Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

  She didn’t look me in the eyes. She stacked books, slamming them on the counter. Other library patrons looked up, startled.

  “They don’t want me to see you anymore.”

  “I can’t believe that. Your mother liked me. You’re always amplifying our differences, instead of seeing how much we have in common.”

  Komakal sighed and shook her head. She stamped another book with undue force, and said, “What is it you think we have in common?”

  I paused, wondering what the right answer might be. “We love art and myths and odd people, and all the stuff most people don’t care about anymore.”

  “She was flattered you liked the kozhukattai. But they don’t like that you have no real job.”

  Dismayed, I asked, “Did you explain, really explain, to your father how hard it is to get a Fulbright?”

  “Yes, but you were uncertain about whether you’d go on to become a professor, and you have no solid plans, even though you’re almost thirty. He doesn’t think you’re serious—about anything.”

  Desperation filled me. Somehow her father had peered into my soul and glimpsed how utterly inadequate I was. In that moment, the love I had for her was an immense black ocean, an ocean in wait, an ocean before a storm moves through it. “Let’s get married,” I said, seizing her small bony hand in mine and kissing it. “I love you. Why not?”

  She looked confused. “What is this nonsense?”

  “I’m dead serious.”

  She scowled and withdrew her hand. “You’re using me, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Komakal shook her head. Without answer, she returned to her work and I flagged down a rickshaw to take me back to my apartment.

  ***

  My research in Chennai was coming to a close, and my usual anxiety and ambivalence about where I belonged pushed to the surface. Should I return to California, my birthplace, my home? Would it be better to travel around India as I’d planned before I met Komakal? I’d gathered nearly two hundred hours of interviews, and I slowly reviewed them all on my laptop, editing them into a single file. Video clips of older men and women whom I’d convinced to talk about Kumari Kandam. I tried to translate for purposes of subtitling, but I couldn’t think clearly without Komakal as inspiration, and the tedious hours passed without my comprehending a word. I couldn’t breathe, the sensation of withdrawal was so horrible, the atoms of my body crying out in protest, my outlook sitting there in a cramped Chennai apartment so bleak.

  My father called me in the midst of my despair. I told him my fieldwork was mostly complete. He said, “You should come home. Mom’s had a health scare, and you know her. She won’t ask you to come herself, but she wants you here.” A doctor suspected cancer, he said.

  “It might be nothing,” my father backpedaled after realizing how he’d frightened me. “You could probably take a few more weeks to travel…” But there would be many chances to sightsee in the future, I thought, so I bought a ticket to return home the following week.

  ***

  Just two days before the long flight to San Francisco, Komakal called. “I can’t paint anymore,” she announced immediately.

  “Why not?”

  “When you’re with me, everything’s in Technicolor, but when you’re gone, it is in black and white. I went to Marina Beach to collect driftwood, and it all seemed so lonely, so pointless. I came back to bed to take rest, and just lay there for three days.”

  I didn’t reply but dropped the book on Chennai’s history I was trying to read. A flicker of hope passed through me. Perhaps everything would work out after all.

  “I was just surprised when you asked. But, you know, I think my parents would accept us if we got married.”

  When Komakal swung by the apartment that night, she noticed my suitcases by the door and made the wrong assumption. She told me that she thought she would be moving into my apartment, and that her roommate might not be comfortable living with both of us at her place.

  When I explained, her usually soft face crumpled into jagged lines, and she began sobbing. “I don’t want to move to the States.”

  “But it’s my home.”

  “It was far enough, moving to the city.”

  I took her hands. “My mother’s sick.” I told her what my father said, that my mother was too proud to summon me home.

  “But when would I see my parents?”

  “We can fly them out.”

  Eventually, she calmed down, and claimed she understood, and so we spent the night reunited. We returned to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant where we’d had our first date and ordered the onion and chili uttapam, sambar vada, and buttermilk we’d ordered the first time around. We meandered down Marina Beach, weaving through a labyrinth of oily dark kelp swarmed with flies, breathing in the ocean air and watching lilac suffuse the twilight sky. We returned to my bed, and resumed our tangle of limbs and tongues, the long slow tussle of sex. We spoke about her parents, and how upset Mayavan had been at dinner. “My uncle was the center of my world as a child. He and my father would take me out on the back of the motorcycle and he’d buy me fancy dresses. He spoiled me,” Komakal said. “They agreed on everything. My father worshipped his brother. But after my uncle died, I guess he started to think differently, like maybe it was more important to live.”

  “It’s hard to understand how Tamil could matter so much you’d set fire to yourself. I was taken aback about how casual you were about the suicide,” I confessed.

  She looked at me uncertainly. For a moment she said nothing, but tears welled in her eyes. “You misunderstood. That wasn’t me being casual. Without something that’s yours, without Tamizh, without your motherland, you’d be nothing! Absolutely nothing.”

  I nodded to avoid making her deep sadness worse. But I couldn’t help but feel a shift inside, and after that, a tidal guilt, for feeling differently than I’d felt before. Had I built up our earlier romance? Had it been an illusion? Or was it that we’d already broken up once, and I knew we would again?

  ***

  When she departed in the morning for work, it was still dark outside, and I was only half-conscious, lost in an alluring limbo of fragments and hallucinations. I kissed her and told her I would write and that I would be back in a month or two. I kind of believed myself. She smiled in agreement, and a wave of nausea hit me looking at the trust in her eyes. A few hours later, I left the key and two suitcases with my landlord and wandered around the campus to get a glimpse of all my old haunts. I ambled by the library, but decided not to go in. I told myself I wanted to avoid a public tearful goodbye with Komakal.

  Instead I stopped at a terrace cafe for a fresh lime soda—fizzy and frothy with salt in the first taste, and then the sweetness of the lime. I’d come here so often with Komakal, talking about ideas, making up stories about people we saw. I watched other young people gathered in groups, horsing around—everything filled with the flavor of the past, everything dear.

  ***

  For the first few days back, even the sunshine in Palo Alto seemed a little too bright, like it had been manufactured by somebody trying to sell you something, a way of life, an intellectual sleepiness, a corporate complacency. At my parents’ house, however, we were on high alert. Doctors had discovered a tumor in my mother’s lung, early stage. The days were spent worrying about her, running errands for the family, and trying to reconcile the strong, lively woman I’d always known with the one who wanted to sleep all the time.

  “When are you going to meet a girl?” my mother asked, putting down her empty glass of wheatgrass juice. “Maybe you should try online dating.”

  “Actually, I did meet somebody in Chennai,” I told her.

  “And?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll reunite one day.”

  “You and your sisters! You work too much, like me, I guess. But I want grandchildren.” She closed her eyes. “Tell me, what was this girl of yours like?”

  “She was intense,” I said. My
mother grunted for me to continue. “Beautiful. Tamil.”

  “When are we going to meet her?”

  “She’s something of an anti-caste activist.”

  My mother’s eyebrows drew together. In spite of her illness, she looked young again with the pearly sheen of afternoon light on her dark brow. “All that doesn’t matter here.”

  “She thinks wherever Indians go, caste goes.”

  “Only when you’re young can you get away with such bold claims!” Her eyes opened, and she paused before she spoke again. “But you know, when we first came here, an Indian woman asked me if I was an Iyer, a Brahmin. It would have been too painful to say no—we had no family in this country, nobody to count on but other Indians—so I just lied.”

  “You did?”

  “But the lie stayed with me. It reminded me of a group of girls who’d thrown rocks at me on the way home from school.”

  “They did? Why haven’t you ever told me that?”

  She kept going. “The time someone set my possessions on fire in engineering college, and the warden did nothing. And what did I know of Brahmin customs? So, I stopped going to Indian functions and decided I would just do my work.”

  “Didn’t Dad support you?”

  She had a pained expression. “We never talk about such things.”

  A tremendous sadness washed over me. My mother had been so isolated, and somehow, I’d never even noticed. I ventured, “Mom, that must have been so lonely.”

  “Nobody talks about such things.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Why am I telling you all this? I had my work and that was enough.”

  She began coughing, and as I fetched a glass of fresh water, I realized how desperately I missed Komakal.

  But in the coming days, the feeling faded. I would stroll downtown to listen to the haunting melodies of saxophonists and Andean flautists busking on street corners, hats overflowing with bills and coins flung on the pavement before them. Crowds of different people floated down the streets with their fancy designer bags and brown paper parcels and precocious children in tow. No, I didn’t quite fit here, but my life in Chennai still seemed increasingly like somebody else’s.

  I tried to email Komakal to tell her that I wouldn’t be coming back for a while. I typed out a message, saying that I would love to see her in the States and that she should come visit me, and that I would buy her a ticket, but unwelcome thoughts crept in. I imagined her in Palo Alto. Meeting my family and friends over dinner. How backward everyone but my mother would find her. Her earnest, impassioned arguments about caste and feminism. How faint her sense of irony. I imagined my older sisters, their hair immaculate due to flatirons, glancing at each other over their understated rose gold jewelry and shiny designer pumps, and snickering with discomfort. I stared at the screen for a few minutes, shifting words around. After a while, I deleted the email.

  A few days later, I wrote a similar letter leaving out the invitation. I wrote in longhand because an email seemed too sterile. Or that’s what I told myself—the real reason, I think, was that I hoped longhand would give Komakal time to cool off before responding. I dropped the letter in the international post and returned to my parents’ house to continue editing my documentary.

  Komakal didn’t write back. Not the next week, or the next month, or even the next year. I kept working on my documentary. Some of the footage included a historian talking about Lemuria, a hypothetical lost land in the Indian Ocean that included California. It was a zoologist’s discredited theory, but it was adopted by both occultists in the West and Tamil writers pushing to prove the past existence of Kumari Kandam.

  When I showed my thesis advisor what I had so far, he told me about the sighting of a Lemurian, a man from the lost continent living in tunnels deep below the earth. I drove up to Mount Shasta to shoot a video with an elderly woman who ran a roadside market. She claimed that over the years she’d sometimes spotted a strange disheveled loner. He would emerge from the forest, just past the observatory, covered in dirt and leaves, wearing tattered white robes, and babbling in an unintelligible language. “Well, every time it’s the same thing,” she said, fingering the sapphire pendant hanging from her neck. “He takes one look at civilization and trudges right back into the woods. Skin about your color.”

  “And you think he’s a Lemurian?” I asked.

  “Oh, I know he is, honey. There’s no doubt in my mind that he is. The lookout’s seen him a couple times, too, wandering the woods below the observatory.”

  I wished I could tell Komakal. I thought she might appreciate this bit of weirdness that connected my home to hers.

  And in my parents’ backyard, I breathed in the sticky jasmine and hot asphalt, looked up at the green light coming through the star-shaped sycamore leaves, watched a gull circling overhead, listened to the sound of the train chugging along the tracks—suddenly belonging.

  ***

  Several years later, when my mother was in remission and my finished documentary had garnered a few prizes at independent film festivals, I did return to Chennai. After a few weeks there, I called Komakal’s mobile phone, but it had been disconnected. Then I called the landline at Komakal’s apartment. I wondered if she’d gotten married. I wondered if I could stand it if she was. I could imagine her flared temper, the sound of her yelling. I almost hung up, but I wanted to thank her—without her, I wouldn’t have had the inspiration to finish the film.

  I waited for four rings. Her roommate answered the phone. When I asked after Komakal, she said Komakal had succumbed to a deep depression and killed herself.

  I drew in my breath sharply, and my heart clenched with pain. “When?”

  “I don’t remember. Maybe three summers ago?”

  She anticipated the question I thought was too offensive to ask and told me that Komakal had plunged into the ocean, her pockets filled with stones. She never came out. A group of fishermen swam after her too late. The roommate continued and as she did, I calculated—the suicide had happened a year after my letter.

  After a moment, I asked, “What became of Komakal’s driftwood paintings?” The roommate told me that her parents had collected them, and she gave me their number. Of course, I would never call.

  I took a train to the beach at Kanyakumari and wandered along the coast, noting the statue of the poet, the tourist stands selling cowrie shells carved with elephants and boats and arecas. This is what she would have seen. The sands didn’t shift colors until sunset, and then they were pinker, less divine than they’d been while I traipsed across them with Komakal. I collected pebbles along the shore, filling my pockets with them.

  The moon rose just before the sun vanished. I’d never truly belonged there—in my motherland—and I hadn’t been able to love Komakal the way that she’d wanted, the way I promised I would when she was helping me with my work. I would always be between things and places and people, never all in. Perhaps I was unable to truly love anyone. Still, I stood in the darkening water in my bare feet, as the beach turned silver-blue, trying my hardest to feel what Komakal must have felt as she drifted deeper and deeper into the water. The cold night tides lapped my toes, and then my ankles, and then my shins. I stared up at the blazing stars and imagined myself carried away by fierce floods, a lost continent unto myself.

  What they did remember—a memory solidified by their families’ yearly slapdash recounting at Christmas—was how they met in first grade. While the other kids dashed up the slides and swung, hooting, on the monkey bars, Kathy Yang hunched cross-legged by herself in the tanbark, too afraid to talk to anyone. A few weeks after school started, Hema Sarma sprinted up to her breathless, shouting Kathy! Kathy!

  “I’m chasing them!” She pointed to the two boys running around the field. She held out her hand. “Come on.”

  Kathy hated any sort of strenuous physical effort, particularly running, but there was something endearing about Hema’s chipmunk cheeks and gap-toothed smile and laughing, mischievous eyes—it was a face that was hard not
to love. Kathy didn’t know how to say no, so she stood and chased the boys, with no idea of what she would do if she actually caught one.

  Hema, always quick, caught a little Japanese-American boy with hair that stuck straight up, and she kissed his cheek with a loud smack. That night, the boy’s mother made an angry phone call to Prabha, telling her that her son had come home shaken and to keep her wild daughter under control. Hema and Kathy giggled over this, mocking Prabha’s rolling distress, “Vaat is this, Haaaayma? You are chasing boys now? Good girls don’t do this, you know.”

  For years after that, they floated everywhere together, a single organism: HemaandKathy. Their fifth-grade teacher called them peanut butter and jelly. Kathy understood herself to be the peanut butter in this analogy—solid, dependable, quiet, and reserved—and Hema to be the jelly: bold, noisy, imaginative, and dreamy. Their nightly rhythm: checking in by phone, sneaking down the drainpipe for a nightly jaunt because Hema’s father didn’t want her on the phone, and waving goodnight through their windows. Like clockwork until Hema became a soccer star. Local newspapers dubbed her the Indian Mia Hamm.

  ***

  Later, Kathy would reconstruct what had happened that Christmas, trying to piece together whether she’d missed signs that Hema had changed. It was the Sarmas’ turn to host dinner. Their house glittered with bushy silver tinsel and paper gold stars, bigger versions of the ones her parents had used to reward her unfailingly good report cards. They’d pulled the usual white plastic tree from the garage and wreathed it in popcorn and felt reindeers.

  In the kitchen, Gopal poured mulled cider for Kathy’s parents, Nancy and John. Prabha bustled into their pantry, which doubled as a prayer room, ferrying out glass bottles of cardamom and cumin, and white plastic yogurt containers brimming with other comestibles. Gopal and Prabha told Kathy’s parents that other Indian parents had told them you must show Ivy League admissions officers your child was both passionate and well-rounded. It wasn’t enough to simply have good test scores.