We drink sweet, fresh coconut water, cool as well water. Afterward, he hacks the coconuts
open, fashions small spoons of husk so that we can scoop out the inner flesh, gelatinous
as egg white, creamy as ice cream.
Alwis lives in the shanty colony behind our aunt’s house. Sometimes leaving her house,
we see him bathing at the single tap that spouts beside her front gate, his dark body
glistening wet in the sunshine. Fingers deep in the snow white foam on his head, he
gyrates precise parts of himself under the tap and waves a sudsy hand in our direction.
* * *
Lying in our shared childhood bed, I am awakened by the dawn that comes suddenly bursting
into our room. A curl of her hair lies against my shoulder as if claiming me while
she lay unconscious. La wakes, pushes me out of bed with her long curved toes, a finger
to her lips. We tiptoe outside to find Shiva. Together we wait for the fisherman who
comes bearing overflowing baskets suspended from the long pole across his shoulder.
His resonating cry, “Maalu, maalu, maaluuuuu!” summons Alice, nudging away the cats
with her slippered feet. The fisherman sinks onto his heels, his sarong pulled up
to reveal thighs like dark muscled wood. He pulls aside banana leaves, displays the
day’s catch, silver sea creatures, small bundles of fat-armed squid, live crabs, with
pincers raised in defense. Alice decides quickly and the fishmonger shakes his head
in admiration. “Alice Nona always knows how to pick the freshest catch.” There is
a brief bargaining war, then our dinner is wrapped up in newspaper. We carry these
bundles into the house like treasure. If Alice is in a benevolent mood, she will let
us help her prepare the fish or crab curry, if not she will tell us stories as she
does it herself. Either way these are magic mornings.
* * *
Rumor has always been the most trusted purveyor of news. Now the trade winds bring
strange tales southward. In Jaffna, a city two hundred miles north of Colombo poised
at the very top of the island, a city which has always been the stronghold of Sri
Lankan Tamils, a gang of Tamil boys is up to suspicious activities, it is said. Smuggling.
Also bank robbing and weapons stockpiling. They are led by a youth with the fierce
eyes of a true believer. He speaks of revolution, secession, independence; he speaks
of splitting the island; he speaks of a Tamil homeland. People scoff, “Ragtag boys
armed with sticks and stones. Uneducated Jaffna kids speaking big-big politics. What
do they know of such things? Who does this kid think he is? A bell-bottomed King Elara?”
On a hot, yellow Jaffna afternoon, an old man sags and crumples at the gates of an
ancient temple. It is the city’s Tamil mayor, Alfred Duraiappah, the newspapers scream,
shot sharp between the eyes by the upstart smuggler, robber of banks, and seventeen-year-old
revolutionary secessionist, Velupillai Prabhakaran. He has killed the old man, he
proclaims, because Duraiappah was a traitor to his race, a lackey to the Sinhalese
oppressors. From now on the battle against Sinhala oppression will be fought by any
means necessary. And in this way the nation hears the name of the man who will come
to be called the Leader.
* * *
In the morning, the postman rings his bicycle bell and Alice, hunch wobbling dangerously,
hurries to the front gate. She leaves the family’s letters on the front table. But
there are others she tucks into her sari blouse. These are from Dilshan, her son,
who has been with our family from before our births but who has newly left us to enlist.
He is in the north with his army battalion, together with entire generations of young
Sinhala men hoping for new lives, better lives than those of their parents. The letters
capture Alice’s whole attention. We watch her read them, her lips moving slowly. But
we are shut out of this part of her life as surely as if she had a door to close.
The letters make her unattentive to us so that we are jealous of Dilshan, whom we
too love, but who steals her affection so completely.
When he comes for leave, a tall, handsome stranger with a shank of thick, black hair
falling into his eyes, it’s hard to believe that he is the playmate we have climbed
all over from birth. It takes us days before we are again easy with him.
Then he is again on the top balcony with us, throwing off our sandals to the ground
below and attempting to hook them like fish with the fishing poles we have fashioned
from sticks and large safety pins. We are on a ship, he says, tossed by the waves.
He makes us see the water rising, the heaving horizon. We lurch about the balcony
like ocean-tossed fishermen, drunk on the picture he has painted with his words.
His return causes strange reactions. Sylvia Sunethra comes into the kitchen. When
he scrambles to his feet she says, “No, no, sit, Putha, you must have enough standing
where you are stationed.” She presses an envelope into his hands and hurries off.
It is money, we know, we have seen her counting out the rupees just this morning.
It is not easy for her to part with, but she tells us, “Poor boy. Might as well give
him something to put aside.”
On the last morning of his leave, he comes to the kitchen steps. He is dressed in
his uniform, the khaki ironed, the boots polished. A different person. A stranger
with hard eyes, he makes us suddenly self-conscious, shy. When he kneels to put his
forehead at her feet, Alice bends over, she runs her fingers over his hair, her hump
quivers. She says,
“Budu saranai, putha.”
After he leaves, she will not talk to us. She keeps her head down and serves us cold
noodles and soggy fish for days.
* * *
In these years it is fashionable to cultivate seawater aquariums, so each house has
great transparent rectangles perched on back porches and verandahs, glass cases in
which live startlingly striped and painted, finned and ruffled sea creatures amid
coral and seaweed. When the monsoon comes, the fish tanks overflow, and the water
gushes out over steps and into the gardens, carrying along the most exotic sea life.
Walking to market with Alice, our slippers are dragged immediately from our feet,
our umbrellas are grabbed and thrown by the winds, so that in a few moments we are
soaked from hair to toe, barefoot and exhilarated. In the churning roadside gutters,
fluttering sea fish gasp and slowly drown in the onslaught of fresh water.
During the monsoon months, all distinctions between land and sea are lost and it feels
as if we are swimming through the air. The cats walk into the house with the kicking
back legs of frogs hanging from their mouths. They must be given chase and persuaded
to dislodge their sleepy, disgruntled-looking prey. Ponds form along the back wall
and soon are crisscrossed in miles of gelatinous strings beaded with ebony seeds that
burst into a million squirming commas. We fill jam jars with tadpoles, balance them
on our desk as we do homework by kerosene lamp (electricity goes out often in the
monsoon). Magnified in the flame, the tadpoles rise and fall, rise and fall while
we labor over numbers and letters. Outside the rain smashes down. Under the table
warm, wet canine tongues lick hopefully at our bare soles, impatient for dinner.
This is our shared childhood then, marred only by certain memorable moments. Once,
for example, my grandmother’s eye, pulled from her various concerns, fixes on the
three of us. “Boy, don’t you have a place to go? Huh? A family of your own?” she asks.
When Shiva, eyes averted, leaves, she puts her twisted hand on my head and says, “Don’t
get too fond of that one.” And I at that age, bold, say, “But Achi, why not? What
has he done?”
She: “He hasn’t
done
anything. But they are Tamil. Not like us. Different.”
I ask, “How different?”
She: “Can’t you see, child? They’re darker. They smell different. They just aren’t
like us.”
Her voice, cajoling. But I am already anxious to get back to the kingdom of our friendship,
and slipping away before she can catch my arm in those tree-rooted fingers, I say,
“Anyway, he’s not as dark as Mala Aunty, so that dark-skinned thing can’t be right.”
* * *
I am ten and Shiva is at my window, holding an unlit kerosene lamp. “You won’t believe
what I’ve found!” he whispers. When I climb out, he pulls me along the side of the
house, pushes aside jasmine vines to reveal a dark crevice. He jumps down into it
and in the moment when I am deciding whether or not to panic, his slim wrist appears
to pull me down into the darkness beside him. I am suddenly blinded, claustrophobia
clawing at my throat when he fires up the lamp, and blue walls spring up around us.
Such a color! Cerulean, turquoise, flashes of emerald, like being swept underwater.
“Look, someone left a radio!” he says. “Do you think it works?” We are laughing with
the discovery of this secret place.
It becomes our hideout, of course. A place to shelter from adult whims, taking with
us the various pleasures of childhood, Asterix comics, packets of biscuits, board
games, jacks, cushions. It was our retreat and sanctuary.
* * *
It is around this time that watching our aunt Mala and her husband, Anuradha, La and
I realize how different they are from the other adults. At parties they don’t part,
him to drink whiskey in the garden with the men and her to sit in the living room
with the women sipping tea. Instead we find them in the in-between no-man’s-land of
darkened hallways, laughing together and touching often.
When she rejoins them, the women tease Mala, “Can’t leave that handsome husband of
yours alone for even one minute, no? He must really be something. The way you are
always after him like a puppy dog.” And, “My God, married for so long and still so
much hot hot passion.” They smooth the knife-sharp pleats on their saris, balance
teacups on their knees, and pat their carefully elegant heads. Behind the good-humored
teasing, we sense the jagged edge of jealousy. Lanka grasps my hand. “Big, fat, stupid
aunties,” she whispers, “why are they so bad to her?” And I, with the infinite wisdom
of thirteen, am able to hit it exactly on the head. “Because she had a love marriage.
But they had to marry whatever smelly uncle was chosen for them.”
But despite their gnawing jealousy, there is one matter in which the aunties may legitimately
pity Mala and for which she must endure the barely concealed glee of women who say,
“Oh, poor thing. No matter. You can’t imagine how annoying it is to blow up like a
balloon and then always have children crying and pulling at you.” Because, despite
more than a decade of happy matrimony, her belly remains as stubbornly flat as on
her wedding day.
Unable to conceive, my aunt delves into the sex lives of plants. Pulling apart tender
flower lips with pollen-dusted fingers, she exposes fleshy stamens, produces hybrids
and variations never before seen on the island. Her dahlias are as big as our heads,
her orchids monstrous in their size and hue. Every year, she walks away from the Colombo
Garden Show with the biggest trophies and the envy of other horticulturally minded
ladies.
Across town, Anuradha’s mother, a lady we take pains to rarely encounter, smites her
forehead. “All this nonsense! Prize, schmize! What is the point of making plants grow
when nothing is growing inside of her?” Refusing to be consoled, she repeats these
words in the presence of the most surefire gossips, ensuring their passage through
an intricate web of mouths into Mala’s burning ears.
* * *
In 1981, in the northern city of Jaffna, Sinhala policemen and paramilitaries storm
the old Tamil library, rip books from the shelves, set fire to the mountains of paper.
The conflagration shoots high into the sky, a funeral pyre visible for miles, a warning
to all who can see. For weeks afterward, torn, blackened pages fly over the lagoons
and salt marshes, the onion and chili fields. They lodge in the branches of palmyra
trees, float into houses and buildings, entangle in the barbed wire fences and the
limbs of gods soaring over the
kovils
. The storm of words finds its way into cooking pots and outhouses. The ground is
littered with fragments of angular Tamil.
In Colombo on television we watch a Sinhala politician. He shakes his head to and
fro, his double chin swaying. He says, “If there is discrimination in this land which
is not their Tamil homeland, then why try to stay here? Why not go back to India where
there would be no discrimination? There are your kovils and gods. There you have your
culture, education, universities. There you are masters of your own fate.” From upstairs
we hear nothing but silence. When I see him next, Shiva is brusque, his usual high
spirits deflated. When I ask him what is wrong, his voice is cold. “They burnt ninety-five
thousand manuscripts,” he says. “Your people burnt up our history.” I stare at him,
not knowing what to say, but already he has turned from me and is running up the staircase.
six
It is January 1983 when an impossibility occurs. Mala’s perfectly synchronized body
refuses to bleed. Mystified, she waits and wonders if she has hit some early menopause,
her body rejecting even the charade of fertility.
In his examining room, as she repins her sari, the doctor waves flippant fingers.
“What nonsense, of course it is not menopause. Young, healthy thing like you. It is
only the most obvious thing. You have conceived. You are expecting.”
“But, Doctor, this is impossible.”
“Why impossible? Are you not having relations with your husband? Is he not able to
perform?”
A deep beetroot blush further darkens Mala’s face. “No, Doctor, nothing like that.”
“Because if that is so, perhaps you should be looking for more virile companionship,
no?”
Mala slaps away the wandering hand. “No, Doctor, we have just been trying for so long.”
The doctor sighs at the ignorance and, worse, silly morality of these Colombo wives,
says, “Well, now the most mundane thing in the world has happened. You have succeeded.
You are pregnant.”