Arul Aunty

Rarely do we have relatives who live anywhere near a hundred years. And it is a greater miracle to have a grand aunt – Louisa Arulamma Thambyrajah, born on 6 February 1911 and a relative of both writers – who survived one of the most brutal episodes of war in her late 90s. On 13 February 2009, as the battle between the military and the LTTE raged in the Vanni, in northern Sri Lanka, Arul Aunty and her close relatives were rescued from Suthanthirapuram by the advancing forces. Before this, the Vanni population had been moving deeper into Mullaitivu week after week in search of shelter. Tens of thousands of people, pulled by the threats of the LTTE and pushed by the firing of the advancing army, dug bunkers for shelter as they made their way eastwards. Hearing of the countless people suffering from starvation or succumbing to injuries, news that Arul Aunty and her relatives had escaped the war was unbelievable to us. It was merely good fortune that helped them escape the horrors of the last two months of the war, a period of even greater brutality than the previous decades.

As we contemplate the years of suffering the Vanni people endured under the repressive power of the LTTE, not to mention the bombing and the onslaughts of the military, Arul Aunty's life is a reflection of the great challenges that ordinary people have experienced in Jaffna and the Vanni. Listening to her, one gets a glimpse of Jaffna society of more than half a century ago, as well as life in the Vanni in the years before the 'final war', as the daily existence was usurped by the prominence of the LTTE. Life in Jaffna, or the Vanni during the war years – in its social makeup, means of earning livelihoods, the development of the region and the struggles of the people – is far more complex than publicly portrayed.