At the gate, Kala took their umbrellas from them and ushered them into the house. The driver followed with their bags, and she brought them into the palatial front room, where they removed their shoes. They always brought her gifts: cans of fruit from their mother; fresh onions and tomatoes; special homemade sweets. After drinking their cups of tea (which always seemed to them deeper and bigger and more adult than those they had at home) they were ushered from the palatial front parlor into the even more palatial dining room, where they waited for their uncle, then ate their dinner, which had always been especially prepared for the first night of their visit.
They waited at the long, high table for Logan. Each place had a glittering set of dinnerware, but they did not touch anything. They always waited in polite silence until the door creaked and he came in, with his long, swinging gait. He always looked impeccable. How did he look so untroubled by an entire day's work on the hot plantations? He twinkled at them, and they forgot to wonder. He had looked very slightly tired when he walked in, but when he saw them, these children, his whole face lit up. During these years his own children were in England, studying, and his sister's children always made him happy. They greeted him and sat down, and then he rang for the cook.
Logan did not have a cook because he was rich; he had a cook because he was a dorai and it was one of the amenities to which a dorai was entitled. Even now, when my mother recalls these meals, there is a sound of amazement in her voice. That there could be such food, and so much of it! But even the food was not the best part of this house. They were most fascinated by the wire that ran from the kitchen to the wall to the table, under the table, under where Logan's hand rested as he ate. There was a small button there, and if he pushed it, it called the chef back into the room. The children loved this bell, the extra air of command it gave an already commanding man. As though it were proof that so many people listened to him. Which they did.
LIKE ALMOST EVERY MEMBER of his family, my great-uncle eventually left Sri Lanka. There was nothing else to do, and I think that my mother likes to remember that bell under the dinner table, my great-uncle ringing for his servant, although that makes it sound like it was an imperious thing to do rather than merely the observation of custom. I think that my mother likes to remember this and then to think about how her uncle crossed the ocean, how he left, because the juxtaposition of the two memories proves to my mother that Logan is a brave man. This was what her family did: leave Sri Lanka, one by one, piece by piece. Although they left it until it was nearly too late, it was not something that was hard to do, finally—leaving. It was something they achieved, with that toughness that they had hoarded among themselves. My mother's family turned anger at their situation into a way out of the island.
My great-uncle Logan, still an almost-young man then, left the country after the riots in 1983, that great spate of ethnic violence in which Tamils were more often than not the victims. Young men in particular went missing or were beaten on the streets. He had left his position as a dorai when the violence began, and as he looked out his window and saw it beginning to escalate, he began to make phone calls. He called everyone he had known in what he was beginning to think of as his former life. The friends of the dorai he had been. He had never abused his position. He had never treated anyone unkindly or unfairly. He hoped now that people would remember this. He hoped now that he would be able to secure what he needed from these friends to leave, and to take his family with him.
Someone called back: Two berths to India, uncle? This was luck, he thought; this truly was luck because these berths were beginning to be almost impossible to get, the ships crowded with the hard quick hurried breath of those escaping. Everyone he had ever known was leaving. He and Kala went over the sea on a ship to India, surrounded by men for whom he had worked and who had worked for him his entire life. They took almost nothing with them: a suitcase apiece. Everything else they left behind. Kala could not even bear to pack up the house. They left it untouched, with the two tall oil lamps from the tea estate shrine still guarding the front door. As though these symbols of prosperity could keep it inside the place in which they had once conducted their lives.
I THINK THAT MY MOTHER was proud to remember what Logan had been like, and that he was able to leave all of this grandeur for a far simpler life. This was what their family did: left Sri Lanka. This was something he did many years later, when my mother was already gone. Later, in Canada, he worked as a security guard for a time. In his adopted country, which was unsafe in new and different ways, it was a job that paid well. This was a profession that many Sri Lankan men took up after leaving their country. At home they might have been bankers, engineers, accountants, dorais. In the West, they looked after others, as they had once been looked after themselves.
This is how they left: they took the boat to India, and from there spent most of their money buying plane tickets to England. After a few months in England, they decided to try for Canada, which was taking Sri Lankan refugees. They bought tickets to New York. They did not have any money left for tickets back, and this was a calculation that worked perfectly. They landed in New York, and an acquaintance picked them up and drove them to the Canadian border. There, he left them with nothing. This was not abandonment; this was planned. To show, formally, that you were in need. To demonstrate that you were seeking refuge. And this is something that can still be done with honor.
Leaving: this is how it is done. Logan, who had once been a dorai of a tea estate in Sri Lanka and who was now just another Tamil refugee, walked toward the officials at the borders, his hands spread wide and open to show that he had nothing. Like a soldier surrendering, revealing that he is unarmed.
THE OTHERS, TOO, ALL found their way out, one by one, each one proving to my mother that she had been right to marry my father, and that she would be right not to go back. More than anyone else, my aunt Kalyani, my mother's older sister, is a labyrinth of information about these leavings. She keeps within herself the tiniest memories about the lives of those around her. She had once wanted to be a doctor, but when she failed the university entrance exams she became a teacher, and then a mother. She was such a spectacular success at both that almost no one remembers now that she wanted to go into medicine. That she used to sing on All-Ceylon Radio.
Twenty-five years after Vani hid under the table in the 1958 riots, there were riots again in Colombo, where Kalyani had moved. In the riots of 1983 the soldiers burned Kalyani's house. The choreography of her life at that time was very simple.
Kalyani is sewing now as she tells the story, patient and calloused fingers working at the pattern on a sari blouse. Her voice is matter-of-fact.
It all started like this, you know. There are the Tamil Tigers who want to separate the north. The boys in Jaffna set up a land mine, right, which killed thirteen Sri Lankan army officers in Jaffna, ceriyā? Do you have that? They were passing in a truck, and the land mine was set off and about thirteen officers died on the spot. They were all Sinhalese. That sparked the riots. It was July 23, 1983. A very hot day. The riots began the next morning. They started burning and looting. Houses were burned down, people were killed. The whole of Colombo was burning.
The twenty-fourth night, a curfew was declared by the government for the next three or four days, but the looting and burning continued. I did not leave the house, and I did not allow my husband or my children to leave the house. Then, on the twenty-fifth night, some thugs brought torches to set our house on fire.
When Kalyani saw the thugs coming down the road, she went to tell her husband, who was in the garden. Together they went to find their children, Haran and Krisha. The four of them jumped over the low wall into the neighboring garden and stayed hidden in that house. The man who owned the house was an atheist from northern India, who had kept himself apart from the conflict surrounding him. From her hiding place Kalyani could hear him talking with his caretakers about his business and the weather. As though there were not a war going on outside. She could not
really believe it. There were the sounds of the men pacing back and forth and conversing, and under that, a steady sound of crackling and falling: the sounds of her house burning. She closed her eyes and listened to glass breaking and men yelling, the very calm and even voice of the Indian man speaking to his servants. She thought to herself, A funny type of man, to argue that there is no God. Perhaps the gods thought it an amusing jest, to have someone who did not believe in them be the person who saved Kalyani's life. When the riots died down they crept back into their house to see what was left, and found there was nothing but a shell of where they had lived.
When the riots died down, they all went to Haran's school and slept there for weeks, surrounded by other Tamil refugees in a makeshift camp. It was very hot and very crowded and they lay body to body on the floor of the school. Even in their sleep they dreamed of one another's sweat. In August, they were sent to Jaffna, crammed into a cargo ship. All the time, people were so close together that it was easy for government officials to forget individual names. This is how people become indistinct, lose each other. You become part of a crowd. Haran was only one of many young men, and to a stranger's eye, maybe a Westerner's eye, they all looked alike. Kalyani wanted to send him some-where different, a place where his body would not be blurred into so many others. She did not want him to be one of the young Tamil men who disappeared under suspicion of being a Tiger.
A short while later, Kalyani managed to send Haran to the United States to live with Vani. He was just the right age to join the Tamil militancy, and there was no way he could stay in the country into which he had been born. The following year, Kalyani's husband went to work in the Middle East, and it was just Kalyani and Krisha. Haran never saw his father again; he died in the Middle East. Kalyani herself left Sri Lanka long ago and floats between countries and relatives, a nomad. She is not a permanent part of anyone's life. It is cold here in the United States, too cold for her. It is winter here and it is snowing.
I want to go back to Colombo and live there. I would be on my own. The weather here is not agreeing with me, she says to me now and looks out the window.
Once out of Sri Lanka and into the West, no one goes back. This is unsaid. It would be insanity. Her voice rarely betrays anything selfish, but I am struck by what I recognize in it. Homesick. There is nothing to go back to there. Her house was torched. She lived in that house for a decade. My mother has always mourned the burned family photographs, but now I realize how much more was there than just the pictures. My aunt is almost too quiet to hear.
Not only the pictures, she says. Everything. House and property, everything. Nothing left, nothing left.
In a moment, her voice is her own again, matter-of-fact. Her eyes are on the sari blouse, the needle and thread moving in and out of the silk.
THE WEEK BEFORE HARAN left Sri Lanka, a friend of his died. This happened in a way that made Haran wonder if he would ever come back. The man who died was a friend of his, but also a teacher. He was the principal of the secondary school that Haran had attended in Jaffna after the riots. He was a very kind man who had always encouraged Haran to study, despite the hanging despair of their family's displacement. Haran sometimes thought of this man as a grandfather. After he was dead this feeling grew.
The teacher's name was Arun, but his students all called him Sir, even those who had graduated. He inspired in them an absolute and almost British formality. He was already very thin and pale by the time Haran met him, and now, as Haran was going away, he was on the verge of retirement. He had been a teacher for many years. Haran went to say good-bye to him, and to thank him. He did not take anything; he could not offer anything the old man did not have. He felt glad when the door was opened to him to see his teacher's face brighten. This, at least, he could return to Arun—some sort of pleasure in simple company. He liked to think he could make the old gentleman happy in some small way. The two of them sat down in the kitchen, and Arun made Haran a cup of tea without sugar. He did this without asking, and Haran saw by the gesture that the old man remembered him exactly, even to the manner in which he drank his tea. It was a gesture of infinite hospitality and affection that made Haran smile. He had grown up in Colombo, but Jaffna, too, had become a home.
The old man was very excited to see him, and Haran saw that he had some piece of happy news that he had been waiting to tell someone. He thought his teacher still looked well. The old man was a cricket fan and had played for the national team when he was younger. Haran could still see the memory of the strong, sturdy, slim build of the batsman within his teacher's aging, sharper frame. He carried the recollection of his own athleticism, and Haran had admired this vigor in him. He had it even now, at sixty-eight, which was old for a man at this time in Sri Lanka. He was perhaps even dearer to Haran because his very age made real the idea that some people lived long lives. That not everyone died or was ruined in violence.
Arun was glowing now with his news, and Haran leaned over his tea to stir and listen. There was to be a cricket match, the old man explained, a grand match between the students of the school and the Sri Lankan Army team. The old man had arranged it himself, he admitted, and he was looking forward to being the referee. He took out a newspaper to show the announcement to Haran. The item had made the front page. Haran, seeing the notice, smiled wistfully, wishing he could stay to play cricket. The old man saw him sigh and said, There will be other games and other times, young man. Haran smiled and sipped his tea, thinking that he would like to look so well at this age. He thought that he would like to sit with the old man for many more days and nights and hear his stories: about the liberation of Sri Lanka, the great national cricket matches, the tea plantations, the villages at the edge of the sea where men made their living fishing. He thought that no one told a story as well as the old man, and he thought that he would like to be like that, when he was old, if he were ever old.
There is not always another time or another game, not even for the old man whom Haran had learned to love during his short time in Jaffna. After Haran left him that evening, Arun, who had been the master of Haran's school, a gentleman, a scholar, an athlete, was killed. It only took one shot; he did not even know that that was what it was, because the gunman simply leaned through a window and let the weapon touch the old man's skull as he lay sleeping. As though it were only an insect that could be swatted away. Later, they found out that the assassin was a Tamil rebel who was angry with the old gentleman for arranging for a Tamil school to have a match with the Sri Lankan Army.
When he heard the news, Haran's Heart—which had broken with the burning of his Colombo home—broke again. It broke quietly but firmly, and he knew that it could not be fixed this time. He was leaving and that was a decision that could not be retrieved or undone. Now he did not wish for it to be. What a stupid, stupid country, Haran thought angrily. These were the things that ended lives, that ended stories? A cricket match?
AND SO FROM THE TIME she was a child, to well after she left Sri Lanka, my mother knew violence. It went back generations in her family; she had seen it and she knew that it could touch her children, as it had touched her sister's. Because she grew up in Jaffna, my mother fell in love with my father as much for what he was not as she did for what he was. He was not a terrorist. He was not violent. He saw people blown apart and wanted nothing more than to put them back together, just as her brother, Kumaran, had once assembled buildings, in the same manner that she herself constructed minds, gave them a framework. What did she love about my father? She liked the quick, unadulterated sweetness of his smile, which was sometimes so innocent it was like a child's. She liked the way his black hair waved back from his high forehead, that she could see already the honest baldness of his old age. She liked the look of his stethoscope around his neck, and the clean boy-smell of his hands and his neck. She liked that he was young and beginning to go gray; she thought it meant that he had known great sorrow, and that she could relate to that. She knew that if he could have put her brother back t
ogether for her, he would have done so. Years later, in a house in Canada, my mother recalled what she thought was her brother's tipping point, the moment when he tumbled across the line of sanity.
He was riding a bus, she said. He was riding a bus and the day was very hot, and so the people on the bus had left the windows open, so as to let in the cool evening breeze. The breeze traveled into his hair and out again. He remembered this very clearly, later, when he was telling us this story, just as I am telling it to you now. I think this is what he intended in relating it, that it be passed on, that things not be forgotten, the way one dead man can be forgotten. It was just a bus, just a bus full of people on the way home, to their mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. But the bus reached a crossroads and a roadblock, and they were pulled over by some members of the army. It was not yet a time of violence, and to be pulled over in this manner was still unusual, and your uncle, my brother, Kumaran, he knew that something was wrong. They all knew, and it blew over them as the breeze had blown over them, and then the soldiers boarded the bus. This made Kumaran very nervous. Just from looking around, he guessed that he was one of the only Tamil men on the bus, and he knew that they had not boarded the bus to search for a Sinhalese man. They were looking for someone, someone very specific. Kumaran looked up and he was horrified, because the soldier at the forefront was aiming his gun directly at Kumaran's head. He gave out a great gasp and began to scream out that he wasn't the person they were looking for, that O God, it wasn't him, but it was too late because the soldier had already fired and the bus was erupting in a panic. Kumaran felt that the side of his head was very sticky and he felt very strange and detached, and he reached up to feel the side of his head. He had been shot at very close range, but he was not dead. How was this? He turned around slowly, his eyes tracking the soldiers more slowly, slower still, because he had been shot and blood was beginning to clog his brain and his vision. And he saw that the soldiers were behind him and that they were handcuffing the man behind him and dragging him away, his bloody shoulder leaving a trail behind him, their footprints in his blood marking the aisle of the bus. He realized that they hadn't been aiming for him, but that if they had been aiming at him, no one would have done anything. He would have died, and he thought about this, and he swallowed, realizing the words that had been on his tongue at the moment that misdirected bullet was fired: O God, it's not me, I'm not even Tamil.
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