The Seasons of Trouble

September 22, 2014
The Sri Lankan civil war ended in 2009 with the government’s decisive defeat of the Tamil Tigers, but the wounds of the decades-long conflict are still fresh. In this harrowing and haunting work, Mohan, an investigative journalist with extensive experience in the subcontinent, follows three individuals from the island’s Tamil community as they try to pick up the pieces. She personalizes the regime’s policy of “diluting the Tamil population in the Vanni and preventing any future claims to a separate Tamil homeland.” As the army gained the upper hand against the militants, soldiers adopted scorched-earth tactics and took to abducting and torturing Tamil civilians. The rebels, in turn, kidnapped children from their own villages to send to the frontlines as cannon fodder. Of one of her subjects, who signed up for the Tigers while in high school, Mohan says, “in her seven years in the fighting force, she never held her breath again while pulling the trigger. But new faces did not replace the face of the first soldier.... She would never feel remorse for the killing of anyone, except him.” As Mohan shows, the survivors are deeply traumatized, and their stories offer no neat lessons or easy resolutions.

September 15, 2014
Putting a human face on the 30-year civil war in Sri Lanka. Bangalore-based journalist Mohan re-creates in scrupulous detail the struggles of three Tamil protagonists whose lives were profoundly altered since the 1980s by the militant separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Discriminatory policies against the Tamil, representing 30 percent of the population, began in the 1950s, accelerated in the 1970s, and culminated with the burning of the Jaffna Tamil library in 1981 and riots in July 1983. Indra is the matriarch whose ancestral ties reveal the degree of complexity among the Tamils: A Hindu whose father was once a soldier in the British army, she married John, a Tamil Christian, whose own ancestors were brought to Ceylon from southern India as laborers for the British tea plantations. Indra, a young mother at the time, was the first to witness the horrible anti-Tamil violence of 1983, which left 3,000 dead and hundreds fleeing the country. Her son, Sarva, who was born in 1980 and earned a diploma in nautical engineering, was abducted in 2008 by the Sri Lankan army and imprisoned for the crime of having been impressed into the Tamil militant group of the Vanni, or the Tamil-controlled interior, when he was younger. Indeed, the LTTE had set up an alternative government in the Vanni, with self-sufficient institutions, though the coercive methods of the LTTE were well-known-e.g., recruiting child soldiers and girls. The third protagonist in the story, Mugil, had been recruited in the Tamil Tigers as a teenager in 1998; retired to become a mother, she nonetheless returned in 2008 to work for the propaganda wing of the group. Throughout the book, the author delivers a narrative as fluid as fiction in the delineation of these scarred lives. Mohan demonstrates an accessible, engaging method of relaying a difficult, violent history.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 15, 2014
Bangalore-based Indian journalist Mohan, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, among other publications, helps fill the yawning information gap created by the Sri Lankan government in the final months of the 26-year-long civil war there (19832009) and in that conflict's painful, unresolved aftermath. Conducting her interviews largely in Tamil, Mohan focuses on two families, that of Mugil, a Tamil Tiger who joined that militia as a teenage girl, and that of Darva, a young Tamil man who was essentially abducted by government agents (and later exonerated) on suspicion of terrorism. These strikingly detailed and graphic accounts, covering June 2008April 2013, are memorable for laying out the horrific conditions these and other Tamil families enduredfrom a lack of essential services to discrimination to a near-permanent state of displacement to the ever-present threat of injury or deathand for showing the utter helplessness Tamil families everywhere experienced in their efforts to avoid the pull of violence that drew in so many Sri Lankans during that period. A significant, though heartrending, account.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)