She handed me the tray of food.
Ask them how they take their tea, she said to me, and leaned down to get the kettle from the cupboard.
I took the food back out into the living room, where I offered it to each man—first Vijendran, then his son, then my father—before setting it down on the table.
Where is your niece? Vijendran asked my father.
Go and call her, my father said to me.
But I did not have to. She came downstairs, wearing one of my mother's saris that was just right for the occasion: lavender, with subtle embroidery. She looked very tall, even without any shoes on, and even fairer than she had looked in the afternoon light at the airport, on that first day. I looked at Vijendran, who was smiling approvingly; I looked at his son, who looked stern and yet happy, without smiling. They both stood up, and I thought: that is what men of a certain era do in the presence of a lady. What time are we in? I wondered. When are we?
Janani looked down and smiled.
This is my niece, my father said.
I did not want to be a part of this, but I could not help but compare myself to her: darker, shorter, bigger. Less lovely. Less Sri Lankan, less proper. Less modest. I wore pants; I had cut my hair short at the beginning of the summer, and it had not yet grown out. Janani, I thought, looked like my mother. I was suddenly sure of it: that Janani, with all her knowledge of what violence could do or be, looked more like my peaceful, lovely mother than I ever had.
[mundu]
VANI
NOT YET MY MOTHER
.
What is not conferred by fate cannot be preserved,
although it be guarded with most painful care;
and that which fate has made his cannot be lost,
although one should undertake to throw it away.
— TIRUKKURAL , chapter 38, line 6
VANI: SHE STEPPED ONTO THE ESCALATOR VERY CAREFULLY because she had never seen one before. She counted under her breath, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, and placed her right foot and then her left, onto the moving shelf. She said to herself, I will go back. I will go back. She meant it. She had no intention of staying. This was Vani, not yet my mother, but stepping onto an airport escalator that would take her there.
Like Murali, she speaks excellent English, which is part of what brought her here. She went to a school where she was taught everything that way, in English. She learned what she was taught and learned it well. But she could not forget that each of her bones had emerged from a Tamil womb. Into a place and family that was Tamil.
It was a country that still remembered the British, who left the year she was born, which was the same year India gained independence. But even now, she still thinks in Tamil. She is exceedingly practical, and also very beautiful. In her world, beauty is a convenient and unimportant side note: Beautiful, but So What? She was not always beautiful—Vani, not yet my mother. Once she was just a little girl in Urelu, another village of Jaffna. Today it is not far from Ariyalai, but then it was far enough that she and Murali never crossed paths. In Urelu, she was not known for athleticism, as her older sister was. She was not known for temper or politics, as Kumaran was. She was not yet known for beauty—after all, she was not yet Beautiful-So-What.
She was the youngest of the children, of which there were three. My aunt Kalyani was born first; second, my uncle Kumaran, the precious boy; and lastly, my mother, Vani. She was good; that was what she was. She was clean and methodical and she never wasted a moment. She is still like this: single-minded. Her name means “wish” or “desire,” which is entirely appropriate. My mother was not born lucky. Luck is something that happens to you. Nothing merely happens to my mother. This connotes a kind of passivity that is foreign to her; she does not understand or yield to it. She has created the situation around her through the strength of her will.
Although I know that she intended to return, I can only guess at why she left Sri Lanka to come to America; unlike the departure of my father, hers has remained an untold story. My mother is not a teller of stories. I realize this about my mother now, her natural reticence, which is not reticence exactly, but rather an almost completely unself-conscious manner of being, a lack of ego that is total in this facet. It does not occur to her to talk about herself. There is simply no reason to do so, and my mother does not often do things without a reason. Her entire family is like this.
Tell me about what my mother was like, I say to a relative on my mother's side of the family.
You don't need to know that, she says in return.
I know this: when she left Sri Lanka, a busful of relatives came to the station to say good-bye to her. When she left, she was in her mid-twenties, not yet beautiful but beginning to be so, not yet my mother, but closer to being so. She was learning a kind of independence she had never imagined, and it was also a kind of independence that she did not want: freedom from her family, which was the thing she loved the most, and which was what she later became known for, at least to me, her daughter. Her love for her family and the life they had led. She was going away, to another country, because she had managed to get a visa, and she knew that this was no longer a good place to be, although it had been a good place to her all her life. She was going, she told herself and her relatives, only for two years. But perhaps somewhere deep down she knew she would never come back.
She had chosen to become a teacher because she liked to teach children, and she loved children themselves, their striving toward character. But this was no longer a good place to teach, or (she thought but did not say) to have children. The teachers at her convent school had gotten her an assignment to teach in New York City. A busful of her relatives came to the airport to see her off. She kissed them good-bye and wished they could come with her. She did not consciously desire disconnection. There was a particular sacredness about everything she had been able to do here. This was something she saw only as she left. The only moment in which you understand an entire perspective is as you look over your shoulder to say good-bye, and this was true for my mother also. The sacred quality of this place was not a holiness she ascribed to herself but rather to everything around her, all the people who had been kind to her, the nuns who had taught her from her time in the convent school as a small girl to her training as a teacher, her family that had sheltered and loved her because she was the youngest, and not because she was especially known for anything but just being Vani, which was enough for them.
She saw now, for the first time, that it might not be enough for anyone else. She was leaving a very religious family, a family that was very tight-knit and traditional. It was and is a family that honors ceremony and resists separation. If this family saw the earth open up in its midst, my mother and her siblings would deny it and then fight to fill the chasm. This is both admirable and self-destructive. My mother is someone who could see a fire in front of her and say it was not there. My mother is someone who, by the force of her will, could put a fire out.
MY MOTHER'S FAMILY IDENTIFIES itself first by honor, although they do not call it that. They do not call it anything, but it is the unnamed honor of a murdered man. I did not know he had been murdered because when they spoke of him they used his name to wrap around the entire family: you are a Vairavan, they would say, and I did not know that they meant him, because when I was born he had been dead for a long time. He had surpassed the boundaries of his life to take over all of theirs. They had named their essential bond after him. He was my mother's grandfather, her mother's father. She was six years old when he died. It was 1954. It was their introduction to violence.
He was sixty-three when he was killed. He had been such a good man that even years later, they spoke about him always as though he were still alive. They never spoke about his unusual passing. Why would they? It did not matter—the mere how of his death. Its story had no reason. Who cared for the how? They cared far more about the kind of man he had been. Later, I was told that he was killed because he was so good. I think this i
s something that his children chose to say and, in so choosing, made true. This might be the reason my mother left Sri Lanka. In what kind of country would a murder like this happen? Someone killed a man not for being rich or for being powerful—which he was not—but for being respected, which he was.
VAIRAVAN: HE WAS A POSTMASTER. He had spent his life in government service, and in service of those who wrote and those who read. He served all over Ceylon, as it was then known, and when he was sixty-one he retired to a farm in Jaffna with his wife, who like him was known for her great virtue. All of his children and grandchildren lived in Jaffna, or near it, and he dreamed of growing old there, surrounded by them. As a working man, he had learned the value of a disciplined and scheduled life. Even as a retired man, he rose with the dawn and went out to milk the cows.
I think what happened was this: that he woke up one morning and thought that the day would be very sweet and mild, with a sweet breeze. That the sky was just considering becoming light blue, and that the fields looked very ripe and gold, that the rainy season had just passed and the harvest was ripening. I think that he woke up and boiled milk for tea, that he put the leaves of his tea into the pot and brewed it, and that he did all of this without waking his wife. That the aroma of the tea filled the house like a blessing, and that he drank two cups of it before putting his clothes on to go to work.
By the time he went outside, the sky, which was not yet light, was turning from black to dark blue and beginning to forget the stars. This was the best weather for working, because the buildings where the animals were kept could become very hot, too hot at midday for an older man to work. He went down and out into the fields and unlocked the door to the cows' shed. He could hear the cows waking up, and the roosters crowing. And the day was beginning to be sweet, as he had seen it would be, and he was glad that he was still strong and could still work on the farm with his wife. He thought of her, asleep, and he smiled. His hands moved on the body of the first animal, and milk shot hot and foamy into the bucket he had placed on the ground.
When he was done, he took the bucket and went back outside, and the sun had just entered the sky. His figure was the darkest thing about the horizon. He could hear the sounds of his wife stirring inside the house, and he was bringing the milk back to her when he heard what he thought was a loose animal, or perhaps a dog worrying the garden. There was a sound like a heavy step on old leaves. He put the bucket of rich milk down on the grass carefully, so that none of it spilled. He went around the corner of the shed to see what the noise was.
HIS WIFE FOUND HIM lying bloody in the fields.
She had searched for him silently and alone when he had not come back into the house. She had followed his path easily, knowing by Heart the shape of his heavy step in the grass. She had stopped only for a dark moment of clarity when she saw the beginning of a bloody and a beaten path that went into the meadow behind the shed. Whoever had dragged his body had left her a clear trail to track, a path outlined by two red lines that were traceable, she saw now, to his bare and bleeding feet.
His dear face, that she had touched and loved, was cut down to the bone. The side of his scalp had been torn away. His body, that she had touched and loved, was cut from throat to belly in a shallow slit that had been enough to drain him of blood, and this in turn had been enough to kill him. If Murali had been there, perhaps he would have slipped on his gloves and murmured sadly: I never liked pathology.Perhaps he would have reassembled the slain man with his doctor's hands that had learned so late to love the body. That was the first test: make the body no one. But this was not Murali. And this was a body that had belonged to someone.
He had been a very handsome man, this great-grandfather, Vairavan. He had had about himself a certain sternness, the same quality that my father would later see in my mother: an unwillingness to relent or compromise that was apparent in his face. Vairavan's children learned to hold this toughness above all else. His look in death still had this quality about it. He had lived a long life, but it was not a life as long as she had wanted it to be. He had not yet become an old man. His wife looked down and with her bare fingers she closed his eyes. She put her hand under his unshaven chin and lifted it. She thought to cry out for someone and then she did not. She looked down at him, her husband, a terrible fury and sorrow fueling in her chest. She had known he would die. Someday. But this was not the body she wanted to remember.
THEY NEVER CONVICTED ANYONE in the murder of Vairavan. He was so loved that no one in their village of Urelu could understand why anyone would kill him. When his daughter, my great-aunt, told me about what had happened, the most descriptive word she could bring herself to say about her father was “respectable.” A man who had been like any other, a catalogue of small daily preferences and mannerisms, the kind of habits I collect as I collect people. But “respectable” was all she said.
They tried and acquitted a man. No one in Vairavan's family went to see the trial. What did it matter? No one cared who had killed him. The how: it did not matter. Only this mattered: they had loved their father and he was dead. Death was not yet a malleable commodity. It meant only one thing. This was an introduction to violence, before the government and the Tigers made it a country where death meant many different things.
NO ONE EVER SAID it had to be this way, and yet everyone did it this way: all the choices they made about how they constructed their lives were made because of him, and thinking of him, this man whom they had loved and who had been slain by someone they did not know. And this was a time when murder was still unusual, when disappearances were still unusual, and this was because it was a country in which people thought that the sky was considering turning blue, that the fields were growing full of richness and harvest, that the young men and women would go to school and the British would not be there, and that meant that everything would eventually be all right. That when the British were gone, they might fight one another with words, but that no one would ever be murdered again. They had thought it would become impossible, and instead, it was becoming more possible all the time.
There is a period before war like the scent of the air before a storm: the earthy smell of thunder and the ground beginning to open up, sensing the coming rain. Their father had dreamed that young men would marry and have children, as he had done; that young men would go to work for their country, as he had done. That they would live long lives. And this he had not done, and perhaps this for my mother's family was the beginning of an awareness of the place around them: both the sacredness and the coming disaster.
Perhaps his dying can be marked on the clock as the time when things began to go wrong. And when everything went askew, perhaps they thought of him more, his body lying bloody and loved and alone in that field where he had been killed. Or perhaps because of the kind of man he was, they did not think of him lying in the field, but instead, walking through Urelu, in which he had been very much alive. When they grew up, they saw that they could not be alive for much longer in this country, and so they left.
BUT FIRST THEY WERE MARRIED. With only two exceptions: my mother, Vani, and her aunt, Mayuri. It was through her young aunts, Vairavan's daughters, that Vani first saw Marriage. And it was only much later that she understood it.
Marriage Undone: Mayuri, my mother's aunt, was going to marry a cousin-in-law, Bala. Dr. Balachandran. He was a skinny man, with a face that was a little foolish and younger than his years. He was soft-spoken, well-meaning, bespectacled, and when he began haunting the porch steps in the evenings to talk to her, my mother's young uncles talked among themselves. Over weeks, over months, they watched as this man's presence drew their reclusive sister outside. Mayuri was the most difficult of the Vairavan women; she was smart, but unwilling to soften herself for the sake of social grace. She was difficult, snappish, peevish, waspish. Her siblings wondered why the mild young man wanted to marry her. They were not alone in their suspicion; no one thought their two personalities a logical match. But with each visit Dr. Balachandr
an paid to the porch steps, their sister's face grew softer and her shrill voice quieter.
The visits went on for so long that the siblings wondered if Bala did intend to ask for Mayuri's hand. He was, after all, a cousin—his visits to the stoop could be merely family interest. But it was Mayuri he sought out, repeatedly. When they heard his step up the stone path to the door, the siblings would scatter across the house, or down into Urelu village. Finally, one day, panic-faced, he went into the house to speak to her father, Vairavan. Her father did not give his consent then but said that he would let the doctor know of his decision. Bala went away expecting to hear quite soon that his Heart's Desire was granted. He knew that some caution was necessary on her father's part. Some dignity had to be granted. It would be Improper to decide too quickly—but he was almost certain. He was a doctor, and doctors were the most sought-after men. Then, as now, Marriage to a Doctor falls into a category of its own. Becoming a doctor in Sri Lanka automatically makes a man many times more desirable. Marrying a doctor was a step up, not just for the young woman involved, but for her entire family. So Bala felt satisfied. He was a shy person, and he had spent weeks working up his courage to speak to her father.
He allowed the summer night to swallow him up again into bachelorhood and darkness. As he disappeared into the evening, he passed once more the girl on the doorstep.
WHEN MAYURI'S BROTHERS AND sisters saw her face they knew that something had changed. Bala had asked to marry her; his wish would be granted. Her brothers exchanged grins. She said nothing. She did not have to. In a village such as Urelu, news travels more than quickly. Neighbors exchanged whispers over fences. Relatives gossiped over cups of tea. Astrologers admitted to being consulted. When word of the Proper and Happy Marriage reached Mr. Thiru, who lived a few houses away, he was unsettled. He was a meddling man. It was too lucky, really, he thought. Such a Lucky Marriage in what was already an inordinately lucky family, with its inordinately good father.
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