By
KILINOCHCHI,
Sri Lanka — Two men were riding the train known as the Queen of Jaffna as it
rattled through the haunted battlegrounds of Sri Lanka’s civil war.
One of them,
Nisal Kavinda, a 20-year-old man from the Sinhalese ethnic group, was jubilant.
He had wanted to ride this train since 2009, when President Mahinda Rajapaksa
declared victory over separatist rebels in the Tamil north, an event he called
“the most happiest thing in our lifetime.”
As the train
approached Elephant Pass, the site of three pivotal battles, Mr. Kavinda jumped
down onto the platform with his camera. A burned-out rebel tank stands as a
memorial to a government soldier who, famously, carried out a suicide mission
by clambering up its side and throwing grenades into it. “Terrorism memories,”
Mr. Kavinda said happily, as he scrambled back onto the train.
Not far away
from him sat the other man, Saravananuttu Subramanian, a 78-year-old retired
accountant in wire-rimmed glasses who watched the tourists from the south out
of the corner of his eye.
“They want
to know how their soldiers defeated Tamil separatists, put it that way,” said
Mr. Subramanian, a Tamil. “That’s what it is, though they don’t say so.”
Outside the
window, the roofless ruins of houses slid by, pitted and gouged and blown apart
by explosions. Thousands of civilians had died there, trapped between the
government and the rebels during the last, flattening assaults of the war, but
there is no memorial for them. Mr. Subramanian stared out, his expression
unreadable.
“The saddest
thing,” he said, “is to start a war and be defeated.”
In October,
after a 24-year suspension, the Queen of Jaffna resumed its regular service
along the 250-mile route linking Colombo, Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated
capital, and the Tamil north of the country. The train was blanketed in flowers
and banana trees as it pulled out of Colombo Fort, celebrated as a sign that
the bloody wedge between the country’s two largest ethnic groups was now gone.
But
conversations on board the train made it clear that a psychological gulf still
separates Sri Lanka’s northerners from its southerners. Visitors from the
south, in many cases, are full of sincere pride about what the government has
brought to the north — peace, they say, and economic development. For many
Tamils in the north, though, the relief of peacetime is mixed with darker
feelings of defeat and humiliation. And the restoration of train service does
not ensure that these groups are speaking to each other.
“As soon as
the war ended, the feedback we got in Jaffna was that buses and buses of
Sinhalese are going to Jaffna out of curiosity,” said Silan Kadirgamar, 80, a
Tamil historian who lives in Colombo. “They came with their own cooking
utensils and food, and they sat on the ground and ate. They didn’t go there to
meet Tamils.”
Twenty-six
years of civil war physically devoured this train, known in Tamil as the Yal
Devi. Tamil rebels pulled up steel rails and wooden ties to build bunkers, and
the Sri Lankan Air Force blew the roof off Jaffna’s train station. But even
before that, people riding this train knew they could be attacked by militants
from either side. If a bus was ambushed, the driver could brake and throw the
vehicle in reverse. A train loaded with people had nowhere to go.
Mr.
Kadirgamar recalled waiting at the station in Colombo one afternoon in 1977 —
his wife and two sons were expected from Jaffna on the afternoon train. It was
not unusual for Yal Devi to be late, but this time, when he asked about the
delay, the station officers were silent. He found a telephone and called two
cousins in the police force. They also refused to talk. Rushing outside, he
picked up an evening paper, which reported that rioting had broken out in
Jaffna.
Night fell,
and in a deepening panic he managed to get a passenger list — his wife, having
anticipated violence, had not boarded with the children. But Mr. Kadirgamar was
standing on the platform at 11 p.m., when the 5:30 p.m. train pulled into the
station. The passengers were gone, except for a handful of injured people, he
said, “and there were bloodstains all over the train.”
“That’s the
way we lived then,” he said. “We took the risk and traveled.”
Five years
into the peace, a ride on the Yal Devi is stunningly normal.
Passengers
line up at dawn with pillows and sleeping children, and there is the slapping
sound of people in sandals running to catch the train. The landscape of
Colombo’s postwar boom flies by, including one of Mr. Rajapaksa’s pet projects
— the Chinese-financed “Lotus Tower,” which, at its final height of 1,150 feet,
will be South Asia’s tallest structure. After that come slums, a mud-colored
river and abandoned rail cars, their metal sides so corroded that sunlight
shines through in patches. After that signs of human life are swallowed by the
jungle.
“There are
no words, that much I am happy,” said Mr. Kavinda, whose T-shirt read #SELFIE,
as the train moved toward the north, a territory long closed to him. As a
southerner he grew up far from the front line of the civil war, but the fear of
terrorist bombings was present from his earliest memory, when his parents
nervously whisked him away from school the minute class was dismissed. Visiting
Jaffna was a way of proving that the fear was gone forever.
“I am not
scared,” he said. “My parents are also not scared.”
Sinhalese
vacationers sprawl out in the course of the journey, beating drums and singing
bayila, the folk songs left behind by Portuguese settlers. The train, restored
with the help of an $800 million line of credit from India, has made the
journey a comfortable and safe one, just six hours on the fastest train.
Government employees receive free passes for reserved seats, and many stay in
hotels operated by the army, making a circuit of Buddhist temples and notable
civil war sites before returning home.
The Tamil
passengers are not singing. They are edgy, perhaps because the train is packed
with government soldiers, returning to their posts after home leave. Officials
have said that the number of government troops in the northern province has
been steeply reduced, offering estimates as low as 12,000, but C. V.
Vigneswaran, the province’s chief minister, said he believed that the true
number was far higher, closer to 100,000. After years of counterinsurgency,
many Tamils are wary of questions from strangers, lest they turn out to be
informants.
“Life in
Jaffna, I would not call it normal,” said Mr. Subramanian, the retired Tamil
accountant, whose own days are delineated by the sound of morning and evening
patrols from a nearby army camp. “Normal is a word that, I would say, doesn’t
come to mind. It is not normal. But it is peaceful. People are afraid to speak
their minds.”
The last
miles of battleground stretch out beyond Kilinochchi. Single bullet-pocked
walls stand alone, fingers of steel reinforcing bars twisting into the air. By
the time the train pulls into Jaffna, which was in government hands at the end
of the war, a kind of normalcy has returned to the landscape — fruit trees,
verandas — and passengers stream off into a city adjusting, awkwardly, to
postwar tourism.
Siva
Padmanathan, 44, who offers auto-rickshaw rides from the station, said his
conversations with southern customers were strange ones, even when they managed
to find a common language.
“They ask
me, ‘Now are things good here?’ And I tell them no,” he said. “They look at us
as if we are exhibits in a museum. They think we are funny people. They think
they won and we lost. Though they don’t say it directly.”
But little
of that came across to Mr. Kavinda, the Sinhalese passenger, who returned south
again on the Yal Devi, thoroughly elated by his tour of the north. He said he
wished that the Tamils he met had spoken better Sinhala, since, as he said,
“Sri Lanka is a Sinhalese country.” But he was sure they were glad to see him.
“The war is
over, so they like to see Sinhalese,” he said. “When we went back to Jaffna,
they were smiling, so I think they like Sinhalese.”
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