From our first conversation, Komakal had been clear about who she was: a Tamil girl from a lower-caste background who hated colonialism, imperialism, and a number of other -isms of which I couldn’t keep track. At first, she didn’t want to have anything to do with an American man, especially one with a Tamil Brahmin father. She was terrified by the prospect of being sucked into what she perceived as my consumerist Western life. But the way she spoke was somehow deeply familiar. And so, I persisted.
“Did you come to Chennai because you hate it there?” Komakal asked on our first official date: a trip to Karpagambal Mess, a cheap restaurant on a noisy thoroughfare where they served the food on bright green banana leaves.
She was eating a greasy chili uttapam with her fingers, dipping pieces into a plastic cup of orange molaga podi, and her small snub nose glistened with beads of sweat. A dull olive lizard skittered up the stucco wall behind her. An M.S. Subbulakshmi song, with its firm tabla beat and its quavering vocal mountains and valleys, was turned up too loud.
She’d chosen the restaurant, possibly to test me, and since I seemed to be passing this test, I stayed mum about my headache, trying to steal as much happiness as I could from the moment. “No. I mean, I was alienated from my life there. I didn’t belong, no matter how much I tried. But I wouldn’t say I hate it exactly.”
“You felt like an outsider? But you were born there, no?”
“Yeah, but over there, people care about their jobs more than anything else.” My older sisters, one a heart surgeon and the other a mergers-and-acquisitions attorney, fit perfectly. “How prestigious the job is, how much you’re achieving. There was no time for art or eccentricity or humor—any of the things I care about.”
“So, they are materialistic.”
I didn’t like to think of it that way—she said “materialistic” in a self-satisfied way, like it was a dirty word, but I knew from watching her enjoyment of the beautiful trinkets I’d brought her at the library that she cared about nice things as much as the next person. “No, they were good people. I just didn’t fit with them.”
“Most of the people I know who move to the States are like you. Upper-caste people from families with money who go to the States and make even more money.”
“Is that really how you see me?” I was hurt but tried not to show it. I had only known her for a month and I wasn’t sure how vulnerable I should make myself. Of course, she discounted my mother’s lower-caste influence. A mother like mine—ambitious, successful, a Silicon Valley workaholic, and yet brought up lower caste in an Indian village seemed about as probable as the yali—a mythic creature carved into the sandstone pillars of South Indian temples in the sixteenth century. The graceful body of a lion, the tusks of an elephant, a sinuous serpent’s tail. She didn’t fit any familiar narrative.
“There’s nothing wrong with it.” Komakal shrugged and put the last fragment of uttapam onto her tongue. “It’s just who you are.” My uneasiness dissipated.
Komakal quickly brought me to her bed. She smelled sweet from coconut oil I’d massaged into her scalp and rubbed along her back, working my hands around her torso to her breasts and pointed nipples. We ran our fingers over and into each other’s bodies, whispering against the jangling cacophony of the busy street below.
Around her bedroom were large pieces of driftwood, haunting paintings in which oil colors oozed into each other. Flat black figures of women were stenciled over the blues and greens. On one driftwood canvas, an upside-down woman dove into a dark knot of wood, while on another, a woman huddled in a fetal position as waves of ultramarine and indigo and kelly green washed over her. Komakal painted them in the evenings after work. Time and again in the coming months, I was drawn to them. I couldn’t stop staring at their strange beauty, a reflection of their artist. I asked her what they meant, but she had no answer.
***
Months later, we took the overnight train on a clandestine trip to Kanyakumari, a beach town at the southern tip of India. Komakal usually went back to her parents’ village on the weekends, but she lied and told them she was visiting a friend from university so that we could travel together. Three oceans in varying bands of brackish tourmaline merged around the beach—the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and the Arabian Sea. In the distance, an island rose above the waves, home to an imposing black stone statue of the Tamil poet and philosopher Thiruvalluvar, more than a hundred feet tall. Komakal had suggested the trip as part of my research, explaining that the land was considered part of Kumari Kandam, one of the only parts that hadn’t been submerged in the floods.
My father’s money, a supplement to the grant money, paid for our fourteen-hour train ride from Chennai and for our fifth-floor room in a luxury high-rise hotel with white marble floors and shimmering tangerine curtains that smelled of camphor and otherwise spare accommodations. We pretended we were married in order to stay in a hotel room together.
“I don’t know if what you felt was so unusual. Displacement might be the natural state, even a defining state of being Tamizh,” Komakal said as we walked along the beach.
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Our people are seafarers. They’ve moved everywhere around the globe. And really, Tamizh is a marginalized language in greater India, even today, isn’t it?”
She phrased it like a question, but she already knew the answer she wanted. My family never talked about any of this. We talked about what we were working on now, about our hopes and future plans, not the past. I wondered if my father would see my new girlfriend as a troublemaker.
“This is why we must keep fighting for ourselves, for our culture and our language.”
“I don’t know. You seem fine,” I said.
“What do you know? You’re American!”
“You’re right.” I didn’t want to get into a fight on our otherwise idyllic trip.
She continued, seemingly unable to let it go. “They used to grab at my breasts and laugh. In school. Those Brahmin boys. They assumed that my body was for them.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Of course, Brahmins don’t understand the value of their true mother tongue, the language of the people. They’re too busy promoting Sanskrit. You know, my uncle believed so strongly in Tamil, in devotion to Tamil, he set himself on fire. Immolation.”
She was proud her uncle had set himself on fire. Doused himself in lighter fluid in the street and lit a match. I imagined the mob, the shock—all for a language, an identity. There was nothing I believed in so strongly, although I wished I did. I was horrified, yet I shuddered with a faint pleasure, thrilled that my girlfriend was from a faraway circumstance, this long line of people who were passionate artists and activists, living in the moment, rather than antiseptic and supportive of an increasingly conservative government. My father would never set himself aflame for any reason, too concerned with accumulating wealth and the security that came with it to ever consider radical politics.
“I think of my uncle all the time,” she said. “I see him sometimes in the stars, and when I think about my problems, I think about what he would do.”
“Was he depressed?”
Her eyes narrowed. “He was despondent for a reason.”
We strolled along the sand for miles, wandering between the long traditional wood boats of the fishermen. The orange orb of the sun hung low over the darkening ocean waves. The sands shifted colors—gold and rose and crimson. My heart stopped. It was spellbinding.
Komakal began telling me the story of Kanya Devi, an avatar of Parvati who was to marry Lord Shiva. When Shiva didn’t come to the ceremony on time, Kanya Devi remained a virgin, and the wedding rice that was left uncooked became the stones on the colorful sand of the beach.
After she finished her story, Komakal said in a quiet voice, “You don’t love me.”
“What I don’t understand is how a single couple in Hindu mythology can have so many different stories. We know, of course, that Parvati did marry Shiva.”
“You’re avoiding my question.”
“Of course I love you.”
I had never loved any woman in a romantic way. The first of my girlfriends, an outspoken Israeli girl who’d gone to my high school, had been troubled by my refusal to lie and tell her I loved her, especially after we chose to go to the same college. She implied that my depression was an affectation. “And your liberal politics are a fucking sham,” she said, tossing her long sandy hair as she dumped me. It took years to recover, but from that, I learned my lesson.
When the second girlfriend, a Stanford medical student and a Tamil Brahmin, second-generation like me, became enraged that I wouldn’t tell her I loved her, she began browbeating me. She shook my hand, shouting, “Just say it, just say it!” so many times that one day while we watched a flock of pelicans lift off at Baylands, I blurted it out, feeling the pain of the lie like a gallstone. I knew that I would disappoint her, and sure enough, I cheated on her the following week.
When it came time to say it to the third girlfriend, a Brazilian comparative literature professor who had immigrated to the states during graduate school, I said it preemptively after sex, kissing the tiny star-shaped mole hovering just above her pale pink lip. Then, racked with guilt, I broke up with her, citing intimacy issues.
In that moment with Komakal, I wasn’t lying. At least, I believed I loved her. Her emotional intensity was like a fiery corona, drawing me ever deeper into her, but I felt something else, too, a darker sentiment. I couldn’t identify what it was in that moment.
“You love me?” She stopped and turned to face me. Behind her, the sun had slipped into a cloud at the horizon, a crescent moon perched pale in the sky, and the beach adopted the numinous blue-silver cast of a holy place.
I faltered—I’d never loved anyone before, how did I know that I loved her? Would she think this meant I also wanted to marry her?—but then I said it again, and it was like I was making her a promise, not just describing my feelings. She told me she loved me, too. Her glowing face reflected the blue-silver light. “I want you to meet my parents. I want you to see the village where I grew up.”
“What did you tell them about me?”
“I said you were a new friend from the library,” she said.
“Are they going to hate me?”
“They won’t like that your father is Brahmin.” She spun away for a moment into the long looming shadow of a palm tree. I couldn’t see her face. “But tell them about your Kumari Kandam research. They’ll like that.”
“Do they know that we’re dating?”
“They might guess.”
That night, she fell asleep quickly and I lay awake in the moonlight, breathing in the wild honeysuckle and camphor. I climbed out of the bed and put on my shirt, massaging the crick in my neck.
The marble floor was ice-cold, and I adjusted the air conditioning. At the teak writing desk, I scribbled notes about Kanya Kumari, what I’d observed, and the myth about Kanya Devi that Komakal had told me. She’d lit a fire inside me. As I looked at my notes—more notes than I’d written during any research session in Chennai so far—I realized that if I stayed with her, I might actually understand the direction of my work and why I was doing it. It was all coming into focus. I stayed there at the desk until close to morning, and then I slouched back to the bed and crawled on top of a shimmery gold throw pillow as if I’d never left, nuzzling her neck and smelling the coconut oil in her curly hair, nostalgic for a time that was already gone, the time before I’d articulated my feelings and committed myself to Komakal.
***
I suppose I could have backed out of the dinner with Komakal’s family in the village, if only because the work was going so well. Instead I took a southbound train, bearing a box of imported European chocolates. Komakal came to the Nagapattinam train station to greet me, and as soon as she saw the box, she frowned. “Why couldn’t you get South Indian sweets?” She tossed the box in a bush by the station that was still damp from the first deluge of the winter monsoons.
“They are not going to hold that against me.”
“But I want you to make a good first impression.”
“It won’t look good that I didn’t bring anything.”
She considered this and then retrieved the box. We rode her father’s motorcycle from the station past a white temple, tremendous and intricately carved, and what seemed like a never-ending stretch of lush green rice paddies to her house. The village was less than a mile from the ocean, and I could smell brine and fish in the warm breeze. I’d never ridden on a motorcycle before, and it felt both emasculating and exciting to be pressed against her thin back, her fragile spine, as she wound through the streets, zooming past a series of blackened roadside hovels and beggars before arriving in the heart of the town at the dilapidated ochre house where her parents and younger brother lived.
As I’d suspected, Komakal had exaggerated her parents’ sentiments. I started to wonder if the staunch political beliefs she described in such lacerating terms were purely her own. Her parents seemed to be ordinary middle-class people with the simple hope that their daughter would marry a boy who’d treat her well. Her mother, Agira, accepted the box of sweets with effusive warmth, and she and Komakal went into the kitchen to finish cooking. Her father, Mayavan, brought me into the living room where he was watching a cricket match on an old television with Komakal’s fifteen-year-old brother. The house smelled like an amalgam of cumin, red chilies, turmeric, mustard seeds, and sandalwood, a comforting odor that reminded me of my parents’ kitchen.
There were, however, certain ways in which Komakal had described her parents perfectly. I thought they would assume I spoke English and address me accordingly, since they knew the language, and that’s what Komakal did. At home my parents and older sisters had only ever spoken English, and perhaps this had given me a warped understanding of Indians. But Komakal’s family spoke to each other and to me in a tangled black velvet skein of rapid-fire Tamil only occasionally appliqued with English words. I struggled to keep up.
“Komakal tells us that you are here doing research. You plan to be a university professor?” Her father passed me a steel plate of moist idlis, still steaming.
“I’m not sure. In the States, a lot of people don’t decide these things so early.”
“You are twenty-eight, no?”
I was twenty-nine but wasn’t sure I should correct him.
“Appa, he just told you what he’s researching. Ask him questions about that,” Komakal interrupted. Her mother shushed her, and then, more than a little embarrassed, I voluntarily nattered on about my Kumari Kandam research, and what I was currently doing, recording interviews with everyday people about what they’d been taught in schools and at home about the lost continent.
“Your job is to go around asking people about this?” Mayavan’s hand paused over his fish curry. He looked incredulous. “And they pay you?”
“I study folklore because it reveals something larger.” I proceeded to quote buzzwords from my application. “I’m writing about colonialism and post-colonialism, and the rebuilding of identity and pride in the face of oppression through oral storytelling.”
Mayavan still looked perplexed as he helped himself to the kosumalli, a shredded carrot salad. Komakal’s brother said, genuinely surprised and with no trace of malice, “You went to university for that?”
I nodded. Agira told him, “But the Fulbright is very prestigious.”
I felt grateful.
Komakal said, “He’s studying the folklore around Tamil devotion, Appa—the folklore around Perippa’s movement. He’s bringing attention to the language, to us.”
“That bloody stupid movement?” Irritation and sorrow for the older brother who had immolated himself flickered across Mayavan’s face. From what Komakal told me, and the fervor for Tamil she possessed, I hadn’t expected he would feel this way. Komakal’s eyes flickered blacker, and she scooped curd rice into her mouth with her fingers. Agira looked do
wn at her plate. Then Mayavan began talking about the match he’d been watching on television and asked if I followed cricket. Flustered because I’d only ever seen Lagaan, I told him that I didn’t, but that I did watch baseball and weren’t they sort of similar? I could tell immediately this was the wrong thing to say, and I wanted to sink into the floor.
Agira brought out a dish of kozhukattai, white steamed dumplings. She sensed my hesitation about eating sweets at all, and misinterpreting, asked if I wanted one of the European sweets I’d brought instead. Embarrassed, I immediately grabbed two soft kozhukattai.
I bit into the brown coconut and jaggery filling. “They’re delicious! Is that cardamom?”
“You haven’t had these before?” she asked.
I admitted that I hadn’t and asked for another. At this she beamed with a radiance that lit up her large, fawn-like eyes.
***
Everything had gone reasonably well. Or so I thought. After dinner, I rode to the train station on the back of Komakal’s motorcycle and kissed her goodbye and returned to Chennai and the wonderful solitude of my research. I was lit up with the possibilities for my documentary about Kumari Kandam mythology, my mind swirling with realizations about how my parents’ different castes might have affected the mythology they’d passed on, and how I might elaborate on these subtle distinctions in my work. I waited a day or two before calling. But Komakal didn’t answer my phone calls for a month. She changed her shifts at the library, so it took quite a bit of time and effort to track her down. After several attempts, I found her at the checkout counter, and it took some time to muster up the courage to confront her. “Are you angry with me? I thought it went pretty well, considering.”
Love Songs for a Lost Continent Page 5