Documenting raw life

There is a small preface, small by the standards of big non-fiction tomes. It is straightforward, simple, written like a reporter, crisp and clean. ‘In late 2009, I met the first of the three people whose stories are told in this book’. That’s the first line. Rohini Mohan, the author, has been reporting on identity and conflict and when the civil war ended in Sri Lanka, she wanted to know what it would be like. “To suddenly declare peace at the end of 30 years of war,” she says in an email interview. ‘The Seasons of Trouble’ got written after many visits the author took to Sri Lanka, over five years. And Rohini, who is based in Bengaluru, will revisit the book two years after it came out, in a session with Sadanand Menon at the Kovalam Literary Festival today.

She is coming back to the place of her birth, to Thiruvananthapuram, from where she was separated as a girl of four or five. The summers after that would be spent at the house of her grandparents, with her ‘big brood of singing, dancing, eating, screaming cousins’ in Kochi. “The state is home, and although I complain about the humidity and conservatism, I think people are truly evolved here in how they interact with nature, and live with diverse cultures,” she says.

Rohini’s writing has that bit of literary beauty not erased by years of reporting that required one to remove the extra adjectives, and put down her words plain. So when she writes about talking to Sarva, one of those three people who made it into her book, she says: ‘Someone must have talked plenty, because on an afternoon in June 2008, Sarvanantha Pereira (real name) was detained by men who didn’t say who they were. They would call it an arrest. It felt more an abduction’. Sarva’s mother is called Indra in the book, not a real name. That’s the second person Rohini talks to, a middle-aged woman in a middle-class neighbourhood in Colombo, searching for a disappeared son. The third is a young Tamil woman who had challenged her during the first five-minute interview in a refugee camp: ‘I’m sure you will never return to see us’.

Rohini says: “The immediate experience is the shock of how little we know about the lives people have led there, because of our own apathy and the government's shutting doors to journalists and activists. But once I won the trust of some people, I realised that because it was an ethnic war, their experience is as personal to each individual as it was collective to whole communities. Truth and lies are easily interchangeable. This is scary and fascinating. It stretched me emotionally and intellectually, and I believe it has changed the way I see the world.”