THAMILVANY EYE WITNESS OF MULLIVAIKAL BLOOD BATH ON BEACH – 2
That was when the reality of the war hit Gnanakumar for the first time. “It was raining and … you could see everywhere on the road the blood is running with the water and the bodies were left there because there was no-one to identify who was dead and who is alive, the bodies were just laid down on the floor and that’s the first time I saw dead bodies and wounded people crying out, shouting.” Wherever they stopped, they built a bunker, digging down until they could stand up in the hole, cutting down palm branches and laying them across the top for a roof and packing sandbags on the top and around the sides. As the frontline advanced, trapping as many as 300000 people inside a shrinking enclave of LTTE-held land, Gnanakumar went to the makeshift government hospital, which had moved into a former primary school, and volunteered to help, dressing wounds and administering first aid. Her laboratory training had not prepared her for anything like this, but she learned as she went along. As the fighting intensified, they were treating as many as 500 people every day in two rooms. “They had a shortage of medicine but they had to somehow save the people. The last two weeks or so there was a shortage of everything.” With replacement blood running out, she had to filter what she could from the patients through a cloth before feeding it back into their veins. When the anaesthetics ran short, they diluted them with distilled water. “I watched when there was a six-year-old boy,” she …
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