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9 TIGER, TIGER

Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1988

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 adoles- cence, 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,

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