Jayakumari’s dazzling smile is what I remember most vividly about her appearance, from our meeting in March 2015. Running wide across her angular face, it appeared often, especially when she spoke of her son, who was seven then.
I met her in Ambalanthurai village in Batticaloa, a district in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province. She ran a small shop, selling packets of sugar, chilli powder, and toiletries. The “shop” was essentially a portion of her brick-walled home. A square-shaped window was kept open, its vertical bars spaced wide enough for customers to easily put their hand in. It was her sale-cum-cash counter.
Jayakumari was among the many women I spoke to for a story on enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka’s post-war north and east. Like thousands of other women, she was looking for her husband who went missing around the final stages of the battle.
As she began telling her story, I realised that the search for her disappeared partner was only one of her many challenges. Both her arms got severely injured in wartime shelling, as the army and the LTTE clashed. She underwent a surgery that barely managed to stitch up what remained of her arms. Ever since, she has not been able to lift even light objects without feeling excruciating pain.
Between running to government offices to follow up on her petition about her husband and weekly trips to the town market to restock supplies at her shop, Jayakumari was raising her little son all by herself. Her life, I thought to myself, is what the aftermath of a war looks like every day. She had no time to deal with the trauma of the past, she was busy surviving.
“Where did you go?” she asked her son half-knowingly, as he came running and hugged her tight around her knees. Breathless, he grinned quizzically at her, maybe wondering who this stranger was. All her labour and optimism was for him, she said.
Jayakumari spoke to me at length of vanishing jobs in her village, of dwindling incomes and about people taking loans. It seemed that hardship had become a running theme around her.
“Have you heard this Kannandasan song where he says, unakkum keezhe ullavar kodi, ninaithu paarthu nimmadi naadu (think of the crores of people worse off than you and feel peaceful)?” she asked, quoting from a famous Tamil film song from the 1960s penned by the poet.
“That line keeps me going. I realise I am better off compared to many others here,” she said, flashing a big smile again. “Whenever I feel bogged down, I go back to those words.”
