlefield, Silvam was sure he would have begged Anna’s forgiveness and
shot him.
The LTTE senior command reacted quickly and arrangements had been
made for an immediate evacuation of the wounded that very night by
speedboats to India. Men would be waiting to receive them at
Rameshwaram, from where the casualties would be taken by road to the
town of Tiruchirappalli (Tiruchi). Silvam was ordered to lead the team and
then stay back in Madras to escort a VIP Indian politician to Sri Lanka. He
was to wait till further instructions and lie low at an LTTE sympathiser’s
house.
Under the light of a waning moon, the two speedboats slipped out into the
dark grey sea. Barely 3 kilometres out, they sighted an Indian naval vessel
—a frigate about 500 yards to the starboard and moving silently like a ghost
ship, its silhouette etched clearly in the muted moonlight. The speedboats
cut their engines and waited. Low in the water, they were a difficult target
to be picked up by radar or by the night watch on the Indian ship. Silvam
wondered how the boat’s pilot had sensed the presence of the ship, for he
could barely see the other boat 50 metres ahead. However, these were no
ordinary fishermen, but trained members of the LTTE’s nascent naval arm.
Each man carried a cyanide capsule, like the other fighting cadres of the
LTTE, hung on a chain and worn around his neck like a signature locket. It
was the LTTE’s deadly equivalent of a name tag worn by regular soldiers
going into combat. The capsule could be used with fatal consequences,
should the need arise. LTTE cadres were trained not to surrender but to
choose suicide by biting on the cyanide capsule instead, if their capture was
imminent.
Suddenly the ship was sighted turning around and the pilots of the boats
swung into immediate action. There was no panic or alarm in their
movements, as they gunned the engines to life and swung the boats away. It
struck Silvam that perhaps the ship was making a normal manoeuvre and
their sudden flight would certainly give away their presence. The last thing
he wanted was to die in a high sea chase, without even having put up a
fight. He had no idea if they were heading towards the Indian coast or going
back to Sri Lanka, for in the excitement of the moment he had completely
lost track of direction. But the boatmen knew from experience and instinct
and needed no compass or fancy positioning systems for direction.
By the time the frigate completed its turn and got into the chase, the
speedboats were lengthening the distance between them. Then the sea was
lit up like a day, as a star shell burst overhead, shredding bare the safety
provided by the cover of the night. Silvam felt naked, as if his clothes had
been stripped in a public place and he ducked instinctively. The speedboats
started to weave a crazy pattern at maniacal speed, as the first of the
machine gun rounds started to stitch the water around them. A shell
exploded close by, buffeting the boat and drenching everybody to the skin.
Silvam braced himself for the end and prayed it would come by a shell or a
bullet, rather than by drowning or in a worst-case scenario, by cyanide, if
captured.
At some stage during the chase, the speedboats parted company with each
other and sped off in opposite directions to confuse the frigate. With their
heads ducked below the gunwale, none of the passengers noticed they were
not together or that the boats had outstripped the ship and managed to lose
the hunters in the vast expanse of the ocean. Silvam raised his head to look
around when he felt the boat had stopped and the engine was idling. He saw
the Indian ship in the far distance, desperately firing star shells in an empty
sea, as a spotlight from the deck futilely scanned the water below. Silvam
was wondering what had happened to the other speedboat, when he saw its
shape glide out of the darkness and come alongside. His admiration for the
LTTE crew went up by several notches. Blind navigation, extreme
manoeuvres, brilliant seamanship and link up. This was as professional as
one could get.
That’s why the naval cordon had been ineffective. With such seamen, which
cordon wouldn’t be? But Silvam wasn’t to know that the senior commander
wore no cyanide capsule around his neck, but instead carried Indian identity
papers confirming him as a fisherman from a village close to Tiruchi in
India. He was as Indian as they come and a professional smuggler to boot.
He had no interest in a Tamil Eelam or the IPKF for that matter and was
slave to none, bar money. His services were being paid for. The crew
exchanged a word, comforted the passengers and then set course again for
the Indian coast.
They landed on an isolated obscure spot of the coastline and were met by
the local LTTE support team. Out of the six casualties they had carried, four
were dead, including the popular camp commander Anna. Silvam was glad
to get his feet back on firm ground and collapsed on the sandy beach in a
heap. The overdose of adrenalin pumped in his body during the thirty-
minute chase, left him exhausted and utterly spent, like a woman after
childbirth. They buried the four men in a clump of coconut trees and
covered the area with bush. Silvam silently mourned Anna’s passing—a
fine man and a close friend. He did not know the other three men.
The local group quickly took charge and the injured men were whisked
away to a private clinic, while Silvam was taken to Rameshwaram and left
at the LTTE safe house, run by a sympathiser. Strangely, Silvam felt safer in
India, then he had ever felt in his country, inundated as it was, with trigger-
happy soldiers constantly seeking to harm him. He stepped out of the house
in the evening and was reminded of Jaffna in more peaceful happier days.
But what he ached for, was a visit to the mountains. It was a strange
dichotomy in his temperament, which allowed him to love all things Indian
in India and—with an equal measure of hatred—destroy all things Indian in
Sri Lanka.
Through his source he found out about his next assignment and was told, no
movement of the Indian politician would happen for a month or so, as
Prabhakaran wasn’t sure where he would be and also the risks were too
high. With a month to kill, Silvam—on an impulse—decided to head north
on a nostalgic trip. The cold season had set in and the weather would be
perfect, for he loved the bracing winter of North India. Tying up with the
local contact that he would make an STD call every alternate day to stay in
touch, he bought himself a second-class rail ticket to Delhi. Like a child, he
found himself a window seat and sat glued to it throughout most of the
journey. This time there were no restrictions and the freedom was
intoxicating, especially when he reminded himself that he was heading into
the heart of enemy country.
As the train crossed into central India and entered the Hindi-speaking belt,
Silvam got the opportunity to practise the language he had lost touch with
and by the time he alighted at Delhi station, he had got his tongue around
most of the words he had forgotten. The multitude of people, the constant
chaos, his familiarity with the language and the overwhelming size of the
country erased all fear and apprehension he had carried about being caught.
With a new-found confidence, he strode out of the station and took an inter-
state bus to Dehradun. The sky remained overcast most of the way and the
weather got colder as he proceeded upcountry. In Muzaffarnagar, he got off
and bought himself a monkey cap, jacket and a cheap camera—for he
wanted to capture the trip for his wife. He reminded himself to pick up a toy
or two for his young son, a very affectionate kid. Every time Silvam left
home, it broke his heart to part from the boy and his heart-wrenching
weeping, and the picture of him clutching his mother in misery would stay a
long time with him. The two of them he realised were his only weakness
and he desperately wished he could somehow get them out of this mess.
With Prabhakaran also having taken a wife, the rules around matrimony had
been slackened by the supreme commander and one didn’t necessarily have
to hide his marital status.
In Dehradun he went around to all the shops he used to visit when he would
come down for the weekly shopping trip, during his course at Chakrata.
Some of the shopkeepers recognised him and enquired where he had been.
He took a local Vikram, a public autorickshaw and got off at the Forest
Research Institute building, for he had always passed it on his numerous
trips to the city and admired the scale of the structure. Posing in front of the
imposing facade with the mountains in the backdrop, Silvam asked a
passerby to take his snap. From there he strolled across to Vasant Vihar, the
residential colony just across the road.
With some difficulty, he found the way to his old instructor’s house, for he
had always come in a covered bus and had never really managed to have a
good look at the route. A lot of new houses had sprung up in the colony and
the trees had grown larger. The bougainvilleas were in full bloom. The
previous day’s rain had washed the mountains clean and they were shining
fresh and green, with the tin-roofed houses in Mussoorie shimmering in the
crisp sunlight. It was a beautiful day and a far cry from the death and
violence of Sri Lanka.
Silvam stood under the arbour of some silver oak trees, across from the
Colonel’s house, deep in thought. Now that he was here, a decision taken in
haste, he wasn’t sure if meeting his old instructor was such a good idea.
They were after all at war and none other than his son was serving in the
army. The Colonel knew all this and might not be as friendly. He could
easily inform the authorities and if caught, the intelligence he carried on
him would be disastrous. It would be a bloody stupid way to go down,
trying to pay respects to your old guru and getting hauled up in the bargain.
The door opened and he saw the Colonel come out with his dogs. He hadn’t
changed a bit in retirement. Silvam wished the circumstances had been
different, for he would have loved to talk about the operations and the war.
Briefly, the Colonel glanced in the direction of Silvam, who promptly
pulled his monkey cap further down and looked away. The dogs rushed out,
eager for a run, the Colonel followed and stood under the porch,
affectionately gazing at his dogs frolicking in the winter sun. Then leaving
them at play, he turned and went in and the door closed behind him with a
bang.
Silvam stood there inhaling the crisp cold air and feeling alone in a foreign
city. In that instant he felt the load of his responsibility—the chosen path of
his life as a freedom fighter—bear down on him, with the weight of the
mountains in front. What was he doing here? Taking unnecessary risks,
when every man counted in the fight. He should be back home, leading his
men and not enjoying a personal holiday. Suddenly, the whole place seemed
too peaceful for his liking. It was all unreal, a chimera in a world to which
he didn’t belong. And for the first time in his life, the realisation dawned on
him, that the old accountant was dead, to be replaced by this seasoned dog
of war and that he would never be a man of peace again. The LTTE had not
only taken away his real name, but also his temperament. Shiva the man of
peace, had turned into Silvam the man of war and strangely, he wasn’t
mourning the loss of the former. Turning, he retraced his steps to the bus
station. Within forty-eight hours, he was back in Rameshwaram at the LTTE
safe house.
Three days later, he got his orders to link up with another detachment of
LTTE operators. The politician’s trip had finally come through and the op
was a go. He was waiting with five heavily-armed men at a deserted strip
off the Tamil Nadu coastline, when the Indian politician joined them. The
flotilla of four speedboats, with armed cadres sailed out. They stopped
briefly to rendezvous in mid-sea with an Indian fishing vessel to refuel. The
vessel was supplied by the local fishermen who got a quota of 1,000 litres
of diesel per boat at a huge subsidy from the Indian government. Selling
part of that fuel at three times the cost was more lucrative than fishing.
‘Strange war,’ thought Silvam, as the boat was getting refuelled. The fuel,
food, training, weapons—everything to sustain the war effort came from the
Indians; in fact the LTTE’s safest bases were in the country of their enemy
and their casualties treated in India, and on top of that, the Indians threw in
four divisions for the killing, as a cherry to the icing on the cake. At this
rate, he mused, once they had Eelam in Lanka, carving out the state of
Tamil Nadu to join them wouldn’t be too difficult. With tanks brimming
with the much-needed gas, they sped onwards, towards one of the many
islands that lay off the coast of Jaffna.

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 Jaffna
The only thing I know is that I know nothing and I am not quite sure that I
know that.
—An old agnostic

After months of jungle bashing, Seven Troop got a breather and was
ordered to move to the suburbs of Jaffna for an area domination role. They
broke journey in Vavuniya briefly, till the Air Force could arrange the airlift.
With nothing to do, Harry took the men out for a run around the airfield
perimeter. There was a bit of grumbling, but it was good to build up a sweat
and the feeling of openness and safety was a refreshing change for
everyone. Months of jungle bashing had sapped all the stamina and even as
a distance runner, Harry felt the heaviness in his legs. The sun was setting
over the palm trees, as they ran past a couple of gunships, with the
technicians working on them. It reminded Harry he had a debt to clear with
a gunship pilot. The faint sound of drums and cymbals from the local army
temple wafted across the field. The evening arti was in progress and God
was much in demand across the island. He heard one of his men Anil’s
sonorous voice leading the singing session.
A Sri Lankan Bell helicopter came prancing across the tarmac, barely 50
feet over the ground and the gunner gave Harry a friendly salute. In the
evening Harry strolled across to the pilots’ mess. All quarters were in tents,
strung in a row along the airstrip and the officers’ mess occupied the largest
canvas. There were a couple of pilots lounging around still in their flying
overalls. He was welcomed immediately with a drink. Harry inquired about
the op discreetly and it took the Squadron Leader, who was the senior-most
officer, some time before he figured out which sortie Harry was talking
about.
‘Oh! That is Bharat you are talking about, the Mannar shoot. Don’t tell me
you are the guy who asked for it.’
‘Well, where is he then?’ replied Harry, ‘I have come a long way to thank
him for taking a shot at us.’
There was an awkward silence, as the pilots sensed the menace in his voice.
The Squadron Leader stepped in to clarify.
‘Bharat’s on leave. But let me answer on his behalf, as we had a good chat
about it later. Firstly, you weren’t in your given location and had moved a
considerable distance. Then you were seen emerging from the jungle and on
sighting the gunship, some of the men made for cover. And let’s face it
Harry, you guys didn’t exactly look like regular soldiers, with beards and
flowing hair. Look at you for example, if I saw you in my gun sight,
emerging out of a forest full of bandits, I wouldn’t think twice about pulling
the trigger.’
‘Touché,’ retorted Harry.
‘Because Bharat was unsure,’ continued the Squadron Leader, ‘he didn’t
fire the rockets, instead he fired a warning burst or two from his machine
gun. I am told one of your men was nicked, well bad luck. Let me tell you
partner, you wouldn’t be standing here if he wanted you dead. Now have a
drink.’
The next day two MI-8 choppers carted them across to the Palaly airfield
from where they made their way to Kokkuvil, a suburb of Jaffna. There had
been a sudden spurt in LTTE radio traffic and the military top brass
suspected either a big strike or the movement of some senior LTTE leader.
The troop had to quickly adapt and change their drills to the urban role,
which after months of jungle ops was not easy. Harry realised that contacts
in built-up areas would be sudden, sharp and short and so he ordered rifle
slings to be removed. All patrolling was to be done with the weapon at port
and ready to engage. If the close confines of brick and mortar, streets and
alleys were a bit of a nightmare for patrolling, the abandonment of the
heavy packs they had lugged was a reason for joy. But it was good to be
back in civilisation and for some R&R a video cassette player and a
television set were arranged on rent and movie cassettes procured from the
Jaffna market.
The three vehicles, which had carted them across from Palaly airfield were
held back by Harry and gave him some mobility. He decided to expand his
beat area, and in the bargain, do some tourism and sightseeing. The first
was a trip to Jaffna University, the site of a disastrous operation by one of
the sister Special Force battalions. There was also a desire to relive his
college days and interact with some of the students. Harry was aware of the
Jaffna University operation, which had taken place before he had landed on
the island. In a way, the real beginning of Operation Pawan was the assault
on the university headquarters of the LTTE. The plan was to make a
lightning raid to kill or capture some of the top leadership, including
Prabhakaran. The plan had gone horribly awry.
In a swirl of dust, the vehicles stopped. Harry could see and feel the tension
amongst the students and the restrain not to panic. The slightest indication
of violence from him could have led to a stampede. The attempt to maintain
a facade of normalcy was noticeable, but it was a veneer, and one could
observe hurried steps and furtive nervous glances. Harry walked into a class
and regretted it immediately. The chatter died to a frightened hush as
dozens of young eyes were fixed on him. The teacher withdrew into a
corner and Harry felt extremely conscious under the scrutiny of so many
eyes. Most of them would have been a couple of years younger than him.
There were quite a few girls and suddenly Harry was aware of his unkempt
beard, faded-torn dungarees and all the accoutrements of war. It was a place
of learning and peace and deserved respect. The loud clomp of military
boots echoed a jarring note to the sensibilities. The gallant and dashing
Lochinvar image faded a little and Harry handed over his weapon and
ammo vest and told the men to wait outside.
It took a while for them to open up but once they knew Harry meant no
harm, the opinions rolled thick, fast and unanimous. The Indians must
leave. Harry focused on a dark, sharp-featured, pretty girl with shining
white teeth and plaited-oiled hair. She was bold in her gaze and questioning,
and he admired her courage. They spoke in broken English and Tamil, and
there was a clamour, as all of them wanted to have a say at the same time.
So Harry asked them to raise hands, and took the questions. It was like a
college town hall with headmaster Harry, taking it upon his young shoulders
to defend the country and army in an open debate. Needless to say, the
pretty girl got more chances to vent her feelings.
‘Saar what if we come, take your house,’ went one of her questions, and
Harry nodded gravely, with a frown of resigned repentance. The longer
Harry stayed, the prettier she looked, and his one-sided interest was obvious
to some of the boys, who smirked and nudged each other. While no one
openly displayed pro-LTTE sympathies, it was clear, they all wanted peace,
and if there was to be any sort of subjugation of the population, then it
rather be by the Tigers than by the Indian Army. There was no gratitude and
the Indians were solely blamed for becoming the problem rather than the
solution. Harry walked out disappointed. What a gross waste of good Indian
lives and to what purpose!
The only heartening sight was the girl with the white teeth and a taste for
North Indian men. Harry recalled the lovely dark face as the vehicles pulled
out of the campus, the quest for life in those young eyes, as they flirted just
so slightly, smiling broadly and raising her hand enthusiastically all the
time. It struck Harry that most of the houses he had visited while patrolling
for a search or just for a glass of water, had mostly only women family
members. They wouldn’t speak much but their sad eyes would follow you
everywhere. The men, he was often told, were either working abroad, dead
or had disappeared, which meant, in all probability they had joined the
LTTE. What a waste of good womanhood, thought Harry pensively.
It was early morning and still dark and in the absence of any street lights,
the silhouette of houses and palm trees stood out starkly against the fading
starlight. Harry was on an area domination patrol and survival was about
denying the enemy the opportunity to hurt you. They set no pattern to their
movement, timing and route. The patrol drifted around aimlessly, cutting
barbed wire fences, jumping over boundary walls and switching lanes often,
with a general sense of direction to be taken and the time they need to be
out. This kind of patrolling, other than putting the wind up the LTTE,
because of a complete unpredictability of the movement, also gave very
little chance for the Tigers to lay an opportunity ambush. Harry knew
because the radio intercepts confirmed the LTTE’s dilemma and concern.
Harry saw a faint light in one of the houses and decided to investigate. Ten
minutes of knocking and there was still no response. All the loud knocking
and kicking of the door was creating quite a din. Anywhere else the ruckus
would have passed off as a domestic row, here it could only mean one thing
—an IPKF patrol had come calling. Harry was worried about drawing fire.
Their presence was known and all it would take was an insomniac Tiger to
pull out his weapon from the well and let off a few bursts, then get back to
bed before his wife even noticed his disappearance.
He surrounded the house and broke in the door. In the dim yellow light
stood a young couple clutching each other for confidence and courage.
Harry took in the scene quickly and weighed them up. They were genuine
and safe and he allowed himself to relax. Harry noticed the woman then and
she took his breath away. In fact there was a mass sucking in of breath, as
the four men with him, inhaled all the air in the room simultaneously and
then there was pin-drop silence. Nobody moved, nobody exhaled, it was
like playing statue and the only movement was of her bosom heaving at a
frightful pace. Harry thought a bosom was designed to convey extreme
distress, other than its normal functions; well this one was for sure.
Harry noticed she was light of colour in comparison to her race, with sharp
features, wearing a purple nightgown, which fell shy of her knees and
barely managed to cover her bosom. Her right breast was threatening to pop
out now in her agitation and Harry observed it had a large black mole
halfway down that broke cover every time she inhaled, which was quite
often in her existing state. He was fascinated by the mole, as were the
others in the room. It looked like a huge tick and Harry had this urge to pull
it off. She reminded him of someone he had seen in a porn flick. He got the
impression perhaps the couple were in the middle of a session when they
had intervened. Imagination was kicking in and Harry saw Anil Pehlwan
lick his lips, horny as the town bull. The couple was mumbling their
innocence in good English and Harry heard something about both being
teachers at the Jaffna University, as he wrenched his attention away from
the black beauty still playing peek-a-boo with the audience.
The loud gunshot report stunned everyone; it stopped Harry’s heart briefly
for sure. Mentally he felt for pain in his body and then cast a quick glance
around, expecting one of his men to slither down. Thoughts were racing
through his mind and then he noticed dust at his feet. The EPRLF boy who
was with his troop as a guide, in his nervousness or excitement (probably
the latter) had accidentally blown his big toe off. There was a pool of thick
dark blood collecting around his bathroom slipper and his big toe lay neatly
severed, a couple of inches away. Strangely, it reminded Harry of a lizard’s
severed tail and he expected the toe to start wriggling away any moment.
Before the EPRLF boy could register the loss or pain, his weapon was
snatched away and attention focused on him, as everybody pitched into him
verbally and physically. It struck Harry that had the shot hit 6 inches to the
right, it would have been his toe wriggling away. He would have earned
himself the wound medal for sure, shot not by enemy fire, but by a sexually
aroused boy, barely out of his teens. Harry was so shaken, that he thanked
the boy for sparing him by punching him repeatedly in the face.
A furtive look by Harry confirmed the heaving bosom had picked up pace
and was probably matching her heartbeat now. With all this vigorous
movement, the gown seemed to be fighting a losing battle and was on the
verge of slipping off. It was a situation Harry was not confident of handling
and for sure he thought, if she didn’t get herself under control soon, they all
ran the risk of shooting themselves in various parts of their anatomy. He
stepped in to chat up the couple and pacify her lest she became hysterical.
Her name was Latha and Harry called her husband thambi (younger
brother).
Once they got over their fears and realised the soldiers meant no harm and
the officer was rather friendly, Latha divulged some information. Two
streets away, she had recently noticed a couple of LTTE fighters at a tea
stall. It was one of those pieces of unsubstantiated loose intelligence,
uttered in times of duress, to please the security forces in any protracted
insurgency area. Harry didn’t take the information seriously, but decided to
swing by as the distance was not too much. As a parting shot, Latha very
innocuously warned Harry to place a guard when the men go out for their
morning call of nature. Apparently the Tigers had noticed a pattern and
were keeping the latrines under surveillance.
The sun was up as they parted company from the couple. Harry decided on
a long circuit to approach the street, before winding up for the day. They
entered the street and he told the boys to spread out. It was a typical Jaffna
suburban residential lane, with small independent houses on either side
separated by palm frond fences and the ubiquitous palm and banana tree in
each plot; very little to differentiate it from a street anywhere in Madras. The
houses were neat, but in need of repair, and the overall impression was of a
place which had seen better days in a forgotten past. Under the shade of a
huge jackfruit tree, a small shop selling the usual daily needs saddled the
street midway, where a group of people were milling around chatting,
drinking tea and buying the odd victuals for the day. A half-naked little boy
went past wheeling a tyre with a stick. The tyre had a close resemblance to
an Indian Army Jonga tyre. Harry wondered where he had got it. Probably
his papa had given it to him as a souvenir after blowing up a few good
men….
A dog and a bitch were joined, coupling away and quite oblivious to the
gathering crowd, while another dog watched silently with its tongue
hanging out in envious lust, hoping for a chance. It was copulation day in
Sri Lanka it seemed and Harry smiled wryly at the thought. The aroma of
spices was sharp and pungent as breakfast was being prepared in many
homes. It smelled much like dosas and the thought of food erased Latha
from his mind. Suddenly there was commotion in the crowd and then four
men get onto cycles and furiously pedalled away in the opposite direction.
Now, no one in his senses ran away from an IPKF patrol unless they were
guilty. So Harry shouted for the men to stop and then to the assembly to lie
down or disperse, so as to get a clear line of fire. But this bunch stayed put,
in fact he observed they were closing ranks and the intention in those few
seconds was quite obvious—they were helping their brethren.
There was a hollow bark of an AK on semi-auto mode as Sathish opened
up. Harry took note; it was the second time Sathish had fired on suspicion,
for no weapons were visible on the men. He was not sure where the bullets
went, probably knocked a few coconuts, but the result on the mating dogs
was unprecedented and instantaneous. They violently uncoupled and Harry
saw the dog turn and run past through the patrol and down the lane.
Sensible dog, though the same could not be said for the locals. Not one
man, woman or child had even ducked; they sure were a seasoned lot;
Special Forces material to a nail. The next instant, the four musketeers had
turned the corner and the last guy let off a burst over his shoulder, perhaps
in mock salute, Harry wondered, looking at their poor marksmanship. It
was pointless giving chase, as they had a head start, were on cycles, and
were familiar with the area. A well-aimed burst from a rooftop or a blind
corner and he would be buying casualties for sure. Then a young man broke
away from the gathering and made a break down the street. Instantly
Sathish gave chase.
The youngster couldn’t have committed a bigger folly, for he was trying to
outrun a handpicked man, who had been trained to cover 40 kilometres
carrying 60 pounds of unwieldy weight in under six hours and then be fit
enough to fight. His flight to freedom was doomed from the moment it took
off. The soldiers and the locals watched the outcome of the contest with
bated breath. The youngster suddenly veered right in an attempt to shake off
Sathish, who was fast closing the distance, and tried vaulting over a waist-
high fence. His foot caught the edge and he toppled over. Sathish sailed
over the fence, like a hurdler, landing lightly on the other side, with the
young man sprawled on his stomach at his feet. A gasp of anguish went up
from the gathering. Harry couldn’t help applauding the ease and panache
with which Sathish had reeled him in. He was reminded of lines from
Chekhov, ‘When a man spends the least possible movement over some
definite action, that
is grace.’
However, he was furious. Months of toil and they had lost the only chance
of getting a kill because of that lot. He lined up all males above the age of
fifteen and the only confirmation he wanted was that the youngster and the
four who got away were LTTE cadres; a simple affirmation of a fact. But it
was ‘illae Sir’ (no Sir) to a man, down the line. Tempers were high, their
adrenalin was pumping and so they resorted to some basic street
questioning methods, which were quick, unimaginative and ineffective from
a results point of view, but highly satisfying to quell one’s bloodlust. It was
lots of boot, butts (rifle and human) and the rest of the anatomy no-holds-
barred. Harry recalled, it was called a ‘Chicago Stamping’ in one of the
James Bond books that he had read and this one lasted for ten minutes.
They rolled back to the post, which was a semi-independent bungalow in
Kokkuvil. Everybody was feeling better after a dose of violence and
permission was sought to issue rum. As most IPKF posts were attacked by
the LTTE at night, all drinking as per local army orders was to be done
during the daytime—a sure way to turn one into an alcoholic. A few more
years of deployment in Sri Lanka and Harry was certain, cirrhosis of the
liver would end up claiming more IPKF lives than the Tigers. Sufficiently
inebriated, they got to work on the young man they had caught, who they
found out was called Shankaran. In the late 1930s, Sir Charles Tegart, who
had policed Calcutta ‘very efficiently’ for thirty years, was brought in to
police Jerusalem. He introduced what was called the ‘water can’ method,
whereby water was forced down a prisoner’s nose using coffee pots. The
Americans call the practice ‘waterboarding’. The Indian Special Forces in
Sri Lanka, however, had their own name for this interrogation method—
tanni (water) parade. The methods might have differed, however, principles
of all three remained the same—to give one a taste of drowning.
There are various nuances to the practice and a master practitioner can
actually drown a man for a few seconds, before bringing him around. Harry
was not sure if technically death was due to asphyxiation or drowning,
however the difference between death and life was precariously balanced on
a few seconds of breath either way. A few seconds more under water and
you could lose the man, while a few seconds less and a determined man
could play along for hours. Harry recalled an Urdu couplet quoted quite
often which was appropriate to that scenario, which went:
There are only two states in life.
This state—the living—and that—the dead.
Between the two states, the distance is of just one breath.
While it runs, it is this state and when it stops; it is the other.
The pros whom Harry had studied under, would often take a deep breath
along with the victim and time the duck accordingly. A hardened case,
Harry had seen once, lasted seven such duckings before he cracked. In
sheer admiration his interrogators had served him an omelette. Then there
were occasions when water was not so freely available for a ducking and a
cloth was stuffed into the mouth. Water was then poured down the cloth,
while clipping the person’s nose. The latter was a slower process and more
frightening than the former, as the interrogator had less of an idea about how
much water had been poured into the prisoner. So Harry was told by an
enlightened soul, who had undergone both forms of interrogation. Harry
had wondered if the guy ever went under a shower thereafter.
The man Shankaran however, was not made of such mettle and the moment
his head was pulled out of the bucket, he started to sing like a canary on
cannabis. The atmosphere changed immediately and Shankaran was offered
or rather forced to have a drink. Never having touched alcohol in his life,
the potent Indian rum hit him like a six to the fence, for he got up, staggered
a few steps and then crashed awkwardly on to the table, made out of
ammunition boxes.
‘Hey, you will damage our expensive table,’ retorted Sathish.
Everybody had a good laugh, including Shankaran who dissolved into an
uncontrollable giggling fit, like an adolescent virgin. It was prime time
entertainment for men who had found very little to laugh at in months. By
the time he was three pegs down, he was positively cursing the LTTE for
ruining the country and was prepared to sell their mothers to the nearest
bidder.
‘The local Tiger squad Saar, was escorting a senior commander, when you
people turned up. But more important, is a small camp in the Alampil
jungles,’ he said, his speech heavily slurred, ‘I delivered a mobile Honda
genset there some months ago. This one is a screen defence and the camp
around 8 to 10 kilometres further inside, is one of the biggest. I can take
you in till the first one though.’
But Alampil was way beyond their area of ops and Harry showed no
interest. An interrogation report was sent to the Divisional Intelligence
Officer and Shankaran was packed off to the nearest brigade headquarters.
The Intelligence Major read Harry’s report, had a brief chat with Shankaran
and packed him off promptly on the next convoy to the Gurkha Battalion at
Kumulamunai, responsible for the Alampil area. The news about a camp in
the jungles there was stale, for everybody knew it existed somewhere in that
piece of green real estate. The question had always been, who would walk
into the Tigers’ den?
Harry visited the lane of their last patrol after a couple of days, to be
greeted by sullen looks. The damage was noticeable with swollen faces and
broken limbs among the local residents, but they seemed to have got back
to life with a vengeance, including the bitch, busy coupling with a different
dog. But everybody it seemed was back to normal, barring the few aches
and pains.

Unbeknownst to Harry, Silvam was ensconced in a house just behind the tea
shop. He had landed back from India, escorting the AIADMK (All India
Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) politician. Having seen the boat crew
in action on his way to India, Silvam had sat confidently through the
journey back.
He knew with experience that their speedboats were much faster than
anything the Indians could throw at them and the guys knew the waters
better. In any case, Lady Luck was on their side and the crossing was
uneventful, except for bearing with the politician, who was constantly
throwing up throughout the trip like a drunken sow and soiling the entire
boat.
They made their landing on one of the small islands that lay off the coast of
Jaffna. From there along with a band of twenty fighters, Silvam made his
way to Kankesanthurai at the northern tip of the island. There, the politician
was handed over to the next man in the chain responsible for conducting
him further, with the final destination known only to a few. ‘Clearly,’ thought
Silvam, ‘he was on his way to meet Prabhakaran, to be running such risks.’
A message came through that Silvam had been promoted to the rank of a
Colonel while he was away and he was ordered to head down south, to take
command of the unit in the Alampil area.
Breaking journey at Kokkuvil, where he had lived years ago while working
in Jaffna, he stayed the night at his old landlord’s house, who welcomed
him with warmth. There was never a fear of anyone informing the army, as
the entire population to the last man, was pro-LTTE. The local Tiger squad
was supposed to drop him off at a bus stop, from where he would go by
road till Kilinochchi. If you weren’t carrying a weapon the possibility of
getting caught by the Indians, at the many check posts they had strung
across the island, was nigh to nil. He was having his morning cup of tea and
chatting up the locals, when suddenly round the corner, the Indian Army
patrol materialised most unexpectedly. There was no question of getting
into a firefight with so many civilians around.
Time slowed down, as if to fill the space between them, giving him
adequate opportunity to notice that the men wore black bandanas and
beards. He knew instantly where he had last seen them—in a jungle,
through the high-powered telescopic sight of his sniper rifle. Unbelievable,
same unit, a second time and for a fraction of a second, he thought he
recognised one of the men in the column as his old instructor’s son, but
before he could confirm his suspicion, all hell broke loose. The next instant
he was sitting behind on the carrier of a bicycle, with the Tiger boy peddling
furiously and his two accomplices covering the retreat. There was the
thump of gunfire from behind, one of the fighters fired over his shoulder in
reply and then they took a turn to disappear in the warren of narrow
alleyways that dissected the town into a chaotic maze.
Silvam heaved a sigh of relief; the gods were on his side, for no mortal can
cheat death so many times. While killing had become business, of an enemy
who had remained largely faceless, discovering Harry’s presence bothered
him. For the first time there was a face to the enemy, whose father had been
his guru and whose hospitality he had partaken of in a foreign land. But the
coincidence was unbelievable. He didn’t want to be the instrument of
Harry’s death. After all that was the least he owed his old guru.
Getting off at Kilinochchi, Silvam made his way to Kumulamunai where
he spent some time with his wife and young boy. He was told a new Gurkha
Battalion had replaced the Sikhs in the location and in the evening he took
his son out for a cycle ride on the road, which went past the post on the
hillock. Silhouetted against the darkening sky, a few figures could be seen
on the hill, the only sign that human life now existed on that piece of high
ground. For no villager had ever occupied it. Even the stray dogs and cattle
avoided the high ground and children were forbidden to venture up the hill
for the locals believed, the place was evil, with a potential to heap great
misfortune on any mortal desecrating it by inhabiting the ground. The
villagers had subsequently built a temple at the base of the hill, to appease
and contain the malevolent evil spirits.
The Indians of course were ignorant about the local superstition, not that
they would have changed the location if someone had mentioned it to them.
For the hillock, by any standards of defensive deployment, was the most
strategic ground to hold and perfect for dominating the area around. Silvam
however, was aware that a hundred-plus foreign souls, dangerously-armed,
were ensconced in an area half the size of a football field, with intent to do
him and his brethren harm. That was his area of operation and the unit
freshly inducted. Moreover, he neither believed, nor had the patience to
wait till the evil of the place unleashed its calamity on them. It was a capital
target, plain and simple and waiting to be punished. It would also establish
his leadership in his new command. He made a mental note of that.
The village was also the entry point to one of the biggest camps the LTTE
had in the Alampil jungles next door. One of his tasks therefore, was to
ensure the Indians didn’t stray into LTTE country, for with the urban centres
under heavy IPKF control, if the LTTE were to get expelled from their
jungle hideouts, it would be nothing short of catastrophic—the end of the
game. The only way Silvam knew to dominate an area was to take the fight
to the enemy. He waited and prayed for the opportunity and the opportunity
didn’t take long in coming. The moment the tents and the radio antennas
were up and the bandobast necessary for the conduct of war was met with,
the camp vibrated with energy akin to a live beehive. Patrols could be seen
going out in various directions for area familiarisation, choppers
replenished rations and warlike stores, and the local headman and seniors
from the village were summoned for a quick powwow with the Colonel. In
a very quick time, there was an air of purpose and action amongst the
troops.
Silvam was in a small hamlet, dealing with a suspected informer, when news
came of a large column of Gurkha troops reportedly streaming out of their
post and heading towards the jungle hideout. Silvam was immediately
summoned by none other than Mathaya, the second in command in the
LTTE hierarchy after Prabhakaran, who was in camp then and personally
briefed him to stop the advance.
‘Mark my words Silvam,’ and Mathaya’s gaze was steady, long enough to
emphasise the importance of his order, ‘you must first try and discourage
them from proceeding any further, for I don’t want any attention coming this
way, while we have an important guest from India. But if they resist,
annihilate them to a man. The severity of the punishment must be an example
to deter them from ever straying into the jungles, for the rest of their stay
here.’

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 Gurkha Battalion HQ Post,
Nayaru Lagoon
When first under fire and you are wishful to duck,
Don’t look nor take heed at the man that is struck,
Be thankful that you are living and trust to your luck
And march to your front like a soldier.
—Rudyard Kipling

The Commanding Officer (CO) of the Gurkhas was a tall strapping man
who had practically grown up in the unit from the time he was
commissioned. The Colonel was what they called a regimental soldier and
nowhere was it reflected better than in the affection he got from his men,
which he reciprocated in equal measure. To command your own unit was
every soldier’s dream and to do so in war was the apogee in his profession.
He was sure of his standing, a confident leader and certain the men would
follow him to hell. With his senior Company Commander, he stood now at
a vantage point, next to the machine gun nest, surveying his area of
jurisdiction spread below, with the trained eye of a soldier. The Colonel
inhaled sharply, smelling the salty sea air which was heavily laced with the
smell of fish, enjoying the peace, the maintenance of which, he knew,
would decide his career.
To the west, the sun was an orange blob dissolving into the glimmering
lagoon and turning it red. The village of Kumulamunai was behind him and
hidden by a grove of dense coconut trees. A smaller hill, 600 yards to the
left, interspersed the patchwork of otherwise flat open fields. In between the
two hills, a small area had been levelled to provide a makeshift helipad. A
narrow dirt track hugged the coastline and ran past the two hills to
disappear into a copse of wild coconut and banyan trees in the distance. A
lone cyclist with a small child could be seen on the track, adding a certain
tranquility and normalcy to the scene. An open field stretched in front for
half a mile, giving a clear field of fire, beyond which could be seen the dark
green line of the jungle. In a few minutes another day would come to an end
in Sri Lanka. The Colonel looked wistfully towards the distant jungle and
turned to the Major.
‘That’s where the beast is,’ he said, with a nod of his head, ‘and that’s where
we should seek him. Two months and I haven’t heard a shot fired in anger.
We will have to stir ourselves Shukla, or perish of boredom. Is the LTTE
podiyan (a low-grade messenger or courier), what’s his name—Shankar
something, the guy passed on to us by the Jaffna brigade, is he ready to lead
us to the satellite camp?’
‘Doesn’t seem too keen to venture out of the post Sir,’ answered Major
Shukla. ‘Shit-scared. He knows his way only till the smaller camp, but
apparently the mother camp further inside is huge. Says, if you go in, you
will stay in, none will come out. He’s overestimating the calibre of his old
pals or underestimating our fighting prowess. Anyway, will get the boys
ready and the moment the leave party rejoins in a few weeks, we hit the
road.’
A couple of weeks later, a company strength-plus, self-contained for forty-
eight hours and led by none other than the CO personally, set out on a seek
and destroy mission. Shankaran made a determined attempt to dissuade
them for the last time, pointing out their unpreparedness, but his pleas were
brushed aside and the column boldly marched out in broad daylight. If only
the CO had read Mao, perhaps he may have understood what the prisoner
was desperately trying to convey—that in waking a Tiger always use a long
stick.
But then, except for artillery shelling, there are few things in the field of
battle that can easily deter a hundred-plus quality fighting men. Especially,
when they belong to a regiment whose battle honours cover the world and
run the length of your arm. Bravery was a byword with these men,
encapsulated in the motto, that ‘it is better to die, then to live the life of a
coward.’ Paeans had been written about their courage and the first Field
Marshal of independent India, Sam Manekshaw, himself a Gurkha officer,
had once remarked that, ‘Anyone saying he was not scared was either a liar
or a Gurkha.’ Such men then, had little to fear.
As they approached the jungle, they were fired upon and the men went to
ground. The fire was desultory and from a distance. The CO consulted the
forward platoon and ordered them to continue with the advance as the firing
was ineffective. Spread out, the column was nearly half-a-kilometre long, as
it wound its way through secondary jungle like a languorous giant snake.
Shankaran at this stage made another feeble attempt to drive some sense in
the commanders, but the die was cast and the heavily-laden men marched
on till they reached a thin strip of land, with the jungle on one side and the
sea on the other. If a piece of real estate was ever designed for an ambush,
that little plot would have scored a perfect ten. Even under more peaceful
circumstances, the most accomplished practitioners of the art of ambush put
at the receiving end would have found it nigh to impossible, if asked to
extricate themselves under fire. The only counter was, what the training
manuals often teach in such a situation—to turn and assault. And yet even
that was not possible, for the distance from the firing point to the killing
ground was neither too close for an assault, as most would have been cut
down in the intervening space and nor was it too distant for the fire to be
inaccurate. And whatever few deficiencies were thrown up by the terrain,
were quickly made up by the ingenuity of the LTTE commander in the use
of ground. This then was where the bulk of the column was engaged and
stopped by a large body of hostiles. The column splintered and in the
absence of any coherent command and control, the situation turned rapidly
into a fight for survival and then degenerated into a rout.

Silvam, having selected his ambush site, a narrow wedge of land saddled
between the lagoon and the jungle, waited with a bunch of fifty fighters. A
couple of Tigers kept a watch on the column from the time it moved out of
the post, keeping abreast of their advance and rolling back gently all the
while, as it advanced. When the party was halfway to the jungle, Silvam
ordered his men, via the radio, to fire some warning shots.
‘Make sure there are no casualties,’ he warned, ‘or we will have them
baying for blood. Just enough to dissuade and turn them about.’
He heard the gunshots and waited anxiously. Shortly afterwards his walkie-
talkie crackled to life and he heard the breathless excited voice of the squad
leader.
‘The column is on the move again Sir. Should I drop a few to stop the
advance?’
‘Parva illae, don’t worry Kumaran. Fall back gradually and lead them to
the point. The reception party is waiting.’ Deep down he was pleased they
had persisted in continuing, for he could now follow Mathaya’s orders and
teach the Indians a lesson that they would not forget for years to come.
From the edge of the forest, Silvam watched the patrol trudge past barely 30
metres away. Timing it to perfection, he waited till the column was midway
down the thin strip of land before giving the order to engage. A hundred
yards of the jungle suddenly erupted into a hail of devastating fire. There
was pandemonium amongst the ranks, as the soldiers ran helter-skelter to
save themselves. But there was no place to hide and the only cover
available, which was the jungle, was where all the fire was coming from.
The CO, with his party along with the vanguard platoon, was trapped and
pinned down. The proximity, volume and the accuracy of fire was such that
the column was viciously torn asunder in the middle and all control lost, as
platoon and section commanders tried to get a grip on the rapidly
deteriorating situation. With a slackening in command and in the absence of
any coherent orders, the tail end of the column promptly turned around,
seeing men from the leading sections fleeing back. A running fight then
ensued over a couple of kilometres, with the contact becoming
individualistic, as groups fought their way back. Finding no way out of the
killing field, some of the soldiers jumped into the lagoon.
A body of men, with the CO and the Subedar Major (SM), however settled
down to what would be the last fight of their lives. The savage trading of
lead continued through the night, with fire from the small group of Indians
gradually dwindling by the minute. Sometime during the night, the Colonel,
who had been wounded early in the fight, closed his eyes forever to the
world. The morning brought no cheer to the remnants, as they expectantly
looked around for some succour in the form of reinforcements. Grossly
outgunned and running short on ammunition, the last few Gurkhas did what
they had done best for centuries. Pulling out their kukris, they charged the
enemy as a body and were promptly cut down within seconds.
Like a member in a participatory Greek theatre, the stout, handicapped
Colonel of the LTTE watched with grim satisfaction as the macabre dance
of death was played out. The result of the ambush was better than he had
anticipated and he exhorted his men over the din of battle to make each shot
count. Silvam didn’t have to give any orders to cease fire, for it finally
stopped when there were no more targets to be shot at. He waited for a few
pregnant minutes and then gingerly stepped out to inspect the carnage. The
ground was littered with bodies and gear and to the gently murmuring
sound of the waves in the background was added the forlorn moaning of the
dying and injured.
The Tigers then walked amongst the fallen, taking head shots to put the
wounded soldiers out of their misery. Silvam knew there would be
retaliation and the place would be swarming with troops shortly. With no
half measures in his dictionary, the job was still undone. He was going to
follow the second part of Mathaya’s order to the letter and set such an
example, as to render the unit unfit for combat. With a wry smile, he then
recalled the words of his instructor in Chakrata.
‘When you have your man down,’ the old Colonel had said, ‘don’t hesitate
to kick him hard between his legs, till he bawls “papa”.’
Professional soldiers are predictable, thought Silvam, and more so if they
have been your trainers. He was well acquainted with their standard
operating procedures. Having mauled the unit, he knew retaliation was
imminent and a troop build-up would follow as a precursor. The nearest
landing zone was the Gurkha post and that was where he would head. If the
plan formulating in his mind went well, he would crown the success with a
chopper to his name. Splitting the team in half, he led the raiding force back
to the village of Kumulamunai, using tracks and paths unknown to the
IPKF.
From a distance he could see frenzied activity in progress on the post. The
news of the debacle was filtering in and the disquiet it had created was
visible. Silvam went straight to his house and warned his wife to pack up
and take refuge in the stone temple next to the sea and away from the
mayhem that he was about to unleash.
‘Wait for me, for I will join you for sure, and look after the little boy,’ he
told her, as she stood there petrified, clutching her son to her bosom, with a
profound sense of foreboding gnawing at her innards. ‘Don’t venture
towards the village for the Indian dogs will be rabid by then and will bite
anything Sri Lankan—man, woman or child. Wait for a few days and in
case you don’t hear from me, then assume I am dead. Keep this address, go
across and meet this man. He will help you. Stay out of this madness for I
see no end in sight. Give the boy a peaceful environment to grow up in, an
opportunity destiny has denied us.’ Pulling something out of his front
pocket, Silvam slipped a folded piece of paper across to her.
The villagers were then told to assemble in the local school and those
showing reluctance, such as the old and the sick, were herded by force and
a guard posted to ensure no one would contact the IPKF post. Silvam knew
from experience that the first reaction of the soldiers would be to take their
anger out on the nearest village, which by their expectations, should have
warned them about the impending attack. With the locals taken care of,
Silvam along with fifteen men parked himself on a high ground, 600 metres
away from the post, with the helipad below and in his direct line of sight.
There he waited, like a patient hungry vulture.

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 Post-Road Junction
As for man his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth /
for the wind passeth over it, and it is gone.
—Psalms 103:15-16

The sojourn at Kokkuvil came to an end and Seven Troop was asked to
move back for jungle ops. Harry looked despondently for the last time at
the little bungalow, the bustling street and the shops which had been home
for a few weeks. The basic comforts of civilisation like electricity and toilets
were addictive after having lived rough for months, and with a heavy heart,
the troop boarded the chopper for Kilinochchi.
Harry had lost count of the number of times he had moved locations. In his
opinion, it was all a waste, with no return on the efforts put in. This time it
was a Kumaon company post they were attached to and the moment the
langar (cook house) was functional to churn out puris, it was rock and roll
in the bushes. It was supposed to be another of those never-ending
ambushes and Harry was just settling down for a long haul when he got a
message to abort and head back to base. He was getting a feeling that these
outings were designed more to keep them busy rather than kill any Tamil
Tigers.
He now feared dying of prolonged boredom in the bush, more than by
enemy fire. Harry was temperamentally not designed to sit immobile for so
long and often got the urge to run out screaming, or throw caution to the
wind and just be normal for a change, a sort of picnic in the bush. ‘It was
only from the point of view of stillness that one understood motion,’ he
reminded himself for the umpteenth time. ‘You are a renunciate, a pilgrim,
Harry Baba, this will only make you stronger. Stay the course, everything
passes, perishes and palls.’
He had heard of road rage and wondered if the symptoms he displayed at
that point could be classified as bush rage. Maybe, he mused, a new kind of
ailment had been discovered by him; depression due to sustained exposure
to the bush, culminating in insanity, wherein the patient finally starts
thinking he is the bush. He comforted himself by recalling the words of FS
Chapman—a man who had spent three years in the jungles of Malaya
during World War II—‘There is no good or bad jungle, only the mind
makes it so; the jungle is neutral.’ All talk in the jungle was in whispers or
sign language and even back at base it was not strange to find people still
continuing conversations in whispers.
By the time Harry got back to the post, the Major had already departed with
the rest of the team. The operator told him it was an SOS op and a big bird
was coming in to pick them up in twenty minutes. Packing took no time as
they lived off their backpacks and moved every week or so. In jocularity
they called themselves the whores of the army—anyone could take them.
The MOH (meat on hooves, in army parlance live goats) had been delivered
and the men herded the four goats to the helipad. The MI-8 circled over the
post and lost height rapidly in what seemed like vertical drops and settled
down in a cloud of dust, engine whining and rotors running. It was the
helicopter version of the Khe Sanh style of landing and take-off. Harry
recalled reading it was during the siege of Khe Sanh, an American base in
Vietnam, where the pilots perfected the art of landing fixed-wing aircraft
under fire. Basically, just short of the runway, the pilot did a vertical climb
and then corkscrewed straight down, before pulling out just in time to land.
The Russians followed the same trick during their stint in Afghanistan to
avoid the Stingers and rockets. The pilot signalled to Harry to load and
pointed to his watch. Landing and taking off in Sri Lanka was when those
guys earned their flying allowance.
A few choppers had been knocked down or damaged by the LTTE and the
pilots were very jittery on the ground. In fact the unit had lost an officer
while attempting a jungle insertion. The chopper was on a low hover over a
jungle clearing and the officer was standing at the door managing the
winch, when suddenly they received heavy ground fire. The pilot pulled out
immediately and the chopper limped home damaged, carrying the officer
dead. A single bullet had slipped from under his bulletproof vest and met
his unfortunate heart. Clearly, it was preordained, for how could one
explain that the very clearing in the vast jungles selected randomly from the
map had the Tamil Tigers taking a coffee break, when they saw this gift from
heaven descending and emptied their magazines at it in joy.
The pilot then revved up the engine to indicate his impatience and the bird
hopped a little. The men were crammed like rounds in a magazine, with
their pots, pans, plastic sheets and bamboo poles, along with the goats. It
looked more like a bus full of slum dwellers being rehabilitated than a
military chopper carrying SF troops. The chopper lifted a little, struggled
half-heartedly and settled down in a cloud of dust. The Sergeant chatted into
the radio set briefly, leaned across and told Harry to reduce weight. Out
went some bamboo poles and a sack or two of flour, but the Sergeant was
insistent on ridding them of the goats. An argument ensued and the co-pilot
joined in the discussion.
Tempers were rising and in spite of the shouting, most of the conversation
was getting lost in the din of the engine. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s
burden in this case,’ thought Harry. ‘Unbelievable, such a big chopper and
they were haggling over a couple of hundred kilograms!’ He was briefly
tempted to put a pistol to the pilot’s head to force him to take off, like one
sees in the movies where the hero threatens a doctor or a pilot to save his
men; of course, in this case, it was goats! However, something told him to
keep his own counsel. The Air Force would have been bloody pissed if they
had lost one of their choppers for a couple of goats. Needless to say, Harry
would have lost his neck for certain. It was hard-earned proteins for sure
and in an environment where food occupied a huge part of their thoughts.
After all, what else was there for a man to fight over? The three Zs—Zan,
Zar, Zameen—women, gold and land, as the Afghans say are worth fighting
and dying for, and all were missing in that case.
The bird had been on the ground for over fifteen minutes and the crew was
getting noticeably nervous now. A sitting chopper drew the Tigers like
pirates to pillage. They just couldn’t resist the temptation and would have a
go at it with whatever was available—small arms, rocket-propelled
grenades or mortars. Three goats were put down reluctantly and they were
still overweight and then there was muffled report of automatic fire
somewhere and immediately the whine of the engine picked up. There was
rattling on the fuselage, as if someone was showering pebbles on it and
people exchanged worried looks. A soldier pointed at the roof and Harry
shouted at the Air Force Sergeant to either let them out or take off. The
chopper shuddered violently in protest like a drunken dragonfly, hung in
brief uncertainty a few feet over the ground and then, to the bleating of
goats and clanking of pots and pans, it lifted off with a jerk.
Harry wondered if the Kumaonis providing helipad protection had lost
patience and fired a few shots, enough they knew to end the argument and
give the pilot the boost he needed. After all one would rather lose men than
a chopper on your real estate, it was not good for the post commander’s
dossier. The pilot circled over the post, gaining height, till he was out of
range of small arms fire, before putting the nose down and heading out. It
was only when they were airborne that Harry realised he had no idea where
they were going.
The chopper flew further south and looking down the open cargo hatch,
kaleidoscopic images flashed past; from dense green jungle to a mosaic of
open cultivated fields criss-crossed with dusty tracks and roads. They
crossed a broad tar road, the A-9, the main artery connecting Jaffna in the
north to Colombo further south. At the junction of some of these crossings,
thatched cottages popped up and finally they could see a stretch of scrubby,
sandy white beach. The chopper turned over the green-blue sea and
approached an open area, dotted for miles around with coconut trees. They
were on the north-eastern coast next to Nayaru Lagoon and the place was
called Kumulamunai.
From the men standing around, Harry knew it was a Gurkha Battalion post.
They directed him to a hillock about 400 metres ahead, on which he could
see tents, radio antennae and other indication of army inhabitation. The
moment he mounted the hillock, he got the strange sensation that something
was seriously amiss. A body completely bemired was lying in a foetal
position next to the track. He was a local and showed no sign of life. There
was listlessness about the men in the post and most carried a vacant stare, as
if in deep shock. They were hanging around in groups like people are wont
to do after an incident. There was an unnatural hush about the place and the
feeling of death and loss was all pervasive.
Harry ran into his Commanding Officer who had landed earlier with the CO
of a sister SF unit. The Colonel was talking quietly to the 2IC (second in
command) and the Adjutant of the Gurkha unit, telling them something
about this being a war. Animated chatter in Gurkhali came from inside the
communication tent, as a soldier came out and reported that another party of
five had reached the post at Chemmalai. A little later, Harry heard Hindi
songs being played in the tent and the same soldier came out looking
helpless and dejected, to report that all radio channels were jammed by the
Tigers and they were playing, of all songs, ‘Sare Jahan Se Achha’. Harry
got to know the story from the team commander.
Forty-five men were missing, with a few having turned up at another post.
The CO and the Subedar Major were missing and believed killed. It was a
standard practice the LTTE followed—of mauling a fresh unit so viciously
so as to render it incapable of any further aggression during the rest of their
stay. A little later, the Division Commander flew in and gave a pep talk to
all the officers and JCOs. It was a war he told them and people died, or
words to that effect. Next to arrive was the Brigade Commander and he had
the misfortune of commanding the hottest brigade in Sri Lanka. There
hadn’t been a dull moment since he had deployed the brigade and the
Brigadier was looking for a quiet evening to write a few letters home, when
the news of the debacle was reported. As night flying was not allowed he
commandeered the Div Commander’s returning chopper the next morning
to make his way to the post. He was a Guards Officer, nattily dressed with a
red scarf and a product of the best training institutions the army could
provide. A briefing had been arranged for him behind the mess tent.
It was around nine in the morning and already the armpits were running like
a tap. A large map hung in front and chairs had been arranged facing it, in
neat rows. Even in a calamity situation the army’s bandobast was not
forgotten. People took their seats. The two COs along with the team
commander and the Gurkha officers sat in front. Harry sat behind with the
commander’s chopper pilots. A Major stood to brief them with the help of a
map hung on one side of the mess tent. He was the officer commanding or
was commanding, what was left of the ill-fated company, which was still
accounting its dead and missing. Bedraggled and tired, he looked
traumatised. The Brigadier opened the briefing in a very refined accent and
said something about being ‘here not to criticise but to learn from our
faults’.
The Major narrated the sequence of events and talked about how they were
caught in the open with no cover and how the intensity of the firing broke
the column into two. People insistently enquired if he had seen the
Commanding Officer and why was the body left behind. Leaving the body
of a dead comrade behind is humiliating, unacceptable and a shameful act
and if the bodies happened to be those of your CO and SM, the crime was
unpardonable. The Major claimed, the last he saw of the CO, he was
severely wounded and the SM was along with him. Apparently, the SM
refused to leave his side, stating that he preferred to die, rather than desert
the man he had practically grown up with. Whatever the folly of the plan,
clearly courage in some quarters was not found wanting.
A volley of questions were directed at the Major and Harry felt rather sorry
for him, as he was completely outranked and got no chance to get a word in
edgeways. Everybody was seething with anger and waiting for the
Commander to lay out his plans for retribution. His further inquisition was
interrupted by a burst of gunfire.
The Brigadier arched a questioning eyebrow.
‘Tell the post sentries to stop firing. I said no noise while the briefing was
on. They are probably engaging the fishing boats out in the lagoon.
Continue Major.’
Before the Major could continue, the firing escalated and there was a dull
thud of a mortar bomb. Someone came running to say the post was under
attack. The Brigadier was ushered into the dug-up mess tent, while his
pilots raced downhill to the bird parked below. Within minutes they got the
chopper airborne and Harry watched amazed, as it flew backwards barely 20
feet above the ground, away from the firing. There was panic on the post, as
every man with a weapon blazed away at some unseen enemy. Harry looked
around for his senior JCO to get the troop ready. Some of the men were
having a bath at the well and turned up in an assortment of clothing. Six
Troop was told to take a detour via the village and approach the high
ground from where the fire was coming. They disappeared down the hill at
a jog, while Harry with his men went down towards the helipad, taking
cover behind a boundary wall that ran around a temple. The team
commander joined him there.
The firing had intensified and Harry was unsure what to do next, as he
crouched safely behind the wall. A glance over his shoulder and he saw a
ragtag bunch of men. There was Sathish, his shirt open to the waist, a gold
locket around his neck and a huge grin spreading across his black face, with
eyes practically oozing wickedness. He sure loved a good fight. Anil was in
shorts and singlet carrying the heavy rocket launcher, his brow creased in
anxiety and big droplets of sweat pouring down his face. Zile Singh, all 6
feet of him, looked like a harried Humphrey Bogart, with tousled hair and
furrows across the forehead. He was in a pair of red bathroom slippers with
a bandage around the left foot. Harry peered around the wall and decided
that the only way to dominate the firefight was to make a frontal assault.
The combat logjam demanded sheer aggression, but Harry couldn’t seem
to get his limbs to move. It was raining lead. He stayed put, shouting
something behind at the men. The inability to move bruised his ego, for it
went against his temperament to be cowed down like this and he berated
himself. The fear of being thought a coward gave him courage and he
stepped out from behind the wall. There was a rattle of musketry from very
close and Harry stopped, crouched and watched the pebbles do a tango a
few inches in front of him, as his fear-addled brain tried to make sense of
that phenomenon. Then it hit him, he was the target and it prompted him to
do an ignominious back roll, to retract quickly behind the safety of the wall.
He heard the Major shouting something about getting the men killed. His
mind was going numb with all the orders and noise and Sathish didn’t help
by prodding him with the barrel from behind and whispering in his ears to
take the lead.
There was a militant sitting on a tree across the compound and Harry
indicated this to the Major. Someone then emptied his automatic into the
foliage. Harry recalled a saying by Robert Clive, ‘To stop is dangerous, to
recede ruin’. He took the plunge and ran down, pausing for breath at the
bottom, to get a better picture of the contact. 500 yards away Harry saw five
or six figures wearing lungis and camouflage shirts, under a knoll, quite
oblivious to all the fire being directed at them. He ordered Anil Pehlwan to
fire the 84 mm Carl Gustav rocket launcher for an airburst and the shot was
a beauty, for it exploded where it was supposed to, just above the hill. 800
angry steel pellets showered down, seeking what was legitimately theirs
over a 20-metre radius.
There was panic in the ranks and Harry saw the Tiger fighters scramble up
the slope. They covered a little more distance and Harry loaded the rocket
launcher, on the run, patting Anil on the back to take the shot. Anil stopped,
leaned forward to balance and fired. The round dug into the bund and
exploded harmlessly a hundred yards ahead. Anil’s big chest was heaving at
a frightful pace and the way he had dropped distance, Harry worried about
getting his toes blown off with the next shot. He ordered Anil to drop the
rocket launcher and continue the assault with the AK.
A man was coming towards them, ambling along as if he was out for his
morning exercise. As he drew near, Sathish dropped to his knees to bowl
him over. He didn’t look Tamil, so the men held fire and the Gurkha drew
up to Harry. For a man who had been shot at close quarters and had seen
some of his friends get killed, he was a study in coolness. Calmly he
pointed to the hill behind and narrated the sequence of events to Harry. He
mumbled something about being shot and amazingly showed two neat holes
on either side of the seat of his baggy trousers—‘the advantage of an ill
fitting uniform in combat,’ thought Harry. The bullet had scraped his arse
from end to end, and even that had not rattled the man. Harry wondered if
he had any nerves, for having briefed him the soldier now saluted and
continued at his leisurely pace. Someone shouted at him to change
direction, for he was going towards the jungle rather than to the post and
Harry wondered, if he might not run into another bunch of Tigers at the
other end. The soldier didn’t hear and Harry felt sorry for the Tigers instead,
if this small piece of fighting machine was to find himself amongst them,
brandishing his unsheathed kukri.
The sheer audacity of the attack forced the Tigers to concede ground and
they broke contact. Harry stood looking at the four Gurkha soldiers dead
and stripped off their gear and weapons. One didn’t have to be Sherlock
Holmes to work out the sequence of events. The Tigers arrived at night and
patiently waited for the choppers, but ran into the helipad protection party
and had no choice but to engage them. They then turned their attention on
the small chopper which fortunately was screened by a couple of trees and
managed to take off in the opposite direction. The bodies were lying just
below the knoll, and the Tigers were stripping the soldiers when the rocket
launcher’s round disrupted their proceedings. A couple of soldiers promptly
took cover in a hut close by and were facing the brunt of the Tigers’ fire.
Intercepts confirmed two Tigers killed and another wounded. As they say in
guerrilla warfare, the man with the cheaper uniform generally wins.

Silvam had hung around in the village till nightfall. He knew anyone
making an attempt in the darkness to go across to the post, would in all
probability get shot by the sentries and the villagers knew the risks
involved. He had arrived at the hillock by a circuitous route avoiding the
open ground and the path in front. The night was spent preparing the
position and building a barricade of bush and old coconut trees lying
around. A mortar position was dug and stamped out and Silvam then
gathered the men in the mortar pit and ran them through the sequence of
battle, as he imagined it would unfold, in hushed tones. After downing the
chopper, the group would split up, while a buddy pair would hold off any
resistance and the rest would slip away by different routes and rendezvous at
the jungle camp. A man was dispatched to the temple, just below the post, to
discourage any attempt by the Indians to send out troops. If he had the
numbers, Silvam would have invested the post and annihilated it to a man.
He was an experienced campaigner and had forgotten more about
aggressive fighting than a lot of soldiers would ever learn in a life time of
soldiering.
The group then settled down for the morning to arrive with most of them
dozing off. Silvam, however, stayed awake. The village dogs had been
disturbed by their movement and were raising an infernal din. He was
worried that the Indians might get suspicious and investigate. It was the
only flaw in the planning and he cursed himself for not having tied their
muzzles. Strangely, it struck him that unlike in India, the dogs in Sri Lanka
didn’t have a full-throated bark, but would bay most of the time. And a dog
howling was considered a bad omen amongst Hindus, for it apparently
portends death. ‘Perhaps,’ thought Silvam, ‘the dogs had a premonition
about the calamitous future of Sri Lanka or maybe of the post.’
He looked across at the faint lantern light on the Indian post and wondered
what the men were up to. It looked quiet enough to give him comfort. He
was a day late, for he had received intelligence inputs about fresh troops
that had landed earlier to bolster the post strength. He was more worried
about the newcomers, for he knew the first bunch to arrive would invariably
be the SF guys.
Then his mind drifted to desultory thoughts of home and childhood. He
recalled the kids playing football on the ground below which was now the
helipad and his killing area. Silvam clasped on to a concrete image of
himself as a young boy, sitting on the same hill, watching the game in
progress and feeling very lonely. And here he was now, leading some of the
very same boys who had mocked him in school.
The hours crawled, like they always did in such circumstances and finally
the stars overhead lost their twinkle and faded in the sky that was growing
lighter. A sharp crisp smell which comes at daybreak hit the nostrils and a
cock crowed in the distant village. The dogs, having exhausted themselves,
uttered no cry and none stirred in the village of Kumulamunai. A strong
breeze picked up from the sea, rustling through the palm fronds and
awakening the weather-beaten windsock, as it flapped dismally, trying to
stay anchored to the thin bamboo pole. The post came alive and figures
could be seen attending to the morning stand to, a standard operating
procedure followed in combat conditions, wherein all troops report to their
battle stations in readiness.
The distant whine of a chopper carried across to the waiting men,
galvanising them into action. The Cheetah came over the post and then
spiralled down to land at a small clearing instead of touching down at the
main helipad. Silvam watched in disappointment as it disappeared behind a
bund lined with trees. He was hoping for a bigger bird engorged with men,
which could be downed before anybody had the chance to get out. He could
never forget how they had missed the chance in the Jaffna University
operation. In his mind he latched on to images of that fateful night. The
sound of the chopper getting louder till it engulfed the sound of their
excited chatter, as it landed in the field. The noise of its engines
reverberating in the close confine of the buildings. He recalled the smell of
dust blowing up from the field and the strained whine of the machine as it
laboured to take off under the withering fire it was taking. Some
punishment they took and yet they came. He shook his head in disbelief—
incredible luck, courage and an extraordinary display of flying had saved
the Indians. ‘But this time it is different,’ he thought. It was broad daylight
and he knew exactly where the chopper would land. Briefly he
contemplated moving forward and engaging the parked chopper, but
covering the open ground under the shadow of the post machine guns was a
high risk. He decided to wait and watch.
Then the plan started to go horribly awry, like plans often do when
submitted to the ordeal of battle. A section strength of ten soldiers appeared
on the track, leisurely patrolling towards the helipad. It was the second flaw
in his hastily-prepared plan, for he had completely forgotten about the
helipad protection party which always preceded an air effort. Five men
walked ahead bunched up and chatting, while the rest walked a hundred
yards behind, their rifles slung on their shoulders with the last man herding
a couple of stray cattle with a stick in pure boredom. The group in front was
in the killing ground just below the hill and Silvam took an instant decision
to bag the birds in hand, rather than wait for two in an unknown bush. He
gave the order to fire.
The first volley dropped all five in the group and before he could engage
the remaining section, the men behind ran into a couple of disused huts
nearby. Then a machine gun started chattering intermittently from the post
and within a few minutes, the whole post seemed to come alive to the
crackle of small arms fire. Most of the fire was inaccurate and went over
their heads. He heard the whine of the chopper starting and saw it rise to
treetop level. He directed the fire at the bird, and loosened off a few rocket-
propelled grenades, expecting it to emerge from behind the tree cover and
go sailing over the lagoon, in the direction it had come from, giving him a
clear target. But it just disappeared from sight and for a second he thought it
had crashed. The next time he sighted the chopper, it was 2,000 feet up and
climbing towards the sun.
Suddenly one of the soldiers popped up like a jack-in-the-box from amongst
those they assumed were slain and made a run for it. Silvam, with a few
fighters, ran down firing at him and the soldier promptly hit the dust. They
started to strip the dead bodies off their weapons and usable gear, when
suddenly there was a terrific explosion overhead. The element of surprise
was over and what was intended to be a simple raid to bag a chopper had
broadened into a full-fledged battle.
Anthony, next to him, crumbled to the ground with shrapnel in his leg and
Silvam looked up to see one of his men pointing towards the post and
urging him to hasten back. He knew other variables were coming into play
as the fight progressed, over which he had no control. It was time to slip the
cable. Giving a shoulder to the injured fighter, Silvam scrambled up the
slope. The firefight was slipping out of his hands. He looked towards the
beleaguered post and saw a stream of soldiers running towards them. His
first thought was to wonder, what had happened to his man at the temple,
for he had been stationed just for this eventuality, to provide harassing fire.
The soldiers were gaining ground fast and displaying unusual fieldcraft in
the way they moved, going to ground from time to time, so as to provide a
difficult target.
Silvam decided to break contact and called to his men to collect the dead
and the wounded. He was the last to leave the position and cast a furtive
look back at the post, squinting his eyes in the bright sunlight. He could see
the Indian troops clearly, for the soldiers had reached halfway to his
position and were, it seemed, in consultation with the Gurkha who had
made a run and was clearly alive and kicking. Then he wheeled and ran
down the opposite slope, carrying the bizarre revelation that the men
chasing him were none other than his old acquaintances from the jungle.
An angry and resolute Gurkha contingent immediately poured out of the
post with kukris drawn, for a retaliatory response, to the nearest village of
Kumulamunai, since the local people had not shared any information prior
to the attack on the post. The troops were in the mood for revenge,
particularly since the nearby villagers had been living off the largesse of the
Indians, in rations and medical supplies. Harry saw the grim faces of the
soldiers, as they filed past him on their way to the village and he didn’t feel
sorry for the locals. If you abet violence, some of it will boomerang back at
you. Fence-sitting never helps. And that’s how the cycle of violence
continues.
In the evening, a solemn assembly gathered for the last rites of the dead
soldiers and a hurried subdued prayer ceremony was conducted by the
Gurkha pundit in a combat dress. The flickering flames, in the backdrop of
the dying sun reflecting on the dark expanse of the Nayaru Lagoon, made
for a poignant setting. A thick column of smoke rose up languorously,
spreading a pall of gloom on those below. Briefly, Harry’s mind drifted to a
young woman, a son perhaps or an old mother, somewhere in a remote
hamlet, on a distant mountain, in another country, waiting for the man in
their lives to come home, and waiting in vain.

OceanofPDF.com
 Kumulamunai Village
Death seemed my servant on the road,
till we were near and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy
he outran me and took you apart.
Into his quietness.
—TE Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

For the next few days the team was asked to carry out area sanitisation
tasks. Then a week later they flew back, to hit the very camp which had cost
the Gurkhas dearly in the Alampil jungles. It was a brigade-plus operation
and the Indian Army was baying for retribution. The battalion comprising
three fighting teams had been split across the island, each operating
independently under one of the divisions deployed in Sri Lanka. The entire
Bravo Team collected at Kilinochchi and linked up with the Alpha Team
which had been flown in earlier from the north of the island where they had
been operating. There was great bonhomie as people met each other after
months. The battalion had been on the island for nearly two years and there
had been few occasions when the teams were thrown together. Generally
the only time they operated in tandem was when a camp had to be busted. A
joint briefing was held later and Harry was amazed by the content and the
candidness of the talk given by the team commanders. Given in any other
circumstances, the speech would have shocked the audience enough to boo
the speaker off the stage, but here in the context of the time and place, it
was absorbed by the listeners with fatalistic resignation.
‘Soldiers, you know we have gathered here to carry out one of those ops,
which bring more grief on ourselves, than on the enemy,’ said Sharma, who
was the senior Major. ‘But such are the orders and they will be carried out
to the letter like always. Each man is a volunteer and has gone through hell
to be sitting here. We didn’t ask for you, you came to us on your own free
will. So no whining for God’s sake. You are highly trained, experienced and
the best this country’s army has to offer. Remember that and don’t you let
the flag down.’
‘We are hitting a camp, so write your letters boys, and finish with your wills
—those who haven’t,’ continued Sharma, as the other officers sat around,
nodding their heads in agreement. ‘Legs and arms will go for sure, so don’t
make a racket for God’s sake if you are hit. You know it draws fire. You will
be picked up, if it’s possible, otherwise wait, if you are not in a hurry to
meet your maker. Carry plenty of ammo and water, for if the higher ups
have their way, we might be settling in forever.’ There was some sniggering
from the group, the Major ignored it and carried on. ‘Those who were in the
last big operation of a similar nature where a camp had to be busted in
Muttur know the casualties we took. And that was a much smaller camp.
This one is the mother of all camps and some of the bigwigs in the
hierarchy are present there. You will certainly get a fight for your money.
Watch out for mines and IEDs, especially on the trees and one explosion
doesn’t constitute a minefield,’ and he looked at Harry addressing him
straight.
‘Your troop Harry, sat out the whole fight last time, just because Manohar
blew a leg on a Johnny? Make sure they don’t sit out this time.’
Before Harry could answer, Zile Singh intruded loudly in defence of the
troop.
‘It was a minefield sahib,’ he retorted, ‘we weren’t imagining. I for sure was
not dreaming up the jerrycan strapped 10 feet away on the tree and nobody
knew where the switch was. That alone would have taken the entire troop to
kingdom come.’
‘All right, simmer down Zile. Nobody is calling you guys yellow,’ said the
Major, ‘just be careful.’
Harry started to get a horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach as he heard
them, but drew courage from the men around; they seemed quite calm and
resigned. A form of fatalism had set in and the wise man lived for the hour.
But Harry was unsure about being stoic and quiet if his legs were to blow
off or if his entrails were hanging out. His mind drifted briefly, as he
conjured up images of a severely wounded self, propped against a tree,
biting his lips in the throes of pain, as life slowly drained out of him. He
wrenched himself away from the thought, which threatened to drag him into
a quagmire of despondency, and recalled what he had read about
experienced soldiers. They had learnt the most important quality of survival
in a protracted combat environment—that danger only existed at the exact
place and moment of danger, and not before and not after. Imagination is a
dangerous virtue, for while it helps some men, it can destroy others when
allowed to run riot.
The next day the chopper deposited them in a small clearing very close to
where the Gurkhas had been ambushed. There were various small tracks
disappearing into the jungle and the engineers had marked the usable path
with duct tape and they were warned not to stray for fear of IEDs and
mines. On the main path which had been cleared by the engineers, lounged
a motley crew of men belonging to the various infantry regiments of the
army. Garhwalis, Gurkhas, South Indians from the engineers and joining the
party, the SF men.
Heavy firing could be heard from inside the jungle and Harry noticed the
tension and fear on every face. A couple of casualties were carried out and
he heard an officer screaming into the radio for the casualty evacuation
chopper to land. The pilot it seemed was insisting the landing zone was not
safe and he wouldn’t risk his machine. This was the Indian Army, where the
cost of the chopper was more than the life of a soldier, for it was easier to
replace the latter. The officer was frantic for he could see his man bleeding
to death. He was mumbling something about the boy being the best athlete
and wondered how he was going to inform his parents. Harry saw the small
chopper hovering in uncertainty overhead and the pilot finally decided to
take the plunge, for it came bobbing like a giant dragonfly at treetop level
and landed. Harry was not sure if the casualty was loaded, for at that instant
the firing picked up and without even a by-your-leave, the bird suddenly
took off.
A gunship which had been prowling the sky now came weaving low over
the lagoon, like an angry bumblebee and Harry was gripped by fear, just
looking at the menacing form coming towards them. The whine of its
engines got louder by the second, as it drowned the din created by all the
small arms fire and dropped a 2,000-pound bomb, before banking sharply
and disappearing from the fight. Someone had the sense to send it home, for
the contact was too close for it to support the ground troops anyway. Harry
thanked God that he was not at the receiving end, for he had experienced
the damage it could wreak. It was all so surreal; the imagery sharp and
constantly changing, the sounds loud and the whole scene straight out of a
Hollywood Vietnam War movie.
The Tigers, it seemed, were making one hell of a stand against the might of
the Indian Army. Rumour was that the Black Tigers were in camp and
perhaps Mathaya too may be holed up. The Black Tigers were the LTTE’s
Special Forces and more. Each person was a volunteer and was handpicked
by Prabhakaran himself.
While they waited for orders to move into the jungle, Harry had time to
ponder and observe. He watched in an unobtrusive way as a Gurkha soldier
whipped out his 12-inch kukri and neatly sliced an onion into four pieces.
Then from his pack he took out a packet and carefully pulled out some dry
puris. He made a meal of it, chewing slowly, deep in thought. His helmet
never came off and he looked haggard and sad, with a faraway look in his
eyes. Watching him, Harry wondered, if it hadn’t been for employment,
would he have joined the Indian Army? It was quite a distance from the
hills of Nepal to this back of beyond jungle in Sri Lanka. On a mountain
anywhere in the world, this man would have blended with the terrain, a
heartening sight, but here in a tropical jungle, he was incongruous. Give
him a well-defended enemy position to attack, in a conventional infantry
role and this small jolly man, with a protruding bottom and a wobbly gait,
would be the most fatal fighting man on earth, but here, he seemed to be out
of his depth.
The man caught his eye, smiled and offered Harry his meal. He wiped the
kukri on his trouser, ran a finger along the blade and put it back in the
scabbard. Then Harry heard a loud greeting from behind and turned to see
his old pal Satbir the Jat, grinning from ear to ear and clearly nonplussed
about the danger in store. They sat on the narrow path, shoulder to shoulder
and exchanged news.
‘What bad luck sahib,’ he told Harry, ‘I was about to go on leave, the
convoy got cancelled and then the op was launched. But good, I got a
chance to participate or the boys in the company would have given me
hell.’
The conversation then strangely veered towards the cost and quality of
buffaloes in Punjab and Haryana and Harry’s men joined in, turning it into a
lively debate. The oddity of the subject amazed Harry, discussing buffaloes
at the brink of disparate action, in the middle of a minefield.
A while later, Satbir got up, wearily picked up his rifle, adjusted the helmet
and wandered off down the path. The next instant, Harry heard a muffled
explosion and saw Satbir lifted off his feet in a cloud of dust next to a
decrepit well. He was bawling his guts out and a couple of his colleagues,
instead of rushing to help, hung back out of fear of mines. Harry curtailed
his natural instinct to jump to a wounded colleague’s rescue, checking his
stride immediately and reversing back on to the path. ‘Stick to the used
path,’ Harry reminded his boys sitting around, ‘for remember, the easy way
is always mined.’ As Satbir was carried away, Harry saw one of his legs
hanging below the knee at a grotesque angle and blood oozing from a head
wound. ‘Johnny mine sahib,’ muttered one of his men from behind, spitting
thick yellow tobacco juice, as he shuffled a pack of cards. The Johnny was a
locally-manufactured IED, often using a soap box. The plastic signature
could not be picked up by the mine detectors and the ordnance carried
enough explosives to decapitate the leg below the knee. Once over the
initial shock of the explosion, realisation would set in that one had lost a leg
and was going to bleed to death, a the man would bawl to high heavens for
succour. It was better to have a dead man on your hands, in a combat
situation, especially during a live contact, as the wounded soldiers
screaming had a tremendous demoralising effect on the others around, often
paralysing bodily movement.
This initiated another lively debate amongst them on how Manohar blew his
leg in the last op in the Muttur jungles. And what amazed all, was that he
was way down in the column, when the Johnny took his leg off and not a
scratch to the guys in front and behind him. Harry was sorry for Satbir, a
fine specimen of a man and a soldier, but he was more disturbed at the
shallowness of his feelings. Clearly, emotions were getting denuded under
the constant exposure to violence and death, hardening the man for survival.
The only real thought was the satisfaction that it was not you being carted
out on a stretcher.
Orders finally came to move in and take over position from the Garhwalis
who had been in contact with the Tigers. Harry was burdened with extra
ammo and mines and found himself in a head down ass up position. The
path became narrower and the jungle thicker. It was spooky and gloomy as
no sunlight filtered through the canopy and the fear of mines and IEDs kept
one’s mind sharp. Harry’s eyes were fastened on the track, as they passed a
clearing, where a 2,000-pound bomb had flattened all the trees in a perfect
radius of 10 metres. A little ahead, he saw smoke from hastily-prepared
pyres. The Garhwalis were burning the dead in the middle of the jungle. A
hand with a red thread around the wrist hung out limply from under the pile
of logs. Clearly the holy thread didn’t bring him much luck; perhaps, he
didn’t propitiate the gods of war satisfactorily. Harry muttered a silent
gayatri mantra under his breath.
The first person Harry met was a coursemate, Deepak Madhok.
Imperturbable by nature, Harry saw Deepak ruffled for the first time. His
team had taken casualties and he quickly briefed Harry about the situation.
The CO of the Garhwalis was wounded but was still conducting operations
with a bandaged arm. They handed over the position to the fresh troops and
got out. Harry linked up with the other team which had come in earlier. A
dugout, with hastily-piled logs in front, looked safe and Harry settled down
in it.
There was no sleep that night as the Tigers and the Gunner officer with the
team, kept them entertained. It turned into a duel of sorts. The Tigers
opened up with mortars and a heavy machine gun. The huge bullets cracked
branches overhead and Harry imagined the impact of collecting one of the
slugs. The Gunner Major immediately went on air and called for artillery
support. 8 kilometres away, the light guns responded to his request, as they
belched in unison their cargo of death. The Major kept giving them
corrections in a calm gentle voice, like a father directing his child walking
for the first time. The LTTE camp was less than a hundred metres away and
the hollow thump of the Tiger bombs leaving the mortar tube carried across
no man’s land. At one stage the CO had to curb the Major’s enthusiasm, as
the shells dropped rather close to their own position. A day before, a shell
had landed on their own troops, killing a few. It was frightening to hear the
high-pitched scream of the incoming shells and then the airburst, as shrapnel
tore through the foliage.
Every time the Tigers fired, the Major returned the compliment with interest.
Most feared the shelling more than the Tigers by then. But none could deny
it was a fine shoot. Through the night, Harry heard both male and female
voices from the LTTE camp as they waited for the attack. The women in the
camp were all fighters and as good as their male counterparts. The first
batch was trained by the Indians and subsequently by Colonel Victor
Commander of Mannar, who led them into battle initially. The maximum
resistance Harry knew had come from them at Kopay, as the army advanced
on Jaffna in the beginning of the conflict. He recalled reading a Sri Lankan
writer who had remarked that, ‘It was the first time in Indian military
history that jawans confronted the opposite sex and suffered badly; an
unprecedented phenomenon that shocked the arrogant, male chauvinistic
army.’
Harry didn’t know if it shocked the rest of the army, but he sure felt sorry
for the guys who would perhaps eventually marry them some day.
Nobody was keen to bust the camp, for experience had taught them that the
objective would come at a heavy price, as the place would be brimming
with mines and booby traps. In one of the camps the unit had raided, other
than the casualties, just when the showdown was imminent with the Tigers,
on orders from above, a part of the cordon had been lifted and the birds
escaped. It was all believed to be prearranged and the Indian external
intelligence agency, RAW (Research and Analysis Wing), was blamed
squarely for helping some LTTE top brass evade the dragnet. To the last
man, the army hated the RAW for its perfidy and double games. Another
day and night was spent snarling at each other like dogs, as neither party
could summon enough courage to take the fight across. As the firing
diminished from time to time, the bold scuttled between dugouts like
bandicoots to socialise. Conversation was invariably about the stupidity of
entering the camp and suffering unnecessary casualties.
‘What’s the navy doing!’ piped up Hooda, ‘patrolling the coastline and
pussyfooting, why can’t they just shell the bloody area?’
‘Too decent by far,’ interjected the team commander, ‘napalm the place, like
the Yanks did in Vietnam. But then we Indians are more worried about what
the world will think.’
‘And what are we doing here in any case?’ interjected the Gunner Major,
who was a Sikh officer, ‘the further north you go from Madras, the less
folks know about this war. Most think we are having a foreign sojourn
buying video cassette recorders and gold. What a waste of good lives!’
‘Good lives be dammed,’ spoke up Sharma from the corner of the bunker,
adding a log to the pile in front, ‘I have been around on the island for nearly
eighteen months and on my last leave home, my young son addressed me as
uncle and refused to come to me.’
‘Well Sir, can’t blame the kid though,’ retorted Harry, ‘with your long locks
and flowing beard, you look more like a drifting mendicant. I wouldn’t
touch you with a barge pole either.’
‘If you have them by their balls, their minds and body will follow,’ piped up
Hooda, feeling left out of the conversation.
‘It’s mind and hearts,’ Harry corrected him with a chuckle.
On the third day, as first light filtered through the jungle canopy, all the
other sub-units were finally in position and the cordon considered
sufficiently tight. The dreaded orders were received to escalate the fight and
attack the camp. Harry was tasked to stay in reserve and cover one of the
exits, for once pressure was exerted, the Tigers’ modus operandi had been to
split into smaller groups and break out in all directions. The artillery
shelling abruptly stopped, there was a lingering pause in the firing and an
ominous hush descended in the jungle, the purport of which was lost on
neither the defender nor the attacker. It was clearly the signal for the assault
to commence.
‘The calm before the deathly storm,’ thought Harry, as he hauled himself up
from his fox hole and exchanged looks with the men preparing for the
attack. As he led his troop out, he passed the men getting ready for battle,
some adjusting their body armour, checking strapped-up twin magazines for
a quick change over, others tightening their bandanas and taking a last sip of
water. The regimental doctor was holding fort in situation and had dumped
the huge pack he had been lugging behind a couple of thick trees. His
medical assistant had done likewise and was busy spreading out the wares
of his trade on a groundsheet. Both were climbers and had been old buddies
in a couple of expeditions. Harry looked at the piling medical paraphernalia
on the ground with a jaundiced eye.
‘Hey Doc, hope you don’t have to use all that stuff,’ he said pausing.
‘Not if you guys behave yourselves,’ replied Doc Cheema, straightening his
back and pulling himself up to his full height of 6 feet, 3 inches. Having
witnessed enough bloodshed, his gentle eyes now carried a shadow of
perpetual sadness.
‘Get your head down Doc, you make a bloody big target and I can see you
have carried the hospital on your back. Setting up practice, are you?’
retorted Harry, who was clearly fond of the genial giant. Few doctors would
have had the courage to be in the thick of the action and Harry admired him
for it.
‘Well, you know what happened in the last camp we hit,’ answered Doc
wistfully, ‘mark my word Harry boy, there aren’t going to be any casualty
evacuations happening in a hurry here, once the shit hits the fan. Fight easy
and keep your ass safe.’
Harry winked at the doctor and went past. He patted a few backs, shook a
few hands, ruffled someone’s hair and passed into the gloom beyond, with a
prayer on his lips for the men going in and a fervent appeal to his God that
if his name was written, then let it be instantaneous. Going a couple of
hundred yards further out, Harry spread his men in buddy pairs and they
settled down behind the trees, to wait for the balloon to go up.

Silvam, having arrived in the camp after the raid, had been busy improving
its defences. Booby traps and mines were being activated and some of the
important stores were hauled out by sea as a precaution. While Mathaya
was certain the Indians would retaliate, Silvam believed the last two
operations of his had broken their back and it would be some time before
they mustered enough courage to venture out of their posts. Barely a week
had elapsed since the raid, when Mathaya’s predictions came true. The
Indian Army was on the move and how! For it was not an army which took
a beating kindly and neither was it trained to believe it could remain beaten.
A score had to be settled. Reports came in of troop movement from all
directions, converging towards the camp. Mathaya knew a fight was now
inevitable. The camp was too large to be abandoned without a show of force
and while the Indian politician had been warned in the nick of time and
diverted back to Jaffna, his own capture or fall would be a fatal blow to the
movement.
Mathaya’s dilemma to stand and fight as the senior leader was resolved by
Prabhakaran, who ordered him to escape at all costs. It was too early in the
struggle for his number two to die. The advance units of the army had
already made contact with the LTTE’s screen defences and were waiting for
the reinforcements to arrive. And the reinforcements didn’t take long in
coming. The moment the engineers had declared a big enough clearing
mine safe, the choppers started arriving carrying the Special Forces troops.
Taking over from the infantry, the SF teams quickly punched a hole through
the LTTE’s outer defence cordon and pushed rapidly inwards. Fighting
bitterly for every foot of ground against a ferocious band of cornered Tigers
who knew the jungle terrain like the back of their hand, the SF teams
managed to roll them back, halting barely a hundred yards short of the main
camp. There they dug in awaiting further orders. For experience had taught
them that any further progress would entail running the gauntlet of booby
traps and mines. The first evening Silvam led a valiant counter attack and
managed to push back one of the columns, but only temporarily. For the
moment Silvam circled back, giving a running fight around the camp
periphery, the army promptly moved in again tightening the noose. Once
the troops had closed the cordon around the camp as best as they could,
considering the difficult jungle terrain, they hunkered down for the night
and waited for further orders.
Then the shelling commenced, forcing most of the LTTE men to seek the
shelter of the bunkers. They retaliated by engaging the Indians with mortars
fired from pre-prepared tree platforms to get overhead canopy clearance.
The heavy machine gun, while useless as a weapon for killing in a thickly
wooded terrain, had the right psychological impact of stalling the Indian
advance. But the constant bombardment was taking a toll and more fighters
were getting injured than killed. Sitting in the command bunker, with the
shrapnel screaming through the foliage, Mathaya gave his last order to the
beleaguered group.
‘Anytime now the shelling will stop and the Indians will make their move.
Shekhar to stay in camp with a few fighters till the last bullet.’ He looked at
Shekhar, who acknowledged with pride the order, which was tantamount to
a death sentence for him and his men. ‘Silvam with his boys and a few
Black Tigers from my team, will clear a passage through the eastern side
and hold the corridor till such time as the main body with me can get away.
Thereafter, at your discretion, make a breakout if possible. The evacuation
is to begin now while the shelling is on and while we still have a few hours
of darkness, for the Indian dogs will be reluctant to make a move. Go my
boys, make them wish they hadn’t stepped on our soil and may your
sacrifice not be in vain.’
The bulk of the LTTE fighters led by Mathaya slipped out of camp
thereafter, under the cover of the black night. Silvam and his guns covered
the escape. Barring the odd shell which landed close enough, forcing them
to hit dirt from time to time, not a bullet came their way from the Indians.
Mathaya was correct, for most of the Indian troops in close contact were
static, under cover, waiting for the shelling to cease. Daylight had broken by
the time the last of the fighters crossed Silvam on their way out. Then the
shelling stopped and all small arms fire died down. In the stillness of the
moment, Silvam looked back towards the camp wondering why Shekhar
had also stopped firing and whether the camp was already overrun. With his
task over, he decided to join Shekhar in the camp.
Turning around he retraced his way back cautiously, to be confronted
suddenly by a bearded Indian face, 30 metres away, silently observing him
from across a narrow nala. Silvam recognised the face and also realised that
he had a few seconds before the soldier figured out the man wearing Indian
Army fatigues was the enemy.
‘Madras Battalion Sir,’ he said unhesitatingly in Hindi, ‘we are in cordon
here.’
The soldier didn’t acknowledge. His gaze shifted a trifle from Silvam, to
movement in the background, where some of the other fighters were
gathering. Instantly the face disappeared. Silvam just managed to duck and
warn his boys, before they came under fire. He spread his men out and
returned fire. He was conscious of two things as he settled down behind an
abandoned anthill—that he must keep the enemy pinned down long enough
to give adequate time for Mathaya to get away, and second, in a bizarre
quirk of fate, he was fighting the same bunch of men, who had often chased
him across the island and who were led by an officer whose father had been
his instructor in India.

Harry had deployed his troop and taken shelter behind a tree, keeping an
eye towards the camp as he expected the Tigers to escape once the assault
commenced. Shafts of early morning sunlight penetrated through the gaps
and cracks in the canopy overhead, lighting up the jungle floor like some
laser beam show. The last vestiges of the night still lingered in the nooks
and corners of the jungle. With the guns having fallen silent, it was eerily
quiet, with all creatures, big and small of the jungle, having long departed
the violence imposed on them by humans. But Harry could sense that the
jungle somehow was more alive now, than it had ever been before. Gazing
and hostile, the malice of the place was palpable, for it was clearly waiting
to unleash violence on the unsuspecting. Harry stood leaning against the
tree, inhaling the sharp familiar aroma that permeated a jungle in the early
mornings and wondering how his troop would acquit themselves in a fight
against the Black Tigers. He didn’t have to wait long to get an answer, for
he felt their presence, before he saw them.
A man wearing Indian Army fatigues was standing across a shallow culvert
that ran in front of their position. For a second, Harry was perplexed, for
there were supposed to be no other troops in the area. The man turned and
locked eyes with Harry. He looked familiar. ‘Madras Battalion Sir,’ the man
said softly and again the voice sounded familiar. It clicked immediately, for
he had heard it last pouring threats to the Jats over a radio, nearly a year
ago. It all came back to Harry—the LTTE man they had wounded in the
ambush and the one who had got away. Then he noticed movement in the
background, confirming his suspicion that they had run into a bloody Tiger
patrol. Ducking behind the tree he opened fire.
The fight was vicious, between seasoned professionals, with both sides
eschewing automatic fire to trade aimed shots. To the single shots fired by
the Tigers, the SF team replied with their signature style of double tap fire;
simultaneously firing two rounds in quick succession. Neither party gave
ground. Over the sound of gunfire, Harry heard Silvam giving commands
loudly to his men. He was an energetic commander and was constantly
moving around from one end of the contact to the other. Harry found it
unnerving to hear that high-pitched voice in Tamil, running across his front
under all the fire. It was psychologically demoralising.
The last buddy pair at the furthest end, suddenly fell back, finding their
position untenable under the intensity of the firing. Harry realised what the
Tiger commander was doing; he was rolling in the right flank and
attempting an encirclement. The man was good and if there had been a
bunch of neutral umpires observing the clash, the unanimous decision
would have been, one–love, in favour of the LTTE commander. So far he
had been dictating the firefight. From the corner of his eye, Harry saw
Sathish leave the protection of the tree to toss a grenade. The bullet caught
him in the act, smashing his shoulder and the primed grenade fell from his
hand. It exploded right when Sathish was trying to retrieve it, the impact
hurling him backwards. But the act saved the life of his buddy, who got
away with minor splinters to the back.
For a second Harry could not believe that Sathish was a goner. In every op
in the previous two years, he had always volunteered to be the point man, as
if challenging destiny to do the worst, and now it had. Moving cover to
cover, Harry made it across to the supine bloody figure. The fire from
across intensified, as the opposition anticipated that efforts would be now
made to bring succour to the injured man. His buddy, in spite of being
wounded, had already hauled Sathish by his boots behind cover. There was
little Harry could do other than hold the dying man’s hand, cajoling,
pleading and finally in desperation, ordering Sathish to cling to life, for
whatever was precious to him.
He recalled Sathish telling him once how he had been conned into joining
the SF. As young impressionable recruits in the Madras Regimental Centre,
a couple of men had visited them just before they were supposed to pass
out. They were tall, lean men, sporting beards and non-regulation hair,
tucked under maroon berets, wearing uniforms adorned like Christmas
trees. They had an aura of superiority about them, noticeable in their
confident gait and informal manner of speech. To a house full of awestruck
recruits, they had talked about free fall parachuting, combat diving,
climbing mountains and generally doing stuff unheard of in the regular
army. Thirty had volunteered immediately, much against the wishes of the
Centre Commandant and after a ninety-day probation, only two had been
retained. Sathish was one of them.
‘And guess what,’ Sathish had said in jocularity, ‘I ran into Om Prakash
sahib in the unit, who was part of the team that had come to the centre. And
I discovered he hadn’t even done his free fall course while he was
confidently wearing the badge on his uniform during the talk. That’s what I
call being conned.’
‘Anything to get the good guys in,’ Harry had answered, ‘including a bit of
deceit, if necessary.’
Harry wondered if things would have been any different had Sathish not
made it in the selection. He pulled himself out of the sinking feeling of loss
and focused on the situation in hand. Sathish was gone and so would a lot
of others, he reminded himself, if he slackened control. ‘Most people,’ he
recalled a saying, ‘die at twenty-five, but aren’t buried until they are
seventy-five.’ This man was different, like no other, and had he been offered
a menu of the various ways of dying he could choose from, would have still
preferred the way he went.
Things were only getting hot and Harry ordered Anil to fire the rocket
launcher.
‘Where sahib?’ Anil looked at him incredulously, ‘there is no clearance, it
will explode in our face.’
‘You see the thick tree with the creeper—that’s your target. Hit it. At least it
will shut this Tiger commander for some time.’
There was a huge bang as the high explosive round left the barrel, travelling
at a speed of nearly 800 feet per second; the warhead quickly armed itself
within 15 metres of leaving the firer. Covering the short distance in the
blink of an eye, it exploded on the tree. The sound reverberated through the
jungle like a rolling barrage. The back-blast of the weapon singed a
soldier’s leg and nearly unbalanced Anil, who had fired from an awkward
kneeling position.

But the high explosive round had more effect than Harry had hoped for. It
exploded above and right next to Silvam, felling him like a cut tree. His
face and chest collected the bulk of the steel pellets which riddled them to a
state where his mother wouldn’t have been able to recognise him. Colonel
Silvam was a goner, as life slowly wheezed out of him in laboured breaths.
Still shaken from the explosion, a young fighter who was a member of the
Black Tiger contingent detailed with Silvam’s team, now crawled up to him.
Silvam’s eyes were still open but the light was slowly going out of them. He
looked around at his bedraggled group and gave orders to break contact. As
a last act to his fallen comrade, he plucked the cyanide capsule from around
Silvam’s neck and placed it in his palm. Then picking up Silvam’s weapon
and radio, the Black Tiger and the rest of the group melted away silently
into the jungle with their wounded, to fight another day.

Harry was amazed at the rocket launcher’s efficacy in a firefight. One round
had changed the complexion of the fight. A minute ago they were on the
back foot and now there was no fight. The Tigers had cleared out in a jiffy.
Harry cautiously stepped out of cover and motioned the men to move
forward. A few Tiger bodies were lying around and clearly the warhead had
done more damage than all the small arms firing. Under the big tree, which
had been the target, they found Silvam, badly injured and barely alive.
Harry looked down at the battered form of what was once a man,
wondering if he was the same guy who he had seen and was he the
commander making all the noise? Silvam opened a bloodshot eye and in the
brief time he had between life and death, he recognised Harry. He mumbled
something and it came out in an incoherent garbled whisper. It drew Harry’s
attention and he went down closer to the prone figure. Frothy blood poured
freely from Silvam’s mouth as he struggled with every word. His mind
briefly drifted in all clarity latching on to a picture of his young boy running
towards him, like always, exuding abounding joy at seeing him after a long
time. In the background, he saw his wife, an anxious, worried expression
creasing her young face, as if she knew what the future had in store. She
was wearing her favourite green sari which he had got for her as a gift from
his trip to India. A great sadness engulfed his heart at leaving them alone
like this and so early. He knew the wound was grievous and he was a goner.
His eyes travelled up and through the gaps in the jungle canopy, he saw a
brilliant blue sky lighting up to the birth of a new day. Laxmi would be
waking up the boy for school now. His thoughts were interrupted as he felt
something sharp on his chest.

Silvam saw the soldier next to Harry put a barrel on his chest and realised,
that it was, strangely, none other than his own favourite weapon, the G3
Heckler & Koch, that he had carried and lost in the ambush. All this while
he had fretted about killing his old instructor’s son, foolishly believing in
his immortality while the gods of war mocking his hubris had already
charted a different course. Of all the people, it was the old Colonel’s son
who had finally got him in the end. He didn’t feel anything when the bullets
finally drilled a hole through his chest for he was already dead.

Harry stood there looking at the corpse for a while, perplexed and
wondering at what he had heard the man say in Hindi. Something about
paying a debt, and a line, which when translated, corresponded to what a
ninth-century Japanese poet had once said, ‘I knew I had to go this way, but
I did not think it would be so soon.’
Harry was sure he had misunderstood the unintelligible uttering of a dying
man, appealing for help rather than quoting a rare verse. An uneducated
militant leader couldn’t have possibly read poetry. He hauled out a torn
plastic camo wallet from the front pocket—the only possession on Silvam—
and rifled through the contents. It had a few Indian and Sri Lankan rupees
and two faded bloodstained, black and white photographs, riddled by the
high explosive rounds. One was a picture of a pretty young woman with her
oiled hair parted in the middle and tied in a bun, with a flower tucked in it.
On her lap was a small boy looking sternly towards the camera, while the
woman wore a forced smile, as if reluctantly following the cameraman’s
instruction to do so.
In the second picture, a man wearing a thick green jacket and monkey cap,
was standing in front of an imposing building, with a mountain in the
distant background. A pellet had made a neat hole through the face, making
it unrecognisable. But clearly the picture was of the dead man. Harry was
about to toss it away, when it struck him as weird that a man who lived in
Sri Lanka should be so dressed in winter clothing, and something looked
familiar about the building. He cleaned the picture with a bit of saliva and
was astounded at the discovery. The building was none other than the Forest
Research Institute, in his hometown Dehradun. Harry looked from the
picture to the dead man on the ground and found it difficult to fathom the
strange twist of this remarkable coincidence. He turned to Zile Singh to
share the excitement of his discovery.
‘This man was trained by us in Chakrata.’
‘Is that so sahib?’ answered Zile, showing mock interest. ‘I think we should
make our way to the camp, the firing has ceased there as well and the
injured need to be attended to.’
Harry looked at Silvam’s mangled corpse for a while, contemplating his
life’s journey and the quirk of fate that had led him to that remote jungle at
the precise time to meet the man who would be his executioner. Then
coming to attention, Harry saluted the brave man.
Gingerly they picked their way across to the camp, carrying Sathish on an
improvised stretcher. Every step was a strain on the senses and movement
was agonisingly slow. The lead scout walked 20 metres ahead, to reduce the
impact of any mine explosion on the others. Their nerves were on edge by
the time they heard a command to stop from the perimeter sentry. The
soldier stepped out from behind a tree and motioned for them to leave the
beaten narrow path, which they had been following. He pointed to the base
of a tree next to the track, and ran a finger across his neck. Harry turned to
see a crude homemade claymore mine facing them. The soldier, smiling,
then pointed up. Hanging from a tree was another improvised device. ‘God!
How devilish can you get?’ thought Harry. The first claymore was just a red
herring, meant to be discovered. The killer was waiting above.
The camp was impressively large, with a connected perimeter trench all
around and live-in bunkers and command posts made of concrete. The
LTTE bodies had been all lined up in a row in the centre of the camp. There
were thatched huts, communal for the rank and file and a few single-
occupant ones, with a well and a cookhouse in the corner of the complex.
Harry heard an excited ‘Sir’ and turned to see a beaming Shankaran in olive
green fatigues, handcuffed with a rope and under guard. Someone higher up
in his wisdom had decided to send him across to contribute his two-penny
bit to the clearance op in progress. Shankaran was genuinely pleased to see
Harry and kept mimicking the drinking party they had in Kokkuvil. Orders
were given not to touch the water from the well, for fear of it being
poisoned. The temptation was great as people had been living off a rationed
amount of water for days. A large hut with a tarpaulin sheet on top was the
store and armoury. The trees and the huts bore shell scars, a witness to the
effective artillery shoot. The whole camp was surrounded by a minefield
and extensively booby-trapped within.
Fortunately, an alert trooper noticed a suspicious piece of exposed wire,
with both ends running underground at the periphery of the camp. He
decided to investigate and soon others joined him in unearthing the
network. Everybody was asked to evacuate to one corner of the complex, as
it became clear that the whole camp may be booby-trapped. The engineers
were called in and men trained in advanced explosives from the SF team
assisted them. Once the entire lot of wires and explosives were pulled out
from all corners of the camp, a shiver ran up every living spine. They were
sitting on a powder keg. The entire camp was designed to implode in
exactly such a scenario of it ever being overrun. The network of explosives
was connected to a pressure switch, hidden below a bamboo pole, erected
innocuously at the entrance to one of the bunkers. All that the Tamil Tiger
entrusted with the responsibility of setting it off had to do, was to remove
the bamboo and expose the switch. Perhaps the man got shot before he
could complete his task. Someone unaware would have certainly stepped on
it while exploring the bunkers and blown the rest of them to smithereens.
A safe distance from the camp, explosives were placed on trees and an area
levelled out for the small chopper to land and evacuate casualties or for the
MI-8 to hover and winch up men. The loss had been heavy with serious
gunshot and IED casualties. Two men had received a claymore blast to their
stomachs and hands and needed immediate evacuation. Doc Cheema had
given them first aid and pain killers, but they needed to get to the field
hospital at Vavuniya, where the surgeon would patch them up, for the
onward journey to the military hospital in Madras. They would then be
further sent across to the command hospitals in various corners of the
country.
Once the casualties had been airlifted, the fit and the able-bodied stayed
another twenty-four hours in the camp, destroying whatever they could.
Then the men marched out of the jungle, bedraggled and exhausted, to wait
for the birds to pick them up. Harry was tasked to operate in the
Kumulamunai belt and boarded the chopper from the very same clearing in
which they had landed nearly four days ago. From the open hatch he
watched the jungle shrink in size as the chopper rose and then slowly
amalgamate into the broadening jigsaw landscape of open fields, villages
and the ever-widening lagoon. Harry hoped it was the last time he had to
visit the cursed place, which ended the lives of some very fine men before
their time.

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 Gurkha Post—Kumulamunai
When I am rolling, I exist.
When I rest, I am no more.
—Muhammad Iqbal

The Cheetah, a variation of the Aérospatiale SA Lama helicopter, built

indigenously by the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, circled over the post, as
it sought to align itself over the landing zone. To the soldiers watching from
below, the pilot, it seemed, was unnecessarily agonising over making a
perfect landing. And like a hesitant bee hovering over a flimsy flower, he
took his time making minor adjustments, to gently settle down on the exact
spot marked by a large white H. The door opened to disgorge an odd
assortment of people for a military chopper in a combat environment—
front-line reporters from various national dailies, carrying their notebooks
and cameras. Shradha, being the only woman, was getting all the attention
from Brigadier Bhalla who had accompanied the group from Jaffna. The
reporters were on an official visit and had spent a few days travelling across
the island meeting commanders and civilians alike.
The picture so far had been consistent; peace and tranquility had been
stamped on every inch of the land. Then Shradha’s journalistic instincts
picked up a rumour of a large clash somewhere on the east coast. Over a
drink in the evening at the brigade mess at Palaly airfield, she had badgered
Brigadier Bhalla to get them closer to the fight. Reluctantly, he agreed to fly
them to the post closest to the scene of action. However, he had sternly
warned the gathering, raising a finger like a school master addressing some
recalcitrant children, ‘It would be a brief touchdown, no pictures without my
permission and definitely no interviews with soldiers on the post,’ he said.
Shradha could sense something big was afoot, for no one showed any
interest in their arrival. The post was bereft of any normal martial activity
and rather quiet. ‘Very unusual behaviour,’ she thought, ‘for soldiers were
always most hospitable and happy to meet civilians.’ The few men who
went past avoided any eye contact. Her thoughts were broken by the clatter
of a heavy chopper which landed below the hillock. A bunch of bearded,
long-haired, heavily-armed men alighted. They looked more like Mexican
bandits in some Wild West movie, rather than soldiers. Carrying their heavy
loads, in single file, they silently mounted the hill to the post.
Suddenly, a tall man broke away from the column and approached her, a big
smile disappearing into his thick beard. She looked at him for a second and
then threw herself at him, much to the amazement of the others around.
‘I knew I would run into you Harry,’ she said, holding his hand and
beaming. ‘Gosh, but you look terrible,’ she continued, quite oblivious to the
stares they were getting. ‘And what is this, are you wounded?’ she asked
him, with an alarmed glance at his blood-caked battledress.
‘Not my blood, but equally precious,’ answered Harry, a shadow of grief
flitting across his eyes.
‘I checked with my army contacts when I landed and they said, you were
last heard of in these parts. Did you get my letters?’ she asked expectantly.
‘Haven’t received a letter in a month now. Guess they are chasing me all
over the bloody island,’ he replied, conscious of the Brigadier’s eyes on
him. ‘Look Shradz, we are passing through, basically loading up on ammo
and food. Don’t have time and I can’t tell you much. But we have been in a
big fight,’ he whispered. ‘Need to even the account with the bastards. Will
write you a letter and catch up with you in Delhi soon.’
‘Wait,’ she said, as he turned to go. Rummaging through her satchel, she
pulled out some pictures. ‘Got the negatives developed of my last trip.
Might be of some use to you.’
With a cursory interest, Harry flipped through the pictures, of jungles,
camps and sundry Sri Lankan scenery, which he saw every day and then
stopped at a picture of Shradha standing with a short, stout man, in some
unknown jungle location.
‘Did he limp?’ Harry asked, pointing at the man in the picture.
‘How do you know?’ she answered, looking bewildered. ‘His name is
Silvam. Seemed a big shot in the hierarchy. Spoke Hindi well and claimed
to have travelled in India.’
‘Well, his name was Silvam,’ replied Harry, ‘he met his maker at our hands,
somewhere there,’ he continued, looking towards the distant jungle. ‘He did
pick up Hindi in India and this is where the plot gets bizarre. He was trained
by none other than my own father, in a back of beyond place called
Chakrata. Will tell you the whole tale in more peaceful circumstances over
a drink. Take care and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do kid. Cheers!’
The whine of the chopper’s engine was growing and Brigadier Bhalla was
impatiently herding everybody towards it. Shradha was the last to hop in
and she found herself a seat next to a porthole. The chopper shuddered
briefly, like a big wet dog shaking off water and with a final surge of power,
it rose up lethargically at first, as if reluctant to leave the ground. Then it
circled over the post, gaining height. Shradha pressed her face against the
glass, desperately searching for a sight of Harry on the ground. As the
chopper made a final turn over the post, she saw a lone figure standing at
the edge of the forest. From 800 feet, it was impossible to make out the
features of the doll-sized human, but she didn’t need to. The man briefly
raised a hand in salute and when she looked again, twisting and turning in
her seat, Harry had vanished into the jungle. She felt a sense of great
emptiness as the emotional bond was severed, plunging her into a profound
melancholy.
Having gained a safe distance from terra firma, the chopper dipped its nose
and ran forward like a hunted hare. The land below rapidly disappeared, to
be replaced by a shimmering sheet of water, as it flew over the lagoon.
Engulfed in thoughts of Harry, Shradha sat peering down at the fast-
receding shoreline. A small white temple came into view. It was perched on
a rock that projected into the sea. A woman and a young boy stood holding
hands and looking up at the chopper. The boy raised a tiny hand and waved,
disappearing from sight as the bird banked, setting course north-west for
Palaly airfield.
The woman and the child stood in silence for some time, watching the
chopper get smaller over the horizon, till it vanished from sight. For three
days Laxmi had waited for her husband and now she knew in her heart, he
would never be coming back. As tears rolled down her cheeks, she pulled
out a small piece of paper from inside her blouse and read the hastily
scribbled note in Tamil. A frown creased her young face as she tried to
make sense of the message. There was an unfamiliar-sounding name of a
man, in a city she had never heard of, in faraway India. ‘Dehradun,’ she
muttered loudly to herself, as she tried to fathom where and how far it
would be. At length she looked at the paper in her hand, all the while trying
to figure out what to make of it. Then wiping her tears, she rolled it into a
ball and tossed it into the swirling water below.
Storm clouds were gathering out on the sea and the wind had picked up.
Leading the boy by the hand, she made her way back to the village, from
where a keening wail could be heard faintly wafting across in the breeze.
The village of Kumulamunai was lamenting the death of its heroes.

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 The Wait
Breeze caressed her long tresses,
As fear brought a tremor to her lips.
Her cheeks were flushed with a longing for an uncertain future,
As she waited for him under the palm tree.
Resplendent in womanly glory,
Her eyes glistened with unshed tears of despair.
Dawn to dusk and the sun-rinsed evening changed
moods with each passing hour.
The moon sparkled like diamonds on the endless expanse of water,
And the night came alive to the sound of
a thousand carefree creatures,
Conveying a sense of anticipation for a promise to be fulfilled.
The wind whispered life’s secrets,
drawing her heart towards the scorching pit of doubt.
A nightjar shrieked a warning and in the distance
dogs bayed as if to a lost soul.
And somewhere deep in her heart she knew:
‘He would never be coming back.’
—An anonymous widow, Sri Lanka

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The IPKF Memorial in Sri Lanka

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 There is a vacuum in the field of war fiction in India and Abhay’s
book fills it. —The Hindu
The book engrosses you and transports you to the beautiful Lolab Valley in Kashmir ripped apart
time and again by violence and bloodshed. —Mumbai Mirror
The nerve tingling tale of battles between soldiers and terrorists is interspersed with the narrative of
love in all its complex shades. —The Tribune

The stunning Lolab Valley of Kashmir.

Cold. Crisp. Serene.
Punctuated by the blood curdling violence that rips apart the stillness of this paradise.
Within the militancy torn valley nestles the ravaged lives of the people who inhabit it. And of the
men in uniform who fight for their country.
Set against the backdrop of this rugged milieu is the clash of two charismatic leaders—the inimitable
Major Hariharan of the Indian Special Forces, and the volatile battle hardened Pakistani mujahid,
Sher Khan. Caught in this bitter conflict is the enigmatic Sahira, a local Gujjar girl who has to face
her own demons. All of them have journeys that will test their strengths over and over again…
In the Valley of Shadows is a compelling tale of courage and passion and the hatred that an
insurgency generates, leaving a trail of destruction and devastation in its wake. Follow the thrilling
cat-and-mouse game between two passionate men of war, a chase that only one of them will
survive…

In the Valley of Shadows  Abhay Narayan Sapru

ISBN: 978-81-8328-184-3  ` 295
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