Witness, however, a daily transformation. At noon, Beatrice Muriel returns from the
schoolroom for lunch and overcome by the heavy afternoon air, withdraws into her bedroom
for exactly two hours. In these hours, a different Mala awakens. Assured of Beatrice
Muriel’s immobility by the snores erupting from the bedroom, she is in the street
lightning fast, playing cricket with the boys, making sure that her voice does not
join their cries. Someone screams, “Look out! There behind you! The ball!” and Nishan
knows that Mala is bowling. He goes to the window, sees her poised like the Nataraja,
arm over knee, a ferocious whirlwind of limbs, and the ball goes whizzing past heads.
In these magic hours, Mala climbs high onto forked branches and throws down fruit
to the other children too afraid to follow her ascent. She cavorts on the beach. Stands
on her hands, her dress inverted, a billowing tent, white shorts and black legs exposed.
When Beatrice Muriel awakes, there are twin furrowed brows, twin pencils working in
tandem, four legs swinging under the table where Kalu Balla scratches fleas in his
sleep. When the villagers come to complain, “That daughter of yours has been in our
avocado tree. Stealing all the ripest.” Beatrice Muriel points to Mala, innocent and
scholarly at the table, bellows, “What nonsense! Look at my girl, doing her work.
You mad fellows think you can come and insult us. Better you get out of my house before
I call Seeni Banda.” And the poor man, knowing Seeni Banda and his ancient rifle,
scurries off the porch, cursing the uppity nature of high-caste neighbors and their
spoiled children.
As they walk to school, Nishan’s friends will say, “
Aday machang.
That sister of yours can bowl like a goddamn champion. We should have her on the
school team, even Ariyasinghe doesn’t have an arm like hers.” And he will feel the
stings of pride and resentment at this sister who exists for exactly two hours of
each day.
* * *
At dusk, Beatrice Muriel and Mala gather soiled clothes, ash to brush teeth, a sliver
of soap, and walk toward the river. At water’s edge, a flock of women gather, loud
as birds. They wear sarongs tied above their breasts. Their shoulders gleam like polished
wood in the dying sun. They pull fingers through buns and braids, freeing streams
of hair that unfurl along their spines. Water slides over ankles, calves, knees. The
river is warm from the day’s heat. The women wade to their waists, pour buckets of
water over their heads, soap dark limbs white and frothy.
On the riverbank, Beatrice Muriel squats with Mala clasped between her knees. She
pulls a comb through the girl’s hair, fighting the knotted curls, laments, “Look at
this hair. Won’t straighten no matter how much oil I put on it.”
The women scrutinize Mala’s scrawny figure. They offer advice.
“Rub a coconut husk on her.”
“River sand is better.”
“Bathe her in buffalo milk.”
“Grind turmeric and spread it all over her. My sister’s girl was black like that.
Every day she put turmeric and now the girl is smooth and white as buffalo curd.”
“Nonsense. I’ve seen that girl, she’s still dark like a demon’s backside! My advice,
take her to the devil dancers. Maybe they can improve her color.”
Beatrice Muriel grits her teeth. She has tried these various suggestions to no avail.
Between her knees, Mala practices bowling imaginary cricket balls. Feels the swing
of her shoulder, the perfect arc of the ball, the astonished faces of the women before
they are split wide by the smashing ball. She smiles into the quick-falling darkness.
* * *
Seeni Banda, the one-legged fisherman, spends his mornings at the tea shop sucking
steaming, sugary milk tea from the saucer. At the Doctor’s house, he gives the children
lessons in tea shop politics: “Of the two races on this island, we Sinhala are Aryans
and the Tamils are Dravidians. This island is ours, given to us from the Buddha’s
own hand long, long before they came. And now they have come and we are forced to
share this place. But really it belongs to us.”
Mala says, “But Seeni Banda, our teacher says the Tamils have been here just as long
as we have. She says that no one really knows who came first.”
He flaps a loose-fingered hand at her, continues in the mode of the local pundits.
“Tamil buggers, always crying that they are a minority, so small and helpless, but
look! Just over our heads, hovering like a huge foot waiting to trample us, south
India, full of Tamils. For the Sinhala, there is only this small island. If we let
them, they will force us bit by bit into the sea. Swimming for our lives.”
The children listen, their eyes big. They had not realized that the Tamil children
they go to school with harbored such insidious and watery intentions.
* * *
In the dry season of the year 1958, Nishan is a gawky teenager, black spectacles slipping
down the sweat of his nose, the weight of large textbooks curving his spine. The tea
shop rumors have turned into the smoky scent of sulfur drifting down from Colombo.
Whispers flutter like insects drawn to the lamplight: “They are killing Tamils in
Colombo.” From the opaque darkness, an answer: “This is a Buddhist country. Such things
cannot happen here.”
He is rendered immune to these rumblings by the drama of his own adolescence. Each
night, a Beatrice Muriel–faced vulture gnaws at his liver, his failed examination
papers clutched in her curved talons. He wakes sodden in a chilling sweat. His exams
are upcoming and wrapped up in a fog of equations, memorized test papers, and complicated
mathematical proofs. He is not consciously aware of the fear on people’s faces, the
way in which his parents or Seeni Banda greet strangers with a new suspicion, his
mother’s hoarding of red rice under the kitchen floorboards.
At dawn, he and Mala walk along the silver ocean toward the railway station. It is
quiet, until the terminal. Then schoolboys and girls, giddy in this brief interlude
between the authority of parents and that of teachers, chatter like mynas. There is
a girl in this crowd that he likes. She is a few inches taller than him, so the other
schoolboys tease him mercilessly. But there is invitation in the girl’s eyes, a certain
glance he is sure she reserves for him that allows him to endure the ribbing and gives
him thrills of pleasure when she looks his way.
In the darkened carriage, boys talk of cricket scores and slide their eyes surreptitiously
toward chattering girls. The forward motion of the train rocks them into delicious,
early morning languor.
All this is smashed open with an ear-shattering shriek of metal, the train thrown
against some hard, resisting object. Boys and girls are flung like bits of paper from
an enormous and uncaring hand, bright blood blooming on white uniforms, and bare-chested,
saronged, machete-armed men enter the carriage, stalk heavy-footed down the aisle.
Schoolkids cower, arms over heads. The men breathe words flaming of coconut toddy,
“Tamil devils. Get up! Stand up! Stand up!”
“Look at this one.” A man grasps Radhini, object of Nishan’s ardor, by the upper arm,
above the elbow. She is jerked upward like a fish plucked out of water by a cormorant’s
skewering beak. A machete tip traces her upper arm where uniform gives way to smooth
flesh. Cold metal on skin. A tear trembles on her lash, catching light in that dark
interior.
“Tamil? No?”
Shamefaced schoolboys turn their faces. The odor of panicked sweat settles like a
cloud. My father cannot avert his eyes, Mala claws his arm. “Do something,” her fingers
beg, but though his heart drums staccato, his feet remain leaden.
“Tamil? But no
pottu
? Trying to get our boys to think you’re a Sinhala girl?”
“Maybe we should make a
pottu
for you, no? In the middle of the forehead. Nice big one. Red, I think.”
Swift as a striking cobra, a streak of red across the girl’s curved forehead. The
sudden and unmistakable smell of urine. The front of her white uniform yellowed, spreading.
From the back of the carriage, a loud voice. It is a teacher of the fourth standard,
a tiny fury in a pink sari and thick glasses. “Leave them alone! They’re just schoolkids.”
She pushes past hefty shoulders, wraps her arms around the girl. “This girl has done
nothing. Let her be.”
“She’s Tamil. That’s enough. They take our land, our jobs. If we let them they will
take the whole country.” Miss Abeyrathna, sari rustling like angel wings, says, “Look
at her. She’s a Sinhala girl. Only a little dark. You goondas can’t even tell the
difference.”
A rustling in the mob. A collective pushing forward, and from the back a single, toddy-slurred
voice: “If she’s Sinhala, prove it.”
Miss Abeyrathna pushes Radhini’s shoulder. “Girl. Recite something … the Ithipiso
Gatha, say it.”
In a shivering, breaking voice Radhini recites the Buddhist verses preaching unattachment,
impermanence, the inevitability of death.
For the rest of his life, the cadence of this particular verse will cause my father’s
bile to rise. It will conjure grasping fingers of guilt that wrap about his throat
and make him remember Radhini in that dark compartment, the Tamil-inflected undercurrents
of her accent hidden by her years in Buddhist schools, the front of her uniform sodden
yellow with fear and shame.
She was saved, he will tell us, by the courage of that teacher. The mob, deterred
by her bravery, left then. But there is something that lingers in his eye when he
tells this story that makes us know the weight of it upon his heart.
* * *
There is, of course, another child in this tale, a Tamil child growing up in the north
where grasping fingers of land reach into the frothing ocean. While Radhini recites
terrified verses, he is four years old. At the age of four, the course of any life
lies uncharted; there are perhaps no fangs in this mouth, no incipient claws in evidence.
He is perhaps too young to remember these days of lootings, when houses were surrounded
and set aflame with children crying inside them. He is perhaps too young to have this
memory, but he claims to remember these things. Most specifically, he remembers an
old Tamil woman beset by Sinhala youths, who beat her with sticks and then, laughing
as if at a fair or some other amusement, set her alight so that she squawks and screams,
her sari flapping like the wings of a great flaming bird. Perhaps he is too young
to remember, but these are the images that filter into his dreams. In the decades
to come, when he has become the Leader with blood-drenched claws and ripping fangs,
a tiger-striped army ready to die at his command, these are the images he will offer
when asked why.
three
In Colombo, weakened by his first stroke, his ramrod straight walk broken by an insistent
limp, the mutton soup dripping disobediently out of the corner of his mouth and onto
his starched white shirt front, the Judge dreams of demolishing his meandering mansion.
In its place, he wishes to install a simple modern two-story house.
An army of sarong-clad men is moved in to trample the carefully laid flowerbeds, spitting
betel like blood on the floors and abandoning tools everywhere. In daylight, the ground
shakes incessantly and the family must shout to make themselves heard. At night, they
are kept awake by the laughter of the men who squat in a circle smoking
beedis
like buzzing red fireflies and drinking arrack before falling asleep in the room
erected for this purpose.
While a fine cement dust falls on their heads, rendering all white haired and aged,
the Judge spends most of his time railing against these sons of the soil. “These bastards
will be the death of me! If I look away even for a minute they have put in the staircase
facing the wrong way. Country going to these uneducated dogs.”
He bangs about the property, crashing his cane against walls and doorways. The men
humor his violent moods, but when he turns his back, they snigger and imitate his
uneven walk. The country is theirs now. The reign of brown-skinned sahibs dreaming
of Oxfordshire and sweating in three-piece suits is ancient history.
As her husband battles contractors and shrieks at laborers, Sylvia Sunethra negotiates
marriages for her children, spreading photographs and astrological charts of Colombo’s
most eligible sons and daughters on the dining table. A single dream emerges: to build
a house and fill it chock-f of dutiful children, illustrious sons and daughters-in-law,
an army of projected grandchildren stretching into the distant future.
Trying to ignore the chaos around her, Visaka does her schoolwork out of dusty textbooks.
She works with ears blocked against the drilling and sawing by puffs of cotton wool.
Despite these distractions, she is a good student, bringing home distinctions and
prizes, managing by intense effort to leave the house immaculately uniformed. Secretly,
she wishes to follow in the steps of her brother, Ananda, and become that most respected
and rare of persons, a doctor.
But in her room, hidden behind the tall mirror, taped to the wall, are posters of
clean-shaven, fair-skinned boys, Elvis with his cocked hips and Pat Boone. At surreptitious
moments, she listens to tapes cajoled from her older sisters, dances across the room
to “Love me tender, love me true.” Presses her lips against the slick paper on the
wall, imagines what it would be like to fall in love. To be swept away and destroyed,
merged with another so that your souls are one, one heart beating in two bodies.
At family parties, tottering in their first heels and the unfamiliar weight of saris,
she and her cousins look furtively at the shy boys gathered on the other side of the
room. Which of them will it be? Who will sweep her away on a wave of love, into her
real life? Who will love her tender, love her true? Her heart beats erratically with
these questions, a throbbing in her head.