Island of a Thousand Mirrors (21 page)

His words make me see myself lying on the ground. I am peaceful, but fissures are
appearing upon my skin, spreading, and breaking apart, so that I fall into ten thousand
sharp pieces. The blood gushes out of me, soaks deep into the ground, mixes with the
earth, marks it a darker red, crimson, scarlet. Something pushes at the center of
the broken bits of me. A tiny sapling breaks through the ground, draws my blood into
its translucent stem; it grows, feeding on me. The trunk grows thicker and thicker,
becomes opaque and shoots upward dizzyingly fast, bursts into immense branches, a
forest canopy, its roots reaching deep underground. It eats up my body until I am
gone. But I am no longer important. This tree will bear fruit like the mango tree
that I once danced under. It will provide cover for us and give us roots to anchor
us in this land where we are displaced and despised. And yet, it is a tree that feeds
upon blood at its roots; I wonder about the taste of its fruit.

*   *   *

My officers have been watching me, understanding that my courage is real, steel strong
and sharp. When I ask my Commandant if I can apply, she is not surprised, but instead
looks quietly jubilant. She helps me write the letter asking our Leader for permission.
We work late into the night, choosing the words that will make him see my resolve.
When weeks later no answer comes, I am despondent, but she says, “Wait. Wait. He does
not choose you until you have written five or six times.”

*   *   *

I am given leave to go home. I had wanted this, but on the bus ride, wearing civilian
clothes, I feel unarmed, unprotected. I desperately miss my camouflage trousers, the
skirt brushing against my legs feels so flimsy. I get off at the junction and walk.
Villagers raise their arms in greeting, but no one comes up to me. There is a different
look in their eyes now. Pride, but also fear. I am glad of this. No one will ever
again speak of Appa’s daughter spoiled by the soldiers. From now on, they will see
me as I am, a Tiger with teeth and claws.

I walk toward the little house by the lagoon and Snowy comes out, first barking and
then falling at my feet so that I can rub the soft white fur of his stomach. Amma
and Luxshmi come running, they exclaim over my hair that has grown, my new skirt and
shirt. Luxshmi has grown taller, Amma has grown older. They look into my face and
they, too, take stock of the changes there. They take me to the house, where Appa
struggles to get up from his chair. He hugs me to him, stares at me as if he cannot
believe I am really here. Amma has made food,
pittu
and dried fish. Extravagant food here, but I am used to fresh curries, not these
bits of fish like tiny shreds of wood. While I eat, Amma and Luxshmi talk of what
has happened in the village. The various deaths, the few marriages, the buying of
bicycles and availability of rice. Things that no longer interest me.

I try to talk to them of important things. What we are doing in the Movement; the
new society we will build in which we will be free of Sinhala oppression. We are building
a new world so that they won’t have to live like this, in a mud-and-wattle, cadjan-roofed,
falling-apart house. But I can tell that my words have no effect, that they are not
really listening. I want them to understand that what I am doing is important, that
when we finally win this war there will be food, like before, there will be prawns
again in the lagoon as big as tame dogs, like the ones Appa used to tell us about.
But it is useless. I inhabit a different world now and there are no bridges between
that place and this.

So instead I talk to Luxshmi. I tell her about my glorious new life, the purpose I
have found. I say, “You also must come. You’re a big girl now. Old enough. It’s time
you came.” She doesn’t say anything. She just twists her shoulders to her ears and
looks at Amma and Appa.

Appa says, “Leave your sister alone. She is too young for all this. She is planning
to go to school. Study.”

“Study what? Don’t you realize we are in a war? She is not too young. There are girls
much younger than her in my troop. She will learn discipline and strength. She will
learn what it means to fight and be a warrior.”

He doesn’t meet my eyes when he says, “We are thinking of sending her to Colombo to
study. Somehow getting her past all the blockades.”

“What nonsense! Sending her to those people. The Sinhala will kill her. They hate
us. Do you want her to die there? All alone among them?”

Amma breaks in, her voice half cajoling, “Why do you want to take this one also? She’s
the only one we have left. Anyway, she’d be a terrible soldier. She’s so small she
can’t even carry water from the well. Let alone fight.”

“She’s not much younger than me when you sent me to them.” I look straight at her
when I say this. She looks stricken. “And look how well it has suited me.” I laugh
and they join me, but they are apprehensive, scared even. I don’t mind. My true family
is back at camp, these are strangers I knew in a different time.

When they go to sleep, I walk outside, my senses awakening with the night. I long
to be patrolling with the other women, alert to every noise, my machete drawn, thirsting
for the wet slide of it through flesh. When I return to the single room, I cannot
sleep with Luxshmi’s slitted eyes, Appa’s snoring, and Amma’s heavy arm thrown across
me. There are too many memories in this room, waiting to sit upon my chest, waiting
to steal away my breath if I sleep. I lie awake till dawn, and when I say good-bye
soon after, I can tell that some heavy burden has been lifted off them.

*   *   *

He wants me! He has chosen
me
. Joy pulses under my skin, threatening to break out from under my bones. I am buoyant,
ecstatic. The most beautiful thing has happened; I am chosen. But I cannot betray
this by a single word or glance. No one can know. Not even Meena. When the time comes
they will call me away. Everyone will think that I am on routine training. But I will
be with the Black Tigers, learning the secrets of the Martyrs. Then I will return
to my squadron and resume my old duties, skirmishes and patrols, until finally my
assignment comes and I am stationed somewhere. Always with my eye on the target, following
him, tracking him until the order comes and I am sent out to kill and to die.

The dreams come every night now. And it is always Him pushing and breaking into me.

*   *   *

I am taught Sinhala. I let its ugliness take over my tongue. A year later I am given
my assignment and stationed in Colombo. I travel to the capital for the first time
in my life. There I must wait for the exact time, the precise moment when my target
can be destroyed. The man I have come for is a politician. He is Tamil. But he has
turned traitor, fled to the south, turned his back on his people, joined forces with
our enemy. I will be our Leader’s weapon, his most perfect and precise revenge. I
smile at the thought of our bodies, mine and the traitor’s, mingled on the ground,
in pieces, indistinguishable.

In the meantime, I wait, just another anonymous Tamil woman newly arrived in Colombo,
making a meager living as a shop girl or garment factory worker, sending money to
her family in the village, walking down the street in her shalwar kameez or denim.
Lost in that teeming, steaming crowd on Galle Road.

eleven

Yasodhara

On the Air Lanka flight, I wake, pinned and needled in every limb, to rest my forehead
against the window. Below, with the suddenness of vision, the island appears through
wispy clouds, verdant green and battered by cerise ocean. I had not expected this
intensity in my chest, a thudding as if malevolent gods were dancing on my heart.
We stumble off the plane, bedraggled returnees, some stunned-looking tourists. The
hot air hits us, sweat slides along the crevices of our skin to pool between breasts
and behind knees. In the far distance, the palm trees beckon wildly like old friends
come to claim us. I long to rush into their midst, to the ocean I know is waiting,
but first there is the long process of arrival, lines and dull-eyed officials stamping
papers. Everywhere now the sound of Sinhala and Tamil.

Pushing my luggage into the arrivals lounge, I enter a crowd of expectant faces, grandmothers
and husbands, mothers and brothers, entire villages gathered to welcome home those
lost beyond the dark seas. Past them, a wall of silent uniformed men hold rifles at
their cocked hips.

So many familiar faces. Echoes of Amma or Mala or La in the cheekbones, the eyes,
or the curve of a woman’s shoulders. The stooped man who pushes a broom evokes every
old uncle I have ever met. In America, it was my unconscious and secret habit to seek
out island faces. When I found them, it was almost always a surprise, an occasion.
Some sort of acknowledgment would always be made. Some slight and secret signal of
belonging, even if hostile. We are all strangers in this land, it said, and therefore
united in some way. Here, the faces are all familiar, but they look at me without
recognition. I am the one who has become unrecognizable, with my foreign clothes and
shoes, the sureness of my American walk. I am drowning in this sensation of dislocation
when La comes. I bury my face in her shoulder and weep my jet-lagged exhaustion, my
rage at what I have left behind.

Through the curtain of her hair, I see a slim man behind her. When he smiles, an ecstatic
sort of smile, I am transported. The features of my childhood companion transposed
over his own so that I cannot help but smile back and place my fingers behind my sister’s
back into his quickly grasping hand.

Saraswathi

The Colombo shopkeepers speak Sinhala at me and I reply effortlessly and smile back
at them. I own their tongue as if I have been brought up in this smoky, crowded city
instead of in quiet northern places. Nights when I am spared that other, more ripping
dream, I dream of the dawn lagoon, Amma, Appa, and Luxshmi, even my brothers.

I wake to remember. The boys are dead. Amma’s face is hard, Appa is silent, Luxshmi
is in the training camp. Then I know I am doing the best thing, the only possible
thing.

Yasodhara

The car winds through twilit streets, a cacophony of horns, the press of bodies, crowded
marketplaces, past white Buddha statues in their glass boxes, the tapered leaves of
Bodhi trees spinning in the breeze. The air is smoky, wet, warm, and fragrant with
green things.

At the first roundabout soldiers surround the car demanding identification papers.
What is our business? Why are we on the airport road as night falls? My sister turns
in her seat. Chuckles when she sees my face. Waves her American passport like a precious
fetish. “Don’t look so shocked, Akka. We have these magic things after all. They keep
us protected from all this madness.”

A soldier, he looks all of seventeen, with awkward hands and enormous eyes, takes
my passport, and considers me with curiosity. When he sees me watching him, he gets
shy, hands the passport back silently, gestures with his rifle for us to carry on.

I remember Alice’s son, Dilshan, a boy like this one, lost somewhere in the north,
his body floating in a lagoon, picked at by small fish.

They take me to the house they rent. A small, jade-hued house with red cement floors,
smooth and cool as glass under our bare feet. From each room, I can hear the ocean’s
whispering. In the garden, mango and
murunga
trees twine about each other, dropping ripe yellow fruit and fat blue-green pods.
A series of cats wind themselves around my legs and two Alsatians bound after tossed
sticks and stones, bringing them back to drop at my feet.

We sit in the garden as the fireflies and mosquitoes take center stage, the frogs
begin their raucous song, and the dark shadows of bats flit across the sky. I breathe
in the sudden night air and feel the embrace of green, these various and infinite
shades of fluorescent emerald and olive taking me over. Something coiled tightly in
my chest unwinds like a spring coming undone.

Across from me, the two of them sit close to each other, touching shoulders or fingertips
with the easy, unconscious intimacy of lovers. We drink Coke into which Shiva splashes
potent arrack, and soon we do not mind the ferocious biting of the mosquitoes, the
talk leads easily into that shared space of our childhoods, the Wellawatte house with
its myriad secrets, the passageway between house and wall in which we used to hide,
those long-ago Upstairs, Downstairs wars, our ferocious grandmother pitted against
his formidable grandfather fighting over the mango tree. He turns to me, suddenly
intent, asks, “Do you remember the blue room?” A thrill of pleasure along my spine,
irritation splashing across La’s face. I change the subject quickly.

We talk of the 1983 riots. Those days of knives flashing in the sunlight, disembodied
screaming floating over our gate. It was terrifying enough for us, but upstairs they
waited to be slaughtered.

He tells us of days spent in the dusty, sneezy space under beds, all the children
packed together, half thinking it a game, only afraid when they looked at their parents’
faces. The phone ringing through the house, the voices of distant relatives begging
for shelter. Then the pounding on the downstairs door. A distinctly physiological
understanding of fear learned then. The way the blood drains from the extremities,
pools around the heart, causing cold, shivering hands and toes in that torrid sweating
heat. They waited, he says, for the mob to storm up the stairs. Waited, his mother’s
arms around him, her heart thudding against the front of her thin cotton blouse exactly
where his ear lay so that he learned the precise rhythm of his mother’s fear.

Then hope, because it was not the mob that came, but our grandmother, Sylvia Sunethra.
For the next few days she sent food up to them surreptitiously by the back stairs
while outside the long columns of smoke rose into the air. And finally a panicked
midnight run to the airport with a few suitcases holding everything they would take
into their new lives.