Wreck and Order (14 page)

The walk home from Uncle's takes us through an expanse of tall, shining, swaying grasses. Suriya points to a tree house in the middle of the sugarcane field, which protects the crops from wild elephants. Men sleep up there, and if they feel the tremor of heavy footsteps, they throw firecrackers down to scare the elephants away. She gestures to the bamboo ladder. “You want to go up?”

Inside is a rumpled cotton sheet and the smell of wet leaves and an empty bottle of arrack. A cocoon of vacant waiting. I lie on my back. Blue light dapples the palm-leaf roof where the weave has pulled loose.

The first time I felt I really loved Brian was when he made me feel better during one of my bad nights on our first winter together. “You're slumping,” he said, sitting down behind me on the edge of the bed—flannel pajamas, toothpasty breath. I normally had good posture, one of the things he liked about me. He took my shoulders in his hands and pulled backward to bare my chest.

“It's happening again,” I said. “I need it to stop.” I kicked off my boot.

“What is it?”

“I don't know. It replaces me.”

“Do you want me to hold you?”

“I think so.” He pulled me against his chest. My right big toe pried the wool sock off of my left foot.

“Harder,” I said. He wrapped his long legs around my waist and tightened his grip on my lower arms, crushing me into him. I love getting my blood pressure taken, always dread the pang of emptiness when the nurse presses the release button and the black cuff hisses as it returns my arm to itself.

“Think of somewhere you want to be,” Brian said.

The courtyard of Shirmani just before dawn. Lying on the grass as the stars fade into the childish brightness of daybreak. I closed my eyes and felt Brian's heart beat against my back. The damp grass cooling the base of my neck and the koel birds' slow whistle, a nude teenage boy diving off a boulder into a dark lake. I turned and kissed Brian's cheek. “You made me feel better.” He had reminded me of that other version of myself, the young woman who knew her purpose, knew it wasn't much, knew this smallness was something to be grateful for. “You made me remember when I was traveling in—”

Brian was so tired. Could I tell him in the morning? He was so glad I felt better. Could he please turn out the light now? I nodded against his shoulder. So many tiny failures on his part—larger ones on mine. Stop. Please. Here I am now, in the place I used to imagine myself when I needed courage to face my life in New York. Although if I had known how temporary that life would be, I suppose I wouldn't have needed so much courage.

In the sugarcane field below the tree house, a peacock mews eerily, sorrow reaching for something pretty. Suriya calls up. “El? You are sleeping?”

When we get back to Hashini's house, her husband, Rajesh, is laying red chilies on a strip of newspaper. Their shiny skins wrinkle under the harsh sun. His body is fiercely compact—the brown buds of his nipples too close together, his abdominal muscles like small stones slipped under his skin. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,” plays in my head, deadpan. Cut it out. There is something unsettling about the mind's odd inner loops, like “Falling, falling, effortless flight,” which runs, wheezing, through my head sometimes while I'm having sex. But now I'm nodding and smiling and repeating the words “hello” and “thank you.” Rajesh grins back. The gap between his front teeth leaks red betel juice.

Hashini-Mommy walks through the backyard, holding her long skirt in front of her waist to make a basket. She disappears into a windowless clay hut in the backyard. The kitchen. I ask Suriya if I can see. Pockmarked pots and pans are piled against the wall. The stove is a clay cube with a cauldron resting on top of it, warmed by smoldering sticks. Hashini kneels on the dirt floor and peels potatoes, her hands a blur of unthinking strokes.

“Can I help?” Stupid question. “No!” Suriya barks, smiling.

So I sit still, resigned to aimlessness, waiting to feed off Hashini's hard work. Would it feel good to have such a clear, constant purpose, or does Hashini feel wasted on one repetitive motion after another? Suriya sifts rice in a shallow, woven basket, churning the milky kernels in search of stones, which she tosses to the woods behind the house. The first time she made rice, she tells me, it had so many stones. Every bite was— She crunches her teeth together. I ask how old Suriya was when she started cooking.

“Six years old, seven years old. Like that. I must. Because at that time my father was cruel.” Her mother was afraid for Suriya and her brother to live with their father, so she sent them to live in a hut in the woods. A hut like for farmers. She brought them food at night. But one night their mother did not come. Suriya's brother said, I hungry. Suriya clutches her stomach and groans, enjoying making theater of her past. She cooked rice the way she had seen her mother cook rice. But she didn't know about stones. The rice had so many! She claps her hands to her cheeks and shakes her head side to side, as if the astonishing part of that story is that she ate poorly sifted rice. “Do you have a mother and father?” she asks.

“Yes. Sort of. They're both alive. But my mother left me when I was eleven years old.” This is a sentence I've repeated so many times I no longer hear any difference between the meanings of the words. It's easy to tell the truth about easily comprehensible difficulties. People tend to find me more likable and sympathetic when I tell this story right away. It makes me pathetic in an interesting way, and then later, no matter how sordid or strange or unsettling my behavior is, they have a handy excuse. I once overheard Brian on the phone with his sister, saying, in protest, “She barely had a mother!” I stifled a groan. It's not that I don't believe my mother leaving affected me, any less or any more than my father's depression or my natural shyness. But none of these facts are an explanation for who I am. I'm still trying to find that out.

“What does it mean—left you?” Suriya asked. “She stopped to be your mother?”

“Oh no, she's still my mother. She just met another man and decided she wanted to be with him instead of my father. So she went away and I didn't see her for a long time.”

“Were you angry, Akki?” Suriya asks, addressing me the same way she does her older female cousins.

“Not really. Not at the time. Nangi.” I touch her wrist, proud I know the word for “little sister,” happy I've earned this new intimacy. “She wanted me to move with her, and I actually felt guilty for staying with my dad.”

“Dad means?”

“Father. I'm closer with my father. He's my real parent and my mother is like a fake parent.”

“Did you find a new mother?”

“What do you mean?”

“A new woman to take care of you. An auntie or a lady in your village.”

“No—that makes sense, I guess, but—I still have my mother. We write letters and talk on the phone. We visit each other.” Actually, my mother has always insisted I visit her, that I need the vitamin D and swimming pools she seems to think are only available in Arizona. Plus, she doesn't want to leave her family. She and Rick have teenage twin boys. IVF—she wanted new babies that badly. I've met them a handful of times. Unremarkable kids. It seems only fair that I make no effort to get to know them—what my mother wanted was a shiny new family, unencumbered by my father's “negativity” and the “brutal” New England winters. And she seems genuinely happy making peanut butter sandwiches in their bright condo, wearing flip-flops year-round, drinking margaritas on the balcony with her thoughtlessly cheerful husband. It's a relief in a way that she's separate and okay. Worrying about my father is burden enough.

“And what about your father?” I ask Suriya. “Is he still cruel?”

“No.” She dumps the sifted rice in a large pot and fidgets with the Buddhist protection cord on her wrist. “Now he is tired.” On the road, a group of boys walk slowly past, some of the many villagers who have come to see the sudhu sitting in Hashini's yard. My existence carries weight here, effortlessly. I don't need any convenient explanations for who I am, any concrete descriptions of what I'm doing with my life.

In the days before the New Year, a loud, unremarked succession of motorbikes and auto rickshaws delivers Suriya's family members to Hashini's main room, where the TV blares holiday programming. Men in white cotton suits and women with glossy braids report in voices bright as doorbells from a manicured lawn in front of a palace. I sit outside the open door to the house, next to a teenage girl wearing a pink T-shirt that says
STAR CUTIE
. She stares at me and giggles, her hand over her mouth. “You good girl?” she says at last, jumps up, runs inside.

Nope, I tell the backs of her small, quick calves, irritated with these angelic Sri Lankan girls.

“My sisters so pretty, so fair,” Suriya says.

“Your sisters? I thought you only had one brother.”

“The daughters of Hashini-Mommy.”

“Your cousins—your aunt's daughters.”

“Yes. My sisters.”

“Okay,” I say. “Your sisters are very pretty, it's true.”

“I am so dark.” Suriya marks the word with a wide flick of her wrists. “My mum takes pills when she is pregnant with me.”

I smile at Suriya's oddly posh diction, learned from a British textbook. “Took pills,” I say.

“Took pills. To not get malaria. And it turned my skin. My father tease me—my dark daughter. Like that.” She almost sings the last two words, moving her chin once left, once right.

A pity your mum didn't take pills that turned you albino. You'd be partially blind and have a reduced life expectancy, but no one could deny that you were the fairest of your cousin-sisters. “People want dark skin in the U.S.,” I say. “They lie in the sun and use creams to make their skin darker. We don't think it's attractive to be fair.”

“I don't believe! You too?”

“Yes, I love when I have a suntan,” I admit, righteousness deflated. My hopeless reflection on a winter morning: dim pink blotches beneath my freckles. I used to try to wake up before Brian so that I could splash water on my face and put on blush before he saw me.

“In the U.S.A., I will be so pretty,” Suriya says.

A motorbike pulls up, driven by a young man wearing square-shaped sunglasses, bleached jeans, and a worn T-shirt nestled against his soft belly. “Ayya!” The second syllable flattens itself against Suriya's tongue. “My elder brother,” she tells me. He removes his helmet and stares, seeming unable to reconcile what he knows about his aunt's yard with the sight of a blue-eyed American woman. He and Suriya speak for a while with careless intimacy—quickly and softly, not looking at each other. I sometimes think I would be normal if I had a sibling. A real one. The IVF twins don't count.

When Ayya goes inside, Suriya explains that her parents will not be coming for the family gathering this year. Her mum is in poor health and cannot travel. In a few days, we will visit her parents at their home. Ayya will drive us on his motorbike. He has four weeks' leave from the army.

“What's he doing now that the war is over?” I ask.

“He works at a sentry point. Still there is much need for safety. Soldiers are working so hard in these days to make the country strong.”

I look away and tell her that's great—an American word I loathe. “Did I ever tell you that I visited Jaffna the first time I came here?” I ask Suriya.

“Oh, El, were you afraid? My brother was in Jaffna for a time. I had so fear for him. In those days, I made water offerings to Lord Buddha two times per day.”

“I loved Jaffna. Some of the kindest, most intelligent people I've ever met.”

Suriya purses her lips. “Well, you are tourist. So they are kind to you.”

“Did you hear about the Tree Demon that was attacking people up there?”

“Yes, we have heard that story. But the government has shown it is false. So we do not think on that.” She speaks quickly, walking toward the house. “And now my brother is in Colombo. Is better. You have hungry, Akki?”

Steamy bowls are laid out on the table inside. Hashini gestures to me with a spoon. She dumps a mound of rice in the center of a metal plate and surrounds it with curries. Suriya gives words to each thwack of the spoon: Jackfruit. Potato. Dhal. Aubergine. Hashini hands me the plate and motions to me to sit on the one chair in the room. Suriya frowns. “I think chair is—I don't know the word.” She shakes the chair back to show me how loose it is. “Take care, Akki.” She bends her knees gingerly in demonstration.

The family stands around me, silent, waiting. “Aren't you going to eat, too?” I ask Suriya. Jared is the only person I've ever been comfortable eating around. He always sits next to me at restaurants, not across, so he can keep one hand on my thigh while we eat. When he slid in the booth beside me for the first time, I told him it was embarrassing to be so intimate in public, people would think we were rude. “Who cares?” he said. “People think all kinds of things.” He tucked the hair behind my ears and kissed me on the mouth as the waitress walked up to take our order. I shied away and softly asked for huevos rancheros. And when they came, I struggled to cut the fried tortillas into bite-size pieces, my eyes fixed to my plate, until he took the fork from me, broke off a piece of tortilla with his bare hands, smothered it in salsa and cheese, and brought it to my lips.

But now I am a guest of honor surrounded by eager witnesses. Strips of fried eggplant cling to my fingers as I try to work the curries into a ball. A piece of potato falls to the floor as I lift the ball. Rice coats my chin as I place the ball on my tongue. My fingers have vertigo; they know they're being watched.

“Is it taste, Akki?” Suriya whispers the question, reminding me of a Sinhala word she taught me while we ate ice cream cones the day we met.