Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  Tharshi met privately with all of Uma's teachers, who told her that her Beloved Fatherless Girl was nothing short of brilliant. Tharshi thanked them. And then she asked: Has she been acting odd at all? How does she behave in class? Does she have any friends? It embarrassed her to be so vocal and persistent. She was accustomed to asking for little. The teachers looked at her with curious eyes but answered her politely. Some of them had gone to school with Tharshi themselves. They pitied her, playing detective in her own daughter's brain. Tharshi felt their pity, resented it, put her resentment away, and waited patiently for them to tell her what was wrong with her daughter, her precious Uma, with her too-big eyes in her too-small face. Those luminous eyes that saw into other countries. Otherworld eyes. In the end what they were able to tell her amounted only to this: Uma has always been odd.

  Tharshi thanked them for telling her what she had already known.

  IT HAPPENED AGAIN ONE day on the way home from school. One of her older sisters had lent Uma a bicycle, a rare favor, so that she could transport a very large project to school. As Uma rode home with her basket full of books, her hair, which had grown much longer, billowed out behind her in the wind. A man passing by saw the skinny girl on the bicycle and thought to himself that she was more hair than girl.

  When she did not arrive home on time, Tharshi was alarmed. Had the neighbors seen her? No. Tharshi walked up the hill into the village, to St. Anne's, to see if Uma's teachers knew where she was. None of them did, but when they saw the fear on Tharshi's face, they all came back down the hill with her to hunt for Uma.

  Then Tharshi remembered that Uma had taken the bicycle.

  THARSHI WALKED ALL OVER Kandy Road until she saw the place where the bushes had given way to something—or someone—careening out of control. And then she heard a scream she did not want to recognize. Tharshi found Uma by following the sound of that terrified voice. Picking her way through the brush and debris to her daughter.

  Uma was crumpled under the bicycle, its weight seeming enormous above her small battered body. She was screaming, and this time the scream definitely had sound, sound so awful that Tharshi trembled and quivered and forgot her humiliation. She remembered the sound, had heard it before and did not know where, wanted more than anything for it to stop. But it was as though Uma was sleepwalking. They could not stir her. Eventually her voice ran out, and her hands bled where they clutched to the spokes on the bicycle wheel. They had to untangle her from the metal, cutting her shredded clothes away from her body and the wheels. Falling off the bicycle was not what had cut her so badly; it seemed to Tharshi that Uma had been clawing at herself. There were long scratch marks all over her too-small face, even near her too-big eyes, which were wide open and unseeing.

  THEY TOOK UMA TO ANOTHER DOCTOR. And another. And another. They took her to a psychiatrist, who gave her drugs that did not work.

  They took her to Neelan, who after one look at his sister became completely silent. He closed up his own practice and took her to a temple on the top of a mountain, where they saw an old and holy man. He tilted her face up, blessed her, and sprinkled her with sweet holy ash. This changed nothing, except perhaps to make the gods love her even more.

  The gods took Uma for themselves.

  The doctors took Uma from Tharshi and put her away.

  YEARS LATER, WHEN THE little boy with the heart murmur grows up and becomes Dr. Murali and a father himself, I ask him about his family, especially his sisters, of whom I have heard almost nothing. We can recite all the names easily, but we want to know what happened. Tell me what happened. Did Uma become very famous? I know she was smart. Tell me what she did. Did she get married? Did she get a job? No one knows what happened to Uma. He answers the questions very slowly. He says: Uma got very sick. She went to the hospital, and she never left. In what is left of the small boy's memory, this is truth. But there is more.

  What he does not say: sometimes my sister Uma heard voices. Sometimes I worry that my children, their children will hear voices—although I should know better. I worry that you will hear her, that she will say—Hold my madness for me please. What he does not say: that once, long ago, one of his relatives said to him that he thought Uma had been disappointed in Love, and that she had gone crazy because of it. That this was why she was UnMarried. Alone. Uma was not like Kunju, who had chosen to go bitter instead of crazy. Uma did not have a choice. The constellation of Uma's Brain had reconfigured itself; the auspicious stars had fallen out of alignment because Uma had been UnLoved.

  His mother, Tharshi, is dead, but he knows what she would say if he repeated this story aloud. Tharshi, who loved Uma, would have said her youngest daughter was just Too Special to Get Married.

  [elu]

  V A N I

  E D G I N G E V E R C L O S E R .

  The words of the good are like a staff in a slippery place.

  .

  — T I RU K K U R A L , chapter 42, line 5

  IF THE STORY OF THAT HAPPENED TO UMA WAS SHUT UP IN the cool and quiet cabinet of memory—as family secrets often are—then the story of what eventually happened to Vani's aunt Mayuri is entombed. It is buried so deep that to find it, you would have to walk halfway around the world, back to that teardrop country, and to the house where Vairavan's children used to live.

  What happened after Dr. Bala walked down those porch steps for the last time? Mayuri's mother, Lakshmi, told her that Mr. Thiru, that meddling man, had been able to stop the Marriage because it was not meant to be. Mayuri shook off this explanation. She became a teacher. She lived at home for many years, and as her voice got louder and Lakshmi's got quieter, it slowly became Mayuri's house and not Lakshmi's. One day Lakshmi died and the village of Urelu, full as it had been of people who loved her and Vairavan, barely noticed, barely stopped to pay its respects.

  What happened is that Mayuri became what is known in common parlance as a spinster, and a not very nice spinster at that. What happened is that Mayuri got very lonely, and very quiet, until one day, a new teacher sat down next to her at the noon meal, and she found to her own surprise that she had a friend.

  THE FRIEND'S NAME WAS SHANTHI, and she was all by herself in the world. She was not Married. She had never been Married. She had no other friends because she had just moved to Urelu from Colombo. Mayuri looked across the table and saw part of herself in Shanthi. They were quickly so close that they seemed to form a family. Two women, UnMarried, without other attachments or obligations. They did everything together. The two spinsters vacationed together, shopped together, went out to movies together. Their names, when spoken of in the village's many households, became one. ShanthiMayuri. Coupled with Mayuri's older, more established family, Shanthi found herself with an automatic welcome at many doors that would not ordinarily have been open to her.

  She was a strange woman. Had Mayuri been more observant, she might have seen that Shanthi had no other friends even after she had been there for years, and that although Mayuri's old friends did not ignore her, their voices grew formal when Shanthi entered the conversation. They did not like her; they did not trust her; they did not know her. They had no desire to know her. They did not understand why Mayuri loved her. If Mayuri had thought about it a little longer or a little harder, perhaps she would have seen that she too did not understand why she loved Shanthi.

  But Mayuri loved her, and as always, Love is unreasonable. Shanthi was a snake charmer, and Mayuri loved Shanthi most because Shanthi had chosen her. Mayuri could not forget that once, a long time ago, someone had not.

  THEY LIVED THEIR LIVES TOGETHER, and Mayuri, who once trusted no one, learned to trust again. She did not hesitate to give Shanthi anything. They were like sisters, after all, she thought. They opened a bank account together.

  That was the first mistake.

  It was commonly accepted that they were both a little crazy, maybe more than a little crazy. But Mayuri was the daughter of a good family, and so allowances were made. Every good teacher had her eccentr
icities. And Mayuri was a good teacher. She was also the oldest woman in Urelu to ride a bicycle, and it was a tandem she shared with Shanthi. She wore her hair loose, although that was considered odd in a woman of her age and standing, and her hair had not gone white, even by the time she was fifty-five. It still fell in thick, black, shiny locks around her face, which remained unwrinkled and unbeautiful. At school, the other teachers asked one another enviously if she dyed her hair and asked one another what she was using on her face to look like she was still thirty. She never spoke to men, except those who were related to her, unless it was a matter of urgent business.

  And what my mother had thought about her—that she had allowed things to happen to her, rather than creating a life—became less true. Slowly, in choosing Shanthi, Mayuri chose the way her life formed around her. Shanthi held the trusting Mayuri so thoroughly in her thrall that those who had known Mayuri in her prickly youth thought the newcomer might as well have conjured up a new Mayuri entirely. They were familiar in a way that was more than sisterly. No one had ever seen a relationship quite like this before.

  If they had seen the situation truly, they might have come to understand that Shanthi was not reviving Mayuri. She was—in a sense—killing her. Mayuri was too old for her brother to manage her affairs. Logan was a dorai now; he would not interfere. What she chose to do with the small fortune she had made by saving and investing was her own business.

  ONE OF MAYURI'S STUDENTS was the first to notice that the crotchety English teacher was not quite herself. Every day she seemed less so. She was sick, he thought, and no one was going to take care of her. The boy had a Heart big enough to love even the meanest teacher. At the end of one school day, as he unloaded his books, he said to his mother that he did not like to see Miss Vairavan out of sorts. He thought she was ill. She had been coughing. She looked tired. At first his mother laughed at her son's concern, but then she thought about it. Her son was an observant child, a sharp child, and if he thought something was wrong, she was better safe than sorry.

  She called her friend Sarojini, who was Mayuri's cousin.

  FAMILY IS FAMILY, AND SO Sarojini, although only a distant relation by Urelu standards, walked the path to Mayuri's one evening. She found her older cousin doubled over on the kitchen floor and her cup of tea smashed on the ground.

  She was not just old.

  But also sick.

  Sarojini called Logan.

  BUT BY NOW, LOGAN WAS IN CANADA. Eldest son–ship is difficult to exercise from abroad. He could not mistake the urgency in Sarojini's voice, but Mayuri insisted she was fine, and that her friend Shanthi could take care of her. Logan had little choice but to agree. Had he known the extent of the power his sister was relinquishing, he would have been appalled.

  Shanthi pronounced Mayuri unfit to take care of any of her own affairs and said she would be caretaker. No one in Urelu wanted to contest that, especially when it was what Mayuri herself wanted. Power of attorney went to Shanthi. The bank account, once joint, went to Shanthi. The school no longer wanted Mayuri to teach but allotted her a generous pension, which went directly to Shanthi—as compensation, she noted, for a great service: nursing her sick friend would take a considerable amount of her time and she herself was an old woman. It would take so much of her time that it was determined that she could not continue teaching either. There would be enough of Mayuri's money to support them both.

  THERE WERE LETTERS FIRST. Then phone calls. Whispers, in a barely recognizable accent. She doesn't even feed me. She wants to sell the house—my house! What? Who is this? Logan's daughter demanded into the receiver, and after that heard only a click.

  NEARLY A YEAR LATER, Shanthi herself called Logan. I'm an old woman. I'm tired. It's not my job to take care of your sister. Fine, he said. I can arrange for family to see to her needs. It was all done; Logan flinched when he saw the drained bank account balance and heard from Sarojini how emaciated his sister looked and how well fed her friend seemed. Forget all that, he decided. Let's get her out of there, he whispered over the phone to Sarojini, who was so horrified at what was happening that she was remembering all over again that obligation sometimes brings love with it.

  They got her out of there. She looked so happy to leave, Sarojini reported, and ate as though she had not eaten during her entire time with Shanthi. They made her sign an agreement not to see Shanthi again.

  ONE MONTH LATER, LOGAN receives a panicked phone call: Mayuri has disappeared from her guardian's house—she had been left unattended for only one moment—she is gone—gone—gone. She is too strong now to have been taken against her will. She is still charmed by Shanthi. And Shanthi is still charmed by the promise of a free ride.

  If you want to know what happened to Mayuri, there is only one person you can ask: Shanthi. And you have to find her first.

  MY MOTHER'S FATHER TOO DEAD BEFORE SHE MARRIED.

  Aravindran's children called him Ayah, which in itself is unusual, meaning “sir” and not “father.” Kumaran was thirteen when Ayah died. When he told me about it, his hair was gray and silver.

  I can't really tell you about Ayah. I can only give you the perceptions of him I had when I was young. I wasn't at home when he died. I was boarded and studying at St. John's, in Jaffna proper. And very late one night, my uncle Logan came to the hostel unexpectedly. I came down to see him, and he said, Your father has expired.

  I didn't cry; I think I didn't quite realize that Ayah was dead. I just got into the car and Logan drove and we went to Urelu. So that was the death. I think I cried during the ceremony. We performed the ritual acts for the dead. The younger children weren't allowed to go to the cremation ground itself. I think they thought it was just too much for us. So we stayed at home. I received a great many telegrams of condolence from my classmates. I think I really broke down when I got back to my school.

  A few months later I stopped working at my school. I just stopped. And my class master called me up and said, You're not working anymore, and I said yes and he said, Do you realize that you're taking a valuable place that someone else would like to have, and I said, fine, I'll leave. And I left. That is, I went to see Logan, who was running the tea estates, and said I didn't want to study anymore. I wasn't interested in working on mathematical problems, which suddenly became very unreal to me after my father died. It seemed to have no importance.

  So there you are. Kumaran stopped very suddenly and blinked.

  I don't have very many memories of when he was alive. Just a few, but they are very vivid. I would say he was an extremely emotional person, who could cry fairly easily, and this used to embarrass me. And as a result of this for a very long time after that I made myself unable to cry.

  I saw him cry sometimes not from sadness, but out of pride in his family. I think he identified with them very strongly. Silly things could make him cry, like a cricket match between his extended family and the people in the area in which we used to live. If the family lost, he cried. If the family won, he cried. Ayah used to confide in me quite a lot because I was the only son, and I think after he died I had all of this knowledge that he held within himself. What my father had said to me about the honor and responsibility of being the eldest son and taking care of the family. I have never cried in the way my father did. It was as though my father had cried enough for all of us.

  I also saw my father cry in the sort of mystic trance that quite a number of people in Jaffna used to get into. It was part of the way they related to what they called God. In the Nallur temple it was not unusual to go into a trance like this. I also have memories of following with him behind a guru, a saintly man, who was not living far from where we were. Often we did this. It would happen in the morning. It was like going for a walk. There were no words. The saintly man would lead. The others would follow a few steps behind. It was only later that I realized that these walks with my father and the guru corresponded to what we Hindus call darshan. The mere act of proximity, holiness rubbing off. The mystical aspect.<
br />
  I remember only one negative thing about my father: Ayah telling off the cleaner, who was supposed to belong to the untouchable caste.

  That more than bothered me. I had a sentiment of both injustice and rebellion against my father. In retrospect, I think I probably possess many of the same faults. I'm not going to go into details, but of course, I think I am totally free of any caste, color, or sexual prejudice. Not because I was like that always. But because of the kind of person I chose to be. It was a way in which I did not want to be like my father.

  [ettu]

  KUMARA N

  NOT YET DEPARTED

  .

  Virtue will burn up the soul that is without love,

  even as the sun burns up the creature that is without bone.

  — TIRUKKURAL , chapter 8, line 7

  KUMARAN GREW AWAY FROM his family. He passed through many nations, no longer a citizen of Sri Lanka.

  A few years after Ayah died, I told Logan, who now had authority over me as my mother's only brother, that I wanted to go to England. Why England? I certainly didn't want to do medicine, which was maybe the thing to do. Because I couldn't imagine spending my life dealing with sickness, misery, obliged to look at blood. So that was a flight. For part of my time there I worked as a trainee at a firm. We used to have quite a good time, the students at the office. We didn't do much work. We went to work at half past nine—tea at ten, back at eleven, out for lunch at twelve, back at one or two, out for tea again at half past three o'clock. We used to go and watch rugby matches, or sometimes cricket, on the weekends. Sometimes we went to the cinema. This was a time when I started drinking, not so much to get drunk, but because I thought I should learn to like the taste of beer. That it was a part of this world that I was trying to enter. And then I came back and got back into the engineering faculty at Jaffna. There was nothing positive about choosing engineering. It was just the only thing I could think of at that time that was still acceptable to the family, because it was a profession, but it enabled me to stay in Jaffna instead of going elsewhere for university. And I started to go into what I imagined was a real life.