by Heather Burt
“Mom thinks it’s weird that people like them have a name like Vantwest. She says it’s a Dutch name.”
“So? What’s weird about that?”
“Dutch people are white, like us.”
“So how did people like them get a white name?”
“Mom says they probably intramarried. Their kids go to the Catholic school.”
Clare wonders if Mrs. Skinner has ever been inside the Vantwests’ house. She sells Amway stuff, so it’s possible. Sometimes she comes to Clare’s house with samples, but her own mother always says “No, thank you,” then talks about something else.
“Hey,” Emma begins, “did you know, at the Catholic school they have to—Oh, look!” She points across the street, where Mr. Vantwest is scooting his son and daughter out the front door. When Mrs. Vantwest appears behind them, Emma squeals. “Whoa! Look at that! I bet she’s gonna have her baby!”
It seems Emma may be right. The enormous Mrs. Vantwest is leaning against her slender husband, and the two of them are slowly making their way to the car. Clare dips her finger in the Kool-Aid and sucks distractedly. Emma has told her how babies get out, and even what makes them start growing in the first place, but Clare has never really believed any of it, never believed that she could have come to the world that way. For if such horrible and outrageous things were true, then surely her mother would have told her. Now, though, she isn’t sure what to think. She wonders if terrible secrets have been kept from her ... or if, perhaps, her mother would be as astonished as she herself was to hear Emma’s explanations. The second possibility seems most likely; still, as Mrs. Vantwest reaches the car door, clutching her belly and squatting awkwardly, Clare looks away.
Off to the right, the Vantwests’ son is hauling two small suitcases across the lawn. She fixes her eyes on him. He’s a strange-looking boy, like an undersized grown-up, stiff and serious, with his legs poking out from a pair of school uniform shorts like two halves of a yardstick. He goes to Catholic school, whatever that is. To distract herself from Mrs. Vantwest, Clare wonders about the suitcases—what’s in them, where the boy is going. She pretends one of them is for her, and that she and the Vantwest boy are going to run away from Morgan Hill Road on an adventure, like the Famous Five. They’ll sneak off while Emma and her brothers are watching Mrs. Vantwest, and they’ll go to the train station and sneak on a train. She licks her orange fingers. Then the Vantwest boy looks across the street, right at her it seems, and a terrible awkwardness comes over her. She wipes her hand on the wet grass. The Vantwest boy smiles. It looks like he’s smiling at her, but that’s impossible. It has to be one of Emma’s brothers, or Emma herself. Clare gets up and walks back to the sprinkler, shaking out the skirt of her new bathing suit. Standing under the fan of water, she blocks off streams by covering the holes with her big toe.
1
March 26/96. The thermometer says 32°, but I don’t believe it. It must be 37 at least. They’ve taken my portable fan for an assembly in the auditorium, and I have to keep the ceiling fan on low or it scatters the kids’ stuff. The windows are open but it makes no difference. Sigh. If I’d never moved away from here, would I be comfortable in this wretched heat? I know, I know. It got hot where you and I grew up, but this is different. There’s no winter here. I think my body underwent some sort of mutation over all those Canadian winters. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Or am I just a born wimp? Hmm. I can see you smiling, Clare. You know the truth. First-class whiner and complainer, that’s me, no? But my life is here now. Or it will be. I’m not going back. Where I should go is to the staff room (it has air con), but I’m not in the mood to socialize. Anyway, the break’s just about over. English 12 next. More essays coming in today—sigh again. Thank God for Easter holidays.
RUDY CLOSED HIS DIARY and glanced up at the clock. Wistfully he tried to imagine being cold, to conjure up the sensations of stinging cheeks and frozen nostril hairs, but a trickle of sweat meandering from his temple to his ear distracted him. Something had happened to him in his twenty-five-year absence. The heat in which he used to play cricket and hunt for snakes now tortured him. On particularly oppressive days, his hands and feet swelled up and he moved like an old man through the viscous air. The weight he’d put on from his aunt’s cooking slowed him down all the more. And he sweated—unstoppable streams that pooled in any crease or depression, dripped from the hooked tip of his narrow nose, salted his lips and stung his eyes. As students began wandering in, he recalled the day he’d confiscated a crumpled drawing depicting a naked Mr. Vantwest (the maple leaf covering the nether regions gave it away) spraying sweat over the school flower beds. Embarrassed, but also amused—it was a damn good cartoon—he’d slipped the paper into his pocket and carried on with the lesson while wide-eyed glances darted back and forth across the room.
Today, however, he was quite certain his students wouldn’t be taking any notice of him. The object of their attention would still be the new student, Kandasamy Selvarajah, now strolling toward the front desk of the middle row, explaining the correct use of the semicolon to a group of girls. Kanda wasn’t an ordinary student. He was larger somehow, more present. He’d read more English literature than most of Rudy’s colleagues and had no reservations about quoting Shakespeare or Milton to his bewildered classmates. He was the kind of pupil Rudy had fantasized about having back in Canada. But the reality was all wrong. The boy’s presence in class—his confidence, his command of the lessons—had become irritating. Each time he raised his hand, Rudy felt his own hands clench. He expected to be challenged, to be revealed as a fool or an impostor. And yet, there was nothing concrete for him to complain about, even to himself.
The bell rang. Shirt sticking, drips of sweat trickling from his temples, Rudy took his place before the five rows of uniformed boys and girls, looked past Kanda, and said, “Good morning.” As the buzz of conversation quieted, he mopped his face with his handkerchief. “We’re going to start off with some of those exercises on identifying point of view,” he began. “I think we got up to page sixty-five last time.”
Textbooks were opened, pages flipped. When it seemed to Rudy that most of them were ready, he began reading the page sixty-five excerpt from Robinson Crusoe, his voice strangely crisp in the languid air. His students listened politely, not taking in a word of it, he was sure. With the exception of Kanda. By the end of the passage, not five minutes into the class, the boy’s hand was up. Wiping his forehead, Rudy braced himself wearily against the possibilities—a comment on Defoe’s racism, perhaps (though the selected excerpt was innocent enough), a question about the meaning of distemper ... or maybe that challenge he would be unable to answer. He lowered his eyes and met Kanda’s stare.
“Yes?”
The boy hesitated a moment, then cleared his throat. “Are you feeling ill, sir?”
Around the room heads turned and eyes widened. Rudy coughed involuntarily. “What do you mean?”
“I was only wondering, sir, as you seem to be perspiring very heavily. I thought you might be ill.”
If it was a joke, or an insult, the kid certainly had balls. Rudy mopped his face and studied his student. Kanda himself was tidy to a fault—navy tie knotted snugly around his white collar, black hair trimmed and gelled, spine straight, skin dry. I’m not the impostor here, his appearance insisted. Yet his expression was sympathetic. Not a hint of ridicule or sarcasm.
“I’m not sick, Kanda. I just don’t handle the heat very well. Anymore. But thank you for your concern.” He glanced at James Fernando, the caricaturist, and snickered in spite of himself. “You see, when I first came here, I applied for a job as a garden sprinkler,” he said, folding his handkerchief into a neat square. “But I wasn’t quite sweaty enough, so they made me a teacher instead.”
While James shrank behind his desk, the others laughed. Rudy risked a wink. Then Kanda raised his hand again.
“I have an idea, sir. If we put the desks in a semicircle and you stood under the fan, you might be more co
mfortable.”
Around the room there were murmurs of approval. Rudy dragged the folded handkerchief along his jaw. Finding no good reason not to take Kanda’s suggestion, he nodded, and the boy stood up. It seemed that he intended to organize the desk-moving himself, and indeed he got right to it, directing his classmates, even reminding them not to scrape the furniture across the floor. “Lift it up, or it leaves marks,” he said, his manner neither condescending nor bossy. When the brief chaos had subsided and the students were again seated, their desks forming a horseshoe that opened toward the front of the room, Rudy took his place under the ceiling fan. Chamika Heenatigala, seated closest to the regulator dial, got up and adjusted the speed to full. In the rush of cool air, Rudy’s shirt pulled away from his skin, and his pores tightened in tiny, euphoric contractions. He pocketed his handkerchief, cleared his throat, and returned to the lesson with an awkward smile in Kanda’s direction.
At the end of class, he called for the essays he’d assigned. There was a brief stampede at his desk, and when this had subsided, Kanda came up, paper in hand. “I hope this is acceptable, sir.”
Rudy straightened the stack of essays on the desk. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Would you like me to consider it a practice run? I mean, I’ll mark it, but we don’t have to count it. You weren’t here when I explained the assignment.”
“I’d like you to count it, please.”
Rudy nodded and took the essay. It occurred to him suddenly that he should thank his student for the new seating arrangement. In his head he fumbled with the words, but the longer he hesitated, the more lodged in his throat the message became, until it seemed that to cough it out would sound ridiculous. Just as Kanda was about to disappear out the classroom door, he called to him to enjoy his holiday, but the boy didn’t seem to hear.
Rudy stared blankly at the door, then he lowered his eyes to the essay in his hand. The title, “A Defence of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Their Fight for a Tamil Homeland,” made him frown. He’d asked his students to write argument essays, and predictably most of their chosen topics were banal. Kanda’s topic challenged even more than his classroom manner did. At the same time, Rudy felt his ambiguous antipathy toward the boy taking root in the unequivocal words. He checked the clock then added the paper to the pile.
THE BUS HOME WAS CROWDED AND HOT. Arms and legs, shopping bundles and briefcases nibbled at the boundaries of the tiny space Rudy managed to secure on a padded vinyl seat behind the rear doorway. He eyed a bent woman hoisting herself through the door, clutching the skirt of her sari, and held his breath until another man offered his seat. Then he shut out the faces around him, leaned his head against the metal window frame, and began his hunt for the saints.
They were all along his route through the teeming city, painted plaster statues gazing at the hubbub from behind glass casings: brown-robed Anthonys, arrow-impaled Sebastians, anorexic Marys. Like the faith that had brought them to the island centuries before, these statues had acquired a local character as unremarkable as that of the fruit vendor tidying his mound of yellow coconuts on the sidewalk. Two saints shared a corner with a cross-legged Buddha; the Virgin herself greeted customers on their way to Ganesh Bookshop. One of the Anthonys, without the protection of a glass case, served as a perch for birds and was splattered with droppings. As a private game, a sort of meditation, Rudy counted them. His most recent tally had boosted the total from fourteen saints to seventeen. He was sure there were more, eluding him in obscure nooks and alcoves, but on this particular ride he lost track at the bookshop. Eyes fixed on the blue Virgin stationed a few metres from the shop’s door, he thought of Clare Fraser, his sanctuary. He saw her solemn face watching over him, and he drifted. Unlike other visitants from his Morgan Hill past, she came to him unencumbered, provoking neither remorse nor irritation, though sometimes there was a vague pang of longing, like the echo of a desire he’d ceased to experience first-hand. He didn’t mind forsaking his saint-hunt to be with her—her presence had the same calming effect—but when the bus jerked to an unexpected halt, he lost her as well.
It was a military checkpoint, or police. Rudy was never sure which was which. The men, dressed in khakis and carrying guns, represented a danger he couldn’t quite manage to fear. Not from courage, certainly, or even indifference. Rather, it seemed to him that his years on Morgan Hill Road had left him with a thick, invisible shell that kept him separate, both from the danger and the fear. Mechanically he shouldered his knapsack and stepped out to the side of the road with everyone else. There was no shelter from the sun, but the ID check was carried out with reasonable efficiency, and the passengers soon filed back into the bus to reclaim their spots. Rudy searched his bag for Kanda’s essay. If he couldn’t fear the country’s troubles as he should, he would at least acknowledge them in the abstract. He mopped his face and began to read.
I have been studying in English medium schools because my parents believe that knowing English is the only way to have a good profession. I would prefer to study and work in my own language, but unfortunately, my language and my culture have a second-rate status in Sri Lanka. My people have been treated unfairly and abused. Therefore my thesis is that Tamil people must fight a war for their own Tamil homeland where they can make their own decisions.
The words were eerily familiar, challenging, but he read on.
The Sri Lankan government has discriminated against Tamil people since the early days of independence. Tamils were denied the rights of citizenship; their language was denied an official status and their religions take second place to the favoured Buddhism. Early as 1957 Tamil people are suffering and dying at the hands of Sinhalese extremists. In 1983 in an unjustified reaction against a minor LTTE ambush, thousands of Tamil people had their homes, their businesses, and even their lives, destroyed.
Today the government says that their soldiers are liberators of the Tamil people, but the people don’t think of the army as their liberators. Mr. Prabhakaran and the LTTE are the liberators. The army arrests and kills innocent people out in the countryside where their government can’t watch over them. My uncle who is living in Trincomalee knows a girl who was attacked by army soldiers. She was walking early in the morning to see her brother to give him money from their father for his journey to Colombo. The girl was fourteen years old and she started to be a woman that month only. She passed a vegetated area and two soldiers pulled her off the road and put a cloth in her mouth so she would not scream. The soldiers did not take the money but they violated the girl. Now my uncle says this girl has no hope for the future. I have a sister who also is fourteen, I would do anything to protect her.
For a moment Rudy stopped reading and looked out the window—a flimsy show of respect for the unnamed girl, who, like the dangers of her country, remained stubbornly foreign to him. He thought uneasily of his own sister—how far would he go to protect her?—then he read the rest of Kanda’s argument: his reasonable claims about the plight of Tamil refugees and the need for cultural and linguistic equality, his more dubious ones about the intentions of the LTTE and their leader, his predictions that the government’s recent military offensive in Jaffna would fall on its face. There was plenty in the boy’s essay that made sense, but when Rudy reached the end he sank into a silent, brooding rebuttal: Do you really think the kind of violence the Tigers use can be justified, Kanda? Is the idea of a homogenous Tamil homeland even realistic? Would you want to live in such a place? And so on. When he next looked out the bus window, the essay was rolled up tightly in his hand, and he’d missed his stop.
He got off at the junction of the rail line and Vaththe Mawatha—Garden Street, as some of the old Burgher residents persisted in calling it. There was still a winding half-kilometre to backtrack, but he went first to the shady front doorway of his aunt’s church, across from the train station, to mop his face and breathe in the cool emptiness of the massive white sanctuary. In a few days the place would be chock full for Easter Mass, but for now it was s
tarkly, marvellously vacant. He considered resting awhile under one of the whirling ceiling fans, clearing his head of Kanda and everything else, but he was already late. He pulled off his tie, undid several buttons, and crossed the street.
Passing the station, he quickened his pace to get away from the mob of taxi drivers hovering around their Bajaj three-wheelers, but one fat-bellied driver stepped into his path immediately.
“Sixty rupees only, sir.”
Rudy deked to the right. “No, thanks. I’ll walk.”
The driver kept pace with him. “Okay, okay. Fifty rupees. Good price.”
“No.”
“Okay, how much you want to pay?”
“Normal price.”
“Fifty rupees is very good price for you, sir, but I’ll give you forty-five. Last price.”
Rudy stopped and sighed. “Look—I’m not a tourist. Give me the same price you’d give my aunt and I’ll go with you. Otherwise forget it.”
The driver held his stare a moment longer then shrugged and ambled back to his three-wheeler, refastening his plaid sarong in a neat fold and tuck. Rudy waved away a few more offers and finally slowed to a stroll. He was glad the taxi ride hadn’t tempted him. There were other people out in the road—people who paid him no particular attention as they went about their business—and in that random, fleeting community, amid the tangled yards and airy bungalows of Vaththe Mawatha, he could believe that he really wasn’t a tourist—that this uncomplicated world, the one he’d shared with his parents and Susie for six years, was still his.
Up the road, he stopped to buy a comb of bananas from the fruit stand. Apart from his own “Ayubowan,” the transaction was conducted in silence, for the old fruit vendor spoke no English, and Rudy’s Sinhala was still awful. He nodded his thanks and carried on to the top of Aunty Mary’s lane, where he lifted a few flyers and envelopes from the mailbox then swung open the wooden gate. As he made his way down the narrow, overgrown path that led to his aunt’s bungalow, he experienced a familiar flash of empathy for those outsiders who ardently insisted that his birthplace was so exotic. The short walk took him past feathery ferns, wide, waxy leaves, and whiffs of jasmine that made his head spin. Overhead, the pawpaw and mango trees were loaded, while underfoot, sticky brown fruit oozed from fallen tamarind pods. It was exotic, he had to admit, though he preferred to believe that his own attraction came from a sense that this tangle of tropical growth was part of him.