Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  I MUST GO OUTSIDE myself to see that before Kumaran and Janani returned, we lived a quiet life. In America, Marriage has not been a way out and fear has not been a way of living. Houses don't burn—at least not for the same reasons. But Love, or rather Sex, is everywhere. Murali's Heart has stopped murmuring, but he has never quite reconciled it with this impropriety. So when Sex in its many forms blares out at him, he covers his eyes, and those of his daughter, who is already failing to understand an older, more conservative world.

  He did not come to this country so that his child could fall in Love so Improperly. His daughter, Vani's daughter, is beloved. She has Uma's brains, Mayuri's prickliness, and underneath it all, Harini's steel. She has his Heart. But they know that she is perhaps most like Uma. More like Uma than he would prefer, although this is something he only admits in the dark. No one has said Uma's name aloud for years. Just as Kumaran was once only a phantom.

  AND NOW, MURALI REMEMBERS what Uma and Kumaran were like, their younger selves, as he watches me travel the distance between myself and my uncle. And yet this descent is different from Uma's long absence and Kumaran's long silence. But I too enter my room and close the door, shut everyone else out. I am more at home with a pen than a person. Murali sees this and is not sure what to do. Murali remembers his brother Neelan taking Uma to the temple, remembers Uma's blank eyes as the priest sprinkled holy ash on her forehead. Uma was not there, not there to the point that when the temple lamp was passed she dipped her fingers into the fire instead of hovering at its edge. She did not notice the pain. Murali knows now that you cannot escape your demons. He sees me, Yalini, as perhaps most like Uma: she has those otherworld eyes.

  JANANI: SHE WEARS ANOTHER Wedding-Red sari, like a red ghost out of history. She tries it on, and my mother and my aunt drape and redrape her. Tomorrow they will go to the wedding hall, begin to lay out the lamps and the flowers in preparation for the ceremony.

  The chatter around the bride is loud. They plait her hair, fasten her anklets, and thread flower after flower onto garlands. As Murali did long ago, the groom has built the altar himself. The sound of a wedding, the sound of a going. I clasp a necklace around Janani's neck, pat down her sari and straighten it.

  [ompathu]

  JANANI AND YALINI

  FINALLY THEIR DAUGHTERS

  .

  To discern the truth in everything,

  by whomsoever spoken, this is wisdom.

  — TIRUKKURAL , chapter 43, line 3

  CHILDREN ARE BORN TO BE MARRIED. TO HAVE THEIR OWN children.

  At my birth, to my father, Murali, I looked like his mother, Tharshi, with her high brow. My dark head gleamed under the glaring hospital lights. Murali felt his Heart traveling out of his possession and, with a sigh, let it go. A daughter born in this country, the wrong country, has so much more of a chance. He loved looking down at this bright bundle in his arms. I had only the faintest eyebrows—disappearing eyebrows, like my mother's—and a lower lip with a full pout, like my grandmother's. I could have been any and all of them, and I was: Uma, Harini, Mayuri, Tharshi. I could have been Vani. I could and would be anything. He loved the world of possibility in my newborn face, which was unknown and yet already familiar.

  According to custom, when they brought me home, they shaved my head. Murali held me still, and Vani traced the razor gently over the curve of my baby skull. It is said that hair will grow back stronger after this. I was very quiet. In contrast to Janani, who my uncle told me was a plump, crying baby, I rarely cried. The cutting of my hair was only the first of many transformations. Perhaps they knew it then, but I would not become beautiful. I began by looking like Vani but ended by looking like Murali. I am not pretty. I have his oval face, but his features on me look undistinguished. I do not have Vani's high cheekbones or finely structured features. I was born with dark eyes that became lighter every day.

  My father wanted to take me home to Sri Lanka; he wished that his mother could see me. Day after day, the experience of watching me did not lose any of its wonder. From my earliest months I showed myself to be among the quickest of children. I laughed ahead of schedule, talked ahead of schedule. My mother, a teacher, took great pains in reading to me every night. And she saw her aunts in my many sides. She had not seen them for so long, and to see them now in this small person, this small person who was hers, was very strange. It had been a very long time since she had lived in Jaffna, she realized.

  Because they could not take me to the fine, white sand beaches at home, they took me to the American beaches. It was all so familiar, but also so wrong in many ways. It was filled with the wrong people. The sand was not the right color—not the almost-pure-whiteness of a Ceylonese beach, but rather tea-colored, as if it were the dregs of my mother's cup. Here people sought out the sun, trying to get darker. Their sisters had guarded their skin from the sun and massaged Fair & Lovely into their faces. I scampered bareheaded out of the shade of the umbrella that my father had planted in the sand like a flag. My mother started to say something and then bit her lower lip. This is not a beach, Murali thought. He wanted to take us home. He wanted to see his own mother. He wanted Tharshi to meet Vani.

  IN 1985, THE ONLY TIME I have ever been to Sri Lanka, flying home took more than a day. I was only two and my father wondered if I would remember this trip when I grew up. He thought I would not, and he was right. He wanted to take me anyway. Later he was glad he did. It was four years after the burning of the Jaffna Library, and two years after Black July. In a few more years, the war would kick off again in earnest, and Ariyalai and Urelu would empty of young people. My parents returned to the island understanding that this was good-bye. But after all, how does one say good-bye to a place? My father asked himself this later. For the moment, conversations were not burdened with farewells. Murali moved within the sphere of his family, delighted with the sense of belonging again. He had forgotten what it was like to speak without repeating himself. He had forgotten the gentle sound of British vowels in Tamil voices. He had forgotten his mother's quiet strength and height—forgotten that even in her old age, she was nearly as tall as him and as tall as his father had been.

  He watched with pleasure his mother and his daughter's fascination with each other. Tharshi picked me up, held me close to her, and inhaled my sweet powder fragrance, mingled with her own faint aroma of jasmine and sandalwood. She reached out a dry finger and I curled a moist fist around it. It was then that my father could see the beginning of his father's steady gaze on my face, for I did grow to look like my father, and therefore his father too. I reached out for the diamond glittering in Tharshi's nose, and she gasped with unexpected pain and surprise. I chirped up at my grandmother: What's this? what's this? My mother did not have a m�ukkutti, and I did not remember ever seeing one. My father laughed at the expression on Tharshi's face and disengaged my hand from my grandmother's nose. That was not very nice! he scolded gently. Tharshi rubbed a hand over her nose where I had tugged it and chuckled: Kulapadi! Naughty girl.

  On the third day that we were there, my mother's sister, Kalyani, brought my cousins to visit us, and all of us went to the beach. We piled into an old car borrowed from a neighbor and drove down the road, rattling away. When my father pulled over, my mother was the first to open the door and step into the sand. She inhaled with pleasure and excitement, and this did not escape her watchful husband. So soft. So warm, said his Heart, which had been well for a long time. What are you doing here? It was a Heart glad to be warm again. I followed my cousins into a reedy part of the sea, and my father watched us dip our hands into the water. Later I saw the picture he took of us playing there. In the picture we are all very happy and dirty, our hair beginning to clump with salt, and sand gathering on our skin and under our fingernails. We are all smiling missing-tooth smiles. My face is still round and fair, my hair short. I am two years old, innocently naked to the waist, gleeful, my hands full of shells. It is one of the few candid family pictures; most of them are posed with smi
les frozen on for a special occasion.

  Very shortly after my father took the photograph I was no longer smiling. A jellyfish in the shallow waves bit my ankle. An angry red mark, not quite the shade of a Wedding-Red sari, swelled up on my foot. My father took us home. I cried all the way there.

  THERE WAS A DAY in that trip to my parents' birthplace when my father was missing. My mother did not tell us where he went, and no one mentioned it. I was too young and fascinated with this new place to see his absence. I spent that day playing in the garden as usual. My mother and grandmother sewed on the porch, the sound of insects a quiet hum behind our high-pitched chatter. I looked at some of the old family albums with my mother. The pictures were all very small and square, sepia-toned. My mother told me later that I mistook a picture of Jegan for my father. They had looked very much alike. There were no pictures of Uma in the album, but I was too young then to know the difference. I did not know anything or anyone was missing. And as we were there in the house at Ariyalai with my grandmother, my father was on a train, traveling toward his sister, who had not been entirely forgotten.

  Uma was in a home only a few hours away. Over the years, Tharshi had gone to visit her daughter sometimes, but the Uma of those days was not the brilliant Uma of many years ago. She was dull-eyed and slower, the powerful drugs the doctors had given her coursing through her veins. Sometimes when Tharshi visited her, she brought food. Uma sat there and ate, and Tharshi talked to her and told her all the news of her family. But after a while, Tharshi realized that Uma was not listening to her. Often, her daughter's head was cocked to one side, as though she was listening to something else, something that only she could hear.

  When we went to my father's home in 1985, he had not seen Uma since his childhood. He did not even know where she was. When he asked his mother about it, he saw in her face that she had become resigned to what had happened to her youngest and most cherished daughter. It no longer had the power to shock her, as it once had.

  She told my father how to find Uma.

  Later, my father was very glad that in his last trip home he had insisted on seeing his sister. She was older than he, but as he saw her sitting in her room that had been her home for so many years now, he knew that he had outgrown her. He saw that his sister was surrounded by objects connected to the world of civilization and order: broken pen nibs, half-filled notebooks, shelves of books Tharshi had sent to her over the years, and piles of letters tied with brown twine. The room was immaculate, with the exception of the desk at which she sat. Before her, stacks of paper rose in untidy towers. Fountain pens lay astray. Her cheeks, more hollow now than they had been when she was a girl, were marked with inky fingerprints. He saw that the desk was Uma's center, and it was a place of orderly things arranged in a disorderly way. He saw the slender thread of her connection to the world outside her barred window fraying.

  He was older than Uma now, he realized. He wanted to cry but could not. He remembered a sister who had been quiet, her eyes always looking elsewhere. But he also remembered a sister who had been able to communicate that she knew herself and where she was, a sister who had once been very much in this world. He saw now that she was passing out of it. He saw that while her eyes had not lost their otherworld-ness, they were not as quick as they had once been. She wore glasses now. Her hair was still very long, but now it was silver.

  When my father went to see Uma, she did not recognize him. He had told himself that he did not expect her to know him, but when she looked at him with no sign of recognition, his Heart sighed. It's me, the Heart said. Murali. Thambi. Little brother. We come from the people who share our blood. But she did not remember him.

  He had brought her a photograph of his family. Himself and Vani, me in my mother's lap. It was a studio photograph, posed, all of us meticulously combed and polished. He had labeled it on the back, laboring to make his doctor's hand legible. Murali Thambi, Vani Thangachi, Yalini. 1985. Uma did not speak to him, but he walked over to the desk and laid the photograph down on it.

  YEARS LATER, WHEN THARSHI was sick, my father's brother Neelan went to see her. Tharshi already knew that she would not see my father or his family again. Murali, her youngest, had come—without knowing it—to say good-bye. And so it was Neelan who talked to his mother until her voice drifted off.

  He thought she had fallen asleep. No—she reached out a hand and laid it on his arm. Wait a moment, rasa. She moved her hands to her ears and began to unscrew the earrings from her lobes. Neelan knew these as the diamonds that had caught his father's eye so long ago. She pressed them into his hand. Give these to Yalini for me.

  I did not receive the gift until many years later, when Neelan and his family came for the first time to visit us in America. I watched my uncle take a small, silk drawstring bag from the pile of gifts he had brought us. He gave it to me and gestured for me to open it. The earrings tumbled into my hands, the pure, clear Ceylonese diamonds sparkling far more brilliantly than the American stones my parents had already given me. The daughters of Jaffna Tamils have always been given jewels, although they are no longer used as part of the ritual of dowries. Gifts like this usually come from within the family, but somehow I knew these were not from my uncle. Your grandmother wanted you to have them, he said by way of explanation. The earrings were set in very old gold, the posts thick in the traditional style. They did not fit into my narrowly pierced ears. My mother took them from me and turned them over in her palm. We'll have them remade for you, she said. They had already been remade once, although I did not yet know the story of how these diamonds had been plucked from Kunju's misshapen ears.

  My aunt Kalyani took the diamonds with her on a trip to India, and when she returned after a few months, she brought the remade earrings: very old diamonds in a new setting. These ear rings were smaller than Tharshi's had been. Some of the diamonds had been removed, combined with rubies, and made into a heavy pendant. I knew without asking that although my grandmother, whom I do not remember, wore these diamonds almost every day of her life, here in America they are the kind of gems I should wear only to a wedding. To do otherwise would be tempting God to take away such a gift. Across oceans, a grandmother long gone reached out to hand an heirloom to her granddaughter.

  AND I WILL HAVE PLACES to wear these diamonds: wedding after wedding after wedding.

  All families start with a marriage, and all marriages start with a family. Perhaps this is why before my family goes to weddings my mother insists on taking family photographs. We all look so lovely, she says. No—this is not what she means. For the rest of her life my mother will be racing to replace the irreplaceable: the photographs of her family that burned with her sister's house in 1983 in Sri Lanka. Ask my mother what she would take with her if the house was on fire, and she will not take a minute to consider the question: she would take the photographs. Of course.

  Many of the photographs of her younger days, before she came to America, are missing; she did not bring very many of them to America when she came. There are perhaps ten pictures of my mother and her brother and sister. Once there were three of them. Now there are two. My uncle Kumaran, no longer a Tamil Tiger, died of cancer; it was one of the times I saw my mother cry. I look like her when I cry: our faces crumple as if they are burning paper.

  Now his daughter, Janani, is getting Married. For me this means another transformation. For yearsmy mother has stitched sari blouses, but none of them have ever been for me. Now I am too old to disregard the rules of decorum: although I would prefer not to be pushed into adulthood, she wraps a bolt of silk around me and drapes my hips, my shoulders, in bright cloth. I watch it happen in a mirror. My mother's mouth is full of pins. My aunt Kalyani stands with her hands on her hips in a corner, studying the fit. A little loose here, she suggests. I fight the urge to move, to arrangemy body in some other, less revealing configuration.

  A GIRL WHO LOOKS like her father instead of her mother is a girl who is unsure of who she should be. I had to learn to write in
the first person. It is not something that comes to me naturally. I am a scientist, with a researcher's love of detail, third person, and distance. But you cannot write about your family without writing about yourself. You must be willing to say everything, always. In a moment of comfort I might allow someone like Uma to disappear and be forgotten. I might allow Tharshi's twin, Kunju, who was disfigured by a fire, to disappear and be forgotten. I want someone to read this later, to see that I love my family, even my uncle.

  I only vaguely remember learning to read. My mother, Vani, taught me, and perhaps the reason I do not remember it clearly is because it was not like learning at all. It was knowing—just knowing. It happened all at once, like the sudden downpour of rain in the summer. I never had to guess what something meant. A word in a sentence was like a child in a family—my family: composed and defined by the other words, the way I am composed and defined by the other people in my family. My words always knew one another and were defined in relation to one another, and once I knew what they meant, each word took on a color and a memory of its own. I learned words and hoarded them away. I loved their shapes and hues and the way they felt full and round, and how ink looked sharp and clean on a white page. Words had answers.

  By the time I was three years old I could read. I liked especially to have my mother read aloud to me before I went to bed. Sometimes I would read to her. Sitting on the bed beside her, I listened to her voice or my voice thread its way through a story. After a while, when I knew the story by heart, I would sit and think not about the narrative or the characters, but about the pure pleasure of that quiet sound cutting through the air. It was like the darshan my uncle had spoken of. The holiness transferred to anyone near it. It was like taking a walk right into a sound. It was a beautiful sound, because when we read, our voices were clear and measured each word, making it distinct in its own depth. I could distance myself from my own voice so that it turned into both motion and stillness, and I rocked in the transparent wall of sound and story, loving it. There was beauty especially in the ritual: selecting a book as she braided her hair, crossing my ankles on my bed and waiting for her, opening the first page together. I felt myself expand within this, welling up with stories remembered and stories I did not know I anticipated. I held them like sweet, glad secrets: Harini's beauty. Tharshi's twin. Uma's madness. Neelan's wife. Logan's tea. My father's love.