9

TIGER, TIGER

Bang! Bang! Bang!
‘Open up! Open up!’
Soldiers in this mood rarely wait for an answer,
particularly not at half-past five in the morning.
They smashed against the door with their rifles and
poured into the house. Searching from room to room,
they ordered family members to lie on the floor
before ransacking the place.

Three youngsters woke in terror as their home
filled with noise and light. ‘Out of bed! Out of bed!’
Sweating in the tropical heat with nothing but their
underwear on, the children found that their teeth
started chattering with fear. The soldiers pulled out the
eldest, just eleven years old, and pointed to a patch
of white skin the size of a hand on his stomach.
‘What’s this? What is this?’ they shouted almost
triumphantly. ‘He’s been using explosives!’

‘It’s a birthmark,’ he replied, ‘it’s just a birthmark.’
They pulled the boy away and sat him on a chair
in the living room before beginning the interrogation.
His parents and his grandmother pleaded with the
soldier who appeared to be in charge, and finally they
agreed that the frail youngster, who had yet to embark
on his adolescence, seemed an unlikely bomb-manufacturer
for the Tamil Tigers.

Little Renu was used to turbulence like this.
It had punctuated his life from an early age.
Five years earlier, in July 1983, he was evacuated from
Colombo when still only six years old. Tamil militants
had murdered thirteen soldiers of the Sri Lankan army.
Taking revenge, a Singhalese mob slaughtered hundreds
of innocent Tamils in Colombo,