When my eyes open many hours later, Suriya’s back is still pressed against my chest. The white pit of the sun fills the window. Suriya yawns and fidgets her way to wakefulness.
“I want tea,” she says. “Okay, Akki?”
After she leaves, I cross my legs under me and sit still for a while, waiting for the ache to become nothing more than an ache.
The front yard is empty, the tent and casket gone. Suriya is in the kitchen, ladling thin, beige batter into a small pan on the electric burner. The batter hardens into a bowl-shaped crepe. “Do you like hoppers, El?” she asks, handing me a full plate.
I love. I bite into the thick, spongy center, soaked with spicy coconut sauce. I ask Suriya to tell me how to make these, for when I’m back in the States.
“So easy,” she says, swirling the pan to even out another spoonful of batter. “Rice flour, coconut milk, one egg. Or two eggs. Or no egg, if you don’t have. Salt. Little oil. Hopper dust.”
“Hopper dust?”
“Yes,” she says evenly. I miss her usual exclamatory inflection. “Mix in a bowl and cook in a hopper pan.”
Suriya’s father walks in, wearing the same clothes he wore at the funeral. She straightens her spine. Her voice is too cheery as she tries to hand him a plate of hoppers. He scrunches his small nose as if smelling something rotten, turns his back to us, addresses the doorway. The words march in a slow, loose line, following orders out of habit.
“My father is angry with me,” Suriya says when his hunched shoulders disappear through the door.
“Why is he angry this time?”
“Because my mother loved to make hopper meals. He says to me, ‘Everywhere I see her remembers and her moments.’ This is my father’s sad. But I need her remembers and her moments.” She stirs up the batter, which I will clearly not be able to reconstruct at home. “You know the parable about the woman with a baby that died, El? And she ask Lord Buddha to make that baby live again?” The Buddha told her he could make a special medicine if she brought him mustard seeds from a house in which no one had ever died. The mother went from house to house, clutching her dead baby, begging for the seeds, receiving instead story after story of loss. Finally she buried her son in the woods, sad and okay. A miracle of acceptance. “I need to think of my mother’s small things, to remember them all,” Suriya says. “But I must balance small things with big ones. Do you understand?”
Yes. No. I look at her closely.
“What are you thinking, Akki?” She slides a hopper onto my plate.
That your goodness is not make-believe, not part of any machine.
“What a good cook you are,” I say.
“You only say that because you are my friend. I have so much to learn.” She nibbles the crisp lip of a hopper. “Can I ask you for a help, Akki?”
“Of course.”
“I would like to talk to my boyfriend. He wrote me that we can talk with the Skype. You can help?”
At the house with a computer, I check my email while Suriya plays with the owners’ baby. Joe from Carp Weekly has written back. He has cancer—“of the goddamned tongue! What a fuckin’ wanker God is”—and he’s taking time off from work. The good news is that Donnie will do pretty much whatever Joe asks—“you don’t cross a cancer patient”—and Joe was happy to call in a favor for me. As usual, the paper is in dire need of good editors. Donnie would be glad to have me back on staff, and I’d be salaried. Starting at $40,000 with benefits, a number that sounds to me like success. I’ll have to edit the What’s Hot? section in addition to the In Memoriams—“ladies’ handbags and cocktail recipes and the like. At least that’s what it is now. Let’s just say, there is ample room for improvement.” I hear the words in Joe’s determined, self-contained tenor. So. That’s what I’ll do.
But—Jared. I cannot live in his town. I would never escape my thoughts about him. Anyway, I ought to be teaching impoverished children how to farm or trying to make plastic out of recycled fingernail clippings or becoming the first Buddhist nun who is also a sex educator or biking across the U.S. to raise awareness about Tamil oppression. I wish I would do any one of those things, I really do. But I won’t. Maybe I could move to Montreal, finally get good at speaking French, work at a bookstore or coffee shop or something. My forehead drops into my hand. Enough ideas. Do what is before you. Take the newspaper job, but don’t live in Carpinteria, live in a nearby town—maybe that tiny, gorgeous one with brightly colored cottages and vegetable gardens in the yards and cheap rents because the cliff above it is inching year by year closer to landslide. Return to the work you had when you were twenty-two, knowing now that no greater life is beckoning from afar. I’ve always been right here.
After I set up a Skype account for Suriya, I sit outside with the owner of the Internet café, as Suriya calls this house with a computer. He has a large, silly chin. “Your name?” he asks me.
“Elsie.”
“Your country?”
“U.S.A.”
Time passes. Whorls of dust agitate the pale sky.
“Your name?” he says.
“Elsie.”
“Your country?”
“U.S.A.”
I am an ordinary person with an ordinary life. Even my acceptance of ordinariness is ordinary, the undercurrent of so many “big books.” Madame Bovary, War and Peace, Freedom. The mistake is always the same: trying to live the life one has in one’s head instead of the life before one, which is endlessly generous if you humble yourself to it as the only possible means of fulfillment. But isn’t there something condescending about being told by great artists that ordinariness leads to happiness? Those who create art that preserves their lives from the dull, repetitive labors to which the masses are confined tell these same masses to labor joyfully. Plato’s Noble Lie, retold endlessly. But that kind of ordinariness is not what the man in white robes was talking about in the meditation center in the mountains as the candles flickered and the insects sang and my ass went numb on a thin, hard, overused cushion. What was he talking about? Stopping. Wondering. What am I doing right now. Is it necessary. He was not talking about doing any particular thing. I could stay at the newspaper until I’m old and gray, or come back to Sri Lanka and teach English, or write a novel about a totally imaginary person who has nothing to do with me, or translate a French book that even a non-suicidal person might enjoy. The point is to pay attention to what’s real, not to my imagination. To remember that it’s enough just to sit on a train, seeing, hearing, bouncing, dozing, thinking, letting the mind go blank. That’s love, too, a kind of love. It seems possible to love like that all the time, but then—Suriya walks out of the house. I stand and ask if she was able to reach her boyfriend. Seeming not to hear, she loosens the bun at the nape of her neck to let her hair fall down to her knees, shakes her head, reins the stringy, black mane back in. I offer to bike home and she barely nods, just hops onto the handlebars, the same way I glided into my dad’s car after spending the afternoon in Dan’s attic in high school, when he sang me radio love songs and made me believe I was the most beautiful girl in the world.
Suriya leans over my shoulder as we bike past the swampy lake. “El, that is the first time I have seen my boyfriend in two years. And I will see his real face soon. He is coming back to Sri Lanka. In six months or one year. We will be married.”
I backpedal to a stop in Suriya’s yard. “And you are sure he will be a good husband?” As if that question has an answer. Suriya walks the bike to the back of the house. She cannot know everything of her husband until they marry. But she knows some things. She runs her hand down the side of her face and lets it rest on her neck. She takes the broom leaning against the house and starts sweeping trash and dead frangipani flowers toward the street. Ayya pulls up on his motorbike and throws anxious words at Suriya. The machine coughs dust around our ankles as he roars off.
“The funeral takes Ayya’s money,” Suriya says. “So he goes to find money in the village. One man, he owes my father mone
y from some years ago. Maybe Ayya can find that man.” Suriya stares at the crosshatched line Ayya’s bike leaves in its wake. His military leave was extended for the funeral. It will be awhile before he returns to his sentry point in Colombo and gets a paycheck.
“Ayya is such a kind person,” I say, following Suriya to the backyard. “Does he ever feel bad supporting—” Stop this right now, says a calm, male voice in my head. Suriya’s mother just died. “I mean, ruling over the Tamils, helping to keep them down?”
“The soldiers must rule.” She sounds bored. “LTTE was so bad. We cannot let them come again.”
“The way to stop the LTTE from beginning again is to give equal rights. Treat the Tamils well. Your president has done the opposite.” Suriya’s father is sitting alone on a pink lawn chair, a plate of untouched food resting on his lap.
“Maybe you are right, El. I cannot say. The rulers have the power. We cannot fight our ruler. We do not have this power.” In my head, a chorus of imaginary activists groans, “Speak truth to power! Fight the good fight! Don’t give in to injustice!” But Suriya is not an activist; she is something else. She takes the plate from her father’s lap. “Why did you come to Sri Lanka, El.”
She says it as if it’s an answer she understands for the first time and she feels sorry for me. There is no particular person or event I’m running from, no tidy past tragedy to justify my current desperation. I am a confused American who came to a land of poor, dark-skinned, war-scarred people hoping to learn how to be simple and happy. I am aware of the cliché of my journey and so have diminished in the retelling of it even the parts that did truly change me—if change means relinquishing the habitual markers by which one measures the progress of one’s life—because I am loathe to turn the real goodness I felt in the lake, in the sky palace above the cave temple, on the handlebars of Suriya’s bike, into a self-congratulatory moral, yet another way to manipulate the minute smudge of my personality. So if I ever do manage to make anything out of these notes, it will be the story not of who I am but of who I fear I am.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know why I came here.” For half of an instant, I become the person I feel myself to be late at night when I can’t sleep and I’m all alone with the minutes passing, and I’m wide awake with thoughts I want to force the minutes to understand, but the seconds are too fast, they pass and pass, and then pass again. I take Suriya’s hands, cool and pliable, all those necessary, tiny bones. “I love you, Nangi. I love how you are.”
“Okay. I love you also. You have hungry, Akki?”
—
We take bouncing steps through frothy brown water, where women are bathing and washing clothes. They smile and nod, smile and nod. Suriya is the girl who just lost her mother and I am her friend all the way from America. I’m no longer embarrassed by my U.S.A. T-shirt and Nike running shorts. I walk through the soapy canal and then dive beneath opaque stillness, keeping my eyes open. The underwater world is a blue lace curtain billowing over a bright window. When I surface, two women about my age are talking excitedly, pointing to the far edge of the lake, where a small circle of sky rains on green, green paddy fields.
Suriya swims over and stands beside me. She whispers my name. I crane my neck upward: an untroubled pastel dome. “There must be a rainbow,” I say, just as the women nearby smile hugely and point to the other side of the lake. “I never—” I shut my mouth. A thick band of colored light is climbing slowly over our heads, forming a perfect arc that touches down at last on the tall grasses near the mouth of the canal.
A young father carries his baby into the water. The infant gurgles and smacks the surface of the lake with her small palm. The sky takes a huge breath, sucking the heat from the air. Suriya cups her ear. “Heard you that noise?” she says, English failing her. “It’s coming, oh, it’s coming.” And then we are engulfed in raindrops so huge and fast and loud that it feels like my skin is leather stretched taut over the surface of a drum. I shield the rain from my eyes, while everyone around me cups their hands over their ears. Even physical discomfort is cultural. We turn in slow circles, watching drops bounce off the mirrored lake. Suriya hops lightly. The lake water is hot on my thighs. Cool rain pelts my shoulders. “Disaster wind,” she says, beaming, wide-eyed, enjoying her fear. She puts her arm around my waist under the water. Distant thunder grows closer. Gilded daggers cut jags out of the slate sky. “We should get out of the water,” I say. “You can die.”
“Oh no!” But Suriya moves deeper into the lake. She floats on her back, her mouth opened wide. She swims back to me and takes my hand. We hop together back to shore. The sun comes out on the walk home, raising steam from the rain-soaked earth.
—
The next morning, I tell Suriya that I would like to take her to America with me. She’s hanging freshly washed sheets and towels on the line, wearing her purple pajama pants and True Love Forever T-shirt. “Before you get married,” I say. “We can stay with my father. He has a very big house. And travel around.”
She lets the sheet she’s rinsing fall back in the bucket. “I go to U.S.A.?” She lowers herself to the ground, rests her elbows on her crossed legs and her chin in her hands. She looks up at me through the space between her first two fingers. “Akki, this is my dream. But I never risk to ask you.” I finish rinsing the sheet as I tell her that we’ll need to go to Colombo to get her a passport and fill out forms for a visa. We can travel all around the East Coast. Visit the Statue of Liberty. Go to the beach in Florida.
“In your country, I can wear a bikini?”
“Of course. You can wear whatever you want.”
“Wow,” she tells her lap.
But as we’re brushing our teeth at the water pump that night, she says that she has been thinking about the trip to America and she has decided that she must not go. Before she met me, she never thought about leaving her country. Lanka is enough for her. This is the best way. She begs me not to have angry with her. I tried to make her dream come true. But she cannot go to America.
So instead of booking plane tickets and waiting for hours in air-conditioned offices in Colombo, we spend days letting the rain soothe our senses. After the storms exhaust themselves, I stand in the yard and watch the spidery watermarks on Suriya’s concrete house get slowly erased by the sun. I didn’t really want to sit on a Miami beach with Suriya in a bikini. I just wanted to give her something.
“Are you lazy, El Akki?” Suriya asks me one afternoon. I’m resting my head on the chair back, my legs stretched in front of me. I sit upright. Ayya and Suriya stand in front of my chair, gazing at me expectantly. “Lazy?” I say. My head grows stuffy and hot. Ayya raises his arms as far as he can above his head, making a wide V, and then yawns dramatically. “You. Lazy. Here?”
“You mean bored?”
“Lazy?” Ayya says.
“Sitting. Eating. Talking. Gazing.” I pause after each word so Ayya can understand my meaning through cadence. “I love it here.” He smiles, reassured, and heads up the stairs. “But, Nangi, I do need to leave soon.”
“I know. You must go back to your country and make a family.” Suriya taps an imaginary watch on her wrist.
“No, no.” I shake my head vigorously.
“El. I am joking.”
I squeeze her hand. “You have to go back to Kandy soon, anyway, right? How long can you take off school?”
Suriya gives me the look of condescending surprise that means I have failed to grasp some obvious fact of her life. “I will not go back to school. I must stay here and care for my father.”
I drop her hand. “Suriya. Please. Your father is a grown man. You can’t give up your studies. You’ve worked so hard.”
“I do not give up my studies. My success with school gives me power and it makes me brave. Like the first time I spoke to you in Kandy.”
“That’s exactly why you have to finish school. Get a good job.”
“My boyfriend is here soon,” she says, as if I haven’t spoken a
t all.
“Will be here soon,” I say.
“Will be.” She walks toward the kitchen.
—
I email my father: I’ll be home in a week. I’m coming to stay with him for a little while, before I move back to California. Can he pick me up at the airport? He writes back within minutes. He can’t believe how perfectly I timed my email. He had just been sitting down to write me. He misses me so much, can’t wait to see me, how long will I stay? Just a warning: His accountant has told him that the inheritance money is getting low and the remainder needs to be invested, blah blah blah (my father’s words), he’s not going to worry about it, he’s never agonized over money in his life and he’s never gone hungry. He’s started working as an electrician again, like he used to when he was practically still a kid—I knew that, didn’t I? (I didn’t.) He likes it better than film work, really. No ego. And pretty fucking good pay, considering.
Suriya bikes us home from the house with a computer. Too fast, perfect fast.
—
Suriya insists we visit a highly revered cave temple, to make a fruit offering to the gods in exchange for protecting me on my trip home. We make the two-hour trek by bus on a Saturday. The temple gates are frenzied with pilgrims buying lotus flowers, candles, and fruit platters. Suriya requests the largest platter and asks the harried fruit seller to fill it with rose apples, mangoes, bananas, pineapples. As the young woman deftly slices a pineapple and fans the pieces into floral arrangements, I wish I were buying this food as an offering to Suriya. Her family needs a beautiful plate of fresh produce much more than this famous temple that enjoys the government’s showy patronage. And it seems highly unlikely that any god will concern himself with my personal safety in exchange for a banana in the shape of a tulip.
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