Wreck and Order (20 page)

“There are only Tamils living abroad because they've been displaced,” I say. “A lot of people lost their homes or had to escape from the fighting. I heard about one man who swam all the way to India.”

Ayya believes that I met some kind people in Jaffna—caught up in my argument, I don't register how well Suriya is translating—but the Tamils are not all kind. Can he tell me a story? He takes Suriya's chair and speaks for several minutes, the English binder in his lap. Suriya stands nearby, watching him closely. She looks at the ground when he falls silent, her face muddled. “This is hard to explain,” she says. “There is a girl in Jaffna when my brother was there. Twelve years old, thirteen, like that. She is the daughter of the man who has a good restaurant. Favorite restaurant of the soldiers.” This girl is kind and speaks Sinhala well. The soldiers have to communicate with most Tamil people in English. They are impressed that this young girl knows Sinhala so well and enjoy talking to her. One of Ayya's friends wants to teach her to write Sinhala characters. So they sit together sometimes after lunch and practice writing in a notebook. One day Ayya and his friend go to the restaurant to take their lunch and there is a new family there. Slowly, the soldiers learn what has happened to this girl. Some people in her village started talking about her, saying she has a Sinhala boyfriend. Of course she is not supposed to have a boyfriend at all until she marries. And to have a Sinhala one is very, very bad. The people in the village say that the girl is so upset by what people are thinking of her that she committed suicide. But Ayya doesn't believe. The story is that the girl took off all her clothes and tied herself to a tree and set herself on fire. That seems not even possible. Ayya believes the men in the village raped her and burned her alive. Suriya's voice is quiet, coaxing the unwilling words to leave her throat.

“I'm sorry,” I say, without knowing why. Does it help anyone for me to know these things? For Suriya to know these things?

“But is it possible—weren't a lot of the Sri Lankan soldiers raping Tamil girls?” My voice is small, embarrassed by the words, the pretension that this story has any use as a political lesson. It takes Suriya a long time to explain Ayya's response. She keeps pausing, searching even for words she knows well. Most soldiers would not hurt a woman. There are only some bad soldiers, yes, who use the women. But the Tamil men do the same. Ayya heard of one girl, she was raped by a soldier. That is very bad, yes. But Ayya says something happened to her even worse. Men in her village learn she has been raped and so they raped her too. More than one hundred men. Because she is already ruined. That is how the men think.

Ayya traces circles in the dirt with his big toe while Suriya speaks. I have an urge to stamp out the delicacy of the motion, make him look at me. What is it that we were supposed to be arguing about? “Did you know these stories?” I ask Suriya.

“Stories like this, yes. We all hear bad things from Jaffna during wartime. But we must not think on these things.”

A young father I spoke to in Jaffna told me he didn't care whether the Sinhalese soldiers or the Tamil Tigers ruled in Jaffna—“Fifty-fifty badness,” he called it—so long as there was no more fighting. He mentioned some videos on the Internet of Tamil prisoners being tortured, which he assumed some good soldier had posted as a kind of anonymous protest. The father hoped these videos would be destroyed, that the war crimes would be forgotten. “These things just make Tamils want to fight. And we cannot fight. We will not win.” Running around researching an article I believed would open Americans' eyes to Tamil oppression, I heard the comment as pathetic, the words of someone who has been cowed into silence. Now I have no way to interpret it, no sense of the words beyond the literal.

Ayya tosses his banana peel into the bamboo grove and begins walking toward the house. “Thank you for speaking with me,” I try to call after him, but my voice stays close to my chest.

I spend the rest of the day on my translation, plowing through two chapters with little thought to their meaning.

That evening, Suriya suggests the three of us go to a nearby temple to make a water offering. We fill up small plastic bowls from the tap at the entrance and carry them in cupped hands while we walk in circles around the Buddha statue in the courtyard. “Eight circles,” Suriya says. “Lord Buddha's magic number.” It feels silly to be counting laps with this plastic bowl of tap water, but then pirith begins playing from inside the small temple—a long, one-story structure that looks more like a stable than a house of worship. A monk walks into the courtyard and stands still with his hands clasped behind his back, watching us or the sunset or both. Hard to believe it was the monks who agitated the most for violence against the Tamils, sometimes even leading mobs in ransacking businesses or putting kerosene-doused tires around Tamils' necks and setting them on fire. Please stop. Just focus on one real, immediate thing. Smooth, warm tiles meet the soles of my feet. There is nothing damaging about this activity, no reason to hold myself aloof and analytical.

On the ride home, a flash of light behind the clouds turns the sky into a sheet of pale pink construction paper stenciled with elaborate branches. “Oh,” Suriya murmurs behind me. Heat lightning. A wall of rain moves across the field toward our bike. We are soaked to the skin. Ayya drives slowly the rest of the way home. Rain eclipses our senses. Impossible to worry about the state of the world when you are moving through black, dense water on a vehicle over which you have no control.

Suriya's house is dark and silent. Her father is sleeping and her mother is at an Ayurvedic hospital to get medicine for the health problem that Suriya has explained to me only by pointing to her chest. She flicks a light switch in the kitchen. “Have not current.” She tries to open the tap on the side of the house. “Have not water.” Her voice is mischievous and happy. She is freed from cooking and cleaning. Nothing to do but lie on our beds inside the watery air.

“I feel happy with the dark,” Suriya says. On the street, a man makes a kissing noise, the sound men use to attract each other's attention.

“It's peaceful, yes.” I stretch out on the bed as Suriya begins her ritual hair brushing. “Nangi,” I say, “you were never hoping that Ayya and I—you know…”

I wait for her to absolve me of the need to go further. “Please explain, El,” she says, putting down her brush.

“Were you ever hoping that Ayya and I would get married?”

She rests her hairbrush on her knee, looking so stunned I'm almost offended. “No, no, El. To Ayya, you are Akki. Big sister. American sister.”

“Oh, good. I only want to be his American sister.”

Suriya resumes tenderizing her hair. “And Ayya is not looking for wife now. He is too sad. He had a girlfriend for some years. He loves her more. But this girl marries another boy while Ayya is away. I told him when he comes home to visit. Oh, Akki, he cried more.” I can't bring myself to correct Suriya's emphatic misuse of “more”; it sounds so grave and endless.

Suriya does her best not to ever cry, because if she starts she cannot stop. When I ask how she manages not to cry when hard things happen in her life all the time, she says, “Patience and activeness.”

“You are very smart. But I do think it's all right to cry from time to time.” I hear a song my mother used to play for me when I was four or five, sometimes singing along in a manner that came across as unhinged and desperate even to a child.
It's all right to cry…Raindrops from your eyes. It's gonna make you feel better!
I was already well aware that tears were acceptable in my family, given how many times I walked into the living room and found my mother lying on the rug with cucumbers over her eyes and a mound of used tissues beside her, blasting Joni Mitchell, in the dry-heaves stage of a long weeping. Or watched my father emerge from the bedroom at noon, eyes red, face slack. There is such a thing as being too permissive with the expression of emotions.

I reach out and touch Suriya's knee. “Nangi, tell me about your mother's illness. Is she going to be okay?”

Suriya shakes her head and looks into her lap. “I must not talk about that. I only pray.”

My brain knows this is a sad thing to say. But instead of compassion, I feel defensive and irritated, as if listening to someone complain about something she has no right to be upset about. Suriya's mom might die, I say to myself, scoldingly. But the appropriate feeling does not come.

We swim in the lake most evenings. Sometimes a teenage boy who lost his legs to a land mine bathes with us. His father pushes him to the lake's edge in his wheelchair and then carries him into the soapy shallows, holding him under the armpits as the boy lathers his face and chest. Once, as we drop our sandals and towels on the sand, we see the boy floating on his back, his father's palms supporting him underwater. The boy's closed eyes and upturned lips and sinewy arms stretched wide halt us. “Oh,” Suriya murmurs, intertwining her thin fingers with mine.

Ayya will go back to his sentry point in Colombo in two days. This fact rudely alerts me to the passage of time, something I do my best not to keep track of. I've been with Suriya for more than a month, the length of time I was hoping it would take me to complete my translation. Five long chapters remain. I need to find a quiet hostel somewhere, sequester myself, and do nothing but work. But first Ayya and Suriya are eager to take me to a festival that is coming to their village. It will be Ayya's last day of fun before he goes back to work. And Suriya has had so many chores and she fears that her chores became my chores. But tomorrow we will go to a festival and have fun!

She spends an hour braiding her hair with the help of a plastic pocket mirror on the big day, undoing and redoing every strand that betrays the minutest of bumps. Ayya's motorbike delivers us to a large swath of shadeless sand, imprinted with the crosshatched trails of ice cream carts and the footprints of barefoot kids. Intercoms blare aggressive male voices. Ayya abandons us to join a group of boys who are trying to climb a statue covered in grease, atop of which is a small box that Suriya tells me is filled with money. The boys' faces flush crimson as they cling to crevices in the stone man's giant body—the crook of his bent arm, a fold in his robe. They grimace and curse as their fingers slide downward. Those who make it up highest shove at their competitors, some laughing, some horribly serious, punching as if to kill. Ayya is one of the serious boys. He runs and hurls himself as high up the statue as he can, never pausing long enough to let his fingers lose their grip, keeping his gaze fixed on the box atop the statue. He avoids the other boys unless they go for him, and then he is ruthless. When he shoves a younger boy in the forehead, the boy's neck snaps back as he falls. I cry out as he lands on his butt with his hands behind him. But he raises his fist in the air and shouts at Ayya, grinning.

“Ayya is so strong. Sometime it makes me afraid to see that,” Suriya says. “He wants the money for my family. I hope he will get it.”

“I hope he lives. This seems dangerous.”

“Very danger, yes. Boys have crazy games. You want to see the lady games?” She leads me to a group of women furiously weaving palm fronds into large, tight squares, sweating, grimacing, licking their lips. A fat woman in a white cotton dress finishes first, shoots her hand into the air. A man blows into a whistle. He inspects her work, pulling at the corners, turning it over to check for holes in the weave. The woman stands aside, panting, beaming, hands on hips, chin high. Her pride breaks my heart. Condescension, yes, but the sorrow is real. All I can know of this woman's life is what I can imagine.

“You need ice cream?” Suriya asks me.

“No, thanks. I'm not hungry.”

“Small one,” she says, and orders vanilla cones from the metal box passing by. She allows me to pay. We stand still, licking balls of sugary ice atop cardboardy cones.

A group of boys walks past, holding hands in a tight chain, whispering. “Boys from my school,” Suriya says.

“Hello,” I say, loud, bright, hoping to make a good impression for Suriya.

“Hello,” one of the boys mocks me. “Hello, hello,” the others echo, loud, bright. They skirt away, cackling.

“Stupid boys,” Suriya says. “I think this festival is boring for you.”

“Is it boring for you?”

“Yes.” She laughs. “I did not know the festival is boring until I bring—bringed—

“Brought.”

“Thank you, El. Until I brought you here. There are some rides.”

“I love rides!” This is true, but mostly I want Suriya to believe we are having the good time she needed us to have.

The Ferris wheel is powered by teenage boys in flip-flops and blue jeans, who run around like hamsters on a wheel, jumping into the air to grip the metal spokes and pull the giant wheel down to earth, then heaving themselves up and over the bar just before it skirts the ground, riding the spoke to the top, then dangling to pull the tiny cars filled with shrieking families earthward once again, jumping to the ground, grabbing a new spoke, beginning again, cheering one another on, moving faster and faster. A girl of about twelve or thirteen is crying when she gets off, gripping her father's hand and wailing without apology.

Our turn. I shriek as we whoosh toward the ground. Suriya crushes my hand in hers. At the top, we can see the whole sandy field, crawling with crude human colors and noises and bodies. We spin around and around, propelled by skinny boys in sandals.

When the ride ends, Suriya leads me to a tall, cylindrical tower. I give a man two hundred rupees and we climb a staircase about twice as high as the Ferris wheel. At the top is a doughnut-shaped platform; in the center, a hole with plywood walls; at the bottom of the hole, a man and a motorbike. “What will happen?” I ask Suriya.