THE SEASONS OF TROUBLE

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.