I lay in his arms all night, wide awake. This morning, after Raksha left for work, I called Amma and told her the pregnancy was making me tired. I asked her if she’d mind taking Chaya for a while. Then I called Leilani and told her everything.
We’ll keep it quiet—Leilani thinks that’s best. But I am not going to leave my daughter in the same house with that man for even one more day.
MARCH 3, 1981—CHAYA’S PIANO RECITAL.
We bought the tickets weeks ago; everyone expected Raksha to be there. Leilani won’t say anything, but the others think I should let him come. Kili thinks I just had a bad dream that night; I’m sure the others think that too, though none of the others actually say it. I know what I saw. I know what it would become.
Chaya will be surrounded by other people throughout the recital. She hasn’t seen her father in days, not since we moved back to Amma’s and Appa’s house, and she’s started asking questions I don’t know how to answer. I tuck her into bed, wrap the blue silk patchwork quilt around her small body, kiss her forehead and tell her I’ll explain it all soon. Then I curl up on a mattress on the floor beside her, trying to think what I can possibly say.
I don’t think Raksha will fight the divorce; he sounds like a whipped dog on the phone. He’s drinking all the time, I think—he cries every time he calls. I make him calm down before I let him talk to Chaya. He sounds so small.
He can come to the recital; he deserves the chance to say good-bye to her in person. He can pretend to be a good father for one more day.
JULY 20, 2000—CHAYA LEAVES FOR HER NEW JOB IN CALIFORNIA.
I thought about burning this journal, so Chaya would never find it and suspect. But I saved it instead, buried it in the back of my closet, in a hamper full of scraps and rags. I was saving it for this day, it seems.
Chaya is leaving to start her new position; I don’t know how often I’ll see her after this. Christmas and New Year and perhaps a birthday or two. Maybe she should know what really happened that day, the day her father died. She should read these words and know the truth. I almost told her when she got involved with that white boy—I didn’t trust him. But she got free of him quickly enough. I didn’t need to say the words. But they’re here. If anyone has a right to judge me, she does.
On that day in early March, Raksha at first seemed sober. But when we got to the recital hall, he slipped away. When he joined us in our seats, I could smell it on him. Chaya waited in the wings for her turn to go up. I said nothing. He drank more at intermission. Leilani sat on my other side; when Chaya went up, she took my hand. Chaya played beautifully that day. I never told her that. She was full of smiles as she curtseyed and the audience applauded.
Raksha hugged her when she came down. He hugged her and hugged her and when we left to go to the car, he swung her up on his shoulders. I should have stopped him then—but we were surrounded by people. I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of our friends and family and Chaya’s piano teacher. I don’t know why I cared.
When we got back to the car, Leilani offered to drive; Raksha refused. It was still winter in Chicago—we’d just been through a bad ice storm, and the roads were slippery. I tried to convince him to give her the keys, but he wouldn’t listen. He started to get angry; his voice got louder, and Leilani tried to take the keys from his hand. He shoved her away, hard, so that she fell on the ground. Chaya looked scared; she opened her mouth to yell, and Raksha pushed her inside the car, into the front passenger’s seat, shoving down the lock and slamming the door shut.
I couldn’t let him drive off with Chaya. He was running around the front, climbing into the driver’s seat. Chaya was crying loudly now, and I couldn’t breathe. I was on the wrong side of the car to reach him, to stop him. I opened the back door and climbed in. It took a few minutes—my stomach was so huge—but it seemed like it took forever. He had already turned on the engine. Before I closed the door, the car started to move. I slammed the door shut as Raksha took off. He was shouting at Chaya, “Seat belt, seat belt, seat belt!” and Chaya was crying harder and trying to put the seat belt on. She managed it, and I did too, dragging it across my belly as I begged him to stop the car. I was crying too. He didn’t say anything else, just drove, racing toward the highway, toward Lake Shore Drive. I don’t know what he was planning to do, where he thought he could go. I doubt he was thinking at all. He drove much too fast. Before we even reached the highway, we hit a piece of black ice; we skidded off the road and hit a tree.
We were all thrown forward, but the seat belts held Chaya and me. Raksha had never put his on.
Chaya started screaming, and I tried to undo my seat belt and get to her. The front of the car was crumpled and Raksha’s head was slammed up against the steering wheel, completely still. I couldn’t reach her seat belt release. I reached forward, unlocked her door, climbed out of the car and opened her door, undid her seat belt and got her out. I almost walked away from the car right then. We were on a deserted side street leading toward the highway. Nobody was there—and who would fault me, seven months pregnant and with a hysterical child, for leaving a grown man in a car that might explode? But I had to know if he was still alive.
He hadn’t moved. I walked Chaya over to a tree and told her to wait there. Then I went back to the car. I must have run as well as I could, but I felt as if I were walking in slow motion; everything had been happening so fast, but now time had slowed until it was almost stopped. Chaya was safely away, and I had plenty of time to do whatever needed to be done.
Chaya, I could stop here. Or I could tell you that I found him dead there, tell you what the doctors said later, that the alcohol and the shock and his weak heart had combined to give him a heart attack and kill him at thirty-one. Maybe that’s the truth.
I walked back to the car. I opened his door. I tilted him back in the seat, and I didn’t know if he was breathing or not. His eyes were closed; he wasn’t moving. My belly hurt and my legs ached, and I didn’t know how to tell if he still lived. It didn’t matter. Because what I did then was bend over my husband, shielding my actions with my body. I covered his mouth and his nose tightly with my hands and the folds of my sari. I counted seconds in my head. One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand. How long can a person hold their breath and live? I held my own breath until I had to breathe, until the air came rushing into my lungs in a great gasp, still counting. Seventy-nine. Eighty. Eighty-one. Eighty-two. He never moved.
I stood there until I heard another car pulling up, and then I stepped back and started to cry again. It was easy to cry. A white couple came up, all shock and pity and dismay. They herded me and Chaya into their car and drove us to the hospital, where we notified the police. The hospital sent an ambulance for Raksha. The family arrived soon afterward, and they were all around me when we received official word of Raksha’s death. By that time the contractions had started, and I was barely paying attention to anything other than my belly. Leilani had swept Chaya up in her arms; I knew she’d be safe there. Three hours later, Savitha was born, her birth so quick and easy I hardly noticed it. Savitha means sunlight.
What more is there to say? I didn’t write in this journal again. I took the guilt on willingly. My life since then has been entirely for my daughters. I lost myself, buried myself, in caring for them. But they aren’t children anymore. Savitha is married and gone away; Chaya is finally leaving too. At first I couldn’t bear the thought, but lately, I’ve been waiting for her to go. I’ve kept her too close to me for too long.
I thought once that I would die when this day came, that I would fade away, a widow in mourning white.
I’m forty-nine. I have lived more than half my life unthinking, and the rest for my children. Now, shall I live for myself? Or should I turn myself in, pay for my crime? Chaya, when you read this, come and tell me what you think. I stole away your father, and you have never seemed the same. Silent instead of laughing. So serious. I did what I thought was best; I did it for myself, but also for you. S
hould I have done differently?
I wanted to be a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother. I am not sure that I succeeded at any of those, even the last.
Time to pull out all the threads and start over.
Interlude
Sins of the Father
Jaffna, 1977
VELU’S HAND SHAKES LIKE AN OLD MAN’S AS HE CROUCHES NAKED IN THE DARK ROOM, A TIN BOWL OF WATER BEFORE HIM, A THIN WASH- cloth in his hand. It is miserably hot, the worst of the Jaffna summer heat, and he knows that by the time he walks from his house to where the Tigers are encamped, he will be drenched in sweat. Still, he must do what he can, and so Velu dips the cloth into cool well water, passes it over his thin body. He has always been thin, but the deprivations of the last several years have left him emaciated, his bones poking out, sharp against loose skin. He rubs the skin fiercely, to compensate for the lack of soap, to compensate for all that has happened—rubs until his skin feels scraped raw, flushed and swollen. When the cloth goes dry, he reaches for more water and overbalances, falling sharply onto one bony knee, unable to catch himself with only one good arm. The other hangs limp at his side, useless since the bullet caught it. He resents it, and at the same time is grateful to it. Its obvious uselessness saved his life the last time the army came through.
As he washes himself, he composes a letter to his cousin in America. It is a letter he can never send—so many factors conspire to keep him from speaking as frankly to her as he would like. But for long years, ever since his cousin first wrote to him expressing her condolences over the untimely death of his father, Velu has kept up a secret conversation with her, in his mind. For every line that he puts down on paper, that he shows his wife, that is undoubtedly read by the Tigers or the government clerks before it finally makes its way across the seas, Velu writes a dozen more in the cavern of his mind, lines that echo there, pulsing with truths that cannot be spoken.
If he could, he would say this:
Kili, dear cousin, I do not know if this letter will reach you. Not because of the troubles—not yet. Letters are still going through; we are not yet to the days grandfather spoke of, when he would send letters to his daughter in Oxford, not knowing if they would ever be delivered. Shanthi left Colombo in an evil time, going to school in the midst of war. I was only a child, five or six, but I remember how our grandmother wept at the harbour. Did her father know what he sent Shanthi to, in 1942? Would he have kept her back, if he could have, safe by his side?
All he had were her letters, for that brief year before his untimely illness and death. He never knew that she married, moved to America, had six children. Perhaps I should send the letters to you, so you may know the girl your mother was. But I do not want to let them go; I find comfort in laying my fingers against the thin blue paper. I close my eyes and imagine America, imagine freedom, and prosperity, and peace. You have told me, over and over, that America has its own troubles, and I trust you are correct—but Kili, cousin, I must tell you that America does not know what trouble is.
Velu will not write that, of course. It would not be safe—and even if it were, he can hardly bear to think of his troubles, much less put them down on paper. As he rises from his body wash, he remembers the room he used to bathe in, as a boy in Colombo, in his grandfather’s house. Hot running water in the silver taps, a marble tub big enough to sail small fleets across—and he had those fleets too, light wood boats carved by that same grandfather. He had sailed his boats in the tub, in the small pond in the gardens behind the big house. He had played tennis in the tennis courts, had taken meals at his grandfather’s club, had enjoyed all the privileges of a young Tamil gentleman in Ceylon’s capital city, both while the British ruled and after their departure.
He had been twenty-two in 1958, when the first riots erupted in the streets, Tamil and Sinhalese neighbors lifting hands and stocks and rocks to each other. Velu had not wanted to leave the capital, but his parents had insisted that they would all be safer in Jaffna—and besides, there was a girl there that they had heard about, a beautiful, respectable girl, a doctor’s daughter, a very good match for their son. If he would just come north with them and meet her…
In the end, Velu was a good son. He did as his parents wanted and went north. He met the girl, and she was indeed most beautiful. Velu married her within a year and settled in a nearby village. They worked, and talked, and sometimes laughed. They made plans to move back to Colombo in a few years, when things settled down. They were blessed with children.
It is photos of those children that Velu sees now, as he steps, naked, from one dark room to the next. A black-and-white photo on the dresser, two smiling faces. His son, Pugal, is seven in that photo; his daughter, Kamala, is only six. Their faces are so small.
Velu turns from the dresser to the bed where his clothes are laid out. His wife is not speaking to him, but she has pressed the clothes flat for him, as best she can. She knows he must look good today. A pillar of the community; a man of stature. Someone worth listening to.
If he only knew what to say.
Shall I hold on to these words? My wife does not want me to write to you. She has a myriad of reasons, and some of them are even good ones. She worries that this letter may fall into unsympathetic hands, that it might be used against the Tigers. She is also afraid that if the Tigers or the government read it, our children might be put in further danger. She believes that it is better to keep your problems to yourself, and that distant family, in America, family we have never even met, are not really family at all.
If my wife were writing to you, she would only tell you good things. Oh, she might go on at length about the injustices Tamils have been subjected to, here on this island where we, the minority, once ruled like kings. She would certainly bemoan the loss of my grandfather’s fine house in Colombo, with its cars and chauffeurs, its marble floors, its Sinhalese servants, though she never lived there herself. She would speak of those few Sinhalese who were once our neighbors, our friends, in such language that makes me embarrassed to call her my wife. But she would not say one word against the Tigers, despite what they have now done to us.
Perhaps she is right, and they have done nothing to us. Perhaps we have done it all to ourselves.
Velu sits down on the bed, which creaks under his slight, sudden weight. He shrugs the shirt over his arms, pulls it closed against his sunken chest. He does not think about his limp arm; it has been years since the incident, and he has long since learned to cope, uncomplaining, with everyday life. Others may have praised his courage, his fortitude, in dealing with the injury, but Velu never saw much worthy of praise in his actions. In the end, it was not so big a thing, to lose the use of an arm. It was bearable. It would not break him.
It made life harder for his wife, though. Velu had rarely made love to her before, and after the incident, he had an excuse for avoiding such activity. She was too proud to ask, and so he became celibate. It was easier.
And of course, cousin Kili, my wife also does not want me to write to you because she is jealous. She has resented you since that first letter you sent. Although you and I have never met, I have enjoyed an intimacy within our letters that I have never found with my wife. When my marriage was arranged, I was pleased; she was a beautiful girl. And in many ways she has been a good wife, has taken care of me and of our children as well as she could, given the circumstances. But we have never learned how to talk together. We do not share the same beliefs.
She is bitter, my wife. She mourns the loss of our fine things; she grieves for the house that was promised her, the beautiful home she will never have. I decided my father was right to bring his family to Jaffna, to this Tamil stronghold. I thought that surrounded by our own people, we would be safer, and so I did not take her to Colombo when I could. And now, see—we are trapped. The fighting comes to us, and we have no resources to escape it.
Velu looks up from his shirt buttons to see her standing there, in the doorway. She is still beautiful, his wife. Her hair
falls past her waist, dark and rich as a girl’s. But he feels no pang of desire when he sees her—he is only reminded of their daughter, their Kamala, who has chopped her hair short. All that beautiful hair, which should by rights have helped win her a perfect husband. Velu hadn’t asked for a rich man for his daughter—he had never cared for that. He had only wanted someone kind, someone patient enough to put up with her high spirits, her passionate ways. A husband who would cherish his daughter’s fierce soul, would train it to worthy tasks.
There might have been a time when we could have left for America. You so kindly offered to send us money for the trip—it would have shamed me to accept it, but I should have, for the sake of my family. Since moving to Jaffna, I have tried one business after another, to support my wife and children, but I have not had much luck. I was never meant to be a businessman, you know. I was bred to be a gentleman of leisure, to read Shakespeare and the Ramayana, to argue the relative merits of each. I was once a fine batsman, the pride of our cricket team. I ate roast beef with horseradish for lunch, and an array of breads and rich curries for dinner. And now—now my wife eats plain rice for her single meal. She has grown so thin, my wife. Yet she always set some of her portion aside for the children.
They are so beautiful, my children. You should see them, Kili.
I would have gone to America, would have tried my luck there. But my wife did not want to leave her home. Her friends are here, her relatives. Having made one mistake, having kept her from comfort and relative safety, kept her here, trapped in this disaster, how could I have forced her again?
I should have. I know. It is a man’s responsibility to make such decisions for his family.
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