Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  He went downstairs, still alone, because the other students had not yet arrived. He had been one of the first; he liked to be early, to see the lay of the land before entering it. The main hall looked bare and hot, and big with emptiness. He held his breath almost automatically, suddenly unsure of himself here. He was only eighteen years old. But if he closed his eyes and listened, he could hear his Heart murmuring, and the memory of his Heart murmuring.

  THEY MADE THE FIRST fortnight of medical school hell. Later he would understand why, remembering his revulsion at the sight of the first cadaver. If he was distracted with other things, the rituals of initiations and the macabre humor of young men, he could not think too deeply about his interaction with the ex-person before him. And you had to think of him or her as an ex-person to learn the tender caress of the scalpel, to see how a knife could navigate a spine, lift away skin, reveal muscle and tendon. All bodies are alike in certain facets of their geometry, and for a doctor to understand that, the body had to be everyone and no one. A person ( formerly) was how Murali thought of it, the descriptive always added like that: an afterthought bracketed by parentheses. He had carried his own dead father with him for many years in his Heart, and this burden was not easily put aside. He found in dissection and study a strange intimacy with these dead, who were not his dead, but the dead of someone else. Many of the other students had never seen a dead body before and stood before their assignments agape and fascinated. Some of them were ill. He heard the sounds of them vomiting in the hall as though from a great distance. He had seen his own father's peaceful face when he was quite young, and he thought about that as he stood over his first body, his face impassive. This was the first test: look at the body and make it no one. A person. (Formerly.)

  He had been assigned what they called a body partner, another boy from Jaffna named Murugan who was his friend and colleague by virtue of having been next to him in the alphabetical class lists for years. Neither one of them became ill during this first procedure, and neither one of them spoke. There was no formal or verbal guidance for the first hours. You were alone with the body; you became acquainted. It was during these three hours, before the instructors arrived, that he learned to love the body. He had always seen it as flawed, perhaps because the first body he had met was his own. Those innumerable possibilities for disaster. A thousand parts, none of which were infallible. But over the course of those three hours in the silent hall, he saw for the first time how perfectly everything could work. The synchrony of limb and ligament, the elegance of a joint. A hand he could shake, that would not shake back. How are you, sir, he thought politely. (Formerly Sir.) How nice to meet the body!These fingers had been broken once. He touched them with his own gloved fingers, matching them up and seeing that the hands were very large, larger than his own. Perhaps they were broken when you were young? he thought. You have a scar on your neck—did you cut yourself while shaving, or perhaps during a fight? I see that you were going bald, that you had diabetes and smoked, that you favored your right leg, that you were married, that someone loved you. The ring was still on the cadaver's dead finger. Murali thought all of this quite calmly, smelling vaguely the scent of eau de cologne behind him; they were using it to revive a student who had fainted. Murali himself had long ago given up the practice of fainting, despite his illness: it was a matter of principle.

  In this country, at this time, the practice of initiations was not called hazing, but “ragging.” It was a more civilized word, perhaps. Murali watched and participated in what was happening because he had no choice, but also because in spite of himself he was mesmerized. He began to think that he could imagine what addiction would be like: like ragging, or watching someone being ragged. It required the kind of force he had never had or wanted in himself. But these people were not cruel. He knew that he too would do whatever the senior medical students told him to do, and that it would not be difficult. Later, as a father, as my father, he might worry about hazing. But for now, there was only the cold face below him.

  Murali, one senior said to him, and he looked up through a formaldehyde haze, his gloves dripping saline.

  Yes, sir, he responded promptly and politely, anticipation like sugarcane sweet in his mouth.

  Go over there to the girl at cadaver number seven, and propose to her.

  Murali put his scalpel down. The girl at number seven looked at him, a brittle bone cracking as she moved the arm of her cadaver, folding its hands neatly on its breast. All right, he told himself, all right. He was sure they had warned her in advance. Murugan looked at him expectantly. The long hall, which had been buzzing with students, paused to watch the spectacle. The girl kept picking up her scalpel and putting it down again, making a tracery of cuts up the shoulder of her cadaver, nervous at being the center of attention. He knew her slightly, and his eyes apologized before he even spoke. Then he grinned cheerfully.

  How are you? he asked her.

  Fine, fine, she said, still embarrassed. She fingered an earring.

  You look very beautiful in your lab coat, he offered.

  She giggled, surprised in spite of herself.

  Will you marry me? He made sure to say it loud enough for everyone to hear.

  She giggled again and paused before delivering her answer:

  Yes.

  AFTER MEDICAL SCHOOL HE never saw her again, although he always thought of her affectionately as his Practice Proposal. Nothing was ever so easy again as those first three naked hours. The same people who had failed their entrance exams on the first try were all too likely to fail their final exams and have to spend an extra six months in school before they could try again. Murali was determined not to be one of these. He thought he understood this, finally, the body and its machinations. But he wanted to be sure. In the weeks before the test, he cloistered himself in the library, his dark head bent over his books. His was only one dark head in a row of many dark heads.

  The written exams were not the hardest part of the test, and everyone knew this. The real complication was the clinical test, in which the student was presented with three patients. He would be allowed to spend three quarters of an hour with each of them, and then another quarter of an hour making a presentation on diagnosis and suggested course of treatment. You had to be very careful to divide the first part of the hour to allow for both a case history and an examination: the body in the patient's words and then in your own. It sounded simple enough when the structure of the test was explained, but Murali knew this was only a deception. They went out of their way to find people with obscure diseases. This was not difficult for them; they spent their days teaching and their nights on charity work in the surrounding villages. When the time for the tests came, the instructors went to the village markets, the rice fields, the small offices, and retrieved their own strangest patients. These people had bodies that were constantly failing in innovative and mysterious ways. Not all of them spoke English; they were mostly Sinhalese, and although you were permitted a translator, there was no extra time allotted for such an extravagance. Murali vowed not to need one.

  His first patient was a girl who was extremely beautiful, and unmistakably barren. This was easy enough to diagnose, and he was relieved not to face the burden of disclosure; he saw soon enough that she already knew. He moved on to the next patient, a man whose kidneys were dysfunctional, and in this case too, he finished in advance and saw his instructors smiling with approval. He heaved a dry breath as they took him to the third patient; he knew that tradition required that the third patient be the most difficult, and this was the last fence he had to leap to pass. The patient was a boy, not much younger than himself, but clearly much poorer. He hoisted himself onto the examining table, and Murali saw that even this small effort, lifting himself with his hands, tired him immeasurably. Murali recognized something in this fatigue, if only vaguely. The boy's small, unbendable frame was so tired and yet held so straight.

  What is the matter? he asked. He gestured for the boy to lie down and l
istened as he probed with gentle fingers. The boy described an inability to breathe, and Murali's brain said asthma? No, that would have been too easy. People still sometimes contracted tuberculosis. The boy's breath hitched and jumped, and Murali pressed against his ribs. There, the boy said, and Murali uneasily decided he had cracked ribs and perhaps a punctured lung. He felt a rumble begin in his belly; he had been unable to eat this morning because of nervousness, and now the feeling, which had been only hunger before, expanded so that it seemed to hold all of him inside a bubble of uncertainty. He recognized something about this boy, and he could not put words to it. He did not like to see this: unnamable flaws, untraceable tracks. Bodies did not work like that; the failing was not just in the patient, but in the doctor. He ought to be able to see what it was. Errors of the body were tangible.

  When he told his instructors his final diagnosis, they looked at him, brows cocked. Is that your final decision, Mr. Murali? they asked. You have a quarter of an hour left to examine the patient.

  But Murali knew that he would see nothing else; this patient's body had betrayed no more. Although something more might be there, a quarter of an hour would not be enough to find it. His hands had become sweaty and slipped as he replaced his stethoscope around his neck. He nodded slowly at them to indicate that he was finished, and his stomach lurched when he saw pair after pair of disappointed eyes.

  We'll see you next term, Mr. Murali, said the head instructor.

  What was it? Murali asked. What did I miss?

  You were correct about the ribs and the punctured lung, but you missed a second, underlying diagnosis.

  A door that had been locked in Murali's brain began to creak slowly open. He thought that he could see a bit of light around the corner.

  You listened to his heartbeat, Murali, the older doctor said. I'm not sure why you didn't hear the murmur.

  WHEN HE TOOK THE TEST again six months later, he passed the clinical portion with such high marks that a new examiner wanted to give him honors. But this wasn't allowed if you had already failed once before. It did not matter; the time had passed for him to care about this. He was preparing to leave the country, and the classmates and teachers he had learned to love.

  In emigrating he would leave behind such things and people, the kind of friendly no-longer-strangers whose faces were like his own, whose gentle humor was really humour in the British and Sri Lankan way. Later he would miss this, the rich languid roundness of that British U, the caressed belly of a word on a British tongue. He had gone to school in English, but as a young man, he still thought in Tamil. Later, when he was older, he would find that the language of his dreams had changed. He dreamed in English, but not the American English of his daughter. He dreamed of that gentle wit, those British tongues, and the cold face of the cadaver below him. That perfect body.

  It was language that did him in, language that in the end sent him on his way. He was required to take yet another test to be placed in a government hospital. It was a proficiency test in Sinhalese, which was the official language of the island and had been since 1956. The Tamil Language Act of 1958 had long been forgotten, and this was the reality. Only a few years later, Tamils would have to score higher on the test than their Sinhalese counterparts in order to continue their studies. He loved to speak his own language, but he spoke Sinhalese well and he was not worried about what the government required. But when he reported to the local test office and opened the booklet he felt blank and sick. The minutes on the clock ticked away, and he thought it was like the beating of his Heart, and he was sure that in the quiet room with all the medical students sweating, everyone could hear his brain racing at a liquid speed in Tamil. He had known Sinhalese his whole life, but now he lowered a pail into the well of his mind and found not a word. At the end of the exam he rose steadily and handed his clean paper to the examiner.

  At the gate of the office, Murugan joined him and they walked up the road together, stopping at the public well. When they were younger they had walked this road barefoot. Now they were grown men, wearing covered loafers and long trousers. Their feet kicked up dust that made Murali cough. Murugan handed Murali the dipper of water. Murali gulped the water down, tipping the rest of it onto his head so that his hair was plastered to his brow. Murugan was watching him.

  What did you think of the test?

  I passed it, Murali said.

  But it was hard, wasn't it, Murugan said, without a question mark. He was chewing betel leaf and he spit in the dirt next to Murali's foot.

  I won't take another test in Sinhalese, Murali said and shrugged, suddenly angry.

  What do you mean? Murugan stared.

  I'm leaving this country, Murali said, surprised.

  He was going. He was going. When he told his mother, she cried. She had never found him so immovable. She could not have known—as he did not either—that he was practicing immovability for a moment when he would really need it. He was making himself into a man who would Love my mother before Marrying her.

  [rendu]

  DEATH

  CREEPING TOWARD US

  .

  On her bright brow alone is destroyed even

  that power of mine that used to terrify the most

  fearless foes in the battlefield.

  — TIRUKKURAL , chapter 109, line 8

  SUTHAN: DECADES LATER, ANOTHER MAN, DECIDING TO MARRY another woman. Who knew if or when he would Love her? That was not what this was about. I saw him first about a week after my uncle's arrival, when he came with his father to the small house in Scarborough, Toronto.

  We had been told that he was a few years older than I. He looked younger, perhaps because of the leanness of his silhouette. In the fashion of young men, he had grown a small patch of hair under his lower lip. His ears stuck out from the sides of his head slightly, emphasized by a close-cropped and uneven haircut, but even this could not disguise his essential handsomeness. He had a small mouth, from which a deep voice would eventually emerge. He came to the door and loomed behind his father, who had come to visit my father and my uncle. He kept his hands folded behind his back, not in his pockets, and standing in the doorway, I thought him very formal and quiet for someone our age, someone who had already secured a position of sorts in our family.

  He resembled his father, although perhaps it only seemed so because his mother was not there. She had passed away some fifteen years ago, I knew. After I opened the door, his father leaned into the open air and studied me intently, and I realized that he thought that I was his future daughter-in-law.

  Hello, uncle, I said in English.

  Ah, then you are not Janani, he said. But he was still studying me. He smiled suddenly, and I remembered what my father had told me about this man. My uncle had still not said much about him, but my father, as always, told me the truth: exactly what he thought was true, no more and no less.

  That man, Vijendran, he is a powerful man here in Toronto, my father said. Some of my relatives who live here in Toronto now this man, and they say that he has spent many years getting support for the Tigers here. This is not a hard thing to do, because most of the Tamils here came here after you were born. Canada offered them refuge after 1983. They have been angry for a long time because of what happened in the month when you were born. We mark that as our darkest hour. And is it so easy to blame those people, when they lost so much? Their homes? Their property? Their loved ones?

  I had been born in 1983, in July, when thousands of Tamils were killed while their government did nothing, and I knew that I came from a generation of people who marked those dates as their blackest hour, even though some of us had not even been born yet. I knew that the son of Vijendran, this boy, Suthan, was one of those who held on to that date and all it meant; I knew that soon, Janani would come downstairs, wearing one of my mother's saris, to meet him, and that they would agree on many things, and that one of them would be the Tigers.

  Come in, I said to Vijendran and Suthan, and they untied their sho
es and left them at the door, as was the custom of Tamils even in the West.

  I called for my mother, and she came out into the hall to meet them. My father followed behind her. They each shook hands with Vijendran, and then his son. Luck for a new Marriage in a new place.

  TEA: THIS IS A CIVILIZING THING. In any country, in any time, tea brings order and calm to a place of chaos. And not every place of chaos looks like one. Two families in a too-clean parlor room in Toronto can be chaos.

  And it was, I realized. The men—my father and Vijendran and Suthan—sat around a polished wooden table, and I went to the kitchen to help my mother to get the trays and cups. Sri Lankan women are always trying and failing to bring order to a world of men. My mother had taken out her Indian serving set: a small silver bowl of cashews; another of deep-fried noodles, spicy nuts, and lentils; a third of crispy vadai, the savory snack my father especially liked and that my mother had refused to prepare for him, because it was so unhealthy. But my mother had been expecting them, and they were important people, the kind for whom one prepared special things. In the kitchen, I watched my mother, the set of her shoulders, and her lips, which tightened at the corners. She did not like this man, Vijendran, and she did not like his son. It had taken me a long time to see behind the curtain of her politeness, and to see what she really thought about people. I had had to travel to another country to see what made her uncomfortable, to see what made her afraid.