‘Moon, as you know, Miss Martine answered! She even wrote about you.
‘When she said, “I get a bit foolish sometimes when it is full moon,” it was surely meant for me.
She told me she liked her brother better now. I was proud she thought I understood. She explained that liquid particles could not be cut with swords; about the agitation of liquid particles also: how, if disturbed, they moved; how some might even escape into a gas, despite their molecular constancy.
‘Now I was at the steps wrapping round Sigiriya. But I did not see my mistakes around me, or my now dizzying height. Instead I hugged the famous mirror wall along to the walls beyond painted with stories: my stories of growing big.’
11 Anupama
6 February 2013
A small voice stops Anupama pacing her garden. The other side of her luxuriant green boundary, the elderly woman, her neighbour, is quavering out an old village song.
‘Boatman, I can see a figure on the far bank. I think it’s your wife, waving you home.’
Stiffening at the melody, her mobile to her lip, Anupama shudders at the image.
She turns away with a look of determination, recalling instead two powerful Lankan women: Shanthi Eva Wanasundara, first female Attorney-General, and Dr Shirani Bandaranayake, the first woman Chief Justice. There’s always injustice and inequality to fight. She thinks stubbornly, Sri Lanka has a history of such women, and I could add to it.
‘Handanandāmāmā, their success should give me hope.’
The hot air is thickening; the sky begins bruising like mangoes, and soon it will shed its contents. Anupama pockets her phone in her apron, gathers up her washing, takes it in. But the boatman and his wife and their separation by water follow her.
‘I might like to be with someone, but – if he is often apart from me, or sad – I will not like the state of being married.’
She owns up to herself, I said that long ago. It was part of my confession to Auntie-Uncle Moon. And now, she thinks, for my honest remark, I must absolutely pay.
* * *
1985
The young Anupama stepped up her pace, now slopping her load of water, unburdening herself to her Auntie-Uncle as rapidly as she could. ‘For a while I had been crying when I was happy, laughing when I should cry. On 15th February this year I visited the latrine. I felt sick. I saw pink spots in my knickers. I confided in Upeksha.
‘“Oh for goodness sake,” she tutted. “Another thing to think about.”
‘She went to amma – to my distress getting no response; so she fetched Mohan.
‘She told him in a hissing way, “It’s nothing important, but you’d better tell the mothers that Anupama has grown big. And auntie Nilu. And auntie Prema the elder.’
Mohan was staring at me.
‘“Don’t worry,” I smiled bravely.
‘Upeksha warned, “Stay away from small lady for the moment. So must tatta and the fathers and Jayamal. From today you’re a little man, so keep them off.”
‘Mohan dawdled off on his errand, gazing back, his arms of a langur dangling, a young boy to me still.
‘In our house, no room does not lead to others apart from the cupboard, with its door from the outside merely; but you know this. This was where they placed Upeksha at her time. It has no windows, no way to see you, Handanandāmāmā.
‘Mohan sobbed at the door. “Let me in. I can protect you. Surely I don’t matter, since I’m not really grown yet.”
‘I pressed my eye to a knothole. “Imagine this is just an exciting story.”
‘Upeksha was supposed to be with me. She should have led me to the latrine under a cloth while the mothers and aunties made me the most mild curries and planned what would happen to me next; but soon she grew bored and, unknown to them, she often left me.’
Anupama’s sandals were full of water. She slowed down, shaking out her feet.
‘One day, using one of Miss Martine’s London envelopes, Mohan slid a key on a string under the door.
‘“Put it on,” he hissed. “To protect you from the yakshas.”’
Anupama stopped, put down the buckets of water and clutched her belly, remembering. Rain full of moon glints was gushing down the road ahead of her, and the jackal foxes were still yapping.
She puzzled, ‘The breadfruit tree has male and female flowers. But people often put themselves in separate places: the little men apart from the small ladies who fetch firewood and harvest vegetables; women, who bring water, apart from men, who build the wells. While the latrines were being built they were places only for men, but mysteriously, once they were done, they were transformed to places mostly for women.
‘I still remember long ago, our family discussing which child should receive the letters, and Mr Mendes reminding amma, “It could be a girl, you know,” and amma saying, “But Anupama can be so naughty. She lost her tie on school prize-giving” – which was unjust, she had misremembered; whereas Jayamal had just broken Mohan’s cart and was now refusing outright to receive the English letters, and yet – apart from tatta – the family disapproved not at all. And in these times, the fathers frown at my fascinating questions but not at my crying, and at Mohan’s crying but not at his many questions: Handanandāmāmā, does that seem fair to you?
‘I sat and thought such things in the cupboard. Every day, Upeksha opened the door and fired at me, “Are you clean yet?”
‘Fortunately, from utter disdain she had not requested my dirty cloths for washing; I say fortunately, for since the first day there had been no signs in my knickers.
‘The only escape from her question was yet another lie: on the fourth day I told her, “I am clean.”’
Anupama moved on, but at the Post Office she stopped. She wandered under its roof and, back against the wall, slid down till she was squatting on the ground. She picked up a leech with her fingers, and squashed it with her thumb.
‘Here is what happened next. The astrologer had set an auspicious day. Senior mother and the ladies led me under my cloth, an extra white cloth on my head, up our lane and up the road, to the well. Unveiling me, she doused me in cold water from new pots. She broke them, and the ladies led me home. She gave me a knife. I hacked a coconut in two. Both halves fell inside the doorway. A late marriage.
‘“Did you want to be on the shelf?” teased Upeksha.
‘I know the answer. I might like to be with someone, but – if he is often apart from me, or sad – I will not like the state of being married. As for babies, Lankans adore them, even silly unfeeling boys, but I find them mostly of scientific interest. So I do not think I want a husband at all.’
Anupama drooped, and the leeches teemed around her.
She remembered, ‘All the males of the family were gathered: tatta, the fathers, Jayamal and Mohan. They watched me enter through the veranda. The ladies dressed me in a new red dress. They sat me on a mat, requesting me to stare into a mirror. Junior mother passed me a comb. I drew it through my wet hair. Upeksha took away my hair slide.
‘“Grow your hair now, small lady,” she smiled knowingly.
‘I blew out the lamps. Then people gave me earrings and a necklace and we had a party, all. I felt the same as ever. But since these events were not truthful, since they came from my mistake, they are improper for the album. They were nothing, a painted story on a wall.
‘You know what happened next, Handanandāmāmā. A month passed, not much more. Now I found my knickers full of blood. To me I seemed the same, but everyone else seemed changed, even Mohan. If I had spoken about this to Miss Martine in writing, I would have been discovered.
‘The paws of Sigiriya’s stone lion were waiting to bat us higher still.’ Anupama mumbled her story into her lap. ‘In May I spotted Mohan questioning tatta, then tatta and the mothers talking. On Friday 24th, the little one accused me of tricking him in my writing. I am so sorry: I denied it. We started to quarrel horribly about what words to write in the next letter.
‘My feet had touched th
e clifftop’s metal stairs.
‘Soon, the little one was definite that our letters had got longer. The stairs trembled under me. I longed to tell Miss Martine that I would turn fourteen in three days’ time, but I no longer dared say anything for myself.
‘Then, Mohan was most certain about me. I refused to tell Miss Martine. He passed Mr Mendes our latest letter – containing some secret message I never read.
‘I smuggled a P.S. to Mr Mendes pretending it was from Mohan. ‘“I ardently wish you were here so we could talk.”
‘My one last call for help.’
Anupama was almost home now, her excuse to leave the family over. She roused herself and lugged her buckets on.
‘The mothers and auntie Nilu have just been to see me, as you have witnessed. It was Mohan they sent running, a grin on his face, to summon me. He led me through these most grim, clapping rains. I stood on the veranda before the ladies, with amma nodding dimly, all sagging like wet fruit.
‘“About your letters to Miss Martine,” auntie Nilu began. “You know what you’ve done wrong.” I also knew what you call the lowest part of your body, the hidden part, the part where blood appears. For some reason, my heart drummed hard in there.
‘Senior mother clasped Mohan. I stared at him, and Mohan stared at me.
‘“Lajjawa, Anupama, humility. This one’s a little man now. He’ll read and write his letters from today.”
‘He hid a smile. The thumping grew inside me.
‘“Another thing,” junior auntie muttered. “It’s no longer proper to be with him at night. Take care this doesn’t happen from now on.”
‘Mohan looked horrified. My hammering speeded up, exciting and terrifying both, making me hot and strange. Seeing the fullness of what I had destroyed, I ran to seek you somehow, to confess.
‘I used to collect seeds, remember; but humidity sprouted them and changed them. Rocks and skins are better: they stay the same. In liquid and reptiles, both, their changes are under the surface and not fearful at all, whereas in people, it happens the other way round. I am the same as always – except that no one says so; and if that is the case, then perhaps I am not.’
The sky flooded out the moon as Anupama’s hand pressed against the gate of home.
‘Where are you, Moon, where are you? I shall be punished by the aunties. I have climbed away from what is right. I am teetering on Lion Rock, with darkness and a pouring sky around me.’
On Sunday 21 October, Anupama and Mohan were pulling his cart among the forested streams. Every now and then they stopped, loading up wood. Anupama toiled with the cart downhill while Mohan gambolled about, whipping the treetrunks with a switch.
‘Handanandāmāmā,’ she whispered, ‘do you see how Mohan is now that he controls the letters? His head is dancing like the mosquitos.’
On the Tuesday after school, Anupama was gathering nutmegs on the plantation of uncle Kumara, a generous neighbour.
The vegetation rustled, and Mohan plunged in through it.
His gaze on her was gleeful, half-afraid. ‘My letter from Miss Martine must be coming soon.’
He batted his lashes, cocking his head. ‘My, me,’ Anupama repeated to herself. The nutmegs lay under the trees as if they were hard egg yolks splitting open. She parted a swollen casing, threw it away. The mace enclosing the nut was like the vessels of a heart.
She said quietly, ‘I wonder if you have fed the hens.’ Mohan scampered off. ‘Handanandāmāmā, turn your eye away from these scenes. Oh Handanandāmāmā,’ she keened inside herself.
On the Wednesday and the Thursday and the Friday, Mohan asked Anupama, ‘How long since we sent the last letter?’
The first time she said evenly, ‘Well, Mr Mendes was here on the day that it was done. 29th September. Can you work that out with your maths?’
The next day she just snapped, ‘Twenty-six days’; and the third day she told him, before he’d got through asking, ‘Mohan, it has been twenty-seven days. I have assured you before this, little one, that you just have to wait.’
‘I’m a man and not a little one,’ he said.
That Sunday Raththota held its market. The Liyanages were all there, but for Anupama’s mother. Among the stalls they met their friends and neighbours, most buying as little as they. The eyes of Anupama’s mothers followed her. Between the lines of flip-flops and salt fish and piles of soap, she spotted Mohan by a heap of pumpkins, head upturned, in animated conversation with their father. Tatta answered Mohan in monosyllables, unbending, meanwhile waving at some friend.
Anupama pointed out mutely, ‘Auntie-Uncle, Mohan is trying not to cry.’ She deduced, watching his lips move, ‘He is asking tatta if he absolutely must write the letters on his own.’ Her stomach fluttered. ‘Perhaps they will let us go on as before.’
The following day, there was a lunar eclipse. In Anupama’s village a young woman was getting married; in another, not far off, there was a funeral at the same time. Tatta would attend the funeral as a drummer, while Jayamal and Mohan and Upeksha chose the wedding. Amma refused to leave the house.
Anupama confided in her Auntie-Uncle, ‘I want to stay with amma, to lie beside her and wait for Miss Martine’s letter,’ but senior mother said, ‘Young lady, you must choose.’
She fled to the latrine and held the door shut.
‘Handanandāmāmā,’ she breathed, shallowly, ‘I do not know which is less painful, to celebrate a death, or the married state I do not want; that I may have sent my last letter to Miss Martine, or that I may never read her letters again. I may be running out of time to have my own thoughts to share with her. At school, I have learned about air pockets. I think I am breathing in one of those.’
She went to the funeral in the end. The leaders of the procession drummed their drums and laid a white path of cloths along the lane in front of the dark blue coffin held high. She thought, At least the little man isn’t here. Mohan had a fancy that the mourners scattered fried paddy that he could eat like American popcorn. Even so, she thought, these days all death deters him; and for once, I am most glad.
In the cemetery, she put her burning spill to the pyre. Well-wishers offered messages for the dead man, slipping them into plastic and pinning them among the white bunting hanging limply on the perimeter.
She scribbled her wish. ‘To all the people who are dead to me. Perhaps we may come back in another life.’ She spelt out silently to the moon, ‘This may not be in invisible ink as I once wished; but still it is a code for Miss Martine.’
When the family got home she went to her mother’s room, looking for the mound of her, but amma wasn’t there.
‘The others must have taken her to the wedding,’ said tatta. He acted disappointed in her these days. ‘And, small lady, you are coming too.’
Changed into coloured clothes, the fathers and Anupama walked through their village, emerging out of the lane onto a house yard at the roadside. The rituals had finished under the corrugated-iron poruwa cascading coloured paper. The couple were taking their throne, and people were clapping and cooing, and Mr Jarasinghe was acting the showman with his camera. Anupama hung back.
‘I do not want my finger bound to someone else’s with a thread however golden,’ she told the unseen moon. Soon the crowds snaked along to the community hall where the feast and gifts were waiting. Darkness drew in, thick as paint, on the laughter of adults and milling children. The full moon rose, silver-rimmed, making a black woodcut of the forests high above them. There were the scents of curry cooking and frangipani drifting.
Anupama stayed at her mother’s side. Her mother gorged herself with her usual glazed expression, nodding at anyone near them. Harshini, Anupama’s friend, tried to tempt Anupama away, but she wouldn’t move on to the singing and the dancing.
After several hours the quacking pipes and bonging drums faded away, and eyes upturned to the grey screen crossing the moon. Some guests began low murmurs of incantation. Anupama looked steadfastly at the ground.
&nb
sp; ‘Why aren’t you watching?’ a deep male voice asked.
‘Because I am not interested,’ she said. Then she corrected, ‘That is not a fact.’
‘And what is fact?’ the young man asked.
She turned to him. He was towering for a Lankan, cumbersome, at least twenty to her fourteen, alert looking. He had an aura of applied musk, of careful male preparation.
She said, ‘We have to be honest. What else is there?’
The ground took on its auspicious russet tinge, and the chanting grew.
The young man said, ‘You think that there is something that we can call absolute truth? I’m not so sure.’ The glow picked out his cleft chin. ‘Take the bride, for instance. She’s my friend’s cousin, by the way. I have heard people saying that she is not pretty. Perhaps objectively she is not. But to the bridegroom, I expect she is. Facts change, depending on who believes them, if we need to believe them. And we may find that we change with them.’
‘I do not agree,’ Anupama began, just as a Land Rover rolled onto the verge.
Mr Mendes prised his bulk out of the seat, the sails of his eyebrows flexing, mesmerised by the moonlight. He made Anupama a distracted mock-flourish, absently patting his pocket, which had an envelope sticking out.
She gabbled to the young man, ‘I am not watching because, in a way, I have stabbed the moon,’ and hitching up her sari, she broke into a run.
She skirted the back of the hall, following the village stream uphill. Clouds rolled above, darkening the tint of orange, and whenever the moon came out again the falls were flaming fringes. Soon they began to silver, and she risked staring up.
‘Handanandāmāmā,’ she said, ‘I did not want these last days in our album. They have been full of scenes I did not want. But I know I must continue with my truths, for truth is everything. If I do, please give me one last chance: let me keep my special contact with Miss Martine.’
On the Far Side, There's a Boy Page 10