The Beach at Galle Road

by Joanna Luloff

  Janaki shrugged and returned to her steaming pots. Sam left the kitchen without her seeming to notice.

  Over the next week, Janaki was pleasant and polite to all of Sam’s students, including Nilanthi. When it was time for them to leave, she walked them all to the main road and gave them all blessings for their return journey. Sam watched her as she said her good-byes to Nilanthi. Janaki had wrapped two anthuriums for Nilanthi and gave her instructions for growing them in Colombo. Sam and Janaki never mentioned that kitchen conversation again.

  A WEEK AFTER his students had left, Rohini knocked on Sam’s door. As he sat hunched over student papers, Rohini crawled onto his lap. She picked up the postcard and for the third time that day asked, “When are your parents coming?”

  “In five days.” Sam rubbed at his eyes; he had been crying off and on over the course of the evening. He had never been much of a crier, but lately, the smallest things could trigger an overwhelming sadness, deep and unnameable, that sent shudders through his body. He chalked it up to culture shock, fatigue, change of diet, but none of these things quite explained the tight spring of emotion coiled in his gut.

  Rohini traced his eyes with her fingers. “You look sleepy.”

  She elbowed his belly, and Sam felt immediately calmer. “No, not sleepy.”

  “Can I help?”

  “You can cut these out.” Sam handed Rohini pieces of construction paper with pictures of fruits and vegetables penciled onto them. Sam worked hard at his job and liked bringing games and pictures to his classes. During his training, he had listened diligently to the advice of his Sri Lankan teaching mentors and education-training directors.

  Visual aids foster learning.

  Be there for your students but don’t get involved in personal or family affairs.

  Most of your students will drop out before their O-levels. Your job is to try to keep as many as you can involved in their education.

  His notes and reminders were scattered around the room amid the construction paper, glue sticks, and Magic Markers his mother had sent him from the States.

  After the last pineapple had been cut out, Rohini began to fidget. “We should look at the moon.” She sat up and pulled Sam from his chair. They walked to the garden together, Rohini barely as tall as Sam’s hip. He often raised her above his head and sat her on his shoulders, as his father had done with him when he was a boy.

  “Why is the word for moon the same as the word for rabbit?” Sam asked.

  “Because there is a rabbit on the moon. Look.” She pointed at the sky.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Turn your head this way.” Rohini cocked Sam’s head at an angle. “See?”

  Sam stared at the moon until his eyes grew foggy. In the blur, he saw two ears, a hunched body, and a tiny round tail. “Ah, all right. Now I see it,” he said, and he thought how strange it was that he could be looking at a different moon from the one hanging over his parents’ house in Vermont. There, he had been used to looking for a man’s face in the sky.

  Sam squinted out into the dark. The village center lay beyond the bend in the river where Sam had seen the body. The opposite way were tea fields. And the jungle everywhere else, trees heavy with flat, open leaves, bending and dark. The family he lived with told him stories of the bandits and refugees who used the jungle for hiding places. According to Rohini’s father, Mohan, they fed off the mango and papaya trees and took apart jackfruit to roast the seeds.

  Mohan often tried to frighten Sam into keeping his mosquito net tightly wrapped around his bed to protect him from snakes. Mohan teased him with tales of kraits coming in the night to nibble on the hiding men’s legs or ankles as they slept, snakes more venomous than cobras and sneakier with their painless gnawing. The poison would creep with a hidden pain through the blood, and two days later the victim’s legs would swell from within. The only trace of the krait would be the tiny punctures around the ankle, and by then it would be too late. The bandit or the refugee would try to suck out the poison or apply ayurvedic kola juice to the wound. He would die perhaps a week later, pulse racing, eyes swollen. The image terrified Sam, much to Mohan’s pleasure. “You’re easier to scare than the girl who used to board here,” he would scold, and it would be up to Janaki, his wife, to come to Sam’s defense.

  “There aren’t snakes in your village, are there, Samma?” she would ask. “If Mohan came to visit you, you would have to warn him about bears and the cold winters.” Sam enjoyed letting them fight over him and felt himself relaxing under Mohan’s teasing and Janaki’s protective affection. Sam tried to picture Mohan in an oversize parka, his balding head covered in a wool cap. Would Sam’s parents welcome Mohan into their home as warmly as Mohan had opened his to Sam? How would his father treat Rohini’s ceaseless curiosity? What would Janaki make of his mother’s cropped hair and shorts that ended above the knee? It was impossible to imagine, and as time went on, he had a more and more difficult time picturing himself draped on his parents’ couch, exchanging sections of the newspaper on a lazy Sunday morning.

  Near the village where Sam lived, the police occasionally swept through the jungle. Mohan would join them to hunt wild boar and drink arrack or moonshine kassipu from disguised containers. Before he left, Mohan would strap his rifle across his chest and rub his hands together in expectation. On mornings after the hunt, he would leave the boar carcass on the garden path, and Sam would have to make his way through a swarm of flies, careful not to step on the remains. Just that morning, while rubbing his eyes as he walked to the lat, Sam had stepped on something squishy and wet. He hadn’t dared look down but instead had rushed to the well, where he tried to keep himself from vomiting as he scrubbed the underside of his foot.

  Later in the day, he had heard Mohan’s carving knife sawing into the hide and bone of the boar. Janaki was fixing the rest of the meal, tending to three pots bubbling at once. The kitchen always smelled of cinnamon and smoking firewood. When Sam asked if he could help, she offered him a coconut husk, as she always did, and he took his place on the carving stool. The stool was raised only a few inches from the manure-packed floor, and Sam’s knees jutted up almost to his shoulders as he ground the coconut against the serrated blade. A soft, downy pile of shredded pulp gathered beneath the blade, falling into a wooden bowl on the floor. When Mohan entered, carrying the chopped meat, he looked at Sam and laughed. “You look like an old lady, grinding coconut like that.”

  “He’s getting better at it,” Janaki said, giggling.

  “He should be out there with me,” Mohan said. He liked to poke fun at Sam about all the time he spent in the kitchen. “Don’t you like the smell of meat? Come on outside and help me cut. Get up, Grandma! Get up!” Mohan gripped Sam under his arm and lifted him from the stool.

  “You sound like my father,” Sam mumbled.

  “I am your father. At least for these months you are here.”

  In fact, Mohan was a lot like Sam’s father. Both men hated an argument, or at least they rarely allowed for one. Both were tall, though Mohan had a rounded belly that often dribbled sweat. Mohan liked to tromp around shirtless, a rag draped over his shoulder, which he would occasionally wipe across his forehead. That was the difference: Sam’s father would never be caught with his shirt off.

  SAM’S FATHER WROTE to him every couple of weeks. His blue aerograms would often be waiting for Sam on his desk when he returned from school, the block letters large and even, peeking through the thin paper. He knew his father was proud of him, even if he didn’t fully understand Sam’s decision to put off his life to travel to the other side of the world and live with strangers. His letters were inquisitive and hurried, the first half a quick update of recent events in his parents’ lives, the second a series of questions about Sam’s job or his host family. Sometimes he’d slip in a New York Times article about the civil war. Sam hated when his father did this. He wasn’t sure if it was his father’s way of showing concern or if he assumed that Sam didn’t have a
ccess to any real news. Either way, the articles seemed manipulative to him.

  His mother’s letters came more sporadically but in greater numbers when they did come. Sam wondered if it was the Sri Lankan postal system that created these strange ebbs and flows or if his mother couldn’t keep track of when she had last written. Her letters were longer than his father’s and arrived in real envelopes thick with several sheets of paper. Rather than updates, they were filled with philosophical wanderings about the past, about what Sam had been like as a little boy, and how she wasn’t surprised, not at all, that he had chosen to spend his time helping people. In his mother’s letters, Sam was made heroic. He was altruistic and selfless, or compassionate and brave. Sam tried hard to locate himself in these descriptions, but it always seemed as if he were reading about someone else. As he deciphered the sloping lines of his mother’s unsteady script, he could feel only the selfishness and irresponsibility of his choices. He took a deep breath at the end of his parents’ letters, always signed the same way. He wondered who had copied these closing words from whom: “I love you, come home soon.”

  WHEN HIS MOTHER’S seizures had started, her balance had grown bad, and often if she misstepped, her body would simply collapse. She would fall and everything would shake and the next day she would have a gash on her thigh or a bald spot on her head. Once, she had explained that the most difficult thing about the seizures was that she couldn’t tell the person hovering over her that she was fine, to just be patient, that she could already feel it passing. But to Sam, the seizures didn’t just pass; they lingered in his mother’s brain, sucking memory and strength. When she had first left the hospital in Burlington after three months in the ICU, she had looked at Sam, confused. “And you are?” she asked.

  “Let it go, Sam,” his father said. “Let’s just get her home. She’ll be more herself tomorrow.”

  And his father had been right. The next day, Sam’s mother apologized. “I’ve lost five years,” she said. “It’s like you never graduated from high school, never went away.”

  Sam had felt the first buildings of anger then. When his mother explained so simply that five years of his life didn’t exist for her, he felt as if she was resigned to the erasure of his past. He watched her uneasily in those early days back from the hospital, as she took in the not quite familiar sights of her kitchen, her bedroom, her backyard. He worried about his future—maybe it could get swallowed up, too.

  THE NEXT DAY, Sam caught the intercity bus to Colombo. As the bus journeyed down Galle Road, zigzagging between bicyclists and trishaws and other oncoming buses, Sam tried to see the landscape as his parents might see it. In a few more days, their eyes would travel over this coastline, the arching palm trees, and the turquoise sea. The food would be too spicy for them, so they would have to eat at those tourist places where busloads of Germans stop. The Germans have a habit of throwing candy bonbons from their bus window down at the local children below, a spectacle that Sam had grown to hate. As the resort villages of Bentota and Kalutara passed by his window, Sam imagined sitting with his parents at a buffet filled with sauerkraut and sausages. This is going to be impossible, he thought as he rested his forehead against the seat in front of him.

  Sam had his father’s latest letter in his pocket, with their flight number and the time of their arrival. Just as he arrived at the teachers college, a thunderstorm broke over Colombo, and by the time he got to the faculty lounge, his shirt was soaked through and his father’s letter was bleeding through the pocket of his gray trousers.

  “You’re a mess,” Nilanthi teased Sam as he entered their classroom.

  It was unusual for Nilanthi to begin conversations with him in front of the other students, and briefly he let himself imagine that maybe she was starting to trust him a little bit more, maybe even like him a bit. “It’s the latest fashion, Nilanthi—the wet look. It’s only a matter of time before I become the next Bollywood star, serenading his lady in the rain.”

  “Don’t count on it.” A quick smile passed across her face. She readjusted the bangles on her arms.

  Her nervousness surprised Sam. Was she flirting with him? Before he knew exactly what he was doing, he blurted out, “My parents are coming for a visit. Monday. They’re staying for two weeks or so. Perhaps you could meet them.” Immediately, Sam wished he could take his words back, aware that he was betraying too much. In Sri Lanka, a man asking a woman to visit with his parents was almost like proposing to her.

  Nilanthi stared at the floor. She twisted and twisted her bangles against her wrists. The other students began entering the room, and Sam didn’t quite know what to do. Should he leave her standing there and just walk to the front of the classroom? Just as he was about to whisper, Forget I even mentioned it, Nilanthi reached out and squeezed Sam’s forearm. She nodded once and went to her seat.

  Sam muddled through the one-hour class, confusing his explanations of the passive voice with the simple past tense. With him as their grammar teacher, Sam’s students were doomed, he thought. Nilanthi refused to meet his eyes throughout class, and as the hour wound down, she quickly collected her books and was the first to leave the room. Sam wished he could take it all back, erase both of their embarrassment even as he sat in his chair, wondering what her nod had meant, remembering the gentle pressure of her fingertips on his arm, the surprising coolness of her bracelet.

  When Sam came back from his lunch break, there was a note tucked into his faculty mailbox: “You can reach me at this number at my boardinghouse. Call after six. N.”

  SAM RETURNED TO Melissa’s house. They made noodles out of Japanese spice packets and watched Armageddon on Melissa’s tiny TV. Sam tried not to notice the time as the evening dragged beyond eight o’clock and then nine. He still hadn’t called Nilanthi.

  “The real love story in this movie is between Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton.” Melissa had her legs draped over Sam’s lap. “That scene when Billy Bob tells Bruce that he wished he could go with him, up there into space, to defeat that asteroid? It’s charged.”

  Sam just couldn’t picture it—introducing Nilanthi to his parents. His mother would be polite and give her all sorts of compliments that would only embarrass all of them, and his father would read it as just more proof of Sam’s immaturity and selfishness. So this is the reason you want to stay? he could hear his father asking him. And how would Sam answer? Yes, Nilanthi was a part of it, but it was more than her. He had a life here; he could show it to his father. But in the end, all his father would see would be a young Sri Lankan woman. He would see it as a cliché, and there’d be no changing his mind.

  “Do you think it’s creepy that in the background of Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck’s love scene, there’s an Aerosmith song playing?” Melissa readjusted her legs. “I mean, that’s her father singing while she’s making out with Affleck.”

  Sam reached over Melissa’s legs to grab his beer.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” Sam kept his gaze on the TV.

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  Sam shrugged.

  “Why are you drinking so much?”

  Sam shrugged again.

  Melissa threw her legs up into the air and planted them in front of her. She grabbed her beer and headed into the bedroom and slammed the door, not once looking in Sam’s direction. He didn’t want to come here anymore, but he wanted Melissa to make the decision. He felt that she deserved the satisfaction of being the one to throw him out.

  ON MONDAY, SAM met his parents’ plane in Colombo after passing through three checkpoints and having his ID inspected twice. When his mother came off the plane, she walked right by him.

  “Mom,” Sam said from behind her.

  “Sam? Oh my God, I didn’t recognize you. Were you standing right there? You’re so thin!” She hugged him and he leaned down to kiss her cheek.

  “You feel hot, Mom.”

  “Well, honey, it’s only what—a hundred degrees outside? Of course I’m
hot.” She was still looking Sam up and down, an uncertain smile fixed on her lips.

  “I’ll get the bags.” Sam’s father’s voice startled him; Sam hadn’t even felt his father’s approach. He leaned into an awkward hug and then let his father drift off toward the baggage claim.

  Sam felt a rising panic in his stomach. This is all wrong, he thought.

  IT TURNED OUT that Sam’s mother had a fever after all. When they reached Kandy, the highland capital, she lay in bed for three days straight, refusing to allow Sam to call the embassy doctor.

  “Let her be,” his father had argued. “She’d probably be worse off in one of these hospitals anyway.”

  “Actually, Dad, they’re not so bad. When I got sick last month—”

  “But you’re used to this place. You walk around barefoot. Christ—you eat with your hands, Sam, and squat over a hole in the ground. Of course you don’t mind the hospital.”

  But when the seizures began, Sam’s father had no choice but to let Sam take charge. When they arrived at Kandy General, Sam’s mother was put on a gurney and wheeled into a back room. She hadn’t opened her eyes since they called the taxi. Sam watched his mother’s chest rise and fall unevenly and her top row of teeth graze again and again against her chapped bottom lip. An acrid smell was coming from her mouth and under her arms.

  Soon his mother had been brought to the ICU and was lying on a bed without sheets—a red, plastic-covered bed, the last bed in a row of beds in a crowded room. The doctors came and pumped antiseizure drugs and prednisone into her arms, but still she didn’t open her eyes.

  For days, Sam and his father sat by his mother’s bed. The nurses came and went, checking his mother’s IV or wiping her forehead with a damp cloth. The nurses liked Sam because he spoke Sinhala. They asked him how he liked their country and said wasn’t it beautiful and weren’t the people kind and hospitable and wasn’t it just too bad about the war? Sam only nodded, but his silence seemed to make them even more talkative. They told him about the other patients in the ICU. There was the man dying of a krait bite. There was a twelve-year-old girl who had tried to kill herself by drinking lye. Her parents had been killed during a suicide bombing at the Temple of the Tooth. If she lived, she would probably never speak. There were many girls who had tried the same thing lately, they said. Sam felt himself nodding long after he had stopped listening.