Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  What will you do?

  Janani looks at my father. He looks back at her: it's her decision, not his. It was never his decision, or this whole wedding would not be happening.

  We are still getting Married, Suthan says, his face harder and stronger for having to fight. At the temple, instead. Still today. No delays.

  This is not a noble fight. It has nothing to do with the people dying in another country. It has to do with territory here, territory now, in this Western city. It's as Rajie said: no one is selfless. People profit off this war. In Sri Lanka, they do it by selling arms and feeding the black market. Here it's something different.

  I look at Janani; my father looks at Janani. Suthan tilts his head down at her expectantly.

  She pauses. She looks unhurried, as though she has all the time in the world and no one is waiting to know what she thinks. And then slowly, she begins to nod.

  Yes, she says. Yes.

  KUMARAN: IN MY HEAD, I am always burying my uncle. He died here, in Toronto, and his funeral was like an affair of state, the Tamil state that exists here, an island away from the island that we all remember. Even I remember that nation. And that is because of him. That is because I was raised in a house that could not forget it. A house where I was taught a language and a code that told me about an unofficial war. As a child I read about Tamils murdered, and a Tamil library burned. I knew a woman who, while watching the news, had seen her own mother blown up live on television. I heard stories about Tamils disappearing, Tamils tortured, Tamils killing Tamils. I learned a certain vocabulary. I learned to believe that a government could kill its own and drive them to commit unspeakable crimes. That no one would be right, but that some would be more wrong. I could hate Kumaran and still love him.

  His body was burned here, in Toronto, and he had no son to light the pyre. My father did it. And when he died, finally Janani and I had something in common: even though she did not tell me, I knew that she was doing the same thing I was doing. We buried him in Jaffna. She knew the rituals of her funeral, and I dreamed mine, but we both burned him there. I do it again today, for the occasion of her Wedding: if there had never been a war, Jaffna is where he would have wanted to die.

  IT IS AT MY COUSIN JANANI'S kalyānam, her wedding, that I first truly see and learn the Hindu rites of marriage. It is the first wedding in my generation of the family. I watch what transpires, wondering all the while if I will ever stand where Janani stands today, in an Arranged Marriage or a Love Marriage: wearing Wedding-Red. I am younger than she in more ways than one, although in true time, she has fewer years than I.

  Because neither my mother nor I trusts my sense of Sri Lankan dress and propriety, she drapes my sari for me, as she did in the fittings. I have lost weight since she sewed the blouse, and my arms hang loosely in the sleeves, which according to fashion should be tight. I wear my grandmother Tharshi's earrings. My mother pronounces me dressed only after she dips her little finger in black pottu and anoints me with this paste, which is used to mark the foreheads of UnMarried Women. In Sri Lanka, this is done every day. My mother continues this custom, wearing the Wedding-Red mark of Married Women every morning. I only wear pottu for Weddings.

  All my life, my mother has been my teacher. This is also true in the temple. My mother has taught me that a Hindu temple is very clean. As in most Hindu households, you must remove your shoes before entering and wash your feet. She reminds me that when I sit on the ground I must keep my legs crossed and make sure that I do not disrespect the gods by pointing my feet toward them. Do you have your period? Remember, if you have your menses the priests will not allow you inside the temple.

  Now, as my cousin Janani is getting Married, is only my third or fourth time inside a real temple. The temple near our house was just being built when I was growing up. Hindus traveled far away to be married, and we worshipped the gods in a house on the temple site, which we treated as a real temple nonetheless. The priests came from India and wore only white cloths knotted around their waists. They tied threads of saffron around their hands and ankles for luck. They washed the gods and dressed them in silk. They offered them milk, honey, and yogurt. They marked them in bright colors: red, but also the holy ash called viphuti, which smells sweet, and saffron that had been turned into a paste. When they were done anointing the gods, we also wore these colors of worship. Most of the priests did not speak English, and so I did not talk to them. When I did not understand what was happening, I asked my mother. When we prayed I knelt beside or behind her and imitated her. I stood when she stood, clasped my hands together when she did, blessed myself with the holy fire that the priest held when she did.

  I remember that during one special ceremony, my mother and I walked with a group of women behind the men, who carried an elaborate gold litter with one of the gods in it. I asked my mother why we could not carry the litter. She shook her head, her eyes still on the litter moving on the men's shoulders. There are no women priests, she said. Women have never carried the gods.

  The house held all the gods for the temple, including the nine planets. My mother taught me that in prayer, we circle these nine deities. We each have a nat´sattiram, which is the star of birth. She taught me that at a certain point, in a certain prayer, the priest asks what my star is. I am swāthi. If I am ever Married, I will have to remember this. If my parents are superstitious, they will ask an astrologer to see if my star aligns with the star of my intended.

  The most sacred place in a wedding ceremony is called the mānavarai. It is the altar. It is adorned with flowers, and it faces East, where the sun rises. In America the ceremony is strange enough to us that at weddings, guides explaining its different stages are passed out. The wedding guide takes us through the wedding ritual from beginning to end.

  The priest recites the names of the forefathers of both bride and groom and asks for their blessings. My father had said that in Sri Lanka, a person did not bear his ancestors all his life. This is almost true. They appear only at the beginning and the end.

  As you come out of the island, and as you return to it. And as you are Married.

  WHEN JANANI TOLD ME that she actually wanted to get Married, at first I did not believe her or understand. It was March, right before her father died. We were sitting out in the cold, gray yard. He had stopped taking walks there mostly. My father gave him pain medication four or five times a day.

  I want to get married here, she said. It will make part of what is going on there, forever.

  You are a part of it anyway, I said.

  She did not believe me.

  Her father died in April, just as blades of green were beginning to rise out of the gray garden behind that strange house. The house did not belong to us, and yet we had done so many personal things there. It had begun to feel like a home. We had sat vigil together at his bedside and cooked him meals in that kitchen. We had slept in those beds, and he had died there. That, of course, was the most personal thing. I know that some people do not want to be in houses where people they have loved have died, but I did not want to leave that house. It was the only place where I had known him. I thought that if I walked out the door and into Canadian spring sunshine it would feel like a world in which he had never existed.

  But it was worse for her. It had to have been worse for her, because he was her father. I am guessing when I say this; she did not talk to me. And I was born lucky: I still have my father, and he is an exceptional man. I knew that she grieved not only for her father's passing, but for where and how it had taken place. This was still not her country, and yet he had moved into it so easily and died here. He had shown an ability to adapt that should have surprised no one and instead surprised everyone. I knew that she had sometimes listened at the door as my uncle talked to me, telling me about his life, and I wondered if she already knew what he was telling me, or if she just resented it. She too had been educated as a radical, but her education had been different from his, because she had grown up inside the movement and possibly
still believed in it. And her father was not just telling me about politics. He was telling me about Meenakshi, whom she had never known, and Justine, who was from another world, that she did not know. She had never seen a white person before leaving Sri Lanka. The variety of her father's loves dismayed her, I think, whether she already knew of them or not. She wanted him to love the few things that she already knew: she resented his frankness with me, perhaps because she did not know why he felt he owed me anything. She had never had to share him.

  Janani is very angry with me, he said to me on one of his last days. It was true that although she had gone into his room and spent more time there as the months wore on, she did not seem to speak. Even if it was only the two of them in there and I passed by outside, I heard nothing. Little conversation. Occasionally, a little bit of Tamil: Appa, do you need some water? Sometimes my father went in to check on him. He would carry in a small mug of water and a few pills, and my uncle would swallow them with great effort. Often he had a headache and would ask me to draw the curtains to block out the dull light off the snow. But he almost never stopped talking.

  My daughter hates me because I have decided what I think, he said. But you don't hate me, even though I've sacrificed your independence by being here.

  You're only here for a short while, I said to him. I'm hardly giving up my independence.

  His eyes widened in alarm. Oh, no, he said. You don't understand. They told me when I came here that they were permitting this because of the family's loyalty. I gave them a promise. You know that the Tigers have supporters here. It was a trade—I came here, and you and your mother and your father are expected to toe the line. You don't have to do anything dramatic. But you can't really speak against them. Not here.

  I didn't promise them anything, I said.

  Sometimes promises can be made for you, he said. Sometimes in life things don't work out as smoothly as we'd like. It doesn't matter what you say when you're walking around. Say what you have to say to be safe. You can still decide what you believe and say that to yourself.

  If someone had said that to you back when you were joining the Tigers you would have disagreed with them, I said. Of course it matters what you do. I can't think something and act in another way.

  Not even to save yourself or your parents from a certain degree of pain?

  In my memory, he is still saying this, and I am still shaking my head, unable to agree with him. Although I know that the reason Janani's face is blank and cold is because she has not yet accustomed herself to the idea of a future.

  IN APRIL, BEFORE HE DIED, WHEN IT became clear that the cold was over, my uncle's face began to change even more. His headaches became more frequent. One day, when I was in the kitchen washing dishes, I looked out the window over the sink and back into the gray garden. I saw him fall and shake. His eyes rolled up into his head and my mother screamed. I could hear her scream even through the glass and I raced upstairs to get my father. He ran down the stairs and outside, grabbing a towel from the kitchen on the way. I thought I had heard something once about making sure seizure victims did not swallow their own tongues, but my own tongue did not seem to work properly. My father did put the towel into Kumaran's mouth, bracing himself against my uncle's shoulders to try to get him to stop seizing.

  Watching them, I felt bile rise up in my throat and pushed it back. Two men, both old and getting older, one healthy and hale, one dying. At the beginning it was supposed to be the other way around. The seizure lasted only a few minutes, but it was briefly and intensely terrifying. Janani came up behind me and looked out the window too, and her face scared me even more because it was so blank.

  This used to happen all the time at home, she said. This is how they first knew he was sick. This and the headaches.

  That was scary, but worse was his voice, because it took me so long to notice it vanishing. It gradually slid away and out of his control. On some days he could speak with great clarity and lucidity, but sometimes he would retell me a story he had told me before, but with different times or people. Sometimes the events changed. His eyes turned inward, as though they saw nothing before them. His face changed. And so did my own as I watched him.

  I WAS BORN LUCKY: I grew up safe and warm. No governments sent soldiers to move into my village. I did not worry about my house burning or my pictures being lost. I did not worry about dying. I did not fear having too little to eat. I never stood on queue for a ration of rice or slept in a temple for refuge. I lived in a place of plenty. I had so much to eat that as I watched my uncle die, I began to forget to do so. Watching his face transform, I learned to hate mirrors for the health they reflected. This was not the same hatred that Kunju had for her reflection after her accident. Kunju is long dead, and I never met her. My revulsion at my own image was something I learned, not something that happened to me suddenly, like the fire that took her face from her.

  This happened to me little by little, morning by morning, like droplets of water gathering to form a pool. And I drank that water willingly and took its poison into myself. I am someone who watched my own face change very carefully. I am familiar with the planes and angles of my own geography. I know each scar and irregularity. In that house in Scarborough, I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night and went to the glass to see if my face still looked the same. I stared into my own eyes, barely a finger's width from my mirrorself. No distance. I measured the space between my eyes, the length of my nose, the width of my forehead, the shape of my mouth.

  My uncle was disappearing. And my own reflection seemed all wrong. There was too much of me, and the spaces between my parts were not in proportion to one another. My stomach was not acquainted with my hips. In listening to my uncle and my father and even my mother, I had become a stranger to myself. I did not know how to see myself next to these people. As my father once imagined that his Heart was too weak and too big, I looked into the mirror and saw a body grown oceanic.

  I woke up every morning wondering what would happen, what death would look like when it came. One morning my uncle woke up wanting a mango, and we lived in Scarborough, Toronto, where a mango was not a dying man's dream, but a wish that could be fulfilled. My father sent Janani and me into the city to find the fruit, and also to buy the few small items that my mother might want to decorate the small household shrine.

  When we passed shop windows together as we walked down the street, I looked away. She was so much smaller than I. She was dainty and fine-boned. Next to her I looked clumsy and uncomfortable in my own skin. Which I was. My mother had defeated biology. In a family of women with generous bodies, she was thinner, and thinner, and thinner still. Yet she moved with a life I did not have. When I was alone in my room I stripped down and measured the space between my shoulders. I held my belly and pinched its excess. My hips and my thighs were broad. I was twenty-two. It is an age at which some women are Married. This includes the women in my family.

  You want to hear something I liked about myself ? My teeth are perfect. My mother told me to smile with them showing. But when I finally really understood that my uncle was dying, when I slept, I clenched my teeth and ground them. When I woke my jaw ached. Even as a child, I had trouble sleeping. Even in that house in Canada, I still slept with a light on. When I was small, I tossed and turned so restlessly that my parents put rails on my bed, so that I would not fall out of it. Even so, some mornings, they found me sprawled on the floor. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I had to pass the household shrine to get a glass of water. I was sure that the eyes of the gods moved, following me as I walked across the hall. Many-armed Lakshmi looking at me. I held my breath as I passed them, the way that superstitious Americans hold their breath when passing cemeteries. In the years since, this became unconscious and constant. I held my breath in class, in my sleep, in conversations. My mother sometimes asked me why I was holding my breath. What was I waiting for? What was I so afraid of not finishing? I was being watched. The gods were watching me, and they did not
approve. I bathed only in very hot water, letting rivulets of water run down my body for so long that my mother knocked to ask if I was all right. This steamed up the mirror so that when I stepped out, I was not faced with the macabre view of that distorted reflection.

  If a stray lock of hair on my head bothered me I ripped or cut it off. There was a patch of very short hair in the middle of my scalp, across the part, where it started to grow back. Like Harini's bare spot, behind her ear, except that I did this to myself, and it grew back. In sleep or daydreams I scratched at my imperfections until I bled. Sometimes I woke to find the sheets smeared with red. I scarred easily and so I bore the scars of my fear. I washed my hands every hour, scared to think of what had touched me, or what I had touched. Sometimes I thought if I stood under the water long enough, I could wash away all the dangerous parts of myself. The longer I knew my uncle and my cousin, the more of these parts there were. I wished that my Heart was too big; I wished it could absorb the rest of my body so that no one could see me. There is a trick, you see, to being a scientist, to writing about myself in the first person. You must write about your pain without subscribing to the theory that you need sympathy. Why are you writing that down? Don't keep a grudge against yourself. I will not keep the grudge. I am only recording it. I am writing because I want to know what happened to me. How I started to disappear, even though I had everything that Kunju, Tharshi, Mayuri, Harini, and Uma did not. Sometimes I cried and could not stop. Sometimes I laughed and could not stop. I traveled into darkness and madness, as Uma did before me. As a child, I lulled myself to sleep by listening to the sound of my own voice inside my mind. Now I tried to shut out all sounds, even that sound, the beloved sharp and sweet of the story. Because I did not want to hear what my uncle was truly saying between his words. Burning oneself is called immolation, and in some places it is a holy act. When Hindus die, our bodies are burned on a funeral pyre. Someone we have loved is asked to light the torch. For a long time, many people asked that their ashes be scattered in the holy river Ganges. Pilgrims bathe in this same water to sanctify themselves.