Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  There are no evil intentions in a village as intimate as Urelu. Only evil deeds with good intentions. The young doctor wanted to marry Mayuri. He wanted it, thought Mr. Thiru, somewhat irrationally. Mr. Thiru liked Mayuri. He was a cousin by marriage too. He was happy for her happiness. But Marriage to a Doctor falls into a category of its own. Marrying one of them was a step up, not just for the young woman involved, but for her entire family. Why did Mayuri need to marry a doctor? Some of her family had already married doctors.

  Mr. Thiru thought about it—but not for very long. Then he picked up the phone and called his shy young friend, Dr. Balachandran. There was another family he knew, a poorer family, that had a daughter of marriageable age. That family deserved their chance.

  THE PORCH VISITS STOPPED. At first Mayuri told herself that Bala must be waiting for her father's formal permission to treat her as the woman he would marry. She sat on the steps, slapping away the mosquitoes that landed on her shoulders, looking into the dusk to see if he would appear, this Man Who Desired Her. Three nights passed. None of them was disturbed by his quiet step.

  By the fourth night she knew he would never come again. In the mornings she rose and ate her breakfast. She did not speak. Her brothers and sisters watched her, but they too said nothing. Every day she went to work as though nothing was wrong; every evening, she took her place on the porch with two glasses of lime juice as though nothing were wrong. He will come, Mayuri said to herself, even though she knew he would not. One night as she sat out there, she heard her mother, Lakshmi, talking to their neighbor over the back fence. There was a quiet murmur of conversation and then a long pause. Lakshmi came out onto the steps and stood behind her daughter. Then she bent down to put her hand on Mayuri's shoulder.

  Mayuri had been teetering on the brink of Mutually Agreeable Arranged Love. Instead, she fell into a chasm of disillusionment, not with life itself, but with the idea of Ever Marrying. She shook her mother's sympathetic hand from her shoulder, got up, and walked into the house.

  In a way she never came out again. She never married, and this was not by choice. And Vani saw her do nothing to change her own fate.

  YEARS PASSED, AND SO Vairavan was already gone by the time Mayuri's younger sister, my mother's Aunt Harini, found a different problem: Marriage to the Wrong Man. Or was he?

  Harini and Rajan had known each other since they were young and had wanted to marry each other for as long as they had known what marriage was. Urelu thought them a bit of an odd couple. Harini, Vairavan's third child, was a good daughter. She was tall and beautiful, with a sturdy, thin frame and big eyes that looked very dark against her fair skin. She was also shy, and intelligent enough to know that her striking face could attract the kind of attention that would embarrass or even endanger her. She did not want people looking at her as they looked at her sisters and the other young women of the village. So Harini perfected the art of Hiding in Public. She learned plainness. She managed to dress her beauty down. People hardly saw her until she was twenty yards ahead of them. She walked with her long lashes dropped over those huge dark eyes. She passed through crowds and a full minute later, they wondered to themselves: Was a very beautiful girl just here? And then they shook the thought away, unsure.

  Rajan was a tall, thin, rangy youth, cheaply handsome and mustachioed like the hero of a bad movie. People saw him no matter where he stood in the room. They noticed his flashing teeth twenty yards behind them. They liked him and, at the same time, did not like themselves for liking him. He was more than a bit shiftless. He had a set of friends apart from Harini, a wilder clan of young village men whose backgrounds were dubious. They smoked and drank to an extent that any mother would frown upon, but especially Harini's. But she was friends with Rajan's mother, and it was this friendship that allowed her to tolerate the idea that her Harini might end up with Rajan.

  Harini had a calming influence on him. Rajan around Harini was like a different person: quieter, calmer, more like his father. And around him, guarded Harini forgot to let her long hair fall in front of her face. The mask fell away from her beauty. They loved each other so clearly and simply that Lakshmi sighed, remembering when she herself had been so young.

  So when Rajan's mother leaned over the bougainvillea one morning and said, Lakshmi, don't you think it's time we talked about the children? Harini's mother did not ask what she meant. Instead she paused, and nodded slowly.

  SOMETIMES THIS IS HOW Marriages are Arranged: rather than setting the pattern of love, they follow it. Harini, even bundled in her Wedding-Red, was not the star of the wedding. Nor did she want to be. All eyes were on the groom, who seemed to be swathed in light, a dark-skinned man with coconut-white teeth gleaming in a movie-star smile. Harini's Heart said thump thump thump to that smile. Rajan looked at her across the ritual wedding fire and the smile changed to a conspiratorial grin. I know you, it said. I have you. He had her. But Harini's Heart did not trust that grin. Shut Up, she told it and held her foot out daintily for him to slide the silver wedding rings onto each of her second toes. His fingers on her ankle felt good, and she thought for a moment, irreligiously, unchastely, Improperly, how those fingers might feel in other places. Irritated at herself, she bowed her head so that he could garland her.

  The priest droned on in Sanskrit, then in Tamil. She looked up and saw her mother, standing next to Rajan's. Rajan's mother looked beatifically happy. Beside her, her own mother was imposing and impassive. The temple bells rang, and her sisters moved among the wedding-goers, handing out fruitcake. The guests were hungry. This country did not take Marriage lightly: here, getting Married could take all day.

  HARINI AT THIRTY: SHE remained painfully beautiful, unnoticed in Rajan's shadow, with a child on each hip. He still attracted attention too, flashing his coconut-sweet movie-star smile with a wild edge at its ends, tucked under the mustache. They walked through crowds, him slightly ahead of her, and Urelu, which had grown used to Rajan but never to Harini, gossiped. She had been the good daughter, the one every mother wanted her son to Marry Happily. How had she ended up with this rake? For this is what Rajan had become—a rake. He did not outgrow the habits of his youth. He drank too much. He fooled around. Sometimes when he came home at night and joined Harini in bed his hair had the sweet pungency of ganja. But Harini never said anything. She smiled serenely, even when he grew belligerent in the market with the fruit vendor, or when he slapped their youngest child at whim. He screamed at her in private, then in public, pulling at her long hair. One day a big clump of it fell into his open palm, and they both stared at it, astonished. Then he hit her across the cheekbone, and Harini's mouth flooded with blood.

  This is the taste of a Marriage Dying, her Heart said. Harini had swallowed everything, all her life. Her spinster sister Mayuri's jealousy of a Marriage that had happened too neatly. Her mother's quiet disapproval. Her own self-imposed status as a perpetual shadow. Harini swallowed again, swallowed air and blood. Her beating Heart had grown pulpy and old with abuse.

  But Harini bent double, bent down. She picked up her Go On Forever Smile from where it had fallen on the ground, and went on.

  SOME MARRIAGES DO THAT. They go on even when they should not.

  Even childhood sweethearts cannot prevent their lives from being twisted into shapes they never expected. Logan, Harini's oldest brother and my mother's favorite uncle, sometimes wished he was not the eldest in the family. With eldest son–ship comes responsibility. It fell to him to say something to Harini about her husband.

  The year that Harini's oldest child was seven, the family came to visit Logan's house near the tea estates, where he worked. As Harini walked over the threshold, Logan held the door. His sister's head passed directly beneath his eyes, and he saw for the first time threads of gray in her thick, straight hair. And beyond that, the bare spot behind her left ear.

  He looked up to see Rajan behind her on the path to the house, their younger child hoisted carelessly on one shoulder. Logan resisted the urge to
reach out and take the child from him. There would be time enough for that. Rajan reached out to shake his hand, and Logan took it. He did not embrace him warmly, as he might have one of his other in-laws. He was a little older now, more austere, his own gray beginning to show above his temples. Logan closed the door behind Rajan. They were now in his house, a house that for years had held nothing but Safe Love. Harini caught herself inhaling deeply, as though she could absorb this through her skin.

  Logan's wife, Kala, motioned to the elder of her two daughters from the kitchen. The girl took the tea tray from her, placing the sugar bowl with its precise cubes into its holder. She handed around the tea and passed plates of food, steaming rice and curries. Harini looked up and saw that Kala's daughter was tall and pretty, neatly dressed. Obviously Loved. Harini picked up her teacup and noticed that although she had not seen Kala for a long time, the older woman had remembered without asking how both she and Rajan preferred their tea. She looked up and saw that her brother was much thinner now, that his walk had become more measured. He seemed to her to have found a new easiness within his own body. She saw that her eldest brother had come to remind her of their father, and this made her love him more.

  They sat in the parlor and talked for hours. After a while, Kala excused herself and took all four cousins to their beds. She did not return, and after a while, Logan realized why: she did not want to talk to Rajan, who had clearly been drinking heavily earlier that day. The three of them, Harini, Rajan, and Logan, sat there in the parlor until it was very late. Logan wondered if he could outlast his brother-in-law, who had burned a hole in the arm of the settee with a cigarette and not even noticed. It would be improper and perhaps offensive to ask for a moment alone with his sister. Finally, as the short hand of the clock moved toward midnight, Rajan yawned, a fuzzy alcoholic yawn, and excused himself, cocking a brow at his wife, who shook her head timidly. He inclined his head, good night, and meandered down the hall to the bed that had been prepared for them.

  Logan's eyes followed Rajan out, then returned to his sister, whose beauty had turned stark since he had last seen her. There was a small bruise on her cheek, he noticed, and it looked very slightly swollen. He reached out and put a gentle finger on it. He had been prepared to say something to her about her husband, perhaps a simple and direct conversation that would have gone like this:

  You shouldn't stay with Rajan.

  She would have looked at him and blinked, her Go-On Forever Smile still fixed on her face.

  There's nothing else to do, she would have said.

  But they did not have this conversation because it was not required for them to understand each other. Instead, he looked into her eyes and saw her reply. He saw that she was right. He saw that she knew Rajan drank and smoked to excess. He saw that sometimes she did not know where her husband spent his nights. He saw that her husband still hit her, and that she had issued an empty threat to leave him. He saw that she had chosen not to recalculate her own life. Her face had changed from one of hidden beauty. It had become a beauty that constantly consumed itself and was reborn: a phoenix face in its fierceness, its insistence on survival.

  Logan got up, walked down the hall to his own bedroom, where his wife the Loved was sleeping, and woke her up.

  If you could help her, he said to Kala.

  Kala sat up and rubbed her eyes, already knowing what he meant, already having seen the bare spot and the bruise and the place where Harini's Go-On Forever Smile had gone crooked.

  FOR TEN YEARS HARINI died that way every day. Then one day she walked out into the garden to find Rajan fallen. She swallowed, and stopped smiling, missing him already.

  MY MOTHER KNEW AND LOVED her aunts, but even as a little girl, she chose not to be close to them, because she did not understand their failure to create what they wanted. How Mayuri was left on those porch steps with two glasses of lime juice. How Harini stayed with a man who did wrong and wrong and wrong by her. How had they allowed this? She watched them and took from them Mayuri's persistence, Harini's willingness to smile through pain.

  The rest she left, although she loved them. This is how she became the woman who left Sri Lanka, chose my father, and stood against a family that believed in Propriety and Tradition.

  AND YET, VANI DID not choose to leave Sri Lanka forever. She chose not to go back. It is not the same thing. But in a way, her reasons were the same as my father's. When the conflict begins must depend, like everything else, on the memory you acquire.

  First: Who are you asking? To read the story in the press is to read a story that has never gone far enough. Ask one relative and this is how the story begins: the international Tamil conference came to Sri Lanka, and the government wanted it to be held in Colombo, which was the capital of the country. The Tamil organizers wanted it to be held in Jaffna, the northern city, which was their capital, and so they declined to move it. At the opening of the conference some government soldiers came and shot some young Tamil men. Almost all of them died, and this was what sparked the beginning of the actual violent rebellion: this blatant killing. Whereas before there had been quieter violence or discrimination. Those who attended the conference were mostly young men, young aspiring politicians who grew into old men with old memories of their friends who were killed. If you ask someone else, they will tell you a different story, say that the Tamils were making it all up, that there was no discrimination, that the island was an island of three languages and cultures, and that those cultures were equal before the Tigers began killing people, including their own. Ask another, and another. None of the stories will be absolutely complete, but their tellers will be absolutely certain. This is how we make war.

  But there are some things that are indisputable: even now, it is the young men who disappear. The odd foreign journalist, here and there, but mostly the young Tamil men. Fathers fret anxiously over the whereabouts of their sons. Every night, mothers set places at meals for their boys. And every night, in many houses, some of those places go unfilled. There are people whose job it is to collect the names of the absent and to set them down, record them, send them to as many people as possible, humanitarian and political organizations. This hardly ever accomplishes anything. Years later, when children in other countries ask their parents about going home, their parents say no, that's not a good idea, not this year, it will be too expensive.

  What they do not say: it is too expensive because the country runs on bribes, because you have to pay the police and the army and probably a professional escort to navigate for you, because the four-star hotels are the ones with the most security, not the greatest amenities, because you can only go home again if they promise not to bomb the airport.

  And so, halfway around the world, here I am. Telling you about my mother's family. My mother herself would tell you that it began when she was ten. In the anti-Tamil riots of 1958, when she was visiting Colombo. They were on a road of Tamils, in Wellawatte. But one Sinhalese family lived there too. When they heard the mob coming, they shut their Tamil friends in their house, to wait in the quiet and the cool and the dark for the end. Vani, the little girl who grew up to be the nursery school teacher, Murali's wife, and later my mother, hid under a table. The Sinhalese family passed food through the cracks in the doors and the windows, and the Tamils waited and watched, knowing that it would be over and that it would start again.

  I HAVE LEARNED THAT one way to get my mother to talk about herself is to ask her about other people, other things. It is a trick, really, nothing more. She is someone who is faithful to history and so she cannot help but include herself in the narrative as an innocent bystander, a silent guest. In this manner you can extract her character, piece by piece, because even the most self-effacing person can only remain an innocent bystander for so long before conceding to the power of her own past presence.

  When Vani was at the convent school in Kandy, studying to be a teacher and beginning to be beautiful, she would often spend her weekends at Logan's tea estate in Nuwara El
iya, which was nearby. She was horribly homesick, and visiting her uncle Logan and aunt Kala made her feel closer to Urelu. Late in her childhood, her uncle had become the superintendent of three tea estates, which made him someone of considerable importance. She remembered his house having a formidable formality. He was a dorai, and this meant that he was a man of stature, someone important. A man in charge. His wife, Kala, who was the doraisa�mi, was similarly intimidating. Logan ran the business of the plantation, and she ran the sizable house. They were both jobs that traditionally required homage to ceremony and to manners. It was not until much later, after both my mother and her uncle had emigrated, that her stories of him managed, finally, to permeate the shield of colonial formality that had been imposed on their lives in that place.

  Logan resembled his late father, Vairavan, in many ways, except that the sternness in his face was a bit more sharply drawn. He had a lowering brow and a pronounced jaw. Only the rare and broad smile transformed that imposing face. He was a busy man, and he made time especially for his nieces and nephews when they arrived at his estate on holidays. They arrived by train, and it was a long ride, so when they arrived, they were always very hungry. They were not very old, but they had been taught how to behave, and so no one ever mentioned being hungry until they reached the house and were asked in to dinner. They were met at the station by the dorai 's man, who picked them up in a big, broad, black car that belonged to the estate and was at their disposal for the holiday. They clambered into it, always holding hands, brother helping sisters up into the high coach, suitcases rumbling in the back. Sometimes when they arrived it was raining, and then the ride to the estate was bumpier than usual and slightly unpleasant. They shivered from the wet and thought of what waited for them: the doraisa�mi, smiling one of her smiles-with- teeth (which were reserved for people whom she loved specially), holding for them cups of hot tea with sugar (which is how they all drank it; although my mother does not have a sweet tooth, she would never dream of taking her tea without sugar—that was sacrilege).