“Spy.”
“Ayya does not spy.” She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “I hope you will forgive me, Akki. I have spy you.”
“Have spied on you.” I repeat the words mechanically, awaiting an explanation.
“Yes. It is me.” She speaks quickly, keeping her eyes closed. “The first time, in the night at Hashini-Mommy’s house, I want to make sure you are okay. But then your lamp in the outhouse is so bright and I thought I can see inside without that I disturb you. Then I am more interested because I see only little bit—”
“What did you want to see?”
“Oh, El, I am embarrassed.” Suriya still has not opened her eyes. “I want to see white girl naked.”
Suriya is wearing her hair in perfect braided pigtails; her baggy dress comes to just above her ankles. Yet she sounds like she’s about to hit up a strip club in Bangkok. I reach out and grip her hand. She opens her eyes, but keeps them cast downward. “Nangi,” I say, “it’s okay. Honestly, that makes me like you even more.”
Suriya lifts her chin. “You have not angry?”
“Not at all. But you could have just asked me. I’m not shy about stuff like that.”
“But I am shy! I never dare to ask you.”
“Did you see what you were looking for?”
“Yes.” Suriya looks at her feet. “I want to know if you have hair. Because one time boys in my class have shown this photo of a naked lady. Some bad thing from the Internet. And one boy say me, ‘Ooh, do you look like that?’ And another boy say, ‘No, I think she is hairy!’ And the boys laugh. The lady in the photo has no hair! Just on her head. And I am worried that it is bad to have hair—in that place. But then I think, maybe it is only white girls who have no hair.”
“I guess I answered your question.” Suriya blushes. I laugh and jostle her shoulder. “Come on. I don’t mind at all. Really.”
She faces me, biting her lip. “But how do girls become like that?”
I explain waxing and shaving and the gross American infantilization of women and sexualization of children. I want to make the practice seem as absurd as possible, to be the role model of a woman who is comfortable with her body just as it is. But if Suriya had been spying on me a few weeks earlier, when Jared was staying with me in New York, she might have remained confused. It is oddly unthinkable to me that I would go to the beach or on a date without undergoing uncomfortable, gratuitous hair removal.
Sometimes when I got a bikini wax, I would begin to imagine that the strips of hot wax were being applied and yanked against my will and I didn’t know when it would stop, if ever, and I thought of the secret CIA prisons and Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and Bagram and the so-called stress positions into which prisoners were shackled for hours and days until their shoulders dislocated and their legs broke, and all the other forms of torture happening all around the world at that very moment that were infinitely worse than forced genital waxing—which was, after all, not nearly painful enough to even exist as a form of torture outside my mind—and my lips and hands grew numb and I had to take long, deep breaths and the Russian lady would ask if I was okay, it was almost over, sweetie, just one more little strip.
A tiny purple bird lands on the log between Suriya and me, but flitters off when I turn to look at it. “You know,” I say, “I had a similar thing one time. With a boyfriend.” I haven’t told Suriya about Jared, wanting her to think of me as a heartbroken woman slowly recovering with no one’s help but her own. “He wanted me to look like the women on the Internet.”
Near the beginning of our relationship, when Jared and I were lying in bed after sex, he asked if he could wax my asshole. I was satiated and dreamy and openhearted. “Maybe,” I said. “Is it the hot wax part that turns you on, or—”
“I don’t mean like that. Not as a sex act.”
I stiffened. “You mean you want to wax my asshole to make it look better?”
“I just think it looks hot when it’s all bare.”
“And where have you seen all these bare assholes?” A thin, steel question.
“Relax, baby, I’m not thinking of other girls. I’ve just seen it in porn, I guess.”
I jumped out of bed. “Do you have any clue how much it hurts to rip out your hair by the goddamn follicle from the most tender area of your body?”
I glared at the floor as I pulled on my clothes. Jared sat up and reached an arm out to me. “I don’t get it. You said I could when you thought it would turn me on.”
“I didn’t realize I’d have to become your private porn star to turn you on.”
I repeat this line to Suriya, offering a chaste explanation of a porn star. “That is good, El,” she says. “So you did not see the boy again?”
Amma yells Suriya’s name three times. I am saved from having to lie. We find Suriya’s mother in the yard, looking alarmed. Suriya hugs her and speaks reassuringly. “She believe I am lost,” she tells me.
—
Amma is feeling well today and will be able to prepare lunch. So Suriya is free to study for her exams. She sits in the yard with her giant binder, trying to memorize a few paragraphs she must recite for the exam. I haven’t changed my underwear in a couple of days and resolve myself to the necessity of laundry. As soon as I drop the matted knot of my clothes into a bucket, the soapy water turns opaque gray. I squeeze my orange T-shirt into a ball and rinse it out under the tap. It drips on the laundry line stretched between two squat palmyra trees. As I start to repeat the process, Suriya’s mother comes up and pats my arm. She takes my shirt off the line and returns it to the bucket, into which she dumps much more detergent. With glad violence, she repeatedly dunks my shirt, beats it against a rock, scrubs it with a coarse brush, twists it into a tight coil, and wrings out the coil inch by inch. The cloth is nearly dry when she hangs it on the line. She smiles at me and gestures to the bucket. I imitate her with slow awkwardness. She presses the back of her hand against my cheek.
Suriya walks over and holds her mother around the waist. “She teaches you to be a good Sri Lankan girl,” Suriya says.
“She can try,” I say. I used to participate in psychology experiments to make an easy fifty bucks. The questionnaires asked me to rate from zero to ten how strongly I identified with certain feelings, such as Think frequently about how I look or Feel certain that other people are talking about me behind my back. I always circled ten for Believe I should be punished for my sins. I am the voracious girl in the legend that mothers tell as a warning to their daughters. To be good is to bear repetition and dissatisfaction without complaint, or only inner ones that affect no one but yourself.
Ayya runs toward us, dips his hands in the dirty water, flicks it on his sister, bounds away, shrieking, “Iyeeeee!” Suriya shouts after him and shakes her fist. Still smiling, Amma walks toward the kitchen. Her equanimity feels like a shield or reproach. It reminds me unpleasantly of Brian’s family, the implicit pressure to maintain a state of perfectly reasonable happiness. My eyes reach for Suriya’s. “Has Ayya ever told you anything about being in the war?” I ask, wanting to pierce the bubble of equanimity. “The kinds of things he saw or did?”
“Oh no. He does not tell me that. That is like code. Secret code for soldiers.”
“I’m sure your brother is a good soldier. But not all the soldiers are good. I heard a lot of things from Tamil people while I was traveling—that thousands of innocent people were killed and tortured and raped and lost their homes at the end of the war. And even now they have very little freedom.”
Suriya takes a skirt from the bucket and beats it against a rock. “Why do you not ask Ayya these things?”
“He doesn’t speak English, does he?”
With subtle sarcasm, Suriya widens her eyes and points to her enormous English binder. “Of course. You can translate,” I say, more nervous than relieved. Suriya calls out for her brother. He emerges from the kitchen, eating a banana. My throat grows dry as he approaches. I haven’t spoken to him since I told
him to get lost last night. “I’m sorry—” I begin, but Suriya shakes her head no and addresses Ayya in Sinhala. “I explain it is my fault you are confused in the night,” she says. “Do not worry for that.”
I offer Ayya a wide, close-lipped smile, the same one I used to give the camera when I was a child, doing my best imitation of an acceptable photographic face. But now the very desire to be genuine makes me come across as aloof. Suriya explains to Ayya that I have traveled in Jaffna and am sad for the Tamil people. Ayya meets my eyes. His voice is tight and matter-of-fact. I should not feel bad for the Tamils. They are so rich. So many Tamils are living abroad and sending money back. They are luckier than the Sinhala people.
“There are only Tamils living abroad because they’ve been displaced,” I say. “A lot of people lost their homes or had to escape from the fighting. I heard about one man who swam all the way to India.”
Ayya believes that I met some kind people in Jaffna—caught up in my argument, I don’t register how well Suriya is translating—but the Tamils are not all kind. Can he tell me a story? He takes Suriya’s chair and speaks for several minutes, the English binder in his lap. Suriya stands nearby, watching him closely. She looks at the ground when he falls silent, her face muddled. “This is hard to explain,” she says. “There is a girl in Jaffna when my brother was there. Twelve years old, thirteen, like that. She is the daughter of the man who has a good restaurant. Favorite restaurant of the soldiers.” This girl is kind and speaks Sinhala well. The soldiers have to communicate with most Tamil people in English. They are impressed that this young girl knows Sinhala so well and enjoy talking to her. One of Ayya’s friends wants to teach her to write Sinhala characters. So they sit together sometimes after lunch and practice writing in a notebook. One day Ayya and his friend go to the restaurant to take their lunch and there is a new family there. Slowly, the soldiers learn what has happened to this girl. Some people in her village started talking about her, saying she has a Sinhala boyfriend. Of course she is not supposed to have a boyfriend at all until she marries. And to have a Sinhala one is very, very bad. The people in the village say that the girl is so upset by what people are thinking of her that she committed suicide. But Ayya doesn’t believe. The story is that the girl took off all her clothes and tied herself to a tree and set herself on fire. That seems not even possible. Ayya believes the men in the village raped her and burned her alive. Suriya’s voice is quiet, coaxing the unwilling words to leave her throat.
“I’m sorry,” I say, without knowing why. Does it help anyone for me to know these things? For Suriya to know these things?
“But is it possible—weren’t a lot of the Sri Lankan soldiers raping Tamil girls?” My voice is small, embarrassed by the words, the pretension that this story has any use as a political lesson. It takes Suriya a long time to explain Ayya’s response. She keeps pausing, searching even for words she knows well. Most soldiers would not hurt a woman. There are only some bad soldiers, yes, who use the women. But the Tamil men do the same. Ayya heard of one girl, she was raped by a soldier. That is very bad, yes. But Ayya says something happened to her even worse. Men in her village learn she has been raped and so they raped her too. More than one hundred men. Because she is already ruined. That is how the men think.
Ayya traces circles in the dirt with his big toe while Suriya speaks. I have an urge to stamp out the delicacy of the motion, make him look at me. What is it that we were supposed to be arguing about? “Did you know these stories?” I ask Suriya.
“Stories like this, yes. We all hear bad things from Jaffna during wartime. But we must not think on these things.”
A young father I spoke to in Jaffna told me he didn’t care whether the Sinhalese soldiers or the Tamil Tigers ruled in Jaffna—“Fifty-fifty badness,” he called it—so long as there was no more fighting. He mentioned some videos on the Internet of Tamil prisoners being tortured, which he assumed some good soldier had posted as a kind of anonymous protest. The father hoped these videos would be destroyed, that the war crimes would be forgotten. “These things just make Tamils want to fight. And we cannot fight. We will not win.” Running around researching an article I believed would open Americans’ eyes to Tamil oppression, I heard the comment as pathetic, the words of someone who has been cowed into silence. Now I have no way to interpret it, no sense of the words beyond the literal.
Ayya tosses his banana peel into the bamboo grove and begins walking toward the house. “Thank you for speaking with me,” I try to call after him, but my voice stays close to my chest.
I spend the rest of the day on my translation, plowing through two chapters with little thought to their meaning.
—
That evening, Suriya suggests the three of us go to a nearby temple to make a water offering. We fill up small plastic bowls from the tap at the entrance and carry them in cupped hands while we walk in circles around the Buddha statue in the courtyard. “Eight circles,” Suriya says. “Lord Buddha’s magic number.” It feels silly to be counting laps with this plastic bowl of tap water, but then pirith begins playing from inside the small temple—a long, one-story structure that looks more like a stable than a house of worship. A monk walks into the courtyard and stands still with his hands clasped behind his back, watching us or the sunset or both. Hard to believe it was the monks who agitated the most for violence against the Tamils, sometimes even leading mobs in ransacking businesses or putting kerosene-doused tires around Tamils’ necks and setting them on fire. Please stop. Just focus on one real, immediate thing. Smooth, warm tiles meet the soles of my feet. There is nothing damaging about this activity, no reason to hold myself aloof and analytical.
On the ride home, a flash of light behind the clouds turns the sky into a sheet of pale pink construction paper stenciled with elaborate branches. “Oh,” Suriya murmurs behind me. Heat lightning. A wall of rain moves across the field toward our bike. We are soaked to the skin. Ayya drives slowly the rest of the way home. Rain eclipses our senses. Impossible to worry about the state of the world when you are moving through black, dense water on a vehicle over which you have no control.
Suriya’s house is dark and silent. Her father is sleeping and her mother is at an Ayurvedic hospital to get medicine for the health problem that Suriya has explained to me only by pointing to her chest. She flicks a light switch in the kitchen. “Have not current.” She tries to open the tap on the side of the house. “Have not water.” Her voice is mischievous and happy. She is freed from cooking and cleaning. Nothing to do but lie on our beds inside the watery air.
“I feel happy with the dark,” Suriya says. On the street, a man makes a kissing noise, the sound men use to attract each other’s attention.
“It’s peaceful, yes.” I stretch out on the bed as Suriya begins her ritual hair brushing. “Nangi,” I say, “you were never hoping that Ayya and I—you know…”
I wait for her to absolve me of the need to go further. “Please explain, El,” she says, putting down her brush.
“Were you ever hoping that Ayya and I would get married?”
She rests her hairbrush on her knee, looking so stunned I’m almost offended. “No, no, El. To Ayya, you are Akki. Big sister. American sister.”
“Oh, good. I only want to be his American sister.”
Suriya resumes tenderizing her hair. “And Ayya is not looking for wife now. He is too sad. He had a girlfriend for some years. He loves her more. But this girl marries another boy while Ayya is away. I told him when he comes home to visit. Oh, Akki, he cried more.” I can’t bring myself to correct Suriya’s emphatic misuse of “more”; it sounds so grave and endless.
Suriya does her best not to ever cry, because if she starts she cannot stop. When I ask how she manages not to cry when hard things happen in her life all the time, she says, “Patience and activeness.”
“You are very smart. But I do think it’s all right to cry from time to time.” I hear a song my mother used to play for me when I was four or five, s
ometimes singing along in a manner that came across as unhinged and desperate even to a child. It’s all right to cry…Raindrops from your eyes. It’s gonna make you feel better! I was already well aware that tears were acceptable in my family, given how many times I walked into the living room and found my mother lying on the rug with cucumbers over her eyes and a mound of used tissues beside her, blasting Joni Mitchell, in the dry-heaves stage of a long weeping. Or watched my father emerge from the bedroom at noon, eyes red, face slack. There is such a thing as being too permissive with the expression of emotions.
I reach out and touch Suriya’s knee. “Nangi, tell me about your mother’s illness. Is she going to be okay?”
Suriya shakes her head and looks into her lap. “I must not talk about that. I only pray.”
My brain knows this is a sad thing to say. But instead of compassion, I feel defensive and irritated, as if listening to someone complain about something she has no right to be upset about. Suriya’s mom might die, I say to myself, scoldingly. But the appropriate feeling does not come.
—
We swim in the lake most evenings. Sometimes a teenage boy who lost his legs to a land mine bathes with us. His father pushes him to the lake’s edge in his wheelchair and then carries him into the soapy shallows, holding him under the armpits as the boy lathers his face and chest. Once, as we drop our sandals and towels on the sand, we see the boy floating on his back, his father’s palms supporting him underwater. The boy’s closed eyes and upturned lips and sinewy arms stretched wide halt us. “Oh,” Suriya murmurs, intertwining her thin fingers with mine.
—
Ayya will go back to his sentry point in Colombo in two days. This fact rudely alerts me to the passage of time, something I do my best not to keep track of. I’ve been with Suriya for more than a month, the length of time I was hoping it would take me to complete my translation. Five long chapters remain. I need to find a quiet hostel somewhere, sequester myself, and do nothing but work. But first Ayya and Suriya are eager to take me to a festival that is coming to their village. It will be Ayya’s last day of fun before he goes back to work. And Suriya has had so many chores and she fears that her chores became my chores. But tomorrow we will go to a festival and have fun!
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