Island of a Thousand Mirrors (11 page)

I dream of the Wellawatte house, of dropping down into the blue room where Shiva waits
for me. “I’m going to America,” I say. “Los Angeles.”

“Don’t be crazy,” he says. “That place doesn’t exist. It’s only in the movies.” I’m
trying to tell him that he is wrong, that I am going, that I am already there, when
he throws his head back and starts to laugh. He’s right, I think, it doesn’t exist,
it’s only in the movies.

I wake to La’s head slack on my shoulder, her mouth dripping into the cloth of my
T-shirt. It is evening now, the sun setting in dramatic purple and orange hues all
around us. The light different from anything I have seen, making me aware suddenly
that I am exactly on the opposite side of the world from where I have spent my life.

We have pulled into a neighborhood. There are tall, graceful houses, square lawns
of glistening neon grass, empty streets that make me wonder where the people are.
Surely there must be people. But I see only a car here or there unloading a mother
and a few children. There is no one walking, no shops spilling into the street. There
is no music, no car horns. It is all profoundly quiet, profoundly lonely.

We curve into a driveway. In front of us, a mansion with ornate fairy-tale turrets
rises out of lush greenery. We stare and stare. Does he live here? In this enormous
house that could hold twenty, or more? Ananda Uncle parks still talking, unaware of
our silent awe or perhaps just not commenting on it, perhaps used to the struck silences
of all the newly arrived, all the shell-shocked souls he has similarly rescued. Pulling
our suitcases out of his trunk, he says, “Just hard work and some luck, and all doors
are opened.” He flings open his own door and we are greeted with the most unexpected
of scents, cumin, cardamom, chili frying. We had expected more exotic odors, perhaps
hot dogs and hamburger meat, pizza. Whatever we expected, it was not the scents of
Alice’s kitchen. The disorientation is overwhelming. What is this place that we have
landed in that looks so foreign and smells so familiar?

*   *   *

Ananda Uncle sweeps us around his house. In each enormous, soaring room, we are greeted
by carved ebony furniture, ceiling-tall almirahs, peacock-feathered fans, gaudy batiked
women and flowers, carved elephants, coconut shell turtles, posters of palm-swept
beaches: pieces of island nostalgia thrown up like flotsam on a foreign beach. I hear
Amma whisper to Thatha, “My God, it’s like a handicraft shop.” It is our first experience
of immigrant nostalgia. A force that we will all succumb to, more or less, at various
times.

At six o’clock Ophelia Aunty comes home. She is Ananda Uncle’s beautiful Burgher wife.
The one for whom he risked Sylvia Sunethra’s wrath. The one for whom he moved, as
his mother said, to this “bang-bang, shoot-shoot country.” We are shy in front of
her tailored suit, her efficient heels and lacquered face, while she looks the four
of us up and down, taking in our unavoidable otherness. But there is also a gentleness
radiating from her, a certain tenderness that makes it clear why our uncle has chosen
this woman over all others.

She takes us into the kitchen where a hook-nosed imp stands on a stool and stirs steaming
curries. Ophelia Aunty says, “Rosie, these are Sir’s sister and her family. They will
be staying for some time.” The tiny woman waves her hand, mutters something into her
pot. By Ophelia Aunty’s deference we can tell we are in the presence of a culinary
genius with skills akin to Alice’s. The scents she stirs make the tears prickle behind
my heavy, sleepy lids. America is exciting but already I miss Alice, Mala Aunty, our
grandmother, the house cats, Shiva, everything familiar that we have lost, with a
sudden sharp tearing in my chest.

In the room Lanka and I are to share, a brass cutwork lamp casts broken shadows upon
posters showing the plump breasts and faces of Sigiriya maidens. We lie down on the
soft beds, kick off the thick blankets; we have never slept under anything more than
the thinnest cotton sheet or in separate beds before. We lie awake for hours, our
thoughts bucket heavy with this new place and the strangeness of time moving in an
unnatural rhythm. It is almost dawn, a grandfather clock somewhere in that huge house
booming four before I fall asleep, and then I dream of the island as seen through
clouds, the pain in my veins as it is pulled away farther and farther until swallowed
by the frothing ocean.

When I wake, La is curled around my back in that narrow bed, both of us shivering
despite her hair, which lies upon us like a silky duvet of the purest black. The light
flowing through the window is tepid amber. We go downstairs to learn that we have
slept into the twilight of the next day, carried forward in jet lag through two revolutions
of the planet.

For some time, we flounder between time zones, somnolent and sagging in the afternoon,
wide awake at 3:00
A.M
. Amma goes to work with Ophelia Aunty, leaving before we wake up. She is a preschool
teacher’s aide at Ophelia Aunty’s school, tying the shoelaces of white kids, wiping
their noses, learning to sing nursery rhymes in a new accent so that the children
don’t complain that they can’t understand their teacher. “What is she speaking, Mommy?
Make her speak English like you.” She comes home exhausted and gray so we learn not
to bother her with questions about this place, with all our curiosity and need.

Ananda Uncle takes Thatha to work with him. Our engineer father is now the parking
lot attendant at the clinic that bears Ananda Uncle’s name on a wide golden-lettered
sign. All day he sits in a cramped shelter handing out tickets, getting back dollars,
making change as quickly as he can with the unfamiliar notes and coins. “Why is the
five-cent coin bigger than the ten-cent coin? It makes no sense,” I remember him saying.
He comes home just before we go to bed. He, too, looking shell-shocked, as if trying
to make sense of what he has seen.

It is still Christmas vacation at the school we are to attend, so we must stay home
with Rosie for a week. Guardian-less, we wander that house of trinkets and mementos.
When we find Rosie’s lair-like room under the stairs, she waves us in absently, her
whole attention latched onto the synchronized bevy of hip-thrusting, bosom-shaking
Hindi film heroines on her diminutive TV screen. She pulls a tall bottle from under
her bed, cackles through whiskey fumes, “This is my friend, Johnny, do you know him?
Johnny, Mr. Walker?” We race away, back to our room, wonder whether we can tell anyone,
decide not to. Clearly Rosie is a force in this house, whatever sins she commits overlooked
by dint of her culinary sorcery.

On the third day of house arrest, Lanka says, “Let’s go outside.” I am apprehensive;
we have been warned to stay within earshot of Rosie. But between drunken viewings
of Bollywood’s finest and long hours in the kitchen, it is clear that she has zero
interest in us. Lanka stamps her foot. “What is the point of coming to America? ‘The
land of the free,’ they say, and we can’t even go outside!”

And as always in those days, I acquiesce. We slip past Rosie’s room, down the stairs,
through the heavy front doors into the wide, tree-lined street. Grand houses rise
out of the earth, their roofs caressed by the branches of graceful trees, every perfectly
shaped leaf in place. It is like a picture postcard or an illustration in the children’s
books we learned to read English with. La says, “It’s so quiet,” and I, too, hear
the roaring silence. She grips my hand. “Don’t people live here?” We are used to voices,
car horns, vendors, radios, the constant wash of other people’s lives over ours. This
soundlessness, punctuated only by birdsong, feels ominous. We walk along, the perfectly
paved road hard beneath our feet like a long, winding gray ribbon. The houses are
so huge it takes minutes to walk past each one. La says, “This one is so big. Who
can live there?”

I shrug. “Someone really, really important. Maybe a movie star or something.”

“Maybe it’s Michael Jackson!”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Maybe it is—you don’t know.”

“Okay, so why don’t you just walk up and say hi, does Mr. Michael Jackson live here?
And then maybe you can marry him and live here with him.”

“Okay, maybe I will.”

A police car glides up behind us, giving us no time to panic or run. The blond policeman
approaches with a gunslinger’s walk, says, “What you girls doing out here?” We are
silent. On the island, we knew to act demure when faced with men in uniform. The cowboy-policeman
says, “Do you know what could happen to two little girls all by themselves?” His eyes
glint turquoise as he takes in the insect bites on our legs, the dresses Amma sewed
that reach past our knees, Ophelia Aunty’s oversized cardigans on top, the cheap rubber
slippers. I had not realized our out-of-place-ness was so insistent. He says very
slowly and loudly, “You were reported. Someone called about you.”

This is when we realize that there are eyes behind the curtains, that the houses are
not empty but instead hold people who look out but do not reveal themselves.

In the backseat of the police car, we grip each other’s hands, terror throbbing in
our throats. The policeman says, “Okay, where do you live? On the other side of town?
In Monrovia? Altadena?” But neither of us can speak; we are lost, disoriented by the
litany of unknown places he has named. The policeman sighs. “Well then, I’m just going
to have to take you into the station. What are you two anyway? Runaways?” I meet his
eyes in the rearview mirror, they are a terrifying empty blue, blank as the sky beating
overhead.

As we pass Ananda Uncle’s house, Lanka cries, “There! We live there.”

The policeman stops, looks, his eyebrows rise high into his forehead. “You live there?
In that house?” He points at Ananda Uncle’s mansion, we nod violently. He shakes his
head. “You better not be lying or pulling some kinda trick.”

“We aren’t lying. That’s where we live.” He takes us to the door, keeps his thumb
on the doorbell, until Rosie appears, the irritation in her eyes at being dragged
from bottle and film quickly replaced by deference before this blond giant.

“These children are yours?”

“Oh yes, sir. They are belonging to the Master’s sister.” She grabs us and pulls us
into the house quickly. “Thank you very much, sir. I will be feeding them now. Thank
you.” She closes the door on his face, locks both locks, turns to us. “Where did you
go? Don’t you know that you can’t just go walking anywhere in this country? There
are people, men who like to take little girls and do all sorts of dirty chee-chee
things to them.”

Lanka says back, “This is a free country. We can go walking if we want.”

Rosie’s face contorts into a sneer. “Right. Little children just off the airplane.
Where will you go, huh? This place isn’t like some tiny village at home. There are
no buses everywhere. There are no people who know your family everywhere. Here you
are alone, you hear?”

Later, in our shared bedroom, we play cards for hours, until our fingers stop trembling,
until the silent streets, the hidden eyes of neighbors, the cowboy-cop, seem far away.
La says, “I bet that was Michael Jackson’s house.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I say. We promise never to tell Amma and Thatha. We know it would
just make the bags under their eyes even darker.

*   *   *

“Where is the market?” Ophelia Aunty repeats my mother’s question and giggles behind
her polished nails. “There is no market. We are going to the supermarket.” It is Saturday.
Both our parents are home and rested. We pile into the gigantic car and Ophelia Aunty
steers through the behemoth streets. At the supermarket what riches greet our eyes!
What mounds of dew-dripping, perfectly formed vegetables! There are carrots without
blemish, beets without a trace of the earth in which they grew, fruits of the most
gleaming perfection. Mountains of tangerines, sparkling red onions, bloodless meat.
We had not imagined such munificence was possible, that there were so many ways one
could clean a countertop, so many specialized ways of wiping an ass. How is it possible
to choose amid such extravagance? We wander the aisles overwhelmed, unable to make
decisions.

At home Alice shopped at the market. Sometimes we went to the supermarket, which we
had thought was clean and modern and well stocked, but how paltry it now seemed. Ophelia
Aunty wheels the cart with precision, drops item after item into it while she talks
nonstop.

Thatha shakes his head in wonder. “In this country, they have thought of everything,”
he says, gripping a loaf of packaged sliced white bread in his hands and squeezing
gently.

*   *   *

We learn that in America even the most familiar objects have previously unimagined
manifestations. Rosie presses a bowl upon us. “What is it?” I ask.

“Aligeta pera,”
she says, the Sinhala term for avocado. We survey the proffered dish. The coloring
is familiar, but into this have been mixed various things, including, is it possible,
a tomato? She says, “Try, try—you will like.” She pushes a bag of tortilla chips at
us. “Eat with this.”

Back home, avocados dropped from the trees like a blessing. But we ate them, mashed
with condensed milk, solely for dessert. It was creamy delicious, while this looks
completely alien. To be polite, we taste Rosie’s offering and, repulsed, must wait
until she turns her back to spit it out, the difference between what our tongues expect
and what we are tasting impossible to reconcile.

But there are also unexpected pleasures. Drinking water, for one spectacular example,
now comes gushing straight from the tap. You could fill a tall glass from the faucet,
sparkling cold, and drink, not having to wait for the long process of boiling and
filtering and then refrigerating that we were used to.

Oranges, too, are a revelation. On the island, they were meager green orbs, sour and
full of pips. They had to be mixed with water and great quantities of sugar to make
what was optimistically called orange juice. Here, oranges are a marvel, fat and bright
as sunlight, their juice sparkling, their skins falling away into swirls and curls.
For a time, we revel in oranges, consoling ourselves for the loss of mangoes and avocados
in condensed milk.