“If we don’t survive…”

“Black July” is widely recognized as the start of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war between the government and the Tamil Tiger rebels in 1983. My mother was just 21, my father was working out of the country at the Muscat international airport in Oman and I was an infant.

July 23rd, 1983 started like any other day. My mother was living in their newly built home with her sister, parents and I. Around 08:30, my father called in a panic saying that Sri Lanka was all over the news. He asked my mother to grab our passports and get ready to leave. Within minutes, men with batons and machetes rang the doorbell: “Are there any Tamils living here?”, they asked. Although my mother is Tamil, she looks Sinhalese and speaks Sinhala well. Thanks to my father’s warning, she casually answered: “No, why do you ask?”. They explained they had an electoral list and that there was a Tamil family in the neighbourhood. Their search “unsuccessful”, they left after a few minutes. Our family ran and never saw that house ever again.

Tamils were transported at night by motorcycle as the helmets could hide their faces. The men said they couldn’t transport the baby (me), so my mother had to make the most difficult decision of her life. She handed over her first-born infant son to her neighbours saying: “Please keep him safe. If we don’t survive, his father will come back for him.”. I can’t imagine the feeling of handing over your only child, not knowing if you’ll ever see them again.

My mother and I were eventually reunited and on August 12th, 1983, we escaped Sri Lanka, with a small suitcase and the clothes on our backs. We made our way to the UK, then India and eventually to the US and Canada with my father. My mother hasn’t been back to Sri Lanka since.

The war lasted nearly three decades and came to a bloody end in 2009. Thank God, my mother and her parents made it out alive. Others weren’t so lucky.