The Seasons of Trouble
Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka's Civil War
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
For three decades, Sri Lanka’s civil war tore communities apart. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist Tamil Tigers guerrillas in a fierce battle that swept up about 300,000 civilians and killed more than 40,000. More than a million had been displaced by the conflict, and the resilient among them still dared to hope. But the next five years changed everything.
Rohini Mohan’s searing account of three lives caught up in the devastation looks beyond the heroism of wartime survival to reveal the creeping violence of the everyday. When city-bred Sarva is dragged off the streets by state forces, his middle-aged mother, Indra, searches for him through the labyrinthine Sri Lankan bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Mugil, a former child soldier, deserts the Tigers in the thick of war to protect her family.
Having survived, they struggle to live as the Sri Lankan state continues to attack minority Tamils and Muslims, frittering away the era of peace. Sarva flees the country, losing his way – and almost his life – in a bid for asylum. Mugil stays, breaking out of the refugee camp to rebuild her family and an ordinary life in the village she left as a girl. But in her tumultuous world, desires, plans, and people can be snatched away in a moment.
The Seasons of Trouble is a startling, brutal, yet beautifully written debut from a prize-winning journalist. It is a classic piece of reportage, five years in the making, and a trenchant, compassionate examination of the corrosive effect of conflict on a people.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.