Love Marriage

by V. V. Ganeshananthan

  If I had had the courage, I would have set myself on fire, which would have been bright and would have burned away the darkness. This was not Uma's darkness. It was a different darkness, because it was a darkness that could be stopped.

  KUMARAN: THE LAST TIME I talked to my uncle before he died. He asked to see me alone. I went to his room in that cold Scarborough house and closed the door. It was cold. He lay there, holding his head. This was, of late, his position. He said:

  If you have any questions left you had better ask them.

  I shrugged.

  About families? About ours? Well? he said, impatient. Ask them. I'll be gone, you know.

  I think you're a liar, I said. I already asked you questions. You told me all sorts of things, you told me about your life, and you said you were not prejudiced.

  I'm not.

  I just don't know why I should believe anything you say. You confessed twenty-five years late. You told me what you tried to do to my father, and you thought that by that confession alone, I would understand how you felt and what could make you do that?

  Do you think people don't change? my uncle said. I know that what your father did for your mother was better than anything anyone else could have done. If he had told her where I was, she would have come back to Sri Lanka. Or she would have tried to find me, somehow. That would have been very dangerous, from any standpoint. The army would have suspected her of collusion. She might have disappeared or been killed. You wouldn't be here.

  I sat back in the chair next to his bed. The vinyl stuck to my back.

  You wouldn't be here, I said.

  I killed people, he said. Do you know that? That when I was a child, I ate every meal with your mother, and then I grew up and I killed people? I trained to kill people. Sometimes I even liked it. And your mother still wanted to find me.

  He was trying to shock me into hearing him, and I didn't want to be shocked. Who did you kill? I asked. You left that out of the story when you were telling me about your family. I was working to keep my voice flat and uninterested, but I was interested.

  I killed the woman I was supposed to marry, he said. Not Janani's mother. That was my fault too, but in a different way. I should have protected the mother of my child. But the first woman—her name was Meenakshi.

  I know about her, I said. You told me about that. You didn't do that. It was a suicide bomber.

  I did it, he said, because I was part of the movement. Do you know what they do to people who disagree with them? You have to let me take responsibility. If you don't forgive me, what happens if the war ends? You just throw out all the people who did wrong? Do you know how many people that is? Almost everyone, Yalini. Almost everyone.

  KUMARAN HAD GROWN UP with my mother, and I could see how happy she was to see him, how happy she was that he had chosen to spend his last days with us, and not on war. I looked at her and I thought, She doesn't know, does she? She hasn't ever seen that letter. That letter, in which Kumaran hinted that if my father planned a wedding for Vani, someone in his family would be dead inside a month. Because he was not good enough for her.

  By the time my father proposed to my mother, you see, Kumaran had already disappeared. He had joined the Tigers, who he thought shared his notions of radicalism. Equality. And then he heard about Vani's engagement probably through another Tiger cadre, a fellow from Ariyalai who had been home and whose family knew my father's.

  It was only when he actually crashed through that door in Neelan's house, bearing a Tiger threat, that he realized what a hypocrite he was. He hated himself, just as later I would hate him. He forgave himself, just as much later, too late, I would forgive him. He emerged from anonymity for a forbidden moment, and my father did not tell my mother about it. Although he knew—roughly—where Kumaran was and she did not.

  That was a long time ago, my uncle said.

  I love my father, I said.

  As Janani loves her father, he said. Look at what she's doing. She knows that she cannot go back, and this is the next best thing she can think of. Do you think that will do anyone any good, if it isn't what she truly wants?

  I thought about that for a long time after he died. Look at what she's doing. I am not close to Janani. Why was she getting married in this fashion? And then I realized what he meant. She was doing it for him, because she thought he would want to see tradition preserved, if not in the form of a Tamil country, then in the form of a Tamil daughter.

  MY COUSIN JANANI IS GETTING MARRIED. To my eye she looks very thin and lovely. Her hair is long and wavy. Today it is braided with flowers and gold. Her lips and cheeks have been reddened. Her eyes are heavily outlined with dramatic dark smudges. When she arrived in Canada, we looked alike. Now, standing next to her, I see no resemblance between us.

  After she is Married, her brow will be marked with a red circle, like my mother's. Today, Janani is a goddess: the ceremony itself is conducted so that the groom represents the god Shiva, and his wife-to-be plays the part of Shiva's consort, Parvati. Shiva is also called the Destroyer. This is how the ceremony begins.

  The Bridegroom's Welcome: When the groom arrives at the ceremony, the bride's parents greet him formally. The t�oli, a female related to the groom, brings the tāli, the wedding necklace, and the k�urai to the wedding. The tāli is the gold chain that binds the bride to the groom in purity. The k�urai is the Wedding-Red sari that the bridegroom has chosen for his intended. All my life I have seen this sari in pictures and old homemade films. This Red that is so desired.

  The bridegroom arrives and comes to the mānavarai. In the background I can hear the nātasaram beginning: the holy music that can be heard throughout the ceremony, just under the priest's words. Even my mother cannot translate what he is reciting. It is language far older than even Tamil: Sanskrit.

  ON ONE DAY DURING this time after Kumaran's death and before Janani's Wedding I stopped recording what he had said. About himself. About anything. My Heart remembered Kunju's rage at her own face. I take this rage and multiply it and make it my own. I put it in my Heart to keep it warm and bank its fire. I am angry at what my uncle Kumaran did, and I am angry that he is gone.

  I think Hindu weddings are so long because there are so many rituals for protection and to cast away evil. Getting Married means that you are passing a milestone in the evolution of your soul. As they are married, the bride and groom sit higher than the congregation, on par with the gods. I think that this must be a view from which everything else seems smaller. I think this must be dangerous. I think my soul could not stand such an evolution. I do not know how to be touched or purified. Punyathānam, which is purification: this is the first part of the wedding ceremony, and something that is done separately to the bride and to the groom, who are edging ever closer to sharing a life. The priest splashes the wedding place with holy water and asks for the blessing of the god Ganesha. A group of women perform the pallikai kattu, a ritual that removes any evil. How could I ever do this? This darkness feels irrevocable, untouched by these rituals.

  The bridegroom's consent is sealed by the tarppai, a blade of sacred grass that is tied around his finger. This is sangalppam: the statement of intent. Another thread that has been blessed and colored saffron is knotted around his wrist. This is kāpu kuttu, also to protect against evil. After the bridegroom leaves the mānavarai, Janani arrives, and she is sanctified in the same way. I have never seen such a saffron thread on the wrist of anyone UnMarried, excepting a priest. The Ceremony's Heart: the groom returns and sits with Janani. He on the left, she on the right. The priest recites the prayers of Shiva-Parvati and Navagraha. This will protect them from the cosmic pull of the nine planets. In many cultures, we blame the occurrence of evil on the whims of the planets. I should know better than to do this, but like my family, I find myself believing.

  Homām, the sacred fire, is lit. Then: the dhanikka dhanam, which is performed by Janani's uncle in lieu of her late father. My father places Janani's right hand into the groom's. Into t
hese entwined hands he places a gold coin and other symbols of a prosperous life. The priest announces their names, and the names of their forefathers and mothers, going back in their families three generations. He asks for the blessings of all those present and living, all those present in spirit, and, lastly, Agni, the god of fire. It is Agni who serves as the voice between heaven and earth. He is a god of the otherworld.

  Based on what I know of him, I think Agni must be an angry god. But Janani is smiling.

  KUMARAN AND I ARE, after all, not so different. We both tried to stop weddings, and both of us failed. Look at what she's doing, he had said.

  Janani, I said tentatively. I want to ask you about something your father said before he died.

  My father, she said. Go ahead.

  He said that you were—he implied, really—that you were getting Married for him. Not because you wanted to. Because this kind of Marriage is what you thought he wanted for you.

  She laughed. Is that what he said?

  Is this really what you want? I asked.

  Yes, she said. It is. And you don't have any choice but to believe me.

  You don't have to do this, I said. You could still call it off. No one would be angry.

  Yes, I do, she said. Don't you see? I know what he tried to do to your parents. But this is what I want, just like that was what they wanted. I know that my father said all sorts of things to try to stop their wedding—that your father wasn't good enough, that he wasn't rich or successful. That he could have your father killed. I think he was bluffing. But it doesn't matter. When your father got that letter, do you know what he wrote back? He wrote a letter that said go ahead and try. He knew that no one who loved your mother could do that, if he was really what she wanted. This is what I really want.

  I didn't have anything to say to that.

  She stepped back to look at me carefully. Listen to me, Yalini: my father wasn't trying to get you to stop my wedding. He was trying to show you that it couldn't be done, because it's what I want. It's meant to happen because I chose it. Like your mother chose your father. I'm choosing Suthan and in choosing Suthan, I'm choosing a cause.

  You can be against this if you want—this type of Marriage. But keep in mind that most people are not like your parents. This is a tradition of the place where I was raised, and where by rights you should have been raised. If you try to talk me out of it because you think it's not what I want, you're being too simple. Look at how far you already are from everything Sri Lankan. That's how you see yourself, but that's not how others will see you.

  You cannot just opt out, she said. You have to choose.

  AFTER MY UNCLE DIED, I returned to school. I went back to a campus now mostly empty of my classmates, who had graduated and moved on. My friend, whom I had cut off after the tsunami, had left. I did not know where he was, and it did not matter, because Kumaran had erased the person whom he had known. Still, sometimes I would remember that friend and start across the street, or down a library corridor, thinking that I had seen him. But I was alone with myself again, and myself was someone different.

  Now, some months after Kumaran's death, we are back in Scarborough, Toronto, the home of many Tamils, with many opinions about what they do, and what has been done to them. No law makes me accountable to them but the laws of ancestry and society. I am not accountable to anyone, but I am afraid and my fear spins out of my control. But this is not about a body: not my father's once frail Heart grown strong, or my uncle's brain and its cancer consuming him. It is not about my body and its ease of survival. It is about deciding what I think of what my uncle did, the promise that he made on behalf of our family in the West, so that he could die Here and not There. If he can be forgiven, and where I stand on the shifting ground of war. A noncombatant, but complicit nonetheless if I am silent.

  I know that while it may not matter yet, one day, soon, it will. People will want to know. I want to know myself. Where do I stand? I envy Janani's certainty. She has shifted countries, but not positions. The man the Tigers found for her, the man walking around the fire with her, may match her. He is not afraid of the things that she did as a young woman growing up in the movement, things that she had never told me, but that I suspect. He is able to dream the two of them into new selves, living in a happier Sri Lanka. That happier Sri Lanka does not exist, but his faith impresses her. To tell the truth, it impresses me too.

  I envy it, this faith. I wanted to be certain of my convictions. I knew that there were people whose loved ones had died at the hands of the Tigers, and I wondered what they thought of people like my uncle, whose loved ones had died at the hands of the government. I wondered how and if they chose to be like him, or not like him.

  Sometimes I too dream myself into another self. As a child when I was daydreaming I would look at my palms and then turn my hands over quickly to see if they had changed color. Everyone's palms are the same color. The backs of our hands betray us for the colors we truly are. My dream is like this: I turn my ankle, and my knee, and my hip, and my ribs, and my neck. I reach inside and twist my Heart, my lungs. I turn myself inside out and find that I am a person of color even inside. Some people would try to put a name to that color, to call it the name of a tree or a spice. I hate very little, but this is a thing that I hate. I cannot do this. I cannot name my own color.

  My father sees this. He sees all of this. He sees that I love my mother enough to want to be exactly like her, even down to her unequivocal love of her brother, and to not understand why I cannot. As he once saw how her generous face would be sharpened and honed down to only what was necessary, he sees how I have placed myself into a sphere in which I do not belong. Uma's otherworld. My uncle told me that it did not matter what I said—only what I believe.

  My face in the mirror mocks its earlier innocence. I still cannot tell you everything my uncle did. I do not want to know. I learned to love him and I do not know or want to know what he did. Who he killed. Although these things are a part of him. If I am willing to imagine another self, then I have to know that the things he did, the things that Janani did—these are things I could have done. I knew him well enough to know: governments call men terrorists to erase their reason, to make them crazy. Some of them are, and some of them are not. What does that make me?

  MY FATHER WATCHES ME. Am I his Heart? He remembers how as a child they listened to his chest and told him he would die. It is possible he is remembering his sister, but I think he is hoping I turn out like his Heart. Healed, after all. Still beating, despite what was said.

  KUMARAN: HE WOULD HAVE been impressed, I think, with how his son-in-law received the nearest Hindu temple's permission to be Married the same day, in their courtyard. How all the guests moved without comment, howmy mother acquired a new k�urai sari as a gift from the sari shop owner. The sun and the gods shone brightly on his daughter. I watched her, and in my head, I let him go.

  I had to study how to do this, because his was my first funeral. Both death and marriage require fire. If we were in Jaffna, having a funeral, the sons of the dead man would gather around an ayer, a priest, a Brahmin. The priest would give the mutal makan, the first son, a tarppai for the ring finger of his right hand. In following this custom, the first son becomes a Brahmin, who can partake in all the rituals of the funeral.

  The ayer assembles vessels for the ceremony; in Tamil, he identifies them as Siva, Sakthi, and Ganesha. With these words, the body and soul of the deceased take on godlike qualities.

  The ayer lights the fire. In the fire, he burns all the holy materials—manjal, sandalwood, and camphor. As they burn, they remove all the bad things in life: desire, jealousy, evil, harmful thoughts or intentions. The soul of the deceased travels through this to the place where only good things reside. There is no room for anything evil.

  I have to believe this about my uncle now.

  If he had had sons, if he had had male grandchildren, they would have ringed his body, going around him as he transformed into a god. They wou
ld be followed by the women.

  They would carry the body outside the house to bathe it. The dhobi, the washerman, would assist in this. It would be done with great tenderness, with arappu, a seed from a certain kind of tree. It would be done with oil, with water, with cow's milk, with water from a coconut. It would be done with honey, and with curd. First: the sons and grandsons would bathe him. But because my uncle had none, my father would have done it. And then Janani and I would have touched him, using the tarppai to smooth all this into his brow three times. We would have washed our right hands with water, and the men would have carried Kumaran back into the house, into the courtyard at the center of the house, where the Mourners would be waiting.

  Any man can become a god like this. All you have to do is die, and Mourners will sing the mānikka vasakam, the verses of forgiveness. In the place of my uncle's unborn first son, my father would have circled the body thrice, bearing a garland. He would place the garland around my uncle's throat and rub ash and kunkumum, the red paste, onto his forehead. He is a god. The others would place cut flowers at his feet.

  Manjal, lime, white powder, and kunkumum are ground together into a paste as the ayer sings through the verses of forgiveness. The paste is mixed with rose water, and my father covers Kumaran's eyes with it. The women give the body food for the last time—rice. Then the youngest children, the grandchildren he might have had, hold nay pandam, lit sticks, in a circle around the body, so that the soul can leave it.