Inside are several patio tables, two of which are occupied by single men drinking beer; a chubby-faced bartender chatting with a white couple sitting on barstools and drinking an icy blue beverage out of long, bright straws; Christmas lights flashing over three rows of liquors.
“No,” Suriya says, standing in the doorway.
“Hello, madam!” the bartender calls out. “Come in, please.”
“Do you serve food?”
“Of course, madam, whatever you like.”
“No,” Suriya repeats, holding the door open, refusing to take one step inside.
“Don’t you want to see the menu?”
“No.”
So I follow her back out. “What is wrong with that café?”
“For my whole life, if someone asks me ‘Have you been inside a bar?,’ I must answer no.”
“That wasn’t really a bar. It was also a restaurant.”
“El. There are people inside that room sitting and drinking beer. They are committing no other activity.” She shakes her head, lips pursed. “I cannot eat in that place.”
Rajith is growing fussy, complaining, tugging at Suriya’s hand. I give up.
I follow Suriya back to the lounge chairs by the pool. She unwraps tepid two-day-old curries whose stench overpowers the wafts of chlorine and sunscreen. Rajith takes eager handfuls of Suriya’s cooking. She drops a large ball of food onto her tongue and then gestures to the pool attendant with her dirty hand. “Now he will tell me I cannot eat in this place,” she says. But he just watches us with the same disdain he reserved earlier for the domed, cloudless sky. I’m hungry and dig in, too. An enormous white man wearing a Speedo that sprouts long, curly, blond hairs dives into the pool. A small girl in a party dress complains to her mother in French that it’s too hot outside. A hummingbird dips in and out of the arbor marking the entrance to the bathhouse. The Sri Lankan girl in goggles performs a perfect crawl stroke from one end of the pool to the other. Out of soggy newspaper, we eat handfuls of sticky red rice and fatty curries. I can’t stop eating, even though my stomach contracts around each bite of the old food, grown viscous and clumpy on our travels.
—
Suriya takes a long shower again that afternoon, emerges with rouged cheeks, wearing the towel like a sarong, her knee-length black hair soaking the rug. I invite her to sit on the edge of the bed with me. Her face is open and easeful, until she sees the tightness in mine. “What is it, El?”
“I’ve decided that I need to travel on my own.” Terrible phrasing. “I mean that I need to spend some time alone now. It’s been so good to be with you here, but I just—” I pause and wait for her to help me. She stares. “I am not really good at being with people. I wanted to show you a vacation. But now I need to be alone and quiet. Go somewhere and meditate, I think. And work on my translation. My French works.”
“So Rajith and I go home. No problem. Thank you for showing me a vacation. You are so kind. I understand it is difficult for you.” She stands up and rummages through her bag with her back to me.
Carrying clothes folded into perfect squares, she returns to the bathroom. I watch her narrow, downy calves until they disappear behind the closed door. I actually allowed myself to believe Suriya and I were changing each other’s lives. The angelic, impoverished Sri Lankan and the privileged, self-destructive American join forces and set their small worlds to rights. A heartwarming tale.
—
At the foot of the small mountain that supports the Royal Resort, we wait for buses going in opposite directions. Rajith is bouncy and talkative, taking my hand and telling me things I have no hope of understanding. I thought I would have time at the bus stop to properly thank Suriya for being such a good host, to explain how much her friendship means to me and how impressed I am by the way she moves through the world, tell her I’ll miss her and will try to come back soon. But my bus comes right away. My skinny arms enclose her skinnier frame. Her body is hot and stiff. I step back and hold out two ten-thousand-rupee notes. “I can give you more if you need.” She shakes her head side to side, takes the bills, puts them in the breast pocket of her dress, bites down on her lip. I hug her again. Her arms remain limp at her sides.
I heave my pack onto one shoulder and fumble for the other strap, feeling a pang of such emptiness that I cannot wait to be alone on the bus, just another tourist. “Nangi, please tell your brother and your parents thank you for me. And Nangi, I can’t tell you how—” The bus starts to pull away. “Go, go.” Suriya gestures frantically. I leap onto the bottom rung of the steps, practically shouting, “Colombo? Colombo?” An adolescent boy wearing bleached jeans and a gaudy necklace meets my eye and nods. I push my way through the thick mass of flesh in search of a place to stow my bag. The bus lurches into a pothole. I swing backward and nearly crush an infant with my pack. The mother presses the baby to her bosom, her hand clamped over its head. “Sorry, so sorry,” I say. There is no Sinhala word for sorry. She looks at me steadily through narrowed eyes. I should not be traveling in her country for the equivalent of a handful of pennies. I have been blessed with birth in America. If I can afford a plane ticket to this country, it is my duty to pay for a private driver. But I’d rather stay home than watch Sri Lanka pass by through tinted glass. I don’t care how many babies I have to take out in the process. No, no. I do hope your son’s head is okay. And I’m so glad you don’t know English. Or telepathy. “Sorry,” I say again, aloud, sincere, heavy with the weight of myself now that Suriya is gone, now that I’ve sent her away.
Ducking under arms, swinging from one seat back to another, I make my way to the front of the bus and deposit my bag under the driver’s seat. A young woman holding a baby and sitting beside a small boy points at me and nods her head toward the few inches of space next to her older son until I sit down. The musculature of the woman’s face seems to have wasted away around its frame, displaying her gums and teeth like the plaster model of a mouth in a dentist’s office. Her cheekbones press into her skin, half-moons extending from her temples to her nostrils. Her sari is tied in the Indian manner, bunched and stretched in a thin strip over her shoulder for ease in traveling. Her torso is a small, hard cylinder. The baby lies across her lap, his thick eyelashes pressed together and his tiny tongue falling to the side of his mouth. The mother couldn’t be much older than twenty. She reaches into the purse sitting on her older son’s lap and takes out two pieces of dull yellow candy. She hands one to the boy and the other to me. I open my mouth wide and dramatically place the candy on my tongue. The child imitates me with slow precision. The baby gurgles and paddles its feet against his mother’s concave stomach. She puts him over her shoulder and pats his back, but it’s too late. He is wide awake and suffering and his suffering must end now. He pulls at his mother’s sari blouse, pushing his feet into her stomach and trying to scale her upper body. The mother pulls—gently, gently—his hands from her blouse buttons. She puts her index finger in his mouth. He cranes his neck back and bites down. Her eyebrows wince lazily. He spits out her finger and resumes his wail. She holds him against her chest, rocking methodically, her face blank with exhaustion. Motherhood: the greatest gift of all time, according to Suriya and government posters pasted throughout Sri Lanka. The little boy sits with his hands on his knees, leaning forward to see out the window past his mother’s shoulder. The baby’s wail claws at my throat.
When I was a little girl, I had the usual fantasy of feeling the baby kick in my stomach, singing it to sleep, nourishing it through my breasts, my body existing only as sustenance for another creature. The fantasy began ebbing in adolescence, as I retreated further and further from my peers, lusting after vagueness. I have little respect for the maternal instinct now, the hope for self-fulfillment through the most obvious pathway of the body, the dumb ease of a woman with a baby, their bodies so perfectly suited to each other it’s as if they’re already dead and appearing in an album of old family photographs. At what used to be called childbearing age, Virginia Wo
olf wrote in her diary about the devils that plagued her, “heavy black ones,” devils of failure—a twenty-nine-year-old woman, unmarried, childless. Twenty years later, she wrote to herself that children were nothing compared to writing. But of course I am no Virginia Woolf. I am a modern evolutionary casualty, a woman capable of bearing children but deprived of the will to do so; a woman endowed with the will for meaningful work but constitutionally incapable of pursuing it. I am the type of human who will die out.
COLOMBO
Outside the train station, vendors are building pyramids out of watermelons, papayas, and wood apples. They shake out their legs, down clay cups of tea, yawn, hack, spit. “I give you good price, madam,” a man says, holding out a watermelon to me. I’m carrying a water bottle in one hand and a coconut roti in the other. The straps of my backpack dig into my shoulders. Heat surges through the veins in my face. I look down at the watermelon and shake my head, scowling.
“But you can balance on your head, no, madam?”
Peals of laughter from the vendors.
A man covered in warts and fist-size moles shuffles his bare feet along the pavement, hand outstretched, repeating a Sinhalese plea in a monotone. I put a coin in his hand as we pass each other. He scowls at his palm. He expects paper money from tourists.
I was relieved the first time I heard the anti-panhandling announcements on the subway in New York. We ask you NOT to give. Please help us maintain an orderly subway. There was a gray-haired black man who kept showing up in my subway car. His tiny eyes blinked under thick brows as he shook the coins at the bottom of his battered twenty-ounce Pepsi cup, intoning, “If you can spare anything in the category of a few dollars or a few cents. If you can spare anything in the category of a few dollars or a few cents…” The vain, stubborn care of the word category was a fist around my heart. The authoritative voice on the intercom required me to ignore it. I tried to explain the sadness of this relief to Brian. “But it doesn’t help anyone to collect a handful of coins on the train,” he said.
“But that might be the only way some people can make money,” I said.
“You can’t really believe that.”
So many times a day I loathed him. Why does it still feel terrible to be exiled from the “normal days” he promised?
I walk into the train station and buy a ticket south. I want to find a sleepy beach town to finish my translation, stare at the ocean, reckon with the state of my life. When the train arrives, I heave my pack through the window to reserve an open seat and then clamber aboard after my belongings. I lean back against the sticky leather seat and close my eyes. My favorite fact of traveling: so many hours in which it is impossible to do anything at all. The train grumbles and lurches. I rest my elbow on the ledge of the open window. The wind tastes sweet on my arms. Suriya will be alone in the kitchen tonight. The image is a lump in my throat. But I don’t wish I were there with her.
We chug through the hysteria of Colombo’s sounds and smells and competing needs until we are riding the spine of a high, narrow mountain, alongside a river gilded with mineral silt. Fragments of artificial color dot the hillside—the saris of Tamil tea pickers plucking rough leaves by the handful and dropping them in giant sacks tied to their backs. Water buffalo crawl antlike in the paddy fields below layers of mountains, the closest ones feathery with giant pines, the farthest purpled silhouettes.
We stop at a town that has set precarious roots in the hillside just below the tracks. A pudgy woman gets on the train and sits next to me, a toddler on her lap. The girl wears a red tank top on which sequins form the words HEARTS HEARTS HEARTS!!! She eats cookies out of her mother’s purse and beats a rhythm on her knees. “Butalay, butalay, boom boom!” Men walk up and down the aisles, hawking fried fish and dhal balls, calling “Swaray, swaray!” Sunlight spears the tip of my elbow. Metallic claps coming from the floorboards between cars keep time with the jolting of my seat. As pictures outside the window flash and disappear—waves hurling themselves at shore, women weaving palm fronds into roofs in their front yards—I feel myself inside a small, sparse room. Curtainless. Bright. White walls, heavy furniture with peeling white paint. A bed covered only in a white sheet, always mussed. Clean but untidy. Objects lie about, living inside their discrete functions. A mew of contentment presses against my closed lips. For a short while I am so relaxed that where I imagine myself to be is the same place as where I am. The train picks up speed and jostles the room out of my hands.
—
Hours pass. I sit. The mother and toddler are replaced by a man with a small, deeply creased face. He nods at me in greeting, picks up an English-language newspaper that has been abandoned in the aisle, shakes it open and laughs. I glance at the headlines: President Lowers Rice Prices! President De-mines Northern Region! President Opens State-of-Art Cinema!
“Were you reading this?” he asks.
“No.”
“Good. All lies.”
“Is that a government paper?”
“Indeed. Garbage. You are from the U.S.A.?”
“Yes, I am. How can you tell?”
“My elder brother has lived in Chicago for many years. I recognize the American manner.”
“What is the American manner, exactly?”
“Friendly but cautious. Wary.”
“Your English is better than most Americans’.” I offer a smile that I hope distinguishes my friendliness from that of my wary compatriots.
His family used to be quite cozy with the British, he tells me. He spent most of his childhood on a golf course, in neat little suits and bow ties. His laugh is raucous and long. His uncle served in parliament and his parents were some kind of government administrators. The British loved the Tamils. Divide and conquer! Well, the Sinhalese have certainly put us back in our place. “Nimal.” He holds out his hand.
“Elsie. So what happened to your family after independence?”
They had to leave Colombo after Black July, the month of riots in retaliation for the Tigers’ first big attack, which killed thirteen Sri Lankan soldiers. Colombo raged for weeks afterward, with Sinhalese mobs setting fire to Tamil homes, businesses, and people. A mob nearly killed Nimal. His perfect Sinhalese accent saved his life. “Death to Tamils,” he shouted, until the mob was convinced he was one of them. But his family could not stay in Colombo after Black July. Sinhalese his parents had been close with cut off all ties, afraid of being branded collaborators. Nimal’s best friend bid him farewell after school one day. “I must not look you in the face again in this life,” he said, and turned his back. After the riots, Nimal’s uncle quit parliament. He had stayed even when his party was forced to support the Sinhalese-only language policy, even when they gave up the fight against the law requiring Tamils to get better marks than Sinhalese to enter university. But after the government-supported pogrom, Nimal’s parents and uncle had to accept the gravity of anti-Tamil feeling. Their family name would not protect them from a mob armed with machetes and kerosene. They moved to Vavuniya, Tiger country. Those were the golden years for Prabhakaran, who had prepared himself to lead the Tamil Tigers by torturing insects and sticking pins in his fingernails to inure himself to pain. He demanded every family give one child to the LTTE. Nimal had only one sister. The Tigers loved female fighters—bombs could easily be hidden under the dresses of seemingly expectant mothers—but Nimal would never have sent his sister to war. So Nimal joined the Tigers. When they said jump, you jumped. Anyway, he didn’t mind joining, after what the Sinhalese did to his cousin. Crucified him in the road. Nailed his hands to the pavement. Left him there to be stampeded. Nimal thought Prabhakaran was a lunatic, but this lunatic was the Tamils’ only hope. The Tigers used to put up posters that showed two different Tamil girls: One going to school with pigtails and a neat dress, then ending up dead in the bushes, her skirt pushed up past her waist; Sri Lankan soldiers smirked nearby. The other girl stood tall and proud in camouflage pants, staring down the barrel of a rifle. This was not only propaganda. Nimal�
�s sister did not join the Tigers and she was raped by the Indians, the supposed peacekeeping force that came to help end the war. India sent the most brutal men they had—from backward tribes, no inkling of civilization—and gave them no direction. Nimal told his sister never to tell anyone that she’d been raped so she would be able to get married later. Which she did, to a carpenter who was forced to build bunkers for the Tigers. They had four kids. The whole family is dead now. Killed during the last months of the war. Rajapaksha knows how to win a war, you have to hand it to the man. Jail the journalists and bomb, bomb, bomb.
Or so goes my fantasy of the story Nimal might tell me, a tidy, personalized illustration of the Sri Lankan horror stories I’ve read about.
What actually happens is that Nimal crumples the newspaper and chucks it out the window, asks me what city I live in, tells me he was in New York once, asks what I think of my country’s first black president. I try to get him to talk about how his family fared during the war, mentioning the Black July riots to let him know I’m informed, but he just laughs more, tells me I know my history, am I sure I’m American?
I turn my face into the breeze from the window, strong enough to justify closing my eyes, Dieu merci. I spend a lot of time reading alone while others are sitting in traffic on their way to a desk, and I tell myself this makes me better than other Americans, with their slavishness to their computers and SUVs and houses with two guest bathrooms. But what do I have? I have a full, active mind that brings me neither peace nor love nor contentment nor purpose. If I were a character in a novel, I would be the quintessential twenty-first-century narrator: characterized by the aimless bustle of the sharp mind, revealed through thoughts about my inner torment rather than events that explain the torment. There was a blog post about this on some literary site one time. I read it in my pajamas after Brian left for work, drinking coffee, eating instant oatmeal. My mental activity both sustains and paralyzes me! Exactly! I finished my oatmeal, sat at the table. The obvious paradox was that there was nothing I could do with the realization. I was not some dynamic character out of, say, Dickens or George Eliot or, um…I grip my fist in front of my mouth, deeply ashamed, even in the theater of my mind peopled only with other thoughts, to be unable to recall a single other nineteenth-century novelist. As if quick recall of canonical writers would lead to inner peace.
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