Rani was so different from them, her history and experiences so far from anything they were familiar with, that thinking of her now Krishan found it hard to believe they’d shared a living space, that their lives had intersected in any substantial way at all. The first time he encountered her, he remembered, had been more than two and a half years before, on an afternoon when he’d been taking a tour around the psychiatry ward of the General Hospital in Vavuniya, where he’d gone to speak with the doctor in charge about a program for trauma victims being run by his organization in Jaffna. He’d been walking with the doctor just outside the ward, no longer talking about the program specifically but about how things worked at the ward more generally, when glancing through the tall iron gratings that looked into the ward he had noticed, sitting up on one of the beds, quietly reading a book of some kind, a woman in a neat purple frock. The woman was heavyset, her skin blackened around the eyes, and lowering her book as they passed she’d looked up and smiled gently. Struck by the disjunction between her calm, reflective demeanor and the slightly unhinged appearance of the other occupants of the ward, most of whom seemed to be in varying states of psychosis, he’d asked the doctor once they were past earshot who she was and what she was doing there. The woman, the doctor told him, had had three children, two boys and a girl, and had lost both sons during the war. The elder one had been killed while fighting for the Tigers in 2007, and the younger one, only twelve at the time, had been hit by shrapnel on the penultimate day of fighting in 2009. The woman was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder with severe depression, and came to stay at the ward for a few days every month, officially to get medication and to receive electroshock therapy, but also just to be able to leave home for a while, where she was plagued by endless thoughts of her sons. She was better now than when she’d first begun receiving treatment, the doctor told him, but it had been three years since then, and there was no hope of her condition improving while she remained at home. At home she was forced to spend too many long stretches of time by herself, trapped in her own mind, and there were too many associations with her two sons for her to be able to move on, not that moving on would ever be fully possible for cases such as hers.
It wasn’t long after this encounter that Appamma had made the trip to London, and though Krishan’s mother was able to take care of her by herself for a while, it soon became clear that someone else would be needed to look after Appamma when school started and his mother’s teaching duties resumed. A professional nurse or caretaker turned out to be too expensive, and his mother spent several weeks asking almost everyone she met whether they knew someone who might be willing to stay and look after Appamma for a salary of some sort. Failing to find anyone as the start of the term drew closer, exhausted and having no idea what to do, she’d remembered the story Krishan had told her about the depressed woman who needed to leave home in order to get better, had asked him to get in touch with the doctor to see if the woman might be interested in taking the job. The suggestion had seemed out of the question to Krishan, not only because Rani hardly seemed capable of looking after herself, let alone another human. She’d lived through the last two years of the war, losing both her sons and seeing unimaginable violence all around her, and even if she said yes he would feel uncomfortable about her living with them in their two-story house in Colombo, would feel guilty living opposite someone who’d suffered so much and now had nothing, not even her mental health. Her status in the house and the work she did would be ambiguous too, since she wasn’t a professional nurse, and there was no guarantee she would be treated respectfully by Appamma either, who was sometimes extremely irritable in her state of infirmity. His increasingly exhausted mother refused to let go of the idea, pointing out that if what the doctor said was true then maybe it would be good for Rani, that in any case the choice was hers to make, that it wasn’t for him to decide whether or not she should take the opportunity. Krishan finally gave in, confident the idea would be rejected as absurd, and apologizing on behalf of his mother he put forward the suggestion to the doctor, who, to his surprise, immediately agreed. It would be good for Rani to leave the north for a time, the doctor said, and perhaps looking after someone else would help get her mind away from her own troubles—he would ask her if she was interested and would let them know. Two days later he called to say that Rani was indeed interested, that she would come the following week.
When he went to pick her up at the Pettah bus station late at night the following Sunday, Krishan had found Rani standing near the station entrance, hair disheveled, sari full of wrinkles, the duffel bag containing all her things thrown over one of her hefty shoulders. She was looking at the city around her uncertainly, at the density of bright lights, private vehicles, and tall, multistoried buildings, at the paved streets and the people around her speaking a language she couldn’t understand. It must have been unsettling, Krishan realized as he descended from his three-wheeler, to be seeing Colombo for the first time, to come here after having lived all her life in a small village on the far side of the country, under Tiger control for more than fifteen years. It must have been unsettling to have looked out the window of her bus at the miles of continually built-up area that led, through the densely populated outskirts and suburbs, into the central parts of the city, to see up close the money and power of the state against which so many people she knew had given up their lives trying to fight. When she saw him coming toward him Rani had smiled as though he were an old acquaintance and begun walking in his direction. She didn’t say much on the ride home, despite his attempts at making conversation, not so much out of shyness, it seemed, as from simply having nothing to say. There was something confident about her manner, even in the uncertainty of the new environment, and unpacking her things as soon as they arrived at the house she made herself at home with relative ease. She did everything that was needed of her, with more attention to detail than Krishan or his mother had been able to give, not hesitating even when she needed to help Appamma in the toilet or the shower. The first week passed without any of the discomfort Krishan had feared, and soon he felt he’d been wrong to be skeptical about Rani coming to stay with them, that maybe it had been a good idea after all. There were occasional tensions with Appamma, of course, who especially early on, when the childishness brought on by her condition was still strong, disliked not being the main subject of attention, but Rani didn’t seem to take issue with any of her occasional rude or insensitive remarks, either because she knew Appamma was not in her right mind or because she simply didn’t care. She smiled in his presence and engaged in conversation with all three of them, though she rarely initiated a conversation herself, and except for her appearance, her darkened eyes and often uncombed, unruly hair, the only sign she gave of being less than well was the way her gaze sometimes seemed to slip away from what was in front of her, as if there were other things on her mind than the work that occupied her hands. Krishan wondered what she was thinking at such times, whether she was remembering her sons or what had happened during the last months of the war, but he’d never dared broaching the subject explicitly, and in the first few weeks the closest they got to acknowledging her life in the northeast were moments in which she discussed the family she still had left, when she had reason to mention her alcoholic son-in-law, or the stepdaughter she’d helped raise, or her two young granddaughters, who, it was clear, she cherished more than anyone else alive.
It was strange to reflect on the fact that Rani was dead, this person who’d lived in their home for over a year and a half, this person to whom each of them had, in their own particular ways, become so attached. It was strange too to think that after having survived so many shells and so much shrapnel during the end of the war she’d died the previous day in such an arbitrary, almost careless way, her neck broken at the bottom of a well. Her nephew too had died in an accident after the war, he had learned from Rani during conversation one day—he’d been nineteen or twenty, his motorcycle had collided with
a lorry, and he’d died on the spot, his body thrown up in the air by the force of the impact. That incident too had felt strangely arbitrary when he heard about it, strangely careless given all that the boy had seen and survived during the last two years of the war. Krishan had dismissed it simply as coincidence at the time, as yet one more of the cruel flukes of the world they lived in, but the thought occurred to him now that perhaps the boy’s death hadn’t been purely accidental, that perhaps Rani’s death hadn’t been accidental either. There’d been so many stories of accidents in the northeast in the years since the end of the war, drownings, fires, mine explosions, and road accidents above all, so many brief second- or third-page news items that noted how some or another unknown person from the former war zone had died in some or another bizarre or unexpected way. Accidents happened everywhere, of course, but these accidents had to have been more than just bad luck, for how could such hardy people, people who’d gone through so much and still come out alive, allow themselves to die so easily now and with such docility? It was as though there was some other, more obscure logic at work than mere chance, as though death was in some way following these people who’d managed to survive, as though they were in some way marked, the various statistically high probabilities on which ordinary life was based beginning, for them, to alter, to change more and more in favor of their unforeseen demise—as though they themselves walked with open arms in the direction of these seemingly accidental deaths, as though they themselves welcomed them or even willed them to take place.
Standing there with his back to the wall, his gaze following the lights of a ship lost in the black water, Krishan thought again of Rani’s daughter’s voice on the phone, her affectless tone and her eagerness to be done with the call. It made sense, of course, since she’d probably had to repeat the same story countless times, since she probably had a lot of work to take care of before the funeral, but all the same he had the feeling she was trying to hide something. He would have to leave early on Sunday morning for the funeral, he realized, and he would have to go alone, the journey there and back was too demanding for his mother, who would anyway need to stay home to look after Appamma. It would be his first time returning to the northeast since he’d moved to Colombo, his first time in almost a year, and he’d be going not just anywhere he knew but to Kilinochchi, ground zero of the war. He would have to go to the town, which the army made a show of keeping oppressively clean and well organized, would have to travel through miles of impoverished countryside to find Rani’s village, which he would be seeing for the first time. It was the place she’d grown up and spent all her life in, which she’d been displaced from with her family during the fighting and returned to afterward without her sons, and the thought of being there made him suddenly uncomfortable now. He wanted to go, wanted to pay his respects to Rani, to acknowledge her in some way and to have that acknowledgment be seen by her family, but he would feel guilty in front of her family members, none of whom he’d ever met before. He would feel guilty seeing the well in which she’d died and guilty for the fact he’d done nothing to prevent her death, which even if accidental he felt certain now had been foreseeable and even predictable somehow. Krishan remembered the way Rani would hug him when he visited Colombo on his breaks from work, the way she would press his face tightly against her ample cheeks, as if welcoming back a son she hadn’t seen in years, and standing there looking at the darkness of the sea he felt his eyes beginning to water, the significance of the phone call at last beginning to sink in. He heard, approaching from outside his field of vision, the faint clanging of heavy iron, and looking to the right saw the hazy yellow headlights of the commuter train in the distance, their circles becoming sharper and brighter as the train advanced along the faint arc of the coast. Its movement became louder and more convulsive as it drew nearer, the pounding of its wheels on the tracks almost deafening by the time the front carriage hurtled by and cut off his view, each subsequent carriage superimposing itself so rapidly over the preceding one that the train appeared stationary while it moved. He watched as the open-door carriages passed motionlessly one by one, their fluorescent light falling on the multitude of bodies sitting and standing and leaning out, fixing their postures briefly against the night, the scene unchanging for what felt like an impossible amount of time till finally the train vanished and the jolting faded and only he remained, gazing at the water from the deserted road.
JOURNEY
4
His body heavy from having woken up so early, Krishan was sitting on his haunches, leaning back against one of the tall iron posts that rose from the platform, watching the people around him with the dense, trancelike clarity that often takes hold when one is up before the day, when everything outside is still shrouded in the pitch-black darkness that directly precedes dawn. The train, which was scheduled for a quarter past five, had not yet arrived, and the platform had filled up with people, with middle-aged men, older couples, and families sitting or standing in the cool darkness of the morning, gazing out in silence at the trains arriving and departing on the other tracks. He was watching a family of five who had stopped not far from where he was sitting, standing in a circle near the edge of the platform around three large pieces of luggage. The mother and father were looking around the station with quiet but focused curiosity, as if they might be called upon to draw the scene from memory later on, the three teenage children, two girls and a boy, leaning on the bags with seeming indifference, lost in the dim blue glow of their phones. The parents looked like they might still live in the country, but it was obvious from the appearance of the children that the family was visiting from abroad, their foreignness, like that of many diasporic children, immediately recognizable by the clothes they wore, their tight, branded shirts and tank tops, their loose tracksuits and formfitting jeans. On another day Krishan might have tried to speculate about the family’s origins and the circumstances under which they’d left, studying how the parents were dressed, whether the children spoke Tamil or the language of their adopted home, how nervous or at ease they seemed to be returning to their place of origin. Today, though, he simply gazed at them without curiosity, not in the mood to analyze or conjecture, content to give sensation precedence over thought as he sat there waiting for the train.
He’d been in a strange mood over the last day and a half, distracted and somewhat removed from himself, unable to shed any tears since his walk on Friday evening, unable for any sustained period of time to think about Rani, who’d once more begun to seem distant and elusive in his mind. He had told his mother the news on returning home from his walk and they’d decided it was best not to inform Appamma till the next morning, so she wouldn’t have to spend the night reflecting on the death by herself, and retreating to his room he’d spent the rest of the evening trying to read, his thoughts drifting now and then to the email he’d received from Anjum, the question of how to respond. When they told Appamma after breakfast the next morning she hadn’t been as shocked or upset as they’d feared, responding with surprise as she asked for all the details and then falling silent as the information sank in. She was sad but her sadness was muted, calmer and more thoughtful than they’d expected the night before. Shrugging her shoulders, her eyes watering slightly and a kind of wistful smile on her face, she told them that Rani had suffered a lot, poor woman, that maybe it was for the best she was gone. She’d been silent for a while and then asked his mother to take out twenty thousand rupees from her bank account, to be given to Rani’s daughter to help with expenses for the funeral. It was money Krishan didn’t know his grandmother had, money she’d apparently saved up over the years from her monthly pension payments, modest sums she received because her husband had been a teacher in their village in Jaffna. He’d been surprised to learn Appamma had a bank account, that she was actively keeping track of the money she received, had been even more surprised at the generosity of the gesture given the childish self-absorption he’d come to associate with her old age. He’d
known his grandmother was close to Rani, that the two of them had spent nearly every day together for almost two years, but the majority of their relationship had taken place while he was elsewhere, it made him realize, while he was busy with other things, and listening to his grandmother reminisce about Rani at various points over the previous day he could tell, despite her measured response, that the two of them had been intimate in ways he had no inkling of.
A Passage North Page 7