One of the most enjoyable parts of an IIT KGP student’s life is preparing for the homeward journey after the end-semester exams. The process would start by crowding around the Hall of Residence office in the evenings, when the Hall Wardens would be doing their daily visits, to get the travel authorization form signed by them. If I remember right, the signed authorization allowed students to get discounted train tickets. The next step would be to go line up at the Indian Railways office on campus, also open in the evenings. The homeward journey allowed the still adolescent IITians to retreat to the comfort of home from the life of semi-adulthood they were thrust into and were still learning to adjust to. It allowed them to behave like teenage kids once again, albeit for a short time, to avoid having to take decisions on day-to-day matters and let their parents handle them just like they used to.

For the three of us Sri Lankans, a homeward journey to Sri Lanka was not an option, and we did not have much choice as to where else we could go. Other foreign students like our friend Abdul Jawad, the Palestinian from Jeddah, or our classmates from Mauritius would fly home for the break. The closest ersatz home for us was Chennai, formerly known as Madras, with which we shared the same language, Tamil. Sri had an uncle who lived in Chennai with his family. Mano had a cousin living with an Indian family at whose house he could also stay. For me, the closest relative in Chennai was Siva aṇṇā. He, like me, fled Sri Lanka to continue his training. He was a dentistry student at the Madras Medical College, MMC. Technically, he is my father’s cousin. But being close to me in age, for all practical purposes, he is like an elder brother.

Once the Indian students went home, we hung around trying to make the most of the long summer days. I listened to the BBC World News on my little short-wave radio whenever I could. I remember that was the summer when Boris Becker created history by becoming the first unseeded player to win the Wimbledon men’s singles championship. Our hall of residence, RP Hall, was not cleaned as regularly as when students were around. I remember walking through the corridors infested with leaves and “LGBs”, the little green bugs that swarmed after it rained. Sri must have already gone to his uncle’s house in Chennai. Mano and I asked for permission from the instructor to sit in on the third semester mathematics course that was being offered as a “summer quarter,” for the second-year students who had failed it during the regular semester. But that only lasted for a month, I think. The summer break was two-and-a-half months long.

There was no Internet in India then and certainly no mobile phones. I wrote an “inland letter,” which looks like a Sri Lankan “aerogramme” but is meant for internal, rather than international, communication, to Siva aṇṇā to ask if I can visit him, and he must have responded yes, because I found myself on a berth in Madras Mail on a summer day in 1985. The faster train, Coromandel Express, left earlier in the evening and arrived in Chennai a day later, whereas the somewhat slower Madras Mail left later in the night, ran for two nights and a day an arrived early in the morning the day after the next. Having arrived at Chennai almost before sunrise. I decided to have coffee first at a makeshift roadside restaurant (known as “hotels” South Asia) before daring to go out into the unknown city and figure out how to walk to the MMC hostel. I knew that it was within walking distance from the Chennai Central station, but never having been there earlier, I did not know the exact way.

When it was bright enough, I decided to venture out of the “hotel” and navigate the narrow alley. I could see a man and a boy, presumably father and son, walking towards me on the other side of the alley. The son was probably in his early teens. I saw the father egging him on, and the boy resisting. Finally, the boy crossed the alley, and tried to grab my bag. I started shouting and yanked my bag back. The boy ran away, his father cursing after him. Perhaps this was a test to initiate the boy into adult thiefdom, and he failed.

Shaken, and glad that it was light already, I found my way to the MMC hostel and walked up several stairs looking for the room number that Siva aṇṇā had sent me. The door was open, and a bed had been moved next to the door to block it. A young man was fast asleep. It was not Siva aṇṇā. I could guess that it was an attempt to deal with the Chennai heat without the aid of air conditioners, while making sure that thieves won’t walk into your room and take your stuff away. I roused the man and asked where Siva aṇṇā was. He just said, “He went somewhere,” moved the bed aside so that I can get into the room, and promptly went back to sleep. Having encountered the thief initiation earlier, my body was full of adrenaline. I wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep myself. I did my morning chores, bought something to eat from a snack seller doing his rounds, and waited. The young man eventually woke up a couple of hours later. He explained that he was Siva aṇṇā’s room mate, and Siva aṇṇā often went to a house where other Sri Lankans lived. But he had no idea where this house was. He took me down the hall to the room of another Sri Lankan dental student, who is now a well-known dentist in Toronto. His room was full of young Sri Lankan men! Fortunately for the endless stream of young men fleeing Sri Lanka to Chennai, the residence halls at MMC were only loosely managed, unlike the ones at IIT KGP. This meant that kind-hearted students could let refugees, who often had nowhere else to go, stay with them. What followed was a tour of the rooms of other Sri Lankan students. From them, I gleaned that some men from Kuppilan, my father’s village from which Siva aṇṇā also hails, had rented a house on the outskirts of Chennai. Siva aṇṇā often went to stay there. The house was in a place called Eekkaduthangal. They didn’t have an exact address. But then, this was not unusual in South Asia, and I didn’t expect to get exact co-ordinates anyway. They told me which bus to take from Parry’s Corner, which was literally around the corner, and roughly where to get off (“If you reached the Defence Colony, where the film actress Revathi’s family lived, you have gone too far!”).

Armed with this valuable knowledge, I left the MMC hostel lugging my travel bag, into the scorching Chennai sun. I was amazed that I traveled with just a shoulder bag in that heat. Either I didn’t care too much about reusing clothes, or I assumed that I could figure out a way to wash them often. I did reach the Defence Colony after all – there was no sign advertising Eekkaduthangal. I got off the bus and started slogging back towards Eekkaduthangal. Totally parched, I decided to go into a house and ask for water. That was a house where a refugee Sri Lankan family lived. I asked if they knew where Siva aṇṇā lived. They didn’t. But in the ensuing conversation, when they realized that he is from Kuppilan, they made a connection. A young boy from that family then walked me to another house where a bunch of Sri Lankan boys were living. One of them was somehow connected to Kuppilan. He didn’t know Siva aṇṇā either. But he took me to yet another house. I think someone in that house finally recognized Siva aṇṇā’s younger brother Jeeva’s name and knew where they lived. So, after a couple of hours of running around, I finally walked into the compound with a half-built house where there were several young Sri Lankan men including Siva aṇṇā and Jeeva.

The men at the Eekkaduthangal house were an eclectic bunch. There was a jovial, capable young man who acted as the de-facto leader of the house. He could make a mean pittu. Many of the young men there were waiting to go abroad. Some had left militant movements disillusioned and were trying to figure out what to do with their lives. I remember a soft-spoken man in his thirties who would go up on the unfinished roof every morning to work out. Later I was told that he led a prominent militant operation that took place in the late 1970s. I didn’t quite figure out the logistics of how the house operated. All I remember was that they cooked together and ate together and seemed generally happy. I hope I contributed to the upkeep of the house during the few days I stayed with them.

I had a cousin, also studying in Chennai at the time. He, Siva aṇṇā, and I hung out for the next week or so. My cousin had procured a video of the attack by TELO, a Tamil militant group, earlier that year on a police station near Chavakachcheri. We didn’t have a TV or video cassette recorder we could use to watch the recording. By this time, my classmate Mano had also arrived in Chennai and was staying with his cousin who was living at the home of an Indian family. They had heard romantic tales about Tamil militants. So, they wanted to see the video, too. The three of us went to visit this joint family house in Chennai where an entire clan of Chennai brahmins lived. They immediately assumed that my cousin was a Tiger militant. He loved this and, of course, did nothing to dissuade them from their first impression, sometimes declining to answer their incessant questions with an apologetic look, which they interpreted as an operational security consideration. It was hilarious to watch. Later, my cousin told me that sometimes Sri Lankan students traveled without tickets in Chennai public transport. If they were caught, they would tell the ticket inspector directly or indirectly that whatever punishment the ticket collector had in mind for them would not hold a candle to what they had to endure in the battlefield. They were invariably let go.

At the end of the video screening, the famous Tamil writer Indhumathi, who was a friend of the family showed up. Perhaps Indhumathi, too, believed that she met a group of Tamil militants that day!

Siva aṇṇā and my cousin also took me to the back of a restaurant one day and ordered a bottle of beer for the three of us to share. This was the time when Tamil Nadu was ruled by the movie idol M. G. Ramachandran. He had built a massive following playing the righteous hero who was the friend of the poor and the oppressed. As a hero, he never drank or smoked in his movies. When his government came to power, he immediately introduced total prohibition of alcohol. That was a popular move because the women among his supporters bore the brunt of rampant alcoholism among working class men. Therefore, alcohol had to be procured and consumed clandestinely in Tamil Nadu at the time. I had not consumed alcohol in Sri Lanka. I remember that when I went to see a classmate who had joined the merchant navy, he gave me a can of beer. I brought it back home and put it in the fridge for my appā, but my sisters and I were curious about the beer. So egged on by them, I opened the can to smell and taste a drop. Imagine appā facepalming when I offered him the beer can hours later.

I must have traveled to Chennai for the long summer break in 1986 as well, although I don’t have firm recollections. Knowing Siva aṇṇā, I am pretty sure that he wasn’t there when I showed up.

But I did go to Chennai during the summer of 1987. IITians are required to go for industrial training during the summer before their final year. I got an intern position at Hindustan Computers Ltd, HCL in Chennai. During this time when technology imports from the west were both banned and sometimes sanctioned in India, HCL was one of the few innovative home-grown technology companies. Later, with trade liberalization, they became body-shopping companies sending legions of software engineers to work in the west, often in terrible conditions, making the owners of these companies very rich in the process. The so-called Y2K problem made them billions. It took Indian technology companies a decade or more to start innovating once again. In contrast, Sri Lankan technology companies were tiny and could not compete in the body-shopping or software maintenance markets with the armies from India. So, they started innovating earlier.

I showed up at IIT Madras with a letter from the placement office from IIT KGP requesting them to give me accommodation at an IIT hostel. I was assigned a room in the Mandakini hostel – hostels at IIT Madras are named after great Indian rivers. Chennai has a severe water supply problem. During the summer, water supply was gradually dialed down. When I arrived, at the beginning of May, Mandākiṉi had a few hours of running water. One of the Sri Lankans in Mandākiṉi, lent me his “good” bucket, keeping the slightly broken one for himself. This is Sri Lankan hospitality. By the time I left Chennai that summer, I had to walk a kilometer every morning to the last hostel that still had running water.

The next day, I showed up at the HCL office, which required me to take two buses from Adayar, where IIT Madras is located. I was marched to the accountant’s office first to set me up on the payroll. That was when they realized that I was a foreigner. After some handwringing, with characteristic Indian resourcefulness and flexibility, the accountant said, “We’ll sort this out later,” and sent me upstairs with an employee badge. My supervisor, a young man in his thirties with a scooter and a young family in Besant Nagar, immediately complained to me about the last summer trainee they had from IIT Kharagpur who was a shirker. I resolved to rectify this impression and regain the reputation of IIT Kharagpur. My first assignment was to write a printer driver so that they could print the beautiful output of a typesetting program they had on an old-fashioned dot-matrix printer. Inkjet printers were not available, or at least not widely available, in India then. So, while one could look at the beautifully typeset documents on the relatively high-resolution displays they had, they could not print them on paper. I loved that job. I learned a lot during those three months, enough for me to venture into writing an article about “desktop publishing” for my department magazine the next year.

It was also a summer of contrasts for me. Back home, the Sri Lankan forces had launched a new offensive, the Vadamarātchi operation, and were rapidly advancing towards Jaffna. The Indian misadventure in Sri Lanka, known as the Indian Peace Keeping Force, was to begin later that summer. Letters from home had stopped coming, and I had no other way to contact my family. The news reports were horrifying. My fear, throughout those four years in India, was that my family would be killed in the war, and I would be left alone. Before that, through two anti-Tamil riots, we always stayed together as a family so that whatever fate befell on us would affect us all. Now, their lives were at risk but at the same time, I was living a privileged life in Chennai. I was earning a salary (the accountant figured out some way to give me an envelope stuffed with cash every month). I knew I could get a job in a company like HCL when I graduated the following year. I was not enamoured with going to the US for grad school like pretty much every IITian did. I could see myself settling down in Besant Nagar with a young family and a scooter. Perhaps it was my good fortune that this did not come to pass. I remember reading Erich Maria Remarque’s lesser-known novel, Shadows in Paradise. A quote from it stuck with me ever since: “I yearned to embrace this country, […] Why couldn’t I be part of this? Why must I belong to the army of homeless souls who climb endless flights of stairs, ride eternally up and down elevators, and wander from room to room, tolerated but unloved, and only too ready to love in return for being tolerated?“

There was one last ersatz homeward journey from KGP to Chennai. Right after the final semester exam in 1988, I got Hepatitis A, colloquially known as jaundice, for the second time in 6 months. Jaundice was common in India, but getting it for a second time was unusual, and, some thought, could be fatal. I was in hospital for a few days. I wanted to go home. So, I went to Chennai to stay with Siva aṇṇā for a few days. By the time I came back to KGP to wrap up the loose ends, pretty much everyone else had left. I submitted my thesis, burnt all the letters I had, letters that sustained me during my four years of exile, and prepared to make the final actual homeward journey. I decided to go via Chennai because I needed to get my US student visa. It was of course natural for me to try to get it in Chennai and not Colombo. Colombo felt like a strange city in a strange land. Chennai was, I imagined, my own.

There was a crazy Tamil architecture student in our wing at the hall of residence. He said we can go to Chennai together. But he was forever failing his subjects. He needed to finish one last assignment that he needed for graduation. He couldn’t tell when that would be finished. So, we did not make any advance reservations. One evening, an hour before Madras Mail was to leave, he announced that he was ready. We rushed to the station. We had no reservations. But my friend assured that we can travel in the unreserved compartment. A stupid decision given that the journey would take two nights and a day. After four years, I knew this was folly. But my friend assured me that he had done it before. We didn’t have any alternative anyway. We hopped on to the unreserved compartment when the train arrived. It was teeming with people travelling short distances. We hardly had room to stand. When the train stopped at the next station, Balasore, an hour or so later, we decided to run to another compartment and try to get a reservation from the conductor. The train usually stops at Balasore for 10 or 15 minutes, giving us ample time. We walked along the platform. Wagon after wagon was full, with no free berths. Suddenly we came across a wagon that was relatively empty. We thanked our lucky stars and got in, waiting for the conductor to arrive.

The conductor arrived a couple of minutes before departure and immediately ordered us off. It was a wagon reserved for the Indian military. We started running along the train again, and it started to move. I jumped on to the steps of a wagon. Its door was closed. My friend was running along the platform. I held out my hand. He grasped it momentarily and immediately let go. Electric trains accelerate very fast, and I believe this stretch was electrified. It was like a scene from a movie like the Wild Geese. When it was clear that my friend was not going to make it, I turned my gaze inwards. The conductor was watching this drama from the inside. He had no option but to open the door and let me in because I could otherwise die.

Once inside, he asked me for my ticket. I had my ticket but of course no reservation. He assumed that my friend had our reservations and asked me in Hindi if that is so. I sort of understood his question but just said that my friend couldn’t get on to the train. He let me sit on the floor.

The next morning when the train stopped at a major station, the conductor advised me to go the next wagon and persuade the conductor there to sell me a berth.

In Chennai, I queued up at the US embassy at 5 am to get my visa and got a ticket to Sri Lanka from Trivandrum. I visited one of my IIT-KGP juniors at her grandmother’s house in T.Nagar to bid her goodbye. Armed with tips from her on what bead necklaces and what saris to buy for my sisters, I went shopping with my friend Sritharan’s aunt.

I had booked my flight to Sri Lanka from Trivandrum because my IIT KGP friend, Joy, lived there. We lived next door to each other during our entire time in KGP. Hanging out with the foreigners (three Sri Lankans and a Palestinian), he had become an honorary foreign student at KGP. He is also like a brother to me, and our bromance has been what you would expect from any pair of men who are close friends. A few days before I was to leave for Trivandrum, a letter from Joy arrived announcing that he would not be in Trivandrum when I arrived because he had to travel elsewhere to secure high-school admission for his brother. This was a total surprise, and I was at a loss. Luckily, my IIT KGP friend Vinod, who also lived in Trivandrum agreed to host me for the couple of days I was to be in Trivandrum. When I wrote the first draft of this piece, this paragraph was not in it because I had totally forgotten about this incident. I wonder if my mind blotted it out as trauma or as just another happening that did not rise to the level of special mention!

Finally, after four years of exile, I boarded a plane in Trivandrum with a bag full of stuff, including saris and bead necklaces. But the true homeward journey had to wait for one more day — taking the bus the next day to Jaffna and a ride in a rickety “hired car” to our house in Thinnavely. Everything and everyone looked alien to me. The cost of living had shot up dramatically – I had a cup of tea in Muṟikaṇdi and offered a 10 rupee note expecting to get nine back as change. I got back a piece of candy instead, which was the standard Sri Lankan shopkeepers’ way of dealing with not having change. My sisters were now young women, not little girls. Four years of campus life meant that when I spoke in English (which thankfully happened only in Colombo when I had to go to a travel agent to book my flights, or the Dutch embassy to get a transit visa) I had to watch out not to pepper my conversation with casual swear words.

In my naivete, I left one bag behind in Siva aṇṇā’s room when I went back to Sri Lanka because of course I was going to travel to the US from my city, not some foreign city like Colombo. Reality set in soon afterwards. I had to make one last return trip to Chennai from Colombo just to fetch that bag!