Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  KUMARAN: WITH HIM, now we too were trapped. We could not take him back into the United States. He would be arrested as an illegal, and certainly also for his past affiliation with the Tigers, whom some nations, including mine, call terrorists. But Toronto is different. He had come to Canada, having passed through London with forged papers, and now that he was here, we knew that he would not be sent back. Canada's arms had always been more open. After what had happened in 1983, many Sri Lankan Tamils had come here for asylum and refuge. Now, in 2005, the Canadian immigration authorities had flagged him. Caught. For someone else, it might have been over. But at their prompting, he had produced the Sri Lankan national ID card with his real name. He said Tiger. I can imagine how the knowledge of his history spread across their faces with something that was not quite alarm. We know this man has done things that would make his mother weep. But his mother had already done her weeping.

  He also carried a letter, signed by a Sri Lankan physician, which promised a definite terminus to his stay. This man is dying. Cancer of the brain. He said refugee, he said Tiger, and they saw how sick he was. Too sick to send back. My father too, vouched for this. They said Yes. You may die here. My father handed over his passport and signed a paper that claimed responsibility for my uncle. I did not know then what that meant. I love my father, because in the end, he was everyone's doctor. Anyone he could help.

  TORONTO: FOR YEARS, Tamil refugees of my parents' country had found their way here, stumbling toward the blooming garden of Little Jaffnas, a space that, while it is not home, has the redeeming quality of being arranged in the same way. A place where a newly transplanted blind man might walk into the grocery store and know instinctively where to find the cashews, the bread, the mangoes. This Toronto insisted on its very Tamilness in a way that was both comforting and dangerous. America had never offered me anything like this. On my birthday, the anniversary of Black July, the Tamils of Canada gathered in open assemblies to praise their new country for saving them. Later, Canada too would say the Tigers were terrorists, but then, when my uncle entered the country, they had not yet been named anything forbidden.

  My father called another Tamil physician, who met us at St. Anthony's Hospital. We were admitted with no questions, and my uncle was placed on a gurney and wheeled away. An intravenous line already threaded into his arm, his wrist, where I had held it. They wanted to rehydrate him because he had been vomiting on the plane. My cousin did not try to go with him. She watched impassively. Her father resisted nothing about the sterile implements of sedation around him.

  When he was gone, my mother asked her if she had eaten anything. No, she had not. My father pressed some money into my hand for the hospital cafeteria: go and buy some food, he said.

  We walked to the elevator together, she and I. It was the first time we had walked anywhere together. The elevator seemed very small, and we did not speak to each other. I leaned against the metal rail at the back, and she looked at me, or rather my mirrored reflection, in the mirrored walls. She wore a linen blouse of the type that my mother sometimes wore, the buttons too big and far apart, the collar conservatively cut and high, the sleeves too big for her skinny, strongly muscled arms. Her bearing too, was slightly military. I knew stories about the Tigers and children, about the Tigers and women who had taught her to carry herself like that. She kept her hands folded in front of her, and her slender, neat braid neared her waist. Her long skirt almost touched the floor. Her sandals looked new, but that did not matter: it was already fall, and we would need to get rid of them before winter came. I remembered my mother telling me that she had never worn a covered shoe before coming to the United States.

  Janani did not follow me but rather walked alongside me as we went down another long, blue hospital corridor, her eyes darting around, assessing everything carefully. She was not nervous, but her eyes were watchful. Although I had never seen the darkness of the Jaffna Teaching Hospital and could not have imagined its bullet-pocked walls, I thought that she must never have seen anything like that hospital cafeteria before. She did not look disoriented or confused. I pointed her toward the tea, found two plates, and heaped them with overcooked white rice and curries. The hospital did have curries—probably because of all the Tamil doctors and patients here. This will be like home for her, I thought—rice and tea. Dark curry, brown faces.

  I paid for the food and then we sat down. I pushed a plate toward her, across the wooden table, which was not made of real wood. She handed me a cup of tea, waiting until she was sure I was holding it to let go. Later, I realized that this must have all seemed very inhospitable to her, very Improper. As a girl raised in Jaffna, she would have known that a host does not eat with a guest. I had never been taught that. Which one of us was the host here? I thought it might be me and felt inadequate. She was a conservative girl, a Proper girl. Not as Proper as I thought—she had traded her father's plot of Jaffna land to a man, to another man, to another man, in exchange for aid with her father's journey. But she told me none of that. She claimed none of the escape for herself. She drank her tea and looked at me, unsmiling.

  Your mother and father didn't say anything, she said. They didn't tell you we were coming. This time she spoke in English, and I could tell that her mouth was out of practice. Her e's sounded like a's, and her a's tilted upward into i's.

  No, I said. How old are you?

  She frowned, trying to remember the number in English. Finally she said it in Tamil. I nodded my understanding.

  Eighteen. She was four years younger than me. Later, I would do the math of it and see how it had worked: in 1984, the year after I was born, the leader of the Tamil Tigers, who had once proscribed marriage for his cadres, had fallen in Love. Like anyone else. And within a few years, that love had made other love possible, and here was my cousin, sitting before me, looking like me and not like me.

  Now I asked:

  Where is your mother? In English.

  My mother was in the movement too, she said. She was killed a few years ago in a bombing. She said the whole sentence in Tamil except for bombing. She did not pause between the first and second sentences, and that made it easier for me to move past my regret at asking the question. I still wanted to know: What kind of bombing? Was she the bomber or the bombed?

  I did not ask, because although Janani's still face was not a locked gate, neither was it an invitation. She did not look at all sad. She tipped the sugar canister into her tea, and far too much sugar came out of it. She stirred and drank as though she did not believe that too much of anything could have a consequence.

  They just let you come with your father? I asked.

  She stopped sipping and I saw her decide to slow down so that I would understand her.

  In slower Tamil: I wanted to come with my father, she said, but also, I did not want to leave. That was my home, you know? She studied my face. No, you have never been there, she said. I can already see that you do not know anything about it.

  The war? I know about the war.

  You barely understand me, she said. How could you know about the war? You grew up without speaking Tamil? The war is like Tamil for you. Something you would learn about only if you had to, not because you chose to. We have heard about Tamils abroad. The convenience of their belief.

  I must have turned red. She was Proper, but still direct. You could be Proper and angry, I saw.

  I speak Tamil, I said. A little.

  Go ahead and speak it then, she said. You are an American. Not very Tamil, I think, or you would already be married. But I will be married before you.

  You are going to be married? I asked.

  I am here to be with my father when he dies, she said. He is going to die. I know that. I would have preferred that he die there, in the place that he, we, fought for. That we wanted. The place where I grew up, where my real family is. Where my mother died.

  Her face twisted a little at that.

  I wanted that for him, she said, but he wanted to be here with you
r mother. I think she must have been his favorite sister, even despite the way that she got married.

  We had already sat for hours in waiting lounges, in airport offices and hospitals, to get my uncle to this place. My father had confirmed for me who my uncle was. And he had told me, in not so many words, that certain people would expect things of us because Kumaran was here now. But neither my mother nor my father had mentioned anything about Janani marrying.

  They did not tell you about that either, she said. And then, in a different voice: I suppose it's possible that my father has not told them yet.

  She waited for me to say something, but I did not.

  There is a man who lives here, in Toronto, she said. His name is Vijendran. He does a lot of work for Eelam. That is the name of our country, the homeland we were fighting for. Do you even know that? And this man has a son. He is my intended.

  You're eighteen, I said.

  Old enough, she said. Our grandmother was married with children at that age. My mother is dead and my father will be dead and then I will have no one.

  What about us? I asked.

  She looked at me.

  Your parents are kind, she said. But they are not my family. You are not my family.

  She did not know yet that that was not her choice to make. We would each try and fail at this: to leave our families behind.

  NOW, FINALLY, A YEAR later and years too late, death has done what no one else could do, not even Kumaran himself: it has made him no longer a militant, no longer a Tamil Tiger. He is no longer here. And his daughter is the one about to be Properly Married.

  Later that week, we took him from the hospital. He had told my father, not my mother, that he did not want to die in a hospital. And so arrangements had been made—by whom or how, I did not ask. We went to an empty house on the edge of Scarborough, a particularly Tamil part of Toronto. We put my uncle in a hospital bed and scheduled regular visits from a hospital nurse. We put my uncle in a bed to die, surrounded by us.

  Watching my mother I could tell that she was glad to do it, that to care for my uncle as he died made her happier than she had been, not knowing where he was. She would rather he died in her presence than lived his previous life. She did not want to imagine him in other places. She changed his sheets, made his favorite curries, read to him, and played the Tamil music he loved in his room. In the morning she drew his curtains, and in the evening, she closed them. Sometimes Janani helped her, but mostly she just seemed to wait, and wait. For what, I did not know. She sat on the sill of the window facing the backyard and watched everything. The window faced an English-style garden, a small patch of gray ground, with a waist-high fence and trellis peeling white paint and dead leaves and branches. The whole world bloomed around that garden, but it did not grow a thing. Although it was naked of any life, if my uncle had the energy my mother and he sometimes walked, very slowly, arm in arm around that garden, so that he could get some fresh air.

  During the days my father generally left them alone. But he rose before my mother, and in the very early, cold dawn, when only he and my uncle were awake, he would go into my uncle's room and do the daily checkup. Once, I woke up too, sweating, and, on the way to get a glass of water, heard them.

  Breathe in, my father said. Then: How's the pain?

  My uncle muttered something I could not hear, his Tamil too fast for me to understand.

  I can give you some pills, my father said. It will be similar to morphine.

  Cyanide, my uncle said. He laughed roughly, but genuinely, and I felt a sudden rush of liking. I leaned back against the cool white wall. It was still dark. My father had not turned any lights on. But he must have heard me moving, because he came out into the hall and saw me standing there.

  Go back to bed, he said gently.

  I did not move.

  Well, if you are not going, he said then, very slowly and hesitantly, you could go and talk to your uncle.

  THE LIGHTS WERE NOT on in that room, but the dull light of the morning came in through the windows, and the hospital bed was white, so I could see his face clearly. He had raised the bed halfway, and a book, a familiar copy of the Tirukkural that I thought might belong to my father, lay open on his chest. He looked so strange to me. His face was my mother's, but it was a dying face. And so I had not really wanted to see him. Mostly he had been in pain, and that kind of pain felt new to me, even watching it from the outside. No one I had truly known had ever died, and I did not want to truly know him. In that abandoned house, which was abandoned even as we lived in it, we did not know each other. I had not talked to him. I rose, I read, I helped my mother, and I slept.

  I was wondering if you were ever going to come and talk to me, he said in Tamil. He patted the bed next to his knee. Sit and tell me about yourself.

  I did not sit down. What do you want to know? in English.

  What are you studying? Still in Tamil.

  English, I said.

  He laughed. Well, that explains it. What are you going to do?

  I'm going to be a doctor, I told him, and that made it real, suddenly.

  Do you speak Tamil?

  I understand it.

  Are all the children here like that?

  Well, we're not like your daughter, I said before I could stop myself.

  He laughed again, harder this time. Then his face jerked suddenly, and again I saw that enormous physical pain bearing down on him. I felt sick, but he made his face stay in the smile. I admired that almost against my will.

  I do not think that anyone is like my daughter. I know that you have not talked about it with your father, but he knows, and your mother knows. It is true, that she is going to be Married. That is what she wants. It is her way of supporting the world she and I have left.

  She can do whatever she wants, I said.

  I wanted to tell you something, he said. In English now. A story. But you want to leave. It would be easier to leave, that's true.

  Something in me rose up at the tone in his voice, although I knew he was baiting me.

  I didn't say that I wanted to leave, I said.

  You don't know me, he said. You didn't have to say that you wanted to leave. Why would you want to know me, when I have caused your mother such grief ? Perhaps I will only cause you grief. How old are you? I'd like you to stay. I can manage the English, if you want. Once, long ago, I spoke only English. The Queen's English, actually. You should be in school, no? How much time do you have?

  I think the question is how much time do you have? I said.

  Long enough, he said.

  KUMARAN: HE SAID, I want to tell you that your father is an exceptional man. Do you see that your father is taking care of me, even after what I did to him? I wrote to him, you know, and not to your mother, because I thought that it would be too hard for her. I wanted to spare her the arrangements, the logistics of bringing me here. Your father did too. He has always wanted to spare her any grief.

  We are not friends, my uncle said. We have never been friends. But your father is an exceptional man.

  I sat still for a moment. After what you did to him? I asked.

  Ah, my uncle said. He is even more exceptional than I thought. He did not tell you. He left it for me. I deserve to have to tell you. When your father wanted to marry your mother, I tried to stop him. You know where I was, don't you? Do children here know about the war?

  We know about the war, I said. As a child, we used to receive newsletters about it. Unofficial publications, because no one would publish anything official. I remember that the newsletter used to come, and if I got home before my father, I could manage to read it.

  What did you read?

  It was very graphic, I said and shuddered. I had been very young. Much of the information had been in Tamil, but I remembered the bits in English. I had been an early reader. My father had come home from work one day and found me reading descriptions of torture. In the rough English of the nonnative speaker, the writer had detailed scenes inside army f
acilities: Tamil men hung upside down, the soles of their feet burned, their private parts laid bare to fire ants and electrocution. Answer the question, those men were told: Are you a Tiger?

  I was a Tiger, my uncle said. I am a Tiger.

  I thought that once you joined the Tigers, you couldn't leave, I said.

  They couldn't use me like this, he said. I became sick and there was nothing they could do about it. Perhaps they think I can be more useful here. People here have money. They, we, are very intelligent. I'm sure you know. We became famous. We bombed the airport and killed no one. We even drove the Indian forces out of Sri Lanka. We were very clever. We did all this with nothing. We had nothing compared to the armies of Sri Lanka, the armies of India. I was with them from almost the beginning, and I was with them for a long time. They made it possible for me to leave. People talk about their rules, but no one knows about their exceptions. Nothing there is hard and fast. How can war be hard and fast? It's a very long war. It changes. It evolves. War does.

  Like the rule against Marriage, I said.

  He blinked, surprised that I knew that much. Yes, he said. When the Tigers began, when the boys began to form the movement, one of the ideas was that we had to be disciplined, and that that kind of love was a distraction from our goals. We were just coming to arms, after a long time of trying peaceful methods. In the 1970s, people everywhere were becoming radicals, even in America. And I was just coming to arms. I was young. I should have been at university. That was what had happened to a lot of us—we should have been at university, and because of what had happened to Tamils who wanted to study, we felt there was nothing else we could do. What else could we do? I had been gone already, gone awhile, when I heard through some rumors that your father wanted to marry your mother. For me, the university was a place where the political world was born. I began to believe in things there, things and people other than God, when before I had only believed in the ties of blood. For your father, the university was a way out, a way to a place where he met your mother. I do not even remember how I heard about the two of them. I was so angry about everything, and especially about that. My sister in another world outside mine. Your mother had exited the place where we grew up, and your father meant that that exit would be permanent. She was supposed to come back to Sri Lanka. I wanted her to come back. I wanted to think that we all had a future there.