Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  Nadarajan: I can tell you about him, although I have never met him. There are sentences about the war in news stories, things that are true and not precisely true. It was a war that my parents passed on to me in small ways: newsletters in the mail with updates, letters from home. A strange inheritance, this grand play in which Nadarajan is the chorus. He is banned in many countries—most countries. Interpol says that he speaks English, but I imagine that he does not want to, because he is fighting a war for the people and language to which he was born.

  “Very alert, known to use disguise and capable of handling sophisticated weaponry and explosives, hair combed back, stout build.” This is the Interpol description. Above the description (“Person may be dangerous”) there are two pictures of him. He has a mustache and, after what seems to me the curious fashion of South Asian men, he has what theWestern world would consider too much hair. The lush sign of a fierce and pulsing life. He is forty-eight years old, and this means that he is of the generation of my parents. This means that if what they write is true, that in 1975 he killed the man who was the mayor of Jaffna, he was only a boy. Only a decade younger than my father. Not even as old as I am now. He looks like men whom I have known all my life.

  He is not the person who started the movement of the Tamil Tigers. The literature of terrorism (and there is a literature) says that the Tigers began in England. They credit Victor Rajadurai, intellectual revolutionary, Kumaran's London acquaintance. But it was Nadarajan who rose to eminence as the political and military mastermind behind the war that destroyed the country. I have read my father's books. A scholar wrote:* “It is certain that the Tigers would not have lasted so long and been able to inflict so many losses on their enemy if it were not for their fanaticism. Assistance from the Tamil state in India, as well as the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora from Norway to Botswana, has played an important role. But this, again, does not fully explain the riddle . . . in the final analysis, there is no satisfactory explanation for the Tamil Tigers and their fanaticism.”

  But there is an explanation: It is Nadarajan. It is Victor. Their sheer charisma and magnetism and capacity for violence. Nadarajan became the face of the movement, but it was Victor who pulled Kumaran in, made him his protégé. It was Victor who was the diplomatic face of the Tamil rebels. It was Victor who let Kumaran go.

  * Walter Lacqueur, The New Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 196. Quote altered slightly for clarity (explanation of Tamil Nadu).

  AFTER KUMARAN DISAPPEARED, my mother did not see him for years. No one in the family did. This ate at her daily. All of them. Then one day one of them—it was Kalyani—saw him on the news and stopped, speechless, breathless, unable even to point and to say: Kumaran. There he is, our boy who is no longer a boy, our boy who has become something that the newspapers would say is barely human.

  His mother had known that he was not dead. She felt his chest rise and fall somewhere on the island. But they stopped saying his name, knowing that if they said it aloud, someone far away in the government might hear it, and then they would all disappear. People who had been tasted by a passing wind and spat out again.

  KUMARAN WAS THE ONLY one who did not leave, and because he did not leave Sri Lanka he left the family instead. They held and reflected his presence between them, all of them. They wondered if they would even know if he was dead, and for whose deaths he was responsible. People they knew were found in pieces; the conflict and the movement were notable for how many Tamil lives they cost. The first to be killed were Tamil opponents of the movement. The traitors within. Once they read a newspaper account of him shooting an injured friend in the forehead to prevent his capture by the Sri Lankan Army. Once they were mailed an unmarked envelope containing the shards of a glass capsule, of the kind that was used to hold cyanide, and took it to mean that he had killed himself and had it sent to them as a message. But then later again they heard stories of him. Letters were slipped under their doorsteps. Like other Tamil families, they paid a Tiger collector who came to their house, asking for funds. They did not ask him about Kumaran. They gave him every rupee they had in the house. His mother thought about the girl they had found for him, the young woman he had planned to marry.

  Unfinished Marriage, Promised Marriage: Her name was Meenakshi, and she was a lovely young schoolteacher whose face had begun to look old the day he disappeared. He never wrote to her or called her. There was no contact. They had been friends from childhood, and Kumaran's mother knew her mother. They never talked about where he had gone. One day the women saw each other at the market, and Meenakshi's mother stopped Kumaran's with a light touch on her arm. Meenakshi is going to Australia at the end of the month, she told her. Kumaran's mother knew what this meant, although it was not explicitly stated. She nodded and murmured her congratulations.

  But later that month, before leaving on her planned trip to Australia, Meenakshi was killed by a Tiger suicide bomber in Colombo. Collateral damage. Kumaran heard the news and tried to kill himself. It was only the voice of Victor that stopped him. This is what it costs, my friend, he said.

  And Kumaran believed him.

  Later, when he fell in Love again, he remembered her. He married Janani's mother in a Hindu ceremony run in the heart of Tiger country, and as he went around the homām with her, he watched her feet move in small, sari-bound steps. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after, those legs would wear a soldier's uniform. He did not know then that she too would die. He would have married her even if he knew, of course. And she left him with a daughter. A widower, someone who had Loved a Wife—but a Tiger, still.

  SUTHAN: HOW IS SOMEONE a Tiger in the new world? On the streets of Toronto, we took Janani shopping, and when we went into a store and told them whom she was marrying, the younger women in particular wore looks of respect or alarm. Janani seemed not to notice.

  Between one store and the next, Rajie asked her:

  Do you know what your fiancé does?

  He works for his father at the car dealership, Janani said.

  Right, Rajie said. And he is involved in some illegal activity, so that the money can go back to the Tigers.

  What? Janani said, suddenly sitting up and leaning forward from where she sat in the backseat.

  No one else is going to tell you, Rajie said. Maybe none of them knows.

  It sounds like he is just doing what has to be done.

  This whole conversation was in Tamil. I cannot tell you how I understood all of these words in Tamil. Some of them I had never heard before. But it was the clearest conversation. I could not participate in it. This was between them.

  What does he do? Janani asked.

  I don't know all of it, Rajie said. But a lot of the young men here do it. They say that they believe in the war that you were fighting over there, and they steal, they sell, they deal.

  Deal?

  Rajie didn't answer that.

  Do you know about this? Janani turned to me.

  This doesn't happen in the United States, I said, putting up my hands. I don't know anything about this. Suthan is someone the Tigers chose for you. And you let them.

  She stared straight ahead, into the bare stretch of highway ahead of us, through Rajie's spattered windshield.

  I did things I did not want to do, she said, to reach an end that I thought was just. Maybe he is just doing the same thing. Doing what he thinks he has to do. They would not send me into something I could not do. This is something that is good—for me, for him, for them.

  Maybe, Rajie said. Be careful—people who deal in businesses like that have enemies.

  SUTHAN: I DID NOT REALIZE that Rajie had known him, growing up, until they encountered each other one day on the driveway in front of our Toronto house.

  Rajani, he said, very formally.

  Suthan! she exclaimed. Somehow he had surprised her, although she knew that he came around every once in a rare while with his father.

  He looked at her, and she looked actually a little
afraid.

  It's nice to see you? she said, sounding like her father on that first day when he had proposed that we be friends.

  Yes, Suthan said. How is your father? Is he here?

  He's inside, with uncle, Rajie said.

  Vijendran got out of the car and stood up and frowned at her.

  Hi, uncle. Well, she said to me, let's go.

  What was that all about? I said, walking quickly to keep up with her.

  We don't get along, really, she said, almost under her breath.

  The reasons were obvious.

  He's going to get himself in trouble, she said. It's one thing to support them, the Tigers. Here that's not illegal. But I've heard a story about another man, around his age, who is also running some illicit businesses. And like Suthan, he says he is giving the Tigers the profits. But not all of these men are honest, and if he and Suthan find themselves at odds? Men in war will do anything. In Sri Lanka, some of the Tigers killed other Tamils who disagreed with them. Like my father's brother.

  I would hate to see that happen here, she said. In war there are two kinds of people: the people who lose, and the people who profit. The people who make the money, and the people who are driven out. Do you know how many displaced people there are? And then you think that the only way out is to leave, but the war just moves with you. I wish that if people were going to fight here, they would fight to leave it behind.

  Maybe that's not so easy, I said, hurrying to keep up with her. Or even right. To just forget it?

  I don't know, she said. Ask my father. Ask yours. Ask them whom they Love, whom they trust. If there's anyone left.

  [aru]

  MURALI

  E D G I N G E V E R C L O S E R

  .

  A crow will overcome an owl in the daytime;

  the king who would conquer his enemy must have a suitable time.

  — TIRUKKURAL , chapter 95, line 8

  THE VILLAGE OF ARITALAI HAS BEEN EVACUATED MANY TIMES since my father left it. War comes and civilians leave—for schools, churches, shelters, emigration. But Ariyalai's citizens still recognize one another across crowds in other countries. Once upon a time in Ariyalai, everyone was related closely enough to be kin, but distantly enough to be lovers. The bloodlines, like the roads, went largely unnamed. It had never been necessary before. But now we follow those attachments with desperation, as though in losing them we might lose track of who we are.

  MY FATHER CAME FROM A family that loves without hesitation or embarrassment. Later some of them would grow out of this, but it was in this mood of absolute freedom and passion that they were Married. I told you of Jegan, who spotted Tharshi and asked for her hand when she was twelve. Perhaps their union passed this kind of abandon to their children at birth. My father's oldest brother, Neelan, carried it beyond Jaffna and became to Murali an example of Marriage Done Right—although there were others who cursed Neelan silently and said that he had Married the Enemy.

  My uncle, Neelan, the eldest of Tharshi's children, is nearly two decades older than my father, and much loved. If Neelan is not scandalous, then he is at least Out of the Ordinary. Marriage Without Consent was perhaps easier for my father, because his brother Neelan had already Married the Enemy. She was the Enemy only by an ethnic definition. These definitions are always ugly: Sinhalese intruder in a Tamil family.

  WHEN HE WAS TWENTY-THREE and a first-year student in medical school—another doctor-to-be—Neelan caught typhoid. No one knew from whom: it could have been another doctor, a patient, a nurse. He was severely ill for nearly three months. He boarded in a private house—across the road from a relative of his future wife. There was no treatment for the fever. One morning, he woke up and found that the men who slept on either side of him had died during the night. He himself was so ill that his mother, Tharshi, thought that even if he recovered, he would have to give up medicine.

  During the illness he became friends with his future wife's sister. That was how they met. The object of his affections was only sixteen or seventeen, shy and slight. She was also unusual: Nirosha was a Sinhalese girl from Galle, in the southern part of the island, but she had already traveled to the Tamil north—a rarity in those days. When her parents found out what was going on, they took her back to the south. But after he got better, he could not forget her. He had already been promised to a cousin, in the silent, expected way aunts and uncles had of trading cousins in certain families. But he wrote Nirosha love letters in which their languages were mixed. And eventually, by scraping together their own money, she found her way back to him. After Jegan died, and Neelan took his ashes to the sea, he settled his family's debts. Then he turned to his mother and said,

  And what should I do about this girl?

  He and Tharshi had never spoken of it, but he knew she knew. Tharshi looked at her eldest son, her eyes full of love and grief. He hoped his own wife always—and never—looked like that for him.

  Marry her, Tharshi said.

  They were married in a lengthy Hindu ceremony of which her Buddhist parents remained happily unaware. Later a Buddhist priest made peace between the families, and Nirosha's parents forgave her. But when she began visiting around Ariyalai for the first time as his bride, she was welcomed at one house, he remembers, with tea in a broken cup—a small but unspeakable rudeness in a country where all hospitality and love begins with tea.

  By 1983, they too lived in Colombo. When the Sinhalese-Tamil riots started, His Wife the Enemy, the Loved, kept him prisoner in the house for a year, afraid for his life. Today everyone has learned how to say I am not a Tamil Tiger—in three languages. Neelan and Nirosha are no exception.

  LIKE, LOGAN, NEELAN WAS the eldest son. He had seven siblings, and six of them did not worry him. The seventh was Uma.

  Uma: she was the youngest of his sisters. Slight and frail, she was deliberately quiet rather than shy. She had too-big eyes in a too-small face. They were unusually light in color, nearly amber. They were very clear, still, and distant, like a cool lake into which a stone had never been thrown. As her now-grown sisters had before her, Uma went to school every day at St. Anne's, where all the subjects were taught in English. Every day she walked alone up the hill into the heart of Ariyalai. Every afternoon when school was over, she did not linger to play or talk with the other children, or even to run errands for Tharshi. Uma came home, and went into her room, and closed the door. No one really knew what went on in that room, or in that head. No one was close to her. She was somehow unknowable. Those were not Sri Lankan eyes; they were always elsewhere. In other countries.

  Uma was a brain, that much was certain; like Tharshi, she excelled in school. Everyone knew. People whispered to each other about how smart Uma was, how she was always closeted in her room. Now that there were so few children left, it was her own room, and Tharshi did not want to disturb her. But it worried her that the door was never open. She had the uncomfortable feeling that her last daughter was a genius. Not just smart, like Tharshi or Kunju. They had been intriguing, even alluring in their own ways. But Uma was a full-blown genius. And that could be intimidating. What good could genius do a girl? Especially a reclusive girl like Uma? Tharshi was proud of the possibility of genius, egged it on, cuddled it close in secret—but she was a little frightened of her daughter who seemed always to be looking into another country. In the middle of her family, Uma lived alone. Uma was present and absent from the household at the same time. She had no part in the daily fabric of the household as Tharshi ran it. Once inside her room, Uma would not leave even for dinner. Tharshi left trays outside her door. In the morning, she collected the empty plates that had piled up during the night.

  EYES THAT SEE INTO other countries come with ears that hear foreign voices. One Sunday morning, Tharshi was sifting flour on the front porch and heard an unearthly cry.

  What was that? Murali asked, sitting up. He had been lying in the sunlight on the porch, immersed in a textbook. Tharshi was already running into the house. Murali followed
her. She called out for Uma, and there was no answer. She called again, and again, and then for the neighbor.

  From the garden came the neighbor's voice: What is it?

  Probably nothing, Tharshi thought and did not reply, suddenly feeling sick. She walked down the hall to Uma's room. The door was closed. She knocked hesitantly. There was no answer. She opened the door slowly. Uma was convulsing, her eyes wide open, her mouth moving soundlessly, her hands clamped over her ears, as though the house was full of a sound far too loud to bear.

  THE DOCTORS TOLD THARSHI that Uma was probably epileptic. Tharshi called her eldest son to see what he thought. Neelan's pause on the other end of the line was too long, and she knew it, and he knew that she knew it. It was very late to diagnose epilepsy, he told her. It was not a sickness that manifested itself suddenly at sixteen. What was going on in Uma's life? How was she doing in school? Did she have any friends?

  Tharshi was even more terrified to realize she knew the answers to none of these questions.

  NO MORE WAS SAID OF IT, but as usual, rumor wormed its way around Ariyalai—a place where everyone was related closely enough to be kin and distantly enough to be lovers—and everyone tiptoed around Uma. Neelan called once a week to talk to her. How are you, he asked her. He meant it kindly, but it was a sign of something serious all the same. She always managed to answer without providing any information at all. He had Tharshi take her to an Ariyalai doctor. Uma submitted without argument to being examined, but the doctor diagnosed nothing. Tharshi bowed her head at his answer and did not believe him.