What did you do? I asked.
No one cares about a small country, he said. People will tell you otherwise, but it's true. The country of your parents is not important in your country, or even in this half of the world. I was angry for that reason. You don't seem angry about anything. That's very unusual in a young person.
I'm angry, I said. For the first time in many months, that was true.
I mean anger about a political situation. Look at my daughter, your cousin, Janani. She's angry at me for leaving Sri Lanka, for leaving the Tigers. For bringing her to this country, when we fought so hard for that one. Her mother died there and she wants to think that it was for a good reason. The Tigers are the only thing she has known. Life inside the country they are making, with so much work. She sees you and she thinks that you are privileged. She thinks your life is easy. Is she wrong? What are you angry about? I was a young person, and I wanted certain traditions to be maintained. We came from a good family, and I am your mother's older brother. Vani's marriage was part of my responsibility. I wrote a letter to your father.
What did the letter say? I asked.
In the letter I wrote many things that I could never take back, he said. I wish I could take them back. I wrote to your father and I told him that I was part of the movement, that I could find his family. Hurt them.
I leaned forward and looked at my uncle, hard. He stared back, unblinking, the whites of his eyes veined with red, his hands shaking. I could tell that once his mouth had looked like my mother's, but now his lips pressed together, thin and uncompromising.
You threatened my father's family? I said.
I didn't stop him from doing what he wanted, my uncle said. I don't know whether he believed me or not, what he thought I could do. Your father wanted to marry your mother.
This is the story you wanted to tell me, I said in disbelief.
I thought someone should tell you, he said. I think I was jealous of your father before, but I was never more jealous of him than I was at the airport, when I saw you standing next to Janani. Look at how different you are, the things you inherited. I don't know if I meant it, but that was what I wrote.
Is that the whole story? I asked him.
Of course not, he said. But what else are we doing here? I can tell you the whole story.
No, you can't, I said. Part of it is my father's.
MY FATHER GOT A leave of absence from the university hospital where he worked and taught, and my mother, the teacher, found a temporary replacement. And I called my university and told them that once again, I was not returning. I was surprised that my parents did not reprimand me. They had left Sri Lanka, after all, so that I—not yet their daughter—could have an education. I did not know my uncle, not really, and so my mother, at least, had not actually expected me to stay. It's possible that my father did, but after all, he had received that first letter from my uncle so many years before, and he had also been the one to receive the letter saying that my uncle was coming to Canada. My father might not have been surprised that I stayed. He was surprised that I had something to ask not only of my uncle but also of him.
He had set up a small room on the second floor of that house as his study. I had just left my uncle, and came up the stairs to find my father. When he saw me at the threshold of the office, he took his glasses off and looked up from the medical journal he was reading.
Did you have a good talk with your uncle? he said.
You could say that, I said.
I'm glad, my father said.
Does Amma know? I asked him. Did you believe that he would do something to your family?
She doesn't know, my father said. Why would I tell her? I was going to marry her anyway. Gambling on her meant gambling on him. I told you, you marry into a family—all of it. I didn't even know if he would tell you.
How long does he have? I asked.
A few months, my father said. You can hear whatever he has to say.
Don't you have anything to say? I asked him.
He closed the journal and looked up at me. Not really, he said. I married your mother, after all. I won, in a way.
How did you know that he wouldn't do anything? They can find people, I said. I've read about this. Even in North America, the Tigers find people and get them to donate money to the cause. I know that some people do it willingly, but I know that some of them are extorted. I know that they let him go in part because they think he'll raise support for the Tigers here. How did you know that it would be all right?
I had to think that it would be all right, he said. He smiled, which made him look a decade younger than he actually was. In the village where I grew up, he said, I had to fight for the things I wanted. I was the youngest and I had no father. I grew up cautiously, and when I met your mother, I did not want to be cautious anymore. America is not a cautious country. I felt safe enough to gamble, you see, and I had found something, someone, worth gambling on. I don't think I ever really thought he would do anything, even if he could. Can you imagine that? Really doing something? To someone from the place where you were born? Someone who loved your sister, and whom your sister loved? Considering my own family and my own history, I could not imagine that. In our way, my family did everything for Love. Maybe that was naive or foolish, but the places where we were born, your uncle and I—they are not so far apart, even if that is what he would have liked to believe, back when he thought I was not good enough for your mother. Even our philosophies are not so far apart—that the Tigers are right that a cruel government, a government that gets away with everything because it is a government, has wronged Tamils in Sri Lanka. I am a doctor, and I cannot agree with the Tigers' tactics, but at the end of the day, I am a Tamil. People attacked my friends, and the government let them. The government burned my library and attacked my village and took over my house, the house my father built for Love. I left my house and my family there, and the Sri Lankan Army moved in. So I can forgive your uncle, and maybe even understand him. The question is if you can.
I thought you didn't have anything to say, I said.
He was quiet for a moment, and then he reached up and turned off the lamp over his desk. He laughed.
Funny kid, he said, and that second word made him sound very American. You know better than that. All right: I thought I came to the West so that you would not have to know these things. So that you would not have to decide where you stand. But I think now that maybe that is impossible, because it's a war that belongs as much to you as to me. And you cannot decide where you stand unless you know all of it.
I WAS BORN LUCKY: I have a father. And so I am writing of Murali, not yet my father; Vani, not yet my mother; Janani, not yet a bride; and Kumaran, not yet gone. I do not know that my father, having fallen in Love, would see me married in the way that Janani has chosen. Nor do I know for certain what her father would say now, although there was a time when he stood against the changing of traditions. What made Kumaran someone who would set his weight against a moving world? What made my mother tell her family that they had to learn to love the man she loved? What made my father unafraid? My uncle's death is still fresh enough that we cannot look at Janani without thinking of him. Our fathers are nothing and everything alike. A long time ago, my father chose a path that led him out of Jaffna and to my mother. I cannot tell you whether Kumaran chose his way, but whether it was fated or willed, his path led to his absence from the temple of Janani's wedding—a certain space where a father should be.
I want to tell you why I am standing here beside a girl who is about to be Married, whose dead father tried to stop my parents from getting Married. I want to tell you why she is standing before a priest, and I am not. But don't think you can get the whole story. That's part of the charm. Voyage inside a family, and there will always be something unknown, a masked love or hatred, an unexplained death, the exact fragrance of the temple's air at the last wedding. That unknown could have been one person's beginning or another person's end. Marriage Without Cons
ent, In-Love Marriage, is called something else, rendered into Propriety by sheer force of will. Don't think you can find out the truth about your family by coming in, exiting, and reentering through a back door of history, borrowing the record keeper's excuse for intruding with a pen. Even family members will not feel they owe you more than memory, which is convenient, and which has been made beautiful, often through falsehood. At the most, you can pull back the veil for a moment. But the imagination of a family can be as real as its history. Let me be clear: I am only one person. In mapping a family we draw blood from each other. I enter my family as I would a dream—with great caution and wonder.
There are those few who drop their guard, who let you enter. These are the people who have loved their lives enough to forget that you are there while they talk about what has happened to them. We are composed of those around us. Everyone's life is like a garden of relatives. This is how I met the person I loved the most. This is how I loved the person I loved the most. This is how I lost the person I loved the most. This was my mother. This was my father. They might as well be talking to themselves. They lose themselves in the pleasure of the sound of their own voices, the pictures of their own childhoods fresh again in their heads. They are there again, perfectly alone. A sublime solitude. I do not even have to say: Forget I am listening. I am not even here. Tell me about my father, my mother, my uncle, my cousin.
I meant to tell you about your mother, not about me, my uncle says, stopping in the midst of a story, so surprised at himself that he is out of breath.
But I find you just as interesting.
It's just one person's story. There are so many stories.
Translated, he is saying that his story does not matter. We both know this is a lie.
But: I can collect as many as I like, I say.
My uncle pauses. As long as you don't try to build any meaning or unity into it.
I'll try to stop myself.
He laughs. That would be a construction, he says. The reality is always more complex.
What he means is this: it would be false to say that there is a beginning to the story, or a middle, or an end. Those words have a tidiness that does not belong here. Our lives are not clean. They begin without fanfare and end without warning. This story does not have a defined shape or a pleasant arc. To record it differently would not be true.
[ondu]
MURALI
NOT YET MY FATHER
.
Let the physician inquire into the nature of the disease,
its cause and its method of cure, and treat it faithfully.
— TIRUKKURAL , chapter 95, line 8
MURALI: HE, TOO, GREW UP WITHOUT A FATHER.
He was only seven when Inspector Jegan died, and after that, almost in revenge—although upon whom he could not have told you—he remembered everything about his father. Everything. The lengths of their comparative shadows on their daily walks to and from the village school. How much money he had given to the temple. The imprints of his toes in his ceruppu, his slippers, in which Murali's own feet were far too small. His insistence on a mango after the evening meal. How his thick hair curled into an S at the nape of his neck when he needed a haircut.
Later, Murali took his father's name, Jegan, as his own, becoming J. Murali in a country that asked for two names. The inspector had once differentiated his father from the other Jegan, the Jegan who worked as a postmaster. Ariyalai was a big village, with two ends that were a few miles apart. In between, there were thousands of people—families in big houses, no one house too far from the others. They all knew the difference between Inspector Jegan and Postmaster Jegan, although perhaps none so well as Murali.
Inspector Jegan was a fearsome, smileless man, with hair that was already white when he died, although he had not reached fifty. He had heart trouble, like Murali, so when he walked down Kandy Road, which runs through Ariyalai and to Jaffna town, he walked steadily rather than quickly. Children not his own scattered out of his path. He was tall and thin, and in the Ariyalai sun his shadow was even taller. His children studied, and studied, and studied. He scolded other children he saw playing cricket, or loitering in the paths and nooks on the road—they should have been studying too. Although he scolded them, they snuck off to the movies, or to the kadai to buy a rupee's worth of sweets. His own children did not go to the movies. Their father thought the stories, imported from India, were too sexual—inappropriate for children. Every day, he walked a kilometer down the road to bring Murali home from the village primary school. He did not smile, never in photographs, or even at his youngest son, who watched for him through the window of the classroom with an anxious face. It was the steadiness of Jegan's expression that said what he meant. Murali was the eighth of eight children who loved their father not despite his famous strictness but because of it. Their father held an umbrella of care over them. He had built them a house with too-tall ceilings—a house that meant he expected them to grow. When Jegan died of a heart attack in his sleep, Murali dreamed of the monsoon blowing that house inside out.
IT DID RAIN ON THE DAY of Jegan's funeral, but gently—not hard enough to put out the fire of his body burning.
It was an enormous funeral, and everyone came, really everyone. Jegan's family was vast—Murali's father had had forty-six cousins alone. The cousins came, with their parents and their children. The aunts and the uncles came, including the ones who were not related, but whom Jegan's family had called aunts and uncles because they loved each other. All the government clerks who had worked for Jegan sat in a neat row in the back of the crowd, in front of a line of bicycles beyond the gates. And Tharshi, Murali's mother, surveyed this crowd of people. This was the first funeral at Chitupathi, a newly cleared field intended for Ariyalai's dead. Jegan had been given this honor because everyone had loved him.
His body was burned in the best spot, under a maram, a tree, which stood on the top of a slight hill. That morning, one of Jegan's brothers had come to the house and cut down an old tree there—a tree Jegan had nurtured for a long time with little success, a short one in its last years of green. Now his brother brought the wood, split it into long pieces, and laid it in a heap, so heat would gather at its center. The men of the family brought the body in a coffin and laid it on top of the wood, and Murali's oldest brother, Neelan, lit a torch. Then, looking away, he laid the fire to the wood. The body burned. The prayers had already been said.
Murali cried quietly, rubbing at his little face with his fists. They had not meant to let him come to the cremation grounds, but he had not had to insist on his right to be there because no one had remembered to argue with him. No one had told him what was happening, but he knew his father was dead. He was dressed in white mourning-clothes, like all of his brothers and sisters. He clutched some hibiscus flowers, the only brightness. Flowers were not the custom, but he had snatched them off a bush his father had liked on his way to the field, and no one had stopped him. His thin back pressed up against his mother's knees, the misty dampness gathering in his hair, trickling down his face, onto his seven-year-old shoulders, through to his toes. The cold moved into him, although it was never really cold in Sri Lanka, even when it rained, even in Nuwara Eliya, even on the heights of the mountains.
Murali became still then, so still he almost forgot himself.
The next day, Murali's brother came to collect the ashes, which he took to the northernmost beach, in Point Pedro, where Jegan drifted into the ocean, and away.
ARIYALAI STOPPED BURNING its dead at Chitupathi many decades later, when the field became too mine-laden, a result of the war between the Tamil militants and the Sri Lankan Army. Later still, the replacement site, Chemmani, became the site of a massacre of Tamil civilians, and Ariyalai returned to a demined Chitupathi. Murali heard this from around the world and remembered standing in that field, remembered himself in medical school, and understood, finally, how much dignity a cadaver might have in its very intactness.
Even now, he still has th
e malaranjali, the memorial book from his father's funeral. It crossed the ocean with him, tucked in an inside pocket of his suitcase. Like all memorial books, it contains the lineage of the deceased. Murali holds on to it, remembering its making. The writer, a neighboring scholar, had wanted to include Jegan's father's name. But in that whole vast family, no one had known the name of the long-dead, unmet grandfather. They asked the uncles, the aunts, the brothers, the sisters—but no one knew, and it was not a question Tharshi had ever thought to ask. Not something wives asked in a place where there are no real last names. Names were not passed down from father to son, as they are in America. And so Tharshi—Jegan's own wife—did not know.
It had taken a long time before anyone thought to ask Murali. After all, he was only seven years old. He had loved his father; he had stood very still, so still he had forgotten himself, and others had forgotten him also. He had been the only one with the answer. Jegan was his father; Jegan's father was Kathiravelu. Murali knew because he had spent so much time with his father on those walks to and from school. He knew, because as small boys do, he had asked his father questions that neither of them considered very important, just for the sake of hearing his father talk. It was only later, you see, that the question was important. Became important. He was just Murali, once. A young boy who, after his father's death, tried to stop himself from being young. Now he and his brothers have added their father to their names. All of them Jegan.
Love Marriage Page 5