One morning, I had laid my head down on the edge of the table to close my eyes for a moment when someone tapped me on the shoulder. A tall, pale boy held a book out to me. His hair, so brown it was almost black, needed to be cut. His finely drawn, open face looked younger than mine.
I found this in the library yesterday, he said. I think it has your name in it. Aren't you Yalini?
I blinked at him. He stood slightly taller than my father, perhaps six feet. He had a firm but generous mouth. I took the book from him without touching his hand. It was a leather journal of the kind found in large bookstores. My father had given it to me for my last birthday. A strap wound around it held it closed. Without thinking, I unwound the strap and flipped through its pages. This revealed nothing because I had never written in it. I had left it in the library without missing it because it had not yet become important to me to write things down.
It's blank, he said.
Thank you, I said. I hadn't realized that I had left something here.
I didn't open it, he said. I saw you get up without it.
He looked at me, and I thought that he was going to leave, but he stood there. I turned back toward the table so that my shoulders were set against him. I had finished talking to him. But he did not leave. He came around to the other side of the table and sat down as though we were going to continue the conversation.
I had never before met a person who had decided to be my friend without waiting for my consent.
HE HAD DECIDED THAT we were friends. In that long, blank time when everyone treated everyone else with a false equivalence, that meant something to me, and I did not want to argue with the generosity of his persistence. We were friends for three years. Then, in the winter of 2004, I went home to spend the holidays with my parents.
On the day after Christmas, I was walking out the door with my mother when someone called: my mother's sister, Kalyani. My mother turned around to pick up the phone.
Ah, my mother said. All right. We will call back.
She hung up.
What did she say? I asked.
Something about water in Sri Lanka, my mother said. Something bad happening. Let's go.
Something bad was always happening. Later, I thought how tired she must have been, how weary of the updates from the front. For years she had taught herself to avoid them. Or maybe it was just that her sister, in trying to be gentle, had not told her enough to make her understand. None of us had used the word tsunami yet. No one understood what it meant.
We walked out the door and into the winter sun.
BY THE TIME THE CAR rounded the first corner away from the house, my relatives in Australia had called my relatives in Germany, who called my relatives in France, who called my relatives in England and Canada. They called us again. The phone rang and the house was empty. Watch the news, they said into the recording. The earth had shifted, and in doing so, moved the ocean. Water rolled over Sri Lankan homes, over fields, over trees, over temples, into the sky.
IN THE DAYS AFTER THAT, when my phone rang, I did not pick it up. It seemed like that first fall, three years earlier. I did not want to pick up the phone and hear concern that I knew would disappear. My friend called my phone, and I did not answer. He called the house, and when my mother gave me the message, I shook my head: no. I could not stand the idea of that in his voice. I watched the news and saw bodies. We did not know if anyone in our family had died, and then we learned that someone related to me had gone to the temple and drowned there, in a place full of water and gods. I had never met him and felt no right to any grief. I sat tearless before the news. And the news talked about the war, our war, as though it had just begun again. Dear Americans, there has been a war in this place. As though there had been no war for the decades before this. I heard my father say, bitterly, that at least now people would be able to find Sri Lanka on a map.
I have never been one for talking, and I did not want to talk to my friend, because he seemed too far outside this. He seemed too far away from everything I missed. He came from a place full of people who were just learning about war, and I realized then that I had grown up full of it, without realizing it, and that I did not know what to say about it to anyone, even my parents, who were still the people I loved the most. I had been born lucky, outside of war and unable to forget it.We came from different worlds, my friend and I, even though we had both grown up in America, in houses that in my parents' country would be considered rich. There was still a space there. It would have taken bravery to walk across that divide, and at that moment, water inmy head, I did not have it. I was sorry for the difference between us and too tired to reach through it. Without waiting for my consent, he had decided that we would be friends; now, without waiting for his consent, I cut him off.
I cut him off and then I did not think of him. I thought of those bodies in the water, and even more, the bodies before them.
I WANTED, FINALLY, to be a doctor. My father had used medicine as a way out of Sri Lanka. I wanted it as a way in. But that was not possible. I went to my father and said I want to go and he looked at me and said,
Are you trying to kill me?
I don't want to go back to school, I said. Not now.
Bodies in their many shapes have always fascinated me—their infinite variety and similarity, the perfect machinery of each limb and sinew. But this was different. I wanted to go to a hospital, to pick up children who looked like me. I had pushed my American friends away, thinking their concern false, but I was just as guilty. It should not have taken this to make me want medicine. The reasons had been there all along. The irony, of course, is that natural disaster had made Sri Lanka relatively safe for the first time. At least temporarily. Even so, that was not what my father wanted for me. It was more than he could bear, that idea. He did not believe that even God in his anger could have opened up such a window of peace. He did not need to tell me that he thought it would not last. He said it like this:
You can come to work with me.
My father's patients were children with cancer, some of them with radiation-stripped heads so small I could cup them in the palm of one hand. But I entered into the hospital with war still in my head, and I did not really see them. I knew what my friend would have said, even though I did not regret not picking up the phone. He would have known, watching me, that I was not really there. For a whole year, inside my head, I was swimming somewhere else, in the low, dull, swelling current of another storm. Even on that small planet of dying children, I felt nothing but the effort of keeping my head above water.
ALTHOUGH I WOULD HAVE said otherwise once, my mother was not to blame for this. My mother, Vani, was born with grace, but I had to learn it, so I learned it from her. My mother will not show fear, because then it counts; she will not betray anger, knowing how it could come back to hurt her later; she will put your needs before hers without ever letting you know she has done this, because her mother did this, and her mother before her, and her mother too before that. I wanted that mask for myself because I realized for the first time how unprotected I felt in the world. Although my father had once been caught by what he considered the transparency of her face, its pure, clear quality, to me her expression is most remarkable for its ability to give away nothing.
And like that, her voice gave away nothing when she called me in August of 2005. It was the week before school started again, and at last I had left my father's hospital and gone back to campus to finish my degree, as I had promised him I would. I stood in my room, surrounded by suitcases and boxes and books. The phone, covered with dust, rang and I reached to pick it up.
Buy a plane ticket, my mother said, and meet us in Toronto.
She never asks for anything, but for some reason I was not surprised at this, or at my yes traveling across the phone line, through a wire, over the many miles that parted us. She guards her expression, but to think that she feels nothing—that would be a mistake. That was not a lesson she had taught me. I had learned to feel nothing
on my own.
IT USED TO BE that you could be anyone and no one at the airport. My parents came to this country through airports. Who needs the romance of ships? This is nothing compared to propellers, to wings, the long sweet lay of the land down below you. The plane, touching down, enters a new, borderless place. In the terminals of the great cities of the world, we hold passports, but not countries. We move freely with one another. We pay taxes to no one. We arrive; we depart. We collect the detritus of our lives from baggage carrousels. We anticipate great pleasure and pain, comings and goings. This is true even now, as countries have begun to guard their borders more closely, against the fear of enemies and bombs, against the fear of people who look like my father, my brother, my uncle, and my cousins. People live more vividly in airports.
My mother had asked me to meet her in an airport. She had told me which ticket to buy, which hour to arrive, what clothes to pack. I stood by the baggage carrousel in the wide, gray space of arrivals and waited where she had told me to wait. I stood on first one foot and then the other, picking each leg up carefully and setting it down in turn, my impatience barely in check. I believed in traveling light, and had no bags to collect. The carrousel went around to my right, and then a girl moved into my view from the left.
She was unexpected and lovely, because she looked like me, but also not like me. She stood taller, and looked fairer, by which I mean her skin in the harsh light of that space seemed lighter than mine. She was about my age. Her even, regular features looked like my mother's—the sparse eyebrows, the full lower lip, the sharp chin. She had closed her mouth against smiling without looking precisely unhappy. My father had once looked at my mother and seen the face she would later own. This girl's face was like my mother's, but she had no later face inside it. As though she did not believe that there would be a later.
JANANI: SHE WAS COUSIN, although I did not know that yet. She looked like my mother, and like her father, although I did not know that yet either. I saw her before I saw her father, because he was in a wheelchair, and although he was still tall, in his sitting position his eyes did not naturally meet mine. He saw me before I saw him and recognized me. Later, he told me that he was already sorry in that first moment for what he had done decades before. In seeing me, he understood for the first time that what he had done could have led to my not standing there.
Janani moved into my view, pushing him in the wheelchair. Although I did not yet see him, he saw me and began to understand something: he would want to give me an explanation.
I chose to know this story, all its sides and wonders. But first someone came to me and offered to tell it.
WHEN I SAW HIM my mouth fell open slightly, my surprise tumbling out of it finally, if in silence. Restrained a little. After all, I am my mother's daughter too.
He murmured something upward to Janani, and she stopped the wheelchair perhaps five steps away from me. She turned toward me, following the direction of his thin, pale finger to meet my eyes.
You must be Yalini, she said in Tamil. I do not speak Tamil, but I understand it, and I understood her. Still, I did not have time to speak before he did something even more astonishing: he stood up and stepped forward, out of the wheelchair. I made a sound as if to stop him, but I was too slow. He walked the five steps between us very slowly, and I did not understand why Janani did not intervene. His shoulders loomed broadly, but they trembled. He looked as though he might fall down at any moment, but then, finally, he stood before me, taller than me, taller than my father. Unlike her, he had kept some strength in reserve. He had been saving something all this time, all this time he had been gone. Saving it for me, although he had just now realized it.
KUMARAN: MY UNCLE. HE was done with crashing through doors and writing letters. He was done with war, although I did not know that yet. It was him, of course. That I knew, although he had been gone for so long that we had never met.
He stood very tall, and his pale scalp shone through the too-fine threads of his hair, the thinning hair not of someone old, but of someone sick. He looked mortally tired, blue-veined under deep-set eyes, but he had a finely cut face too, a look that belonged in my mother's family. He shook a little, standing, and I reached out automatically to steady him. His wrist was bone-dry, his skin like parchment. His eyes, with the coldness of mountains, beginning to warm. His mouth starting to scab where his lips had cracked in the dry air of the flight. He stood as straight as he could, which was not very straight, but I could see the stance he aimed for, a posture I would later describe not as militant but as military. Despite the effort, he leaned slightly, favoring one side, as though some part of him had been damaged and had healed improperly. It had, but that too, I did not know until later. His hairline shone wetly with the work of standing there. I saw that, and finally I understood where he must have been all these years and why I had never met him. In a moment I filled up with my own past and saw that I had always known where he was. I had always known that he was a Tamil Tiger, although no one had ever told me. Nor had anyone told me why he was here now, but still I knew it: he was here to die. Not in a fight, or for a cause, but at the whim of nature. Because it was time.
His daughter had brought the wheelchair behind him without a sound, and without looking, without reaching a hand out to make sure that it was there, he lowered himself into it. I stood there, my hand still on his wrist, uncertain. And then my parents were there. I did not see them coming. Later, when I knew what had happened between all of them, when I knew that cancer was growing inside him, I went back to that picture in my mind: my mother and, behind her, my father. I tried to recollect the shape of my father's mouth. Did he crush the anger out of it? Did my mother, with her careful, quiet eye, see him do it? Or was it too late for anger? Are you forgiven everything if you are dying?
I do remember that my father looked very dark to me, as though I were seeing him with someone else's eyes. He pushed an empty luggage trolley. My mother, already ahead of him, bent to embrace her brother—even in her tears anticipating both his desire to stand and his inability to do it again. She wept nakedly and I almost did too, out of fear rather than real sadness. Empathy welled up inside me like a foreign creature. I had never seen my mother cry before. Later, my father told me that before I was born, he took my mother to England, to meet her mother, after they had been apart for years. When he opened the door to that house, he said, my mother wept like that, as though she remembered everything for the first time.
Now, as then, he did not know what to do with her tears. He looked at the trolley, and at Janani.
We haven't brought anything, she said.
Nothing, my father said. Then, again, as though this was too incredible: Nothing?
Nothing, she said.
Even the wheelchair, which my uncle needed but did not want, belonged to someone else. We left it at the airport and moved slowly beyond its perimeter, toward a new life.
KUMARAN: HE CAME TO us bearing nothing, truly—except certain implied conditions. He had been one of the Tigers, once, and they had let him go, although they were famous for never letting anyone go. He had spent his life as a rebel, but now he was dying, and he had a daughter. The Tigers had once said: join us, and we are your family. Leave the �ur, your place of origin, in order to fight for it. They were his family, and then they were not. They let him go and, in doing so, made him promise not only his loyalty, but also ours. They let him go only in body. He did not say this to my parents. But my father said it to me. I think he wanted to make sure that I understood what my uncle's presence cost them.
My father thought that price was worth it, because of how much he loved my mother, and how much my mother loved her brother. My mother had never really spoken of him. I had never even seen a picture. In my parents' house the only pictures of children were pictures of me. In the 1983 riots, fire in her sister's Colombo house had consumed the early pictures of my mother and her family; those remaining showed her in New York, wearing those dresses she had made on
the Singer sewing machine. The pictures of my father as a child had never existed.
But I must have known about my uncle nevertheless. As a child I cherished a habit of listening at doors. And although my mother had never spoken of him, my father had, if only to tell me that my mother had a brother who had disappeared.
I was perhaps twelve. I stood in the doorway of my father's study. Be careful with your mother today, he said.
What? Why?
Don't ask questions, he said and then sighed. It's her brother's birthday.
Her brother?
Your uncle, Kumaran, my father said. He disappeared a long time ago. Back There. He waved a hand vaguely, as though he did not know the direction he meant. We both knew the direction he meant.
Is he dead? I asked, not yet old enough not to ask that question.
No, my father said.
I was old enough not to ask where he was. Where else could he have been? If my mother walked into a room and saw me watching the news, she turned away. I knew about the war and could guess at what it had taken from my parents. But I had never thought it could take anything away from me.
In a car heading away from the airport and into Toronto, I finally became old enough not to ask questions. If I had been younger, I might have asked: Where are we going? If you are one of them, how did you get here? How do you have a daughter? The Tigers are famous for their discipline—their dedication to a single cause: the Tamil homeland. Tigers don't have families.
But they do. They do. They live, they marry, they bear children, and they die. Saying they do not cannot erase this. The bearing of arms cannot erase this.
Love Marriage Page 3