Beside me, Rosie’s whiskey breath stirs the hair beside my ear. I yank my sleeve out
of her clawed grip, run back to the bedroom where Lanka lies on the bed, flopped on
her stomach, the soles of her feet gently cupping each other. I clamber on the bed
to be close to her. I wish I hadn’t left this room. Wish I hadn’t heard what I did.
But the words stay with me. The implications of complicity impossible to ignore even
at that age.
* * *
At Christmas we gather at Ananda Uncle’s. Every year there are more new families looking
lost and speaking in thick accents. The women have forests of hair on their legs and
armpits, they wear cheap skirts to the ankle and unflattering haircuts. Their husbands
wear tight suits and rubber sandals. Their children are clad in either frothy pink
or light blue, according to the appropriate gender. They waft a certain specifically
island odor, a suggestion of sweat, coconut oil, and turmeric. Every year they come
looking more and more shell-shocked. It is impossible to tell what they have seen,
what they are escaping. They do not ever talk about these things. They seem so foreign
to us, they have not yet learned to suppress their smells and moderate their voices.
They are surprised by too much and too easily impressed by America.
In a few years, these children will be wearing jeans, their mothers will be perfectly
coiffed, and their fathers will smell of cologne. But for now we keep our distance
lest the aura of foreignness so laboriously shed rubs off on us.
* * *
In these myriad ways, we carved out our lives in Los Angeles. Yet falling asleep was
often an act of travel, taking me quickly by the hand so that I am instantly surrounded
by verdant foliage, the ocean’s emerald roar, the voices of Alice, Mala, our grandmother.
Those most familiar and beloved of women.
But there are also nightmares. Over and over I dream of a small house, a glittering
lagoon, a mango tree, and a young girl. She stands before me and her large bruised
eyes do not leave mine. When she unpins the sari fold at her shoulder and pulls it
away from her, I see sunset-colored bruises on her delicate clavicles. When she undoes
her sari blouse, I see the grenades tucked like extra breasts under her own. It is
grotesque. I wake trembling, and her eyes stay with me for hours.
Part Two
eight
Saraswathi, Northern Sri Lanka
It is the dry season here in the northern war zone of Sri Lanka, and the lagoon reflects
sunlight like the shards of a thousand broken bottles. The village children used to
gather here to play, but I come here alone now. So many of them are gone, whisked
away in speeding white army vans or torn from the sides of dead fathers and bleeding
mothers by the Tigers. The other, “lucky” ones have run away to the Internally Displaced
People’s camps. You can tell where the camps lie from miles away by the smell. Thousands
of people without running water or toilets, there is bound to be this terrible smell.
So even when the gunfire echoes, I am glad that Amma and Appa refuse to leave, that
they keep us here in this small house by the lagoon.
There were seven of us before. Amma; Appa; my brothers, Krishna, Balaram, Kumar; myself;
and like a tail at the very end, my sister, Luxshmi, who was named for the goddess
with the long and lovely eyes, Luxshmi, who provides all things material, a stream
of golden coins pouring from her open palm. Whereas my little sister was named for
the butter-skinned goddess of plenty, I was named for Saraswathi, the serious-eyed
and studious goddess of learning. When I complain to Amma, she only laughs and says,
“Look how wisely we have named you,” and it is true, because there is something in
me that loves the glide of pages between my fingers, the stroke of my pencil across
paper, the hush of the village classroom. Even now I am studying for the teacher’s
certification. Next year when I am seventeen, I will take the exams, and one day maybe
I will be the village schoolteacher.
But these are big-big dreams for somebody living inside a war, so I don’t speak of
them often. Sometimes I get this breathless feeling that the war is a living creature,
something huge, with a pointed tongue and wicked claws. When the tanks rumble past
in the far fields, I feel it breathe; when the air strikes start and the blood flows,
I feel it lick its lips. I’ve grown up inside this war, so now I can’t imagine what
it would be like to live outside it. When Amma and Appa tell stories of before, it
is that world with plenty to eat and no air strikes that is alien to me. What would
it mean to live without the soldiers in their sandbagged checkpoints? Without the
barbed wire? Without the giant photographs of martyred Tigers?
When the war first stroked its nails across the hearts of my brothers Krishna and
Balaram, they were older than me, but only little pieces of the men they longed to
be. The Tigers had come to our schoolroom. They showed us videos of what the Sinhala
do to our people. How they murder and kill us Tamils without mercy. They spoke of
the Leader, his lifelong struggle for Eelam, a homeland where we would be safe from
the Sinhala. What determination shone on my brothers’ faces! They wanted so much to
help save our people, but also to be known as brave and valiant fighters. They came
home quivering with hate, the war shining in their eyes.
When they ran away to join the Movement, Amma didn’t cry. She kept her back straight
and her eyes glistened only with pride. And I, convinced by her strength, hid my own
tears. I was proud of their fearlessness.
Sometimes, Amma takes Luxshmi and me to the martyrs’ cemetery. We search through that
forest of headstones until we find Krishna and Balaram’s names and then Amma cries
over her sons. But I don’t, because these graves hold only rust-colored earth. My
brothers’ bodies were torn apart over the disputed territories, leaving us no fragment
to mourn. It is outside of the cemetery that my brothers haunt me. When the earth
of the onion fields is made ready for planting, I wonder if this was where Balaram’s
blood splattered onto the ground. The lagoon in a particular light makes me hear a
quiet splash. Then I see Krishna’s face floating, his mouth open, his uniform sagging,
the water tinting rose and then scarlet around him.
Sometimes I am certain it was easier, a quiet click underfoot, and then, instant incendiary
light. The swiftness of the land mine. I hope that is how they went. Much better,
faster and sharper, than bleeding in the onion fields or a heavy boot into the lagoon.
This is what happens when you don’t know the way someone died, all the other possibilities
come crawling in until your head is packed full of death. But I’m getting better at
pushing away these thoughts with both hands. The last time we saw either of the boys
was about three years ago. They had been granted leave from the camp and for days
before they came, Amma bought lentils for
vadai,
stirred batter for
appam,
and fried a whole fish. I don’t know where she got it, the market had been empty
for weeks, but the scent of it made us all weak-kneed. We hadn’t eaten like that in
so long.
When they came, they ate and asked for more, but they kept their guns strapped to
their backs while their fingers moved through the food. When they smiled, only their
mouths moved. They looked to the left of me, to the right of me, but their eyes slid
off my face like water. They didn’t praise Amma’s food. They didn’t speak of the weeks
we ate unsalted rice so that they could feast. They talked only of Eelam, of their
weapons, and how many bastard Sinhala soldiers they had killed. When they left, Luxshmi
and I fell upon their banana leaves, scooping up the last bits of
appam
,
rasam
, the precious bits of fried fish into our mouths; we gnawed on those bones until
they were sharp dry splinters. That was the last time we saw them, and now their faces
have grown dim. I can only picture them in their uniforms, not as they were before,
when we were children together, playing by the lagoon, the slap of our slippers echoing
across the bund in time to our laughter.
Kumar, my youngest brother, had eyes like a girl’s, dark as a she-cow’s with great
curling lashes. When Amma brought out her dancing saris, he’d run his palms slowly
over the silk as if they were the pelts of animals. He would put on her silver ankle
bells and dance the gopis or Radha so skillfully that Amma laughed and called him
her favorite daughter. We fought over those bells, each of us, determined to dance
most like Amma.
After Krishna and Balaram were killed, Amma kept Kumar close to her all the time.
She couldn’t bear to lose her last son, she said. She had given two sons to the cause,
she wanted to keep one for herself, for the time when the war was over, she said,
clutching him to her even though by that time he was taller than her and didn’t want
to be held. She kept him in the house all the time. But that year, in the malarial
months after the monsoon, we all had shaking, dripping fevers and there was only Kumar
to go to the market. The soldiers came for him then. Kanahamma, the old market woman,
saw it, the white van swerving to a stop in a cloud of red dust, the nose of a gun
glinting through the open doors. We have not seen Kumar in two years. He would be
eighteen now and I don’t think I would know his face if I saw it.
Amma never cries for Kumar. This is because she thinks he is still alive. At the end
of each day, when the sun is falling quickly over the water, the bats starting to
stream over the violet-dusk sky, she stands at the door waiting for him. She never
says his name, but I know she is still waiting. Stupid Amma. Every time she does this,
I must fight myself not to grab her shoulders and hiss the truth into her face. He
is never coming back. He will never walk through the door, with Snowy at his heels,
a bag from the market over his shoulder, smelling like Kumar, that particular mix
of boy-sweat and dust. There are soldiers everywhere and when they take you, you do
not ever come back. But I can never say such things to Amma. One day she will know
that her youngest son, too, is gone and for him she will not even have an empty grave
to cry over.
* * *
When she was young, before the war came, Amma was a dancer. She has danced in all
the halls and temples of the island and even across the seas in India. When she is
in the mood, she tells us how she met Appa. He was a drummer. But old even then, she
says, his beard already white. Now he is bowed and bent. His left leg drags behind
him and his fingers are always atremble like butterflies. But these are lucky things,
Amma says, because these days, only the very old or the very young are not taken.
On the evenings when the fighting sounds far away and there is no rumble of tanks
or aircraft, Amma’s students come shyly in twos and threes. A few small girls, they
gather in rows, barefoot under the spreading branches of our mango tree. I make sure
that their muscles have not forgotten the stance, that their limbs are well stretched
and pliant before Amma comes. I arrange their arms as she used to arrange mine, curl
or clench their fingers to imply the blooming of the lotus or the ferocity of a warrior
grasping his weapon. I push their shoulders downward so that they must dance from
an even lower squat, their thigh muscles quivering, and the sweat beading on their
upper lips.
When Amma comes out, there is no music, only the rhythmic slap of her hands and her
quiet voice calling out the steps. Sometimes there is also the echo of faraway gunfire.
But those sounds only pull at a small part of our attention. We are caught in the
desire to please Amma, to perfect the placement of our feet on the earth, the tilt
of our chins, and the flash of our eyes. I dance so the girls can follow my feet.
But more than that, much more, I dance for the thrill of it, the way the movements
flow through me like water pouring over my skin, the way my arms move through the
air, winged creatures. In these moments, twirling, stamping, arms extended, fingers
curling and uncurling, in the midst of movement, I feel the air become very still,
very quiet, as if all the attention in the world has descended into this small clearing
in front of our house, as if Krishna with his flute, Luxshmi on her lion, perhaps
even Shiva Nataraj himself, drum in hand, foot poised in mid-stride, frozen in the
midst of destruction, have descended to watch the magic in our limbs, our eyes, our
fingers, as we dance under the mango tree.
* * *
In the darkness just before sunrise, there is a sound like thunder shattering my dreams.
Amma leaps awake, drags me and Luxshmi off the mat and out of the house, sweeps us
into the trench that is next to the front door, and then the whole earth is moving,
bucking and pushing against us as if it rejects us, wishes to spit us up into the
air where the low-flying planes will see us and narrow in with bombs aimed at our
heads. Amma pushes us against the ground so that my cheek rubs against the indigo
earth, the tears running off the side of my face making a sticky red puddle. In a
few minutes, Appa will crawl to us. We know that when the bombings start we must run
with Amma and let him come in his own time. But Luxshmi cries and cries for him. He
comes slowly, dragging the useless leg in the midst of the world being destroyed,
and then the four of us hide, the taste of dirt just under our mouths, the scrape
of it under our clawing fingernails while the bombing goes on and on and on.
After the bombings, Appa begs Amma to take us and leave this place. When he says this,
she gets very angry. She says, “And go where? To the IDP camps? And then what? Live
there for years? With no food and a shit-filled toilet? What will happen to me and
the girls in such a place?”
Appa says, “If you stay here, one day, either the soldiers or the Tigers will come.”