“And what about your father?” I ask Suriya. “Is he still cruel?”
“No.” She dumps the sifted rice in a large pot and fidgets with the Buddhist protection cord on her wrist. “Now he is tired.” On the road, a group of boys walk slowly past, some of the many villagers who have come to see the sudhu sitting in Hashini’s yard. My existence carries weight here, effortlessly. I don’t need any convenient explanations for who I am, any concrete descriptions of what I’m doing with my life.
—
In the days before the New Year, a loud, unremarked succession of motorbikes and auto rickshaws delivers Suriya’s family members to Hashini’s main room, where the TV blares holiday programming. Men in white cotton suits and women with glossy braids report in voices bright as doorbells from a manicured lawn in front of a palace. I sit outside the open door to the house, next to a teenage girl wearing a pink T-shirt that says STAR CUTIE. She stares at me and giggles, her hand over her mouth. “You good girl?” she says at last, jumps up, runs inside.
Nope, I tell the backs of her small, quick calves, irritated with these angelic Sri Lankan girls.
“My sisters so pretty, so fair,” Suriya says.
“Your sisters? I thought you only had one brother.”
“The daughters of Hashini-Mommy.”
“Your cousins—your aunt’s daughters.”
“Yes. My sisters.”
“Okay,” I say. “Your sisters are very pretty, it’s true.”
“I am so dark.” Suriya marks the word with a wide flick of her wrists. “My mum takes pills when she is pregnant with me.”
I smile at Suriya’s oddly posh diction, learned from a British textbook. “Took pills,” I say.
“Took pills. To not get malaria. And it turned my skin. My father tease me—my dark daughter. Like that.” She almost sings the last two words, moving her chin once left, once right.
A pity your mum didn’t take pills that turned you albino. You’d be partially blind and have a reduced life expectancy, but no one could deny that you were the fairest of your cousin-sisters. “People want dark skin in the U.S.,” I say. “They lie in the sun and use creams to make their skin darker. We don’t think it’s attractive to be fair.”
“I don’t believe! You too?”
“Yes, I love when I have a suntan,” I admit, righteousness deflated. My hopeless reflection on a winter morning: dim pink blotches beneath my freckles. I used to try to wake up before Brian so that I could splash water on my face and put on blush before he saw me.
“In the U.S.A., I will be so pretty,” Suriya says.
A motorbike pulls up, driven by a young man wearing square-shaped sunglasses, bleached jeans, and a worn T-shirt nestled against his soft belly. “Ayya!” The second syllable flattens itself against Suriya’s tongue. “My elder brother,” she tells me. He removes his helmet and stares, seeming unable to reconcile what he knows about his aunt’s yard with the sight of a blue-eyed American woman. He and Suriya speak for a while with careless intimacy—quickly and softly, not looking at each other. I sometimes think I would be normal if I had a sibling. A real one. The IVF twins don’t count.
When Ayya goes inside, Suriya explains that her parents will not be coming for the family gathering this year. Her mum is in poor health and cannot travel. In a few days, we will visit her parents at their home. Ayya will drive us on his motorbike. He has four weeks’ leave from the army.
“What’s he doing now that the war is over?” I ask.
“He works at a sentry point. Still there is much need for safety. Soldiers are working so hard in these days to make the country strong.”
I look away and tell her that’s great—an American word I loathe. “Did I ever tell you that I visited Jaffna the first time I came here?” I ask Suriya.
“Oh, El, were you afraid? My brother was in Jaffna for a time. I had so fear for him. In those days, I made water offerings to Lord Buddha two times per day.”
“I loved Jaffna. Some of the kindest, most intelligent people I’ve ever met.”
Suriya purses her lips. “Well, you are tourist. So they are kind to you.”
“Did you hear about the Tree Demon that was attacking people up there?”
“Yes, we have heard that story. But the government has shown it is false. So we do not think on that.” She speaks quickly, walking toward the house. “And now my brother is in Colombo. Is better. You have hungry, Akki?”
—
Steamy bowls are laid out on the table inside. Hashini gestures to me with a spoon. She dumps a mound of rice in the center of a metal plate and surrounds it with curries. Suriya gives words to each thwack of the spoon: Jackfruit. Potato. Dhal. Aubergine. Hashini hands me the plate and motions to me to sit on the one chair in the room. Suriya frowns. “I think chair is—I don’t know the word.” She shakes the chair back to show me how loose it is. “Take care, Akki.” She bends her knees gingerly in demonstration.
The family stands around me, silent, waiting. “Aren’t you going to eat, too?” I ask Suriya. Jared is the only person I’ve ever been comfortable eating around. He always sits next to me at restaurants, not across, so he can keep one hand on my thigh while we eat. When he slid in the booth beside me for the first time, I told him it was embarrassing to be so intimate in public, people would think we were rude. “Who cares?” he said. “People think all kinds of things.” He tucked the hair behind my ears and kissed me on the mouth as the waitress walked up to take our order. I shied away and softly asked for huevos rancheros. And when they came, I struggled to cut the fried tortillas into bite-size pieces, my eyes fixed to my plate, until he took the fork from me, broke off a piece of tortilla with his bare hands, smothered it in salsa and cheese, and brought it to my lips.
But now I am a guest of honor surrounded by eager witnesses. Strips of fried eggplant cling to my fingers as I try to work the curries into a ball. A piece of potato falls to the floor as I lift the ball. Rice coats my chin as I place the ball on my tongue. My fingers have vertigo; they know they’re being watched.
“Is it taste, Akki?” Suriya whispers the question, reminding me of a Sinhala word she taught me while we ate ice cream cones the day we met.
“Rasai,” I say. “Delicious.” An explosion of laughter—the kindness inside our respective insecurities unloosed. I take another bite. The crisped exterior of a strip of eggplant gives way to a creamy mix of cinnamon, cumin, coriander, and green chili. The well-being of others is so contingent on my displays of well-being that it is necessary for me to be well. Hashini nods, satisfied, and heads toward the kitchen as the others fill their plates and then sprawl across the room, crowding onto the couch and sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“Hashini-Mommy will not eat with us?” I ask Suriya.
“She eats when she cooks. She has more works. So many people.”
Suriya mashes her curries and rice into a perfect ball and then opens her mouth wide, her tongue drooping over her lower lip. I imitate her wide mouth and eager tongue. It’s fun to eat. As soon as one of my curries gets low, Suriya balances her plate on her hip and dishes me more with her clean left hand.
The family kneads their leftovers into pasty balls that they drop in the dirt yard. A pack of dogs gathers around the food, snarling and wagging their tails. One of them has a gouged-out eye socket from which dangles a filthy string of something I don’t want to believe is excess eyeball. He runs and growls and gorges like the other dogs. I stand behind Suriya’s cousin at the pump, waiting to rinse off my plate, but Suriya slides it from my hand. “No, Akki. You are guest.” A twenty-one-year-old—or is she twenty-two now?—treating me like a child. I ought to be looking after her. But I’d be terrible at that, even if we were in the States.
I grip the back of my neck, watching Hashini carry curry bowls back and forth from the house to the cooking hut. “Hashini is always working,” I say.
“Yes. She does the mother’s situation very well.” Suriya dries my plate on her T
-shirt. Her placid praise frightens me. But maybe Hashini is happy doing the mother’s situation. Why do I want only inconvenient things?
—
I’ve decided not to use my iodine tablets, to force my body to adjust to the well water. I’m grateful for my headlamp during my second trip to the outhouse that night. Squatting over the hole, my long nightshirt gathered up in my right hand, I’m reaching for the blue plastic bowl floating in the water bucket, preparing to splash myself clean, when I hear something moving on the dirt yard, close to the outhouse. I pause, shirt in one hand, bowl in the other. It could be any number of tiny, harmless animals—I tell myself—but then I hear the movement again, too delicate to belong to an animal. The sound of a human trying not to be heard. Calm your breath. It’s probably just Suriya or Hashini, making sure I’m okay out here.
I crane my neck to the side of the outhouse, where the noise came from. My headlamp catches two disembodied gleaming orbs, pressed against a slat in the boards. Illogically, impulsively, I return my eyes to the ground, fully illuminating my naked lower half. Fuck. I switch off my headlamp and sit on my heels in the dark, heart pounding, gripping the bowl of water like a weapon.
Please God, let those eyes belong to a pervy uncle. Do not let them belong to someone from the village lying in wait for me. How awful that a pervy uncle would not be so bad, compared to—no. Calm down. My bent knees start to ache. Mechanically, I wash myself, pull up my underpants, and stand. I can’t stay in this outhouse forever. I can scream if I need to. I turn my headlamp back on and flash the side wall. The eyes withdraw. That sound again: calculated delicacy. I hold my breath to hear the direction into which it retreats—a sure path to Hashini’s house.
So it was a family pervert. Fear gives way to disgust. Ayya of course. It couldn’t be Rajesh. He’s old and timid and sweet. And Sri Lankan soldiers are notorious sexual predators—the awful thing in Haiti, how the soldiers who went to help after the earthquake had to be sent home for having sex with underage girls, people in Jaffna telling me women were forced to give sexual favors in exchange for seeing their husbands or sons in political prisons. Suriya rolls onto her back when I return to our room. “Okay, Akki?” she whispers. How blind she is to all this.
“Okay, Nangi. Go back to sleep.”
—
The next afternoon, I work on my translation while Suriya watches cartoons with her cousins. I can’t bring myself to tell her that her brother is a Peeping Tom. She would be crushed—disillusioned. The permanent kind. I’m sure she’s not even capable of imagining sexual deviance, let alone associating it with her brother. And in daylight the whole thing seems more pathetic than nefarious: Ayya is so desperate for sexual contact he’s willing to spy on his sister’s friend squatting over a shit-smeared hole.
So I smother the thought and become a ludicrous foreigner with a giant dictionary on my lap, seeking the right word for fougue in the context of a man comforting himself over a lost cat by attributing it to the creature’s fougue. I love the French word because I can’t explain it precisely in English. Any potential equivalent (vitality, chutzpah, pizzazz, spirit) is too colloquial by comparison—because, of course, French is never colloquial for me. I’ve barely spoken the language since my year in Paris more than a decade ago. I lean back in my chair. Sweat gathers under the heavy dictionary on my lap. There’s something sad to me about the act of translating. To fit the book into my language destroys what I originally loved about it—the French sounds like instruments lending nuance to coarse song lyrics, manipulating emotion into shapes as gaudy outside the body as they felt inside; the subtle, unconscious work required to make literal sense of words not native to me replacing the subtle, unconscious criticism I bring to English sentences. La musique sonne mieux quand on n’a rien d’autre à aimer. Music sounds better when one has nothing else to love. Or maybe: You feel music most strongly when it’s the only thing you love. Hideous. Is the original sentence pretentious and self-pitying, rather than the blunt expression of strong, simple feeling I took it to be when I first read it in French? Or am I just a bad translator? On the cartoon inside, female characters giggle and gasp in response to a man’s bravado monologue. Suriya laughs. Maybe the publisher will be interested in Fifi. Then it won’t matter how I feel about translating. I’ll just do it.
Ayya returns on his motorbike. He’s been out most of the day, visiting friends in the neighborhood. He offers me a brief smile as he walks to the house. I lower my narrowed eyes to my book. A tuk-tuk hurls itself into Hashini’s yard. A tall, soft-bellied man who seems very conscious of the beauty of his hair spills out of his tiny, open-air car, shirtless, the top button of his trousers undone. His wife follows, sweaty and plump in the annoyingly forgivable way of full-time mothers, a naked baby on her hip. “Puta!” Rajesh kisses the man on both cheeks. Puta means son, Suriya tells me. Or sometimes daughter, if favorite daughter. This is the family of Hashini’s eldest son, visiting from Colombo. Suriya coos at the baby.
Within minutes, Puta has distributed plastic cups of Sprite, spiked his and his father’s with Johnnie Walker, handed me a guava and Suriya the gold bangles off his wife’s wrist, held his baby’s feet straight upward in a worrisome handstand, and put on a CD so loudly the family has to shout to be heard over it. Suriya picks up the baby and starts dancing—small, precise jumps in rhythm with the sitar blasting from the stereo. I take the baby’s other hand and bounce along. Suriya mashes his cheek with her lips and tries to hand him to me. I back away, still bouncing. I like babies, but they make me uncomfortable. I would like to just observe their barbaric humanness—the intense, mercurial parade of facial expressions and sounds that overtake their bodies—but people always expect you to reach out for them, grinning and cooing.
“A baby is only heart. No head!” Suriya shouts over the music. I shout back my agreement, delighting in the chaos Puta has wrought, delighting in my sober delight. When the sitar album comes to an end, Suriya hands the baby to his mother. “I think you want to make shower before bed, El,” she says. My toes are caked in dirt, the hair around my ears matted with dried sweat, my shirt plastered to my back. I am so grateful for my perceptive host! I follow her into the bedroom. “Open shower, so we must cover,” she says, and shows me how to knot a sarong tightly over my breasts. We pad out to the backyard. The showerhead protrudes from the outhouse. Suriya watches me, saying, “Is okay, Akki? Is okay?” I am so irritated by my overeager host! I just want to feel the cold water soaking my hair and sarong, look up at the cloud masses combing the purpled sky and the loud, tiny birds dipping in and out of fluffy, persimmon-colored flowers blooming atop lanky trees. Yes, Nangi, is okay.
When we return to the house in our sopping sarongs, Hashini is preparing pallets on the living room floor. The drunk cousin snores on the couch. They have offered me the one bed. “I can sleep out here, Nangi,” I say. “The older people should have the bed.” But Suriya laughs and tells me again that I am guest. Guiltily, I follow her into the bedroom. We change, facing away from each other, into loose pants and T-shirts that will dry too quickly in the parched air. I want to stretch out naked and savor these brief moments of coolness. Impossible. Suriya showers clothed, changes into oversize pajamas without exposing herself, sleeps in a room covered by a translucent cloth into which her family members peer unhindered. She is almost never alone with her body. I clutch my stomach against that imagined deprivation. I need my closeness to my body partly because it makes me feel close to my own death, that empty space inside me that none of my words or behaviors can touch.
“You must loose your hair for sleep,” Suriya says, brushing her knee-length black mane, resting one swath at a time over her forearm. “To make long your hair.”
I leave my hair in a messy topknot, exasperated by Suriya’s preening. She’s always smoothing out my shirts, brushing imaginary dust off my shoulders, asking if she can braid my hair. As if I need even more unwanted attention from men like Ayya. “I’m traveling,” I say. “I’m not
trying to impress anyone.”
“But we must always look our best, no?” Suriya says. “For Sri Lankan peoples, if you dress a dirty shirt or messy hair, it is like a beggar. You understand?”
“Yes.” It’s wrong of me to insist on my right to comfortable slovenliness. But Suriya’s obsessive grooming makes me think of photos of my mother dressed like a little woman in the second grade, with her starched dress and permanent. Her mother made her sleep in rollers every night, just because that’s what one did then, even if one was six years old and tossed and turned all night because the rollers were too tight. To make a child suffer discomfort in order to appear a certain way: a mild form of barbarism. Now that children are free to dress however they want, they begin gleefully objectifying themselves in elementary school, courting power through miniskirts and high heels. I dressed that way, too. Freedom and power are not the same thing. It’s always refreshing to see a little girl haphazardly clothed, her hair messy, her eyes distracted by a million things besides how she looks. I feel like that girl in Sri Lanka, the one I should have been when I was eight. I understand this is a privilege denied to Suriya, and I know that I am exploiting it when I tell her I could care less how long my hair grows, I’m just trying not to die of heatstroke. She laughs. I love when she gets my jokes.
She combs her shiny hair through her fingers, staring at something I can’t see, her lips parted. “One time I brushed my boyfriend’s hair with my fingers,” she says. “He said, So gently. Your hands move so gently.” Her voice moves far away from the snoring cousin and the sloppy American visitor. “I was just thinking about that.”
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