The Beach at Galle Road

by Joanna Luloff

  UP NORTH

  Lucy had taken the job in Jaffna much to everyone’s worry. In her letters home explaining her decision, she wrote that she wanted to make a difference. Two years as a volunteer in southern Sri Lanka and she had always felt on the outskirts, observing loss from a distance, putting on her teaching sari, conjugating verbs on a battery-acid-blackened chalkboard, feeling useless as the civil war crackled around her. It echoed from the radios and decorated her rice packets in old newspaper clippings. And in more subtle ways, it folded into the faces and stories of her neighbors, in somber funeral processions, in Election Day curfews, in the drought even. In Jaffna, she explained, she could help in more direct ways.

  But there was something more selfish in her decision, and she would admit this to herself from time to time, even if these confessions never found their way into her phone calls or letters. Often, when she sat on the guesthouse patio after work, she would ask herself a series of questions. Why did she enjoy hearing her parents’ groans greeting her over an often disconnected telephone call, their pleas for her to come home? Why did she like that her Peace Corps friends wrote scolding letters to her, claiming that she was crazy, that she had a death wish? Why did the Red Cross vans streaming by and the sounds of nearby sirens give her a sense of alertness and presence that had always felt so dulled in Galle? And to every question, she formulated an articulate answer, playing devil’s advocate in her mind. It certainly wasn’t death she was seeking; it was the exact opposite—an extreme feeling of aliveness and participation. Alongside her parents’ groans, she convinced herself that she also heard pride. In some ways, she argued, by looking after the Red Cross staff, she, too, was a part of their purposeful van rides.

  Occasionally, when these silent conversations came to a close and she felt satisfied with the arguments she had made, Lucy allowed one final acknowledgment of selfishness. She liked the adventure stories that came from living in the north and from the proximity to the war. These narratives found their way into the letters she wrote home and to her friends south of Colombo. She began each letter with a sense of gravity: “Today the Red Cross opened another vaccination tent for the growing number of refugees.” “Last week the UN patrolled the airport road for undiscovered land mines.” “Tomorrow I’ll fly to Colombo (if we’re cleared) to check in with the embassy.” She didn’t acknowledge her distance from or the infrequency of most of these events. She never mentioned the sweeping and tidying and shopping that filled most of her days, nor the growing disappointment of feeling like a house cleaner in the midst of all this frantic, important activity. Instead she allowed invisible narratives to thread from the little teases of story she was offering. She pictured her parents showing these letters to their friends. She imagined herself being called brave and selfless even though this was, in fact, the opposite of what she had been feeling lately. Still, she couldn’t be held responsible for other people’s imaginations.

  WHEN, FOUR MONTHS ago, her embassy friend told Lucy about the UN volunteer position that was opening up in the north—the Peace Corps – forbidden north with its refugees, no-travel zones, and halted ferries—Lucy had seen it as an opportunity to shift from observer to participant. The job would grant her the status of someone willing to take a risk, to have a formed opinion about this war, based on real involvement. In her mind she became part of the mysterious north, its community of scrambling revolutionaries and depleted aid workers.

  After her volunteer contract expired, she found herself, with surprisingly little effort, aboard a ten-seat plane bumping through forbidden skies. The plane’s windows carried the dust of the desert north, and its engine grumbled and churned for half an hour before taking off, as if struggling for momentum. The seats looked as if they had been stolen from other transportation devices, mismatched and battered. Lucy rested her feet on the flip seat in front of her, trying to silence the incessant rattling, made worse with the slightest hint of turbulence. The journey between Jaffna and Colombo’s airport was short, but her supervisor had warned her that it was a risky one: there was often sniper fire along their route, and the roadways that stretched far beneath them were a notorious no-man’s-land, at times held by government forces, at others under Tamil Tiger command.

  She was traveling with a pediatrician and a surgeon from Doctors Without Borders, three Red Cross volunteers, and a representative from Oxfam who had been sent to document the nutrition and health needs of the new refugee camps. Lucy sat beside her new companions, listening to their stories of starvation, overcrowded orphanages, and the spreading of disease throughout the camps. With her UN passport, Lucy had felt prepared to start making these stories her own, though her assignment seemed unglamorous at best: manager of the International Aid Rest House.

  Lucy had memorized the safety briefings, knew the proper procedure for emergency landings, hijackings, and even water landings, though as far as Lucy knew, the land beneath them was dried out, drought-dusty, with only an occasional slow-moving river. With each knock of turbulence or sudden jolt or loss of altitude, Lucy felt her stomach tighten, her grip lock on her armrest, the thud of her heart in her ears. She knew it was morbid, this excitement she craved, linked with the possibility of disaster, but on the plane she felt fully planted in her life. She felt courageous and strong. When the plane eventually bumped along the Jaffna runway, her grip loosened and she wiped the sweat from her upper lip. In that moment, she had felt completely awake.

  The landscape that greeted Lucy was unfamiliar. In contrast to the lushness of the southern wetlands, Jaffna Town was a dusty, flat, burnt-out desert. Most of the trees were drooping palmyra palms that lined the finger-like lagoons. Lucy would later see workers hacking at the palmyra fronds in order to make them into rooftops. The palmyra roots were tapped for toddy, later distilled into the arrack Lucy would drink at the few remaining restaurants. When the wind blew, ocher-tinged soot whipped through the air and scraped the inside of Lucy’s ears, nose, and eyes. It was a scruffy landscape, its monochrome yellows interrupted occasionally by farms growing tobacco—an impossible-seeming bright green in neat rectangles.

  As she settled in, Lucy tried to explore her new home but found the emptiness and quiet unsettling. The town itself had been made desolate by skeletal neighborhoods and a haunting feeling of disappearance. Lucy was used to chaotic bustle even in the smaller villages in the south, where buses, motorbikes, and bicycles would compete for space on tangled roads. But here, things seemed remarkably calm. Occasional buses would rumble down the streets almost empty. A family of four perched on a single bicycle would head to the fish market. But for much of the day, the roads were empty except for the army jeeps that patrolled town.

  In Lucy’s neighborhood, the only intact concrete structure besides the UN guesthouse was the church, which had become a sort of up-for-grabs shrine. She watched both Hindus and Christians praying there, often bringing their own miniature deities. Many of the Jaffna residents were slowly returning to the town, attempting the rebuilding of their homes and workplaces, after months and months spent in refugee camps south of the peninsula. Lucy watched these projects from a distance, observing the optimistic bustle with a sense of wariness. For as many new projects as she witnessed, she saw an equal number of abandoned, half-finished structures. She wondered where the families who had begun these homes had suddenly disappeared to.

  AFTER THREE MONTHS in Jaffna, Lucy had begun to reexamine her expectations. Looking back on that first plane ride, of course she recognized her own naïveté, but she didn’t feel she deserved all this humiliation and disappointment. Despite her grandiose notions of adventure and purpose, she found that in reality she had merely shifted from teacher to housekeeper. She mopped and planned meals and organized travel while the real aid workers worked, moving with pace and intention to meetings and refugee camps and makeshift hospital tents. She watched their haggard exhaustion and she envied them.

  At first, Lucy had judged some of the aid workers. Their laughter was often
raucous and their sociability seemed inappropriate. Often, as a group, they would ignore the 9 p.m. curfews and clamber into their Pajeros, kicking up dust on their way to the local (and only open) public restaurant. As the lights flickered off in the remaining storefronts and homes, the Lucky Bar’s muted lamps would blink at the mercy of its generator’s whim. Lucy would join them because she was bored and lonely. While Lucky’s employees diligently poured Lion lagers and Three Coins brew into the Westerners’ cooled glasses, Lucy noticed them glancing nervously at the clock, most likely wondering how they might safely return home after they collected their healthy tips.

  Sometimes Lucy would quietly urge her companions to be quick, drink up, and go, explain that they were keeping the servers from being able to go home safely, but usually she would let herself collapse into their stories, let her eyes lose focus and her thoughts grow pleasantly fuzzy. The specifics of their stories often tugged her out of this dazed pleasantness, though, and in these moments she wished they could all just be quiet and listen to the Hindi pop songs that chirped around them. Maybe dance a bit.

  IN THE EVENINGS, if she was lucky, guests would sip tea with her on the porch. Lately a Norwegian doctor had been keeping her company. Isak was young—newly out of medical school—and he had an arrogance that irritated Lucy, but his stories, she had to admit, held her attention. In the evenings, he would stretch out his long legs until they rested under her chair, his bare feet poking out of faded jeans, and he’d take off his round wire glasses. When he rubbed at his eyes and sighed, exaggeratedly, Lucy knew he was about to begin the day’s narrative.

  Isak described children with bloated bellies, infections gone black, and fluttering stacks of missing-person reports. He spoke with melancholy and even occasionally with contempt. “It’s incredible what they do to their own people,” he began one night. “The problem is, neither the army nor the Tigers care what happens here.” He leaned forward. “Most of these children have lived their entire lives in temporary camps. The parents have no hope in their eyes.” He sighed. “But we do what we can.”

  Lucy tried to visualize the places Isak described. She knew they were miserable places, too small and undersupplied for the amount of people living there. She saw Isak in the middle of all this, purposeful and tall, his blond ponytailed hair so out of place in these scenes. He must tower over his patients, she imagined. He must seem like some kind of heroic giant out of a fable. Even as her mind circled around these cinematic images of pain and heroism, what she held on to the most was the “we” Isak used over and over again. She knew he meant the other doctors, the nutritionists, the human rights observers, the Tamil medical students. He didn’t mean Lucy. She wanted to change that. Since she had arrived, Lucy had been trying to find a way into that “we.”

  “Not all of the country is like Jaffna,” she said, interrupting his narrative. “It’s not all hopeless like you describe it. And I doubt this place is either.” She knew her voice sounded defensive, but Isak’s tone of expertise and authority was getting on her nerves. How long has he been here? she asked herself silently. Three weeks? And he’s suddenly an expert? She sat back in her chair and sipped her tea. She kept her gaze on the darkened street.

  Isak tapped the underside of Lucy’s chair. She knew if she met his gaze, he’d be grinning. When he starts talking again, she thought, his tone will be playful. He’ll start flirting. But she wanted him to take her seriously. Mostly she wanted to explain that she had seen another side of this country, that she had been taken up by the cricket frenzy, that she thought string hoppers were the most perfect food ever created, and that in Baddegama, families would come together in the evenings to sip tea and watch the latest Hindi teledramas. In Jaffna, the experiences that had always seemed so mundane to Lucy took on the hue of the exotic. She knew that if she offered up these details, Isak would listen politely and even ask a question or two. But she kept her eyes on the flickering streetlamp.

  The problem was that Lucy had grown bored with her own anecdotes. The amusing snake stories she had accumulated—the one about the heavy winding tree snake that fell onto her shoulder on her first day of school, much to the entertainment of her students—had lodged itself in her throat, she had told it so many times. And when she had told a previous guest the other stories—her host family’s fondness for illegal boar hunting, the monk who had hidden in her garden late at night begging for English lessons when she knew his real intentions—she felt as if she were talking about a friend, another volunteer maybe, and she began to lose sight of which stories were her own and which she had heard from others. They had become abstract, meant only to entertain, and detached from the real memories that had created them. When eventually the guest had excused himself, explaining that he had to get up early in the morning, Lucy had sat on the darkened porch feeling a growing disgust for her lame attempts at connection. She didn’t want to repeat the experience with Isak now. The truth was, he was the expert here, they all were, everyone staying in this house except for Lucy. She still didn’t know anything about Jaffna. She still hadn’t directly experienced any of the war’s reality, nor was she doing anything to help these people Isak described.

  After several moments of silence, Isak pulled his legs back from under Lucy’s chair. “Well, I’m off to write up some reports.”

  Lucy glanced up at him as he stretched his arms high over his head. He looked embarrassed and she quickly felt ashamed for being so rude. She offered him a small smile. It wasn’t his fault she was disappointed, she thought to herself, even if he was arrogant and boastful. “Do you want me to bring some more tea later?” She felt as if she should at least extend some gesture of friendliness, but she was disgusted by the subservient sound of her offer.

  When he winked and replied, “That would be lovely,” she wished she had just kept her eyes focused on the darkness beyond the porch.

  A FEW DAYS later, Lucy found herself in an agitated mood. After she had finished clearing the breakfast room, she heard the postman’s bicycle bell and went to collect the mail as usual. She had received two letters—one from home and one from her friend Lena in the south. She had read Lena’s letter twice now. In it, Lena explained that the Peace Corps was shutting down its program in Sri Lanka. After the bombings of the Galadari Hotel earlier that month, Washington believed that the violence had become too random and unpredictable. They were getting calls from concerned parents. They were sending a team to interview the Peace Corps staff. “But it’s just a formality, really,” Lena wrote. “They’ve already made up their minds. It looks like I’m going to have to find a new job.”

  Lena’s tone was matter of fact. She had been a Peace Corps volunteer for three years and had then been hired as a staff trainer. She had been in the country for close to six years now and Lucy trusted her opinion on just about everything. But as she read the letter the second time, Lucy felt an unexpected panic. Although she hadn’t set a concrete date, she had planned to meet up with some friends along the Galle beach, and hearing about their upcoming departure made her feel suddenly abandoned. Why? That’s ridiculous. Things are safe enough where we were living. She argued with the letter. It’s such a waste.

  After skimming her mother’s letter and getting the usual updates from home—her grandfather’s health, who among her former classmates had gotten married, the new restaurants that had opened in town—Lucy set about writing her own letter home. With only cryptic hints about bombs and scattered violence, she wrote about the sudden closure of the Peace Corps program because of safety concerns. In the next paragraph, she described her intention to volunteer at a local school or orphanage. As she signed her name, she questioned, briefly, her pleasure in encouraging her parents’ worry, though she quickly sealed the envelope with the plan of dropping it in the post that afternoon. Writing the letter had calmed her a bit. She had regained a sense of control. But the feeling wouldn’t last long.

  LATER THAT DAY, when Isak told her about the family that had been buried aliv
e in their bomb shelter, she went to bed with him. It seemed the only way to keep the story a story, distant and removed, another tragedy told over mournful nods. Lucy had known the mother, not well, but she was a relative of Kirina, the woman who came to wash the linens twice a week. Kirina’s family lived a few kilometers outside town, where most people had built bomb shelters under their homes or had shared underground spaces with neighbors in abandoned warehouses. On this particular night, when distant rumblings of fighting shifted the earth, Kirina’s relatives had climbed down into the sandy underground space and were buried there when the earth toppled in over them. It had taken a couple of days for people to realize what had happened, though Kirina hadn’t mentioned it to Lucy when she picked up the bedsheets that week. Instead, Lucy heard it from Isak, who relayed it in his halted, formal English as he rubbed his fingertips along the base of Lucy’s neck. “It seems the land devoured them,” he explained. “And the neighbors knew nothing about it until the child missed two days of schooling.”

  Lucy’s mind wandered. She had heard that some of the village women had set up a makeshift school under a tent, close to where the former school had once been. There, they gave grammar lessons and taught simple math problems, but mostly they let the boys play cricket and the girls sew new clothes from discarded scraps of material. Lucy, over the past several weeks, had kept telling herself that she would visit the school and offer to volunteer there for a few hours a day, but she hadn’t yet taken the mile-long walk. The idea that she might return to teaching filled her with a sense of failure. After all, she could just have kept teaching in the south, extending her Peace Corps contract, and living relatively comfortably, speaking fluent Sinhalese and taking regular trips to the sea.