Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  My mother could keep me occupied for a weekend by letting me borrow thirty books from the library. I loved the libraries—we had two in town, and each had its own cast of librarians and special, hidden places where books waited for me. The librarians loved me—almost could not believe their good fortune in finding a child who wanted to read everything. I remember what they looked like then, but I no longer know their names. You've grown again, they said when they saw me, although I had never been away more than a week. Sometimes I sat for hours, poring over the medical dictionary.

  The old rugs and musty paper odor of libraries seemed very familiar to me, and I loved the sense of being an oasis moving within that great age. My mother would only allow me to borrow as many books as I could carry. How ridiculous I must have looked: a tiny, thin girl with enormous braids and glasses, bent under the beautiful weight of those books. We would come home, me lugging the torn blue-and-white canvas bag, straining at its seams with a few dozen books sticking out at odd angles. The moment we were inside, I would run downstairs where, in one corner, there was a sliding glass door to the garden. If I drew the curtain back, and the day was sunny, I could position myself in the path of a certain patch of light, whose shape and angle and warmth pleased me. I placed my book into the pooling light and disappeared into the pages so deeply that I did not hear if my mother called me for dinner—or a friend called me to play a game—or my father came home from work.

  I read quickly. I read everything—anything I could get my hands on. When I misbehaved, my mother punished me by forbidding me to read. I learned the many ways and places in which you could hide a book. Under a mattress is easy and even expected. If you cross your hands across your chest, concealing a book against the stomach is also possible. I liked to leave a book behind the dogwood tree in the garden. Sometimes, while cleaning, my mother found poetry or novels behind the mirror on my bureau. Or inside a kitchen cabinet. Although my mother did not let me read some things because she thought them too worldly, she did not catch everything. So I was a child with an old soul. I think sometimes I knew too much. Every day, when I came home from school, I would sit in the kitchen and read the newspaper straight through. Every story.

  Whether any of those stories were as true as this one is another matter entirely. And so I come, finally, to the first person, and to the end and the beginning of the story. Reverse a family tree, and branches of blood are whittled down to one person. I am composed of all the women and men who came before me. I am the result of many Marriages.

  TAMIL HAS TWO HUNDRED and forty-seven letters. When I was five years old, I could recite about half of them. I could speak Tamil and understand it. But as I got older, I forgot the words. I do not remember how this happened. Sometimes when I dream, I dream in Tamil. But when I wake up I never remember the words. It is like remembering a fever, or a blessing.

  Even my father has begun to think in English. When I was younger there was a sense of shame in being too connected to a country that was not officially my own. I wanted to be American. I mastered English and went out of my way to tell people I had been born in America. When my parents went to the ethnic marketplace to buy the special spices my mother used in cooking, I stayed in the car and waited for them. When my parents got back in the car, they would smell of curry leaves, saffron, and cardamom. These odors were strange and strong. At home, my mother burned candles so that the house would not hold the fragrance. In Toronto, I learned to seek out the signs of Tamilness: the food, the people, the temples, the customs. Generations before me, Kunju sang for her education. My parents had had to force me to sing the devotionals she had known by heart. The only song I learned without protest was the Sri Lankan national anthem. I sang it once at the temple.

  All the women cried except my mother.

  I WAS BORN into a community of Sri Lankan doctors, their spouses, and their children. None of us yet knew how my family would drift away from this. In the winter, the cold made my mother's feet hurt. It was part of the reason we eventually left for a warmer climate. Her warm island soul hated the icy temperatures. In the new place, we were the only Sri Lankans.

  In the years since we moved away from that first house I have had a recurring dream: I wake up and move through all the rooms of the house. My navigation is rough, my internal compass askew. I bump into walls and tables, bruising myself. I am no more than eight years old, and the architecture of the house is shadowy and fluid. The walls are not where I remember them. I cannot keep track of where I am. I keep hearing the sounds of people all around me—my mother in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. I can hear my father on the phone with someone at the hospital. But they are only sounds. I follow each one, but the sizzle of the stove vanishes as I enter an empty kitchen. The phone is off the hook. My father is not there. His footprints are pressed firmly into the carpet. He is gone.

  I had this dream for the first time just before we moved. I woke up cold and sweating, feeling sick to my stomach. I pushed the sheets away and put one tentative foot on the smooth hardwood floor. I went from room to room methodically, checking for anyone—anyone. I thought no one was home; the house was silent. Each room upstairs was empty, the impressions of bodies in beds the only hint of a presence. By the time I went down the stairs, I was almost in tears—but there, finally, was my mother. She was confused and worried by my panic. I was glad to see her and to know that the walls would not start to shift around me.

  I have been back to see that house only once since we left. My parents had to point the house out to me. The door used to be red. The new owners have repainted it black.

  EVEN INSIDE MY OWN FAMILY, I am a scientist. The doctor's first order of business: do a history.

  When I ask about family, it is my father who pours out his story. I am surprised—by my father, who rarely surprises me. It is my mother's family that has surrounded me and gathered me into its fold. But my father's distance from his family—which is scattered from here, to Sri Lanka, Australia, England, Germany, France, and Canada—gives him perspective. From his distance, he can dislike, he can like, he can judge, he can love, and he can praise with praise that means something because it is measured against those parts of his history that he does not remember with affection.

  Sprawled across a bed in Paris, where we are visiting relatives, my father and I lie shoulder to shoulder, looking at the black book in which I have recorded what I know about the names and histories of our family. I listen to him reel off names, stumbling as he touches the outer fringes of his bloodlines. He does not remember all of their names. This is something that my mother finds astonishing, even shameful. But my father, I have discovered, does not collect names. He collects personalities, like pearls, with all the shading and beautiful, real imperfections of those jewels. It is like the way my parents' families kiss their children differently. My mother's family kisses in, pressing with their noses as though they can inhale you. My father's family kisses out, with their lips puckered and loud, hiding nothing. But my father hesitates, watching me record his words. And my mother outright stops when she sees my pen move across paper, noting what she says about an old rift between two branches of the family.

  Why are you writing that down?

  The three of them—my aunt, my cousin, my mother—look at me, alarmed. We are all clustered around the kitchen table, bathed in sunlight made brighter by snowfall. We are drinking tea. Always tea.

  Why are you writing that down?

  For history. To know, I say.

  There's no need to keep an old grudge, my mother says.

  I'm not keeping the grudge, I protest. I'm just recording it.

  They do not understand this: history. Cure the future by knowing the past. Even my cousin, who is only a few years older than I, cedes to their side. Later, in my room, upstairs, I write down what my mother said anyway. If it is not recorded, in fifty years it could happen again—two families not quite speaking and neither knowing exactly why.

  ON CHRISTMAS IN ENGLAND, IT RAINS.


  (Every day in England, it rains.)

  My mother's cousin drives us from one end of London to the other, to my father's cousin's house, where we will stay the night before going to France. We are late; we stayed too long at one party before coming to this one. When we pull up in front of the house, it is bright with cars coming and going. My father's cousin is throwing the party for him, so that he can see all of his relatives at once. My father stumbles from the car, his eagerness as apparent as a child's. I have never seen him look like this.

  Uncertain, he moves through the door and then into the hallway of the house, into the light room where almost every British relative he has is waiting for him. Almost fifty people here, I would guess. My mother—who unlike him is always sure of herself—is behind him. After her, me, watching my father and myself. It is like coming into another planet, the dance of sociality performed once more. We present our faces to the cousin we have never met and shake hands with her children, who are stunningly attractive.

  We eat slowly. There is row upon row of pies, cheesecakes, rice, curries. We eat and watch my father, who is uncomfortable being the center of attention. I drift into a daze of conversation between my mother and the women around her. She shows me off to one female relative after another. They talk about me in the third person. I am not there. They are not being rude; this is how things are done. The elders compare their prizes, their children; how well you have done is shown in your children. I am especially intriguing to this branch of the family, having not been to England in nearly a decade. They remember me as a thin, bespectacled, bookish girl, with extremely long hair. Nearly more hair than girl, as Uma had once been. Now my mother presents me as I am: shorn and coltish, but an adult.

  What are you studying?

  English.

  What does that lead you to?

  I might be a doctor. I don't know. (In America you don't have to know.)

  Oh. They nod at one another knowingly. In America, uncertainty is permitted. I suppress a sigh, glad that my father's long-ago visa application to the United Kingdom was denied. They smile at me approvingly. It is not a false approval. It is an expected approval.

  What happens next is entirely unexpected. One moment all is lighthearted chatter. The next, two men are fighting each other at the other end of the room. As drunk as they might have been in Jaffna, but with fewer reasons. Two children run screaming back to their mother and she gathers them up. Two women—later, I realize they were twins—are trying to hold the men back. The other guests are frozen. One of the men fights the woman holding him, pushing her back, manipulating himself around until he is within arm's reach of a table. I see my father's lowering brow, his six feet moving across the room swiftly. I see that the man is reaching for an empty wine bottle. He raises his arm over his head, trying to move the woman aside, rearing back like an angry horse, bottle poised to crash down on his opponent's head. Another man shoulders between the furious men until the moment cools. None of us knows what they were fighting about. My eyes meet my father's, his horrified face mirroring mine: this too is family. On the left, my mother's posture has turned to marble. My gentle father looks shell-shocked. Transported temporarily back into the realm of his youth, he had forgotten the passions it held.

  THAT ROOM WAS FILLED with people who wanted to embrace me. But I did not know any of them. Later my father identified them for me: a favorite aunt, a cousin who went to school with him, his second cousin's brother-in-law. I lose myself in names. In America, these names would stun people. Here in London, with its comfortable community of Sri Lankans and other South Asians, these names are like wine, better with age, silky, rolling off the tongue. Yogamani. Balasubramanian. Jeyalakshmi. If I had grown up in this sea of names, this colonial extension, I might have been like these people, who are comfortable with themselves and one another.

  My parents named me Yalini. It means “music of Jaffna.” I do not remember Jaffna, but I know that it is a place of ancient days and holy verses. A place to which I cannot go back.

  I HAVE DINNER WITH my family together the night before Janani's wedding, which I have come to think of in the same way as a funeral. I thought that after this, we would never see one another. We would not miss one another, either. But we were family. And we owed one another this: one last night together in the house where her father had died and loved us both, so differently.

  What is left of a family: Murali, Vani, Janani, Yalini. We invite Lucky and Rajie, because they have acted like our relatives, and because their presence honors my late uncle, whom we buried not so long ago. We sit around the table, eating a vegetarian meal, because that is the auspicious thing to do. None of us, even and perhaps especially Janani, knows Suthan any better than we did the first day we met him. What does he stand for? Who is she marrying?

  I think at her: You don't have to do this. But I do not say it.

  And I am not wrong. As my mother is serving out the rice, a Tamil man whose interests in Toronto rival Suthan's is walking up to the locked doors of the Tamil community center with bolt cutters. He is a tall man, about Suthan's age and height; he has a darker face, and a full beard, but he is skinny, and he wears similar black clothing. He has waited for darkness. Four other men flank him.

  My mother serves the potato curry, placing a generous, saffron-laden mound next to each white pillow of rice, and the man enters the building, and with four quick gestures of his hand, dispatches his friends to the corners of the building, to make sure that there is no one in it. They are not looking to kill anyone. No one starts out that way, after all. As my father asks for another helping of coconut sambol, the man is playing a flashlight across the walls of the main room, its decorations, its map of Sri Lanka, its Hindu gods. He has donned leather gloves, his expression unreadable. He could be doing this in another country entirely. He pours gasoline all over the rugs, and all over the wooden frame of the mānavarai, the wedding altar Suthan has built for Janani, and which tomorrow would have been adorned with flowers.

  My mother is making after-dinner tea and serving vattalappam for dessert, and the men are searching the rooms for valuables and locking down most of the windows, making sure the curtains are soaked in oil. As we bid Lucky and Rajie good-bye, the man is going up the stairs, into the rooms where Suthan has left Janani's k�urai sari, the sari of Wedding-Red silk, which he has planned to present to her during the wedding ceremony. The stranger picks the sari up and smells its newness; he spreads it out and admires the ornate pallu, the part that would fall over her shoulder. In his way he is a traditional man. What he is doing is part of tradition.

  He puts the sari down, and my mother offers my father another cup of tea. He declines it, and the man puts on a ski mask and walks down the stairs from the second floor, back to the first. He leaves a trail of gasoline. Later, I will think of Rajie outside the take-out place, pointing out the places where one Tamil has shot another, for nothing. I help my mother put the curries away, and he closes the door behind him, removes the cut bolt, and walks away. I let Janani go to bed on her last night as an UnMarried woman, and the man gets into a car about a block away from the building. I am washing my face, and he is still looking back at the building. He starts the car and circles back to bring it to the front, where he pauses for his friends, who come out of the building's side doors and get in. He pulls four bottles up from near his feet. They are filled with gasoline and sugar—uncomplicated ingredients. And each bottle has an oiled rag dangling from its mouth, held in place by a cork.

  As I walk up the stairs to go to bed, I do not hear a sound. The house is absolutely still and dark now, the strained sounds of my uncle's breathing gone. The man in the car pulls matches from his pocket and strikes one against his teeth, lighting each rag in turn. The house is quiet. Miles away, in a place empty of people, the stranger hands two flaming bottles to the men behind him. They roll their windows down, and the man in the driver's seat counts to three. Like twinned shooting stars, the bottles spiral through the
air. Two, and then another two, the first pair shattering the hall's front windows.

  The building lights up gradually at first. These are simple people; no C-4, no detonators, no complexity of wires. But still a spark paints a stripe down a trail of gasoline, to another, to another, until a web of light tightens like a fist around the structure in which Janani was to be Married.

  We are in a different country, a different time.

  But the building explodes.

  It explodes.

  It explodes.

  SUTHAN: HE IS UNSURPRISED, and that is perhaps the most terrifying of all. When I wake up the next morning, I hear him talking downstairs, faster and more urgently than I have ever heard him speak before. I listen harder and realize I do not hear his father. He is here himself. His own man. I go downstairs, where he is talking to my father and to Janani. I hear the words explosion and arson and gone.

  What?

  Suthan looks at me, the intruder. Someone has burned down the community center, he explains.